Ben Wittes and Anna Bower: Trump's Reparations Demand

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Speaker 5 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We got a Law Fair doubleheader today. Your friend Ben Wittis will be up here in about 15.

Speaker 5 But first, we had to talk to the woman of the hour, senior editor at Law Fair, Anna Bauer. You got some interesting texts, some signal messages last week.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 6 it's been a weird, weird, weird two weeks.

Speaker 6 And it started with me on a Saturday afternoon. I was, I say this in the piece, I was in my pajamas at like 1.20 p.m.

Speaker 6 in the afternoon because I was having a very rare day off of just kind of like lounging around.

Speaker 5 What's that like? Yeah, talk to me about that.

Speaker 6 Yeah, well, it never happened for me.

Speaker 6 And then then right in the middle of it all, finally relaxing about to watch the Netflix, I get a message from someone who says that they are Lindsey Halligan, the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemy.

Speaker 6 So that took my Saturday for a very interesting turn.

Speaker 5 Indeed. When you got that message that came in on Signal, where she says, hey, it's Lindsey Halligan, did you think it was a prank call? Do you think it was Ben Wittis pranking you? Like,

Speaker 5 what did you make of that?

Speaker 6 Yeah, okay. So, I didn't think it was Ben Wittis pranking me, but I definitely thought that it was some kind of troll or like, even maybe like a disinformation campaign.

Speaker 6 You know, you have to be careful as a journalist about who you're talking to because, you know, sometimes you never know who is on the other end.

Speaker 6 And, you know, I just wasn't sure, but I also had a weird kind of feeling that like it's worth trying to figure out. You know, earlier that morning, I'd been tweeting about the Letitia James case.

Speaker 6 And Letitia James is the New York Attorney General who is one of the people who, you know, President Trump had pushed for Lindsay Halligan to prosecute.

Speaker 6 She was put in this position in significant part specifically to prosecute Letitia James, in addition to James Comey and some other folks.

Speaker 6 And, you know, I had been reading this New York Times article about that case. So I fired off a few tweets as I usually do.

Speaker 6 That one of them kind of just summarized this New York Times article, which included a part that was about grand jury testimony in the case.

Speaker 6 To me, the grand jury testimony read as being pretty exculpatory for Letitia James because the case, you know, the indictment alleges that she committed mortgage fraud, false statements, and the way that they're saying that she, you know, fraudulently entered into this mortgage was that she claimed she was going to have a second home when, in fact, she was going to use it as a rental and investment property.

Speaker 6 The New York Times reporting was that the person who lives in the home, who is her grandniece, had lived there for many years and did not pay rent.

Speaker 6 That to me suggested that she wasn't using the house as a rental and investment property. So I, you know, posted some tweets about that.

Speaker 6 And then when I get the text from this person saying, you're Lindsay Halligan, even though I did think it wasn't real, you know, I did wonder, maybe this is a response to those tweets.

Speaker 6 And then the way that we kind of found out that actually maybe it might be her was I asked her as one of the first questions, you know, where did we first meet and who were you with?

Speaker 6 I knew that that was an answer that only she would be able to really know, or only a handful of people in the world would know, because I've never really spoken publicly about the fact that three years before, I was eating dinner in a restaurant after a hearing that I covered in Trump's criminal cases.

Speaker 6 This at the time was right in the aftermath of the surge at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 6 I went to cover a hearing before Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida and go to a restaurant, and lo and behold, who's there but Trump's attorneys, Lindsey Alligan and James Trustee. I introduce myself.

Speaker 6 We speak for 10 minutes. And then all these years later, I was able to ask her, where did we first meet? And she remembered.

Speaker 6 And so that's the first sign that, oh, this really probably is Lindsey Halligan.

Speaker 5 It was funny to read it, read the whole text exchange because it was like, we met at the Breakers with Trusty.

Speaker 5 I was like, is Trusty somebody's code name? I'd forgot about Jim Trusty. I was like, is that like a nickname?

Speaker 5 It felt a little bit like a plot, a Scooby-Doo plot, kind of.

Speaker 6 Yeah, he's one of the people who was a Trump attorney. He exited the legal team at one point.

Speaker 6 So he still makes a few media appearances here and there, but he's not one of the former Trump attorneys who's been placed into a senior government role.

Speaker 5 The texts continue once you've confirmed her and she

Speaker 5 is objecting to

Speaker 5 your tweets. I'm curious from you both, like, this is extremely unusual, right, for a prosecutor to start texting somebody about, you know, their statements about an ongoing case, is it not?

Speaker 6 And then what were like the merits of her complaints so this is super unusual for a few reasons the first is that it becomes clear that what the reason that she's reaching out to me is in fact those tweets that i'd posted about this new york times article but keep in mind like A, it's unusual in itself for a U.S.

Speaker 6 attorney to reach out to a reporter who they don't have some kind of, you know, ongoing like reporter source rapport relationship, but it's not unheard of, right?

Speaker 6 Like prosecutors do do reach out to reporters. U.S.

Speaker 6 attorneys sometimes reach out to reporters, although typically it goes through, you know, kind of more official channels, but sometimes it is informal, whatever.

Speaker 6 But a few things that were unusual about this is that one, she's reaching out to me about something that I didn't report on myself, but about someone else's reporting.

Speaker 6 And it was just the tweets that I'd posted summarizing it.

Speaker 6 Two, it's about an ongoing prosecution, which is quite unusual because there's a lot of DOJ norms and policies where typically prosecutors just don't talk about ongoing prosecutions.

Speaker 6 There's all kinds of things that can go wrong if you

Speaker 6 make public statements about an ongoing prosecution.

Speaker 6 It relates to a defendant's fair trial rights, prejudicial pretrial publicity, all those things.

Speaker 6 And then the third thing is that the thing that I was summarizing in the New York Times article was about grand jury testimony.

Speaker 6 And that's really unusual for prosecutors to get anywhere near the subject of grand jury matters because not only are there DOJ policies that prohibit the disclosure of grand jury matters, there's also under the federal rules of criminal procedure, a prohibition against an attorney for the government disclosing anything that's occurred before the grand jury.

Speaker 6 And it's a really strict rule. So typically prosecutors don't even go anywhere near that subject matter with members of the media because, you know, it's super risky to do so.

Speaker 6 So all of those things surprised me about this conversation that carried on over the next 33 hours in which Lindsey Halligan, you know, told me that my reporting wasn't fair, something about it was inaccurate, but never would actually tell me what even was inaccurate about it.

Speaker 5 So I will say it's worth mentioning that if there's a strict rule against disclosing grand jury information to the media, this administration is, as you would note, in the James Comey case, taking a pretty hard line on alleged leaks to the media.

Speaker 5 So you would think that maybe Lindsey Halligan might be worried about that.

Speaker 6 This is one of the things that we found to be really newsworthy about this unusual communication between a U.S.

Speaker 6 attorney and a reporter about an ongoing prosecution is that at the same time that she is reaching out to me unsolicited to talk to me about this case, there's a lot of kind of ironies to that because while she's doing that,

Speaker 6 there's reporting just a few days after she texted me that she had fired a number of career prosecutors in her office for allegedly unauthorized leaking to the media.

Speaker 6 And Chad Dill Martin, the DOJ press guy, puts out a statement like, we only speak through our filings. We don't talk about ongoing prosecutions.

Speaker 6 And then also there's the Comey case where, as you've pointed out,

Speaker 6 at the heart of that case is this question of interactions between federal law enforcement officials and the members of the media. Lindsay Halligan is personally handling that case herself.

Speaker 6 And so there's just kind of like all these different ironies to which like she's doing one thing of talking to the media in this really strange way,

Speaker 6 but then at the same time seems to be super willing to

Speaker 6 punish people for allegedly speaking out of turn. So yeah, I mean, it's very strange.

Speaker 5 I'd encourage people to read the whole text exchanges at the bottom of the article that you link to the screenshots of the text, because it is very strange.

Speaker 5 The manner in which she's arguing, in addition to being like inappropriate, and is just, she seems like a very scattered person. Her arguments to you.
don't make any sense.

Speaker 5 And that seems like a weakness in a prosecutor that

Speaker 5 they can't make a sensible argument about the point that they're trying to make.

Speaker 6 It seemed to me like she was trying to tell me something by implication or

Speaker 6 there were things that she said, I can't tell you. And so I really don't know if maybe that's part of what was going on with why everything was so confusing.

Speaker 6 But at the end of the conversation, I still have no idea what it is that I allegedly got wrong or said in my tweet that she

Speaker 6 specifically was taking issue with, despite my best efforts to get an understanding of it.

Speaker 6 But I think you're right, Tim, that it speaks to, like, if you look at the content of the conversation as a whole, you know, part of this story is about what seems to be a real lack of experience here and a real lack of, apparently, you know, competence.

Speaker 6 It just does not seem to be the type of thing that you would see

Speaker 6 in the Justice Department in the past from a U.S. attorney.

Speaker 6 And to make sure that we were right about about that, we spoke to former prosecutors, we spoke to legal journalists in the days leading up to the publication, just to make sure that our gut instinct about this was right, that this is a really strange and bizarre type of communication.

Speaker 6 And none of them had ever seen anything like this. So, yeah,

Speaker 6 it is very strange.

Speaker 5 Another thing that speaks to the incompetence is, or maybe just malice, I don't know, is they're supposed to be preserving all these communications.

Speaker 5 And the other subplot to the story was that, you know, after you published it, they tried to claim that this was off the record.

Speaker 5 You know, she says to you in the text messages, I sent to you on this on Signal, which has disappearing messages.

Speaker 5 Because if you, as if you send a disappearing message, that means it's not on the record. There were two issues with that.
Like, one is that's not how off the record works.

Speaker 5 So it shows just, again, an incompetence and how to deal with the media.

Speaker 5 But two, it makes it seem like she's not following the rules about preserving communications if she was happy for the messages to be disappearing.

Speaker 6 Yeah. So, and this is an issue that this administration has faced in the past, right?

Speaker 6 With the Signal Gate that the Atlantic reported on, and there's been some questions raised around the administration's use of signal, because typically if you're carrying out official business, which arguably, you know, speaking to the media about

Speaker 6 doing press relations about an ongoing prosecution is official business, then it raises questions around federal records acts, you know, preservation.

Speaker 6 It's possible that she was like screenshotting or printing out these communications as a way to preserve them, but like it doesn't seem like it.

Speaker 6 Like, that seems like a very small possibility, but it's still possible, I guess. But, but, yeah, so it raises questions about that.

Speaker 6 And, and to your point about lack of competence around media engagement, it was quite surprising that at the end of this conversation, after we'd, you know, been communicating on Signal for

Speaker 6 a significant amount of time, there'd been a long period of us not speaking to each other.

Speaker 6 Right before we're about to publish, when she becomes aware of it, she suddenly claims that everything was off the record.

Speaker 6 Well, for people who have engaged with the media as public officials, and especially in Washington, very well know, you know, you have to set at the outset of a conversation the basis on which you are speaking.

Speaker 6 And the default is that if there's no discussion about going off the record or going on background, then you just assume that you are on the record.

Speaker 6 And she tried to come back and say, oh, no, that was all off the record. And that's just not how it works.

Speaker 6 And it's strange because, you know, this is a woman who has a degree in broadcast journalism, was on Trump's legal team, and so very much should have, you know, experience engaging with the media.

Speaker 5 Just one last little funny note on competence.

Speaker 5 The spokes sources for the DOJ did spell her name wrong when pushing back on you.

Speaker 5 And I encourage you all to read the article for how you handled that. It gave me a good chuckle.
Last thing, just a biggest picture on the case. You're heading down to Norfolk.

Speaker 5 What is your sense for the status of the Tish James case overall?

Speaker 6 I mean, look, I could very well be wrong, but I looking at, and we've written about this on the site.

Speaker 6 I encourage people to look at my colleague Molly Roberts, some of the work that she's done on looking at what we know from the public evidence and from the indictment itself.

Speaker 6 You know, to me, I have very little confidence that what Lindsay Halligan was telling me in these text messages, which is that I'm all wrong and that the case, the evidence is going to come out and prove me wrong.

Speaker 6 You know, I don't have a lot of confidence in that.

Speaker 6 The indictment is very vague. Everything that I have seen in terms of the public evidence suggests that this is a weak case.

Speaker 6 Again, it's possible that I'm wrong, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a case in which I would be betting a lot on it even going to trial, much less being successful at trial.

Speaker 6 I expect that in this case, we're going to see, like we have in the Comey case, challenges to the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, selective or vindictive prosecution motions.

Speaker 6 And much like the Comey case, I think that those are going to be very strong motions.

Speaker 6 You know, you have public evidence of the president himself urging the prosecution of Letitia James and James Comey.

Speaker 6 If there's ever been, you know, a selective or vindictive prosecution motion that should be successful, it is probably in these two cases. So, you know, I'm skeptical that it'll even go to trial.

Speaker 6 But if it does, I'm also skeptical of the evidence that will be presented.

Speaker 5 All right. Well, keep us posted.
We'll be following the progress on this as you're heading down to Norfolk to cover it. And who knows? Keep an eye on your signal feed.

Speaker 5 Who knows who will be incoming next? Anna Bauer, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Up next, your colleague Ben Witts.

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Speaker 5 All right, we are back.

Speaker 5 In addition to being the editor-in-chief of Law Fair, he also writes dog shirt daily. It's hard for me to tell if that's a dog shirt.
It looks like an animal shirt of some kind.

Speaker 9 Dachins. Well, it's dogs.

Speaker 5 Adachin's. It's a Dachin shirt.
It's Ben Wittis.

Speaker 5 Ben, you caught the end of your colleague Anna's reporting there, and she mentioned kind of the parallels between the pushback that Tish James will be offering to her prosecution, as we've already seen in the filings from Comey.

Speaker 5 And so I kind of wanted to start with you there on

Speaker 5 what your sense is of the Comey case and any additional thoughts you had on what Anna was reporting.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so I was, I supervised that reporting and thus had almost as weird a week as Anna did.

Speaker 9 But I don't have much to add, honestly.

Speaker 9 I've been doing this for 30 years across a lot of administrations now. I have never seen a text exchange remotely like that one.

Speaker 9 And as Anna said, to sort of gut check that reaction, she and I spent the weekend last weekend, that is

Speaker 9 sort of talking people through it from various walks of life that have insight into these interactions, you know, prosecutors, as well as journalists who cover, you know, major investigations.

Speaker 9 And we could not identify anybody

Speaker 9 who had seen anything like that. And not to mention,

Speaker 9 quite apart from the the fact and substance of it, the weird mean girl's tone of it, which I just thought was like this was somebody who had an impulse control issue and couldn't saw some tweets she didn't like and just couldn't help herself from reaching out to essentially a stranger to tell her i really don't like you and i i thought like that is something that i don't know how to get my hands around that moving over to the commy case what do you uh what do you make of the the what he's been filing Right.

Speaker 9 So he filed two major motions this week that are actually interacting with each other. So one of them is the vindictive prosecution motion, which got the vast majority of the attention and rightly so.

Speaker 9 It is

Speaker 9 the most powerful such document that has ever been filed in American court, not because Pat Fitzgerald and the Comey legal team are especially good, although they're very talented lawyers, but because the record of Trump's promises to and machinations to get Jim Comey is so long and so extraordinary that merely lining it up in an organized way creates this kind of breathtaking sense of whoa, you know, like this is a heck of a record.

Speaker 9 And I actually think the more interesting document is going to be the government's response to this, which is due on November 3rd.

Speaker 9 And I was reading it with the question, like, okay, how do you respond to this?

Speaker 9 If you're one of these poor schlubs from North Carolina that Lindsay Halligan has dragged up because nobody in her office will actually prosecute this case, so she's brought in two AUSAs from North Carolina, and you've got to write a response to this motion.

Speaker 9 And you've got to argue that the president's conduct and the circumstances that led to this prosecution are sufficiently normal that that we should have a sort of presumption of regularity about the prosecution.

Speaker 9 And you've got to answer for the fact that you're from North Carolina, not from the Eastern District of Virginia, because nobody in the Eastern District of Virginia will litigate this matter.

Speaker 9 And that Lindsay Halligan herself had to present it to the grand jury alone because nobody would help her. And that, by the way, she's only in the job at all

Speaker 9 because her predecessor, who was a Trumpist himself,

Speaker 9 wouldn't bring the case. And Trump removed him and installed her.

Speaker 9 And oh, by the way, here's 20 pages of Trump tweeting or saying bile against Jim Comey, including that he should be prosecuted, that he's a sick individual, that he's a, you know, a leaker, that he's a, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 9 And so how do you answer that? And so the document I'm really, really interested in is the one that the government is going to have to file in response to this one on November 3rd.

Speaker 9 So that brings me to the second matter, which is that one of the points that Fitzgerald and Comey's legal team makes in their document is that

Speaker 9 By the way, Lindsay Halligan wasn't even legally appointed. She was, the president hates Comey so much that he appointed a prosecutor illegally to bring this case.

Speaker 9 And that gives rise then to this second document, which is a quite technical legal argument, though not a difficult one, that Halligan, in fact, is not legally occupying the office that she's indicted him from.

Speaker 9 That one is going to be tricky to answer to. And in fact, Alina Haba has lost such arguments as have a couple of other U.S.
attorneys.

Speaker 9 So, you know, the Comey team, like, it is not the hardest job in the world because the procedural irregularities are extreme.

Speaker 9 The indictment may be on its face deficient, but is certainly weaker than hell. And by the way, Jim Comey is not guilty of this, whatever else reason people may have to dislike him.

Speaker 5 Not asking you to betray private conversations, but I mean, have you talked to Jim? I know you guys are friends. Like, do we just at least what his mental state is on all this?

Speaker 9 So for reasons that I don't want to go into I have made a point of not being in touch with him since the time of the indictment and and part of that is so that I am free to comment on the case without

Speaker 9 without people thinking that I'm speaking for the legal team or that

Speaker 9 so I'm I'm just sort of making a point of being an independent actor here. That said, I don't deny we're friends and I care about him, and I'm concerned about it for all the obvious reasons.

Speaker 5 His video response is really, really excellent.

Speaker 5 Just the way in which he was trying to use this to encourage other people to stand up and fight. I was really impressed by it.

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Speaker 5 The last time we spoke was when the government was raiding John Bolton's house, the early morning raid of his home. Since then, he has also been indicted by a grand jury.

Speaker 5 The Bolton case feels, at least in the way it's been treated by the press, a little different than the James and Comey cases, which are just like manifestly ridiculous political prosecutions.

Speaker 5 The Bolton case feels more like a obvious political prosecution that also might have some legitimacy to it. And so I'm just wondering what you make of what we've learned since we last spoke.

Speaker 9 Well, I have very complicated feelings about this case. So the first is, let's make the case for the case and then make the case against it.
People are indicted for this sort of activity.

Speaker 9 If you take the allegations in the indictment as true, this is the kind of activity for which senior officials do, in fact, get prosecuted, whether it's General Cartwright or David Petraeus or John Deutsch, right?

Speaker 9 And there are any number of examples of senior officials behaving recklessly and carelessly or in a sloppy fashion with classified material because they are

Speaker 9 not because they're spies or but because they're just arrogant and they don't act like the rules apply to them. And the government's general posture is to take that pretty seriously.

Speaker 9 And it does prosecute these cases. It sometimes cuts them special deals, as in the Petraeus case, but it doesn't ignore that stuff.

Speaker 9 And so some of the stuff that is alleged in the Bolton indictment is, I think, pretty egregious.

Speaker 9 And the stuff that is particularly troublesome is not merely that he was allegedly, and I want to emphasize the word allegedly, sending detailed notes on his in sort of diary form to two family members, but then when his email was hacked by an Iranian connected actor of some kind, seems to have not disclosed the magnitude of the breach to the FBI at the time.

Speaker 9 And so I do think there's reasons to question John Bolton's conduct, and I'm not suggesting at the end of the day that an indictment would not be appropriate. I will say the following.

Speaker 9 We live in a society with a presumption of innocence for everybody, and the presumption of innocence is

Speaker 9 intended to protect

Speaker 9 you against malicious government conduct. And whatever John Bolton might have done, there is definitely malicious government conduct here in response.
And let's tick off some of it. So, number one,

Speaker 9 We know that the president and the vice president have been commenting on this investigation in a way that is, it's not quite at the level of what they're doing with Letitia James and Jim Comey, like sort of demanding it.

Speaker 9 But the president wants John Bolton prosecuted. The president wants revenge against John Bolton, even though John Bolton didn't.
participate in his first impeachment, right?

Speaker 9 John Bolton, like left the rule of law people hanging on that.

Speaker 5 Just on this point, like the easy counterfactual to this is if if John Bolton was doing what Mark Meadows did and like going on to Fox and defending Trump and talking about how great Mr.

Speaker 5 Trump was doing in the second term, how impressed he is by all the pieces.

Speaker 9 This case would not have happened.

Speaker 5 Obviously. And everyone agrees with that.

Speaker 5 I don't think you could find anybody that would say that, no, that there was still that this is still such a serious national security matter that it would have gone forward.

Speaker 9 Number two, we know that while this case generated during the Biden administration, the search warrant didn't happen during the Biden administration. There was a caution about handling it.

Speaker 9 And that's not to say it wouldn't have developed, but let's just say it didn't develop, right?

Speaker 9 And then you get the Trump people back into office on their revenge campaign, which we know includes malicious activity against other people, including lying about them.

Speaker 9 And they get a, you know, warm, as you would say, a warm tingly feeling in their legs about

Speaker 9 this case.

Speaker 5 Upper leg.

Speaker 9 The upper leg. Yeah.

Speaker 9 That includes Cash Patel tweeting about a search while it was ongoing. And it includes the fact, and I know this because I was physically there when that search warrant took place, as you know.

Speaker 9 The New York Post was not there.

Speaker 9 And they had the story that it was happening. I know they weren't there because I was there.
And

Speaker 9 moments

Speaker 9 after

Speaker 9 I went live

Speaker 9 from the scene, the New York Post had the story. And Cash Patel was tweeting about it.
And Pambandi responded. And that is,

Speaker 9 you know, I don't know what more evidence that you could have that the Justice Department, both on the investigative side and on the legal side, is actively trying to humiliate John Bolton.

Speaker 9 And then we have serial stories about how there is pressure to go through the seized material in lightning speed and bring this case really fast.

Speaker 9 Normally, this stuff takes months to go through the material that you

Speaker 9 take in a search when it's some of it may be classified. This is a months-long process.
The FBI is very meticulous about it.

Speaker 9 They got this done in a few weeks, under extreme pressure from the White House and from the Justice Department, Makati Mucks.

Speaker 9 In those circumstances, it seems to me you have to amp up the presumption of innocence. And you say it is there to protect us against the government cheating, lying, and trying to humiliate somebody.

Speaker 9 And we know that the government is cheating and trying to humiliate somebody here.

Speaker 9 And so I actually feel under these circumstances, I have no particular love for John Bolton, you know, not the nicest guy in Washington, but I do think it is important

Speaker 9 to take seriously that he is presumed innocent until they prove every fact in this indictment.

Speaker 5 It's funny that literally every person that defends Bolton in this case begins their defense with a throat clearing about how they have no love for John Bolton. I don't like his policies.

Speaker 5 He's not very nice.

Speaker 5 He's not an enjoyable person to be around. And yes.

Speaker 5 And yes.

Speaker 9 And of course, he has that mustache.

Speaker 9 And the mustache, I think, if he like there might be a whole different attitude about John Bolton if he shaved, but the Constitution is there to protect people you don't like.

Speaker 9 It's not merely there to protect the people you do like. And I feel very strongly about John Bolton's civil liberties.

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Speaker 5 I want to go on to the Trump settlement. Donald Trump is demanding that his Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him.

Speaker 5 There were two ongoing lawsuits before he won the 24 election. One was a 2023 lawsuit about the Russian investigation.

Speaker 5 There was another one, which was a lawsuit that they're filing over the classified dock search at Mar-a-Lago, arguing that that was inappropriate. This is insane on so many levels.

Speaker 5 You wrote on Tuesday, I want to read you to you.

Speaker 5 I am sufficiently enraged by Trump's demand for hundreds of millions of dollars in gratitudes from a department now run by his personal lawyers to compensate him for warranted and merited investigations and prosecutorial activity.

Speaker 5 That the better part of valor is to refrain from comment until my blood cools. I'm hoping the blood is still hot, and I would like to hear from you about this.

Speaker 9 I mean, look,

Speaker 9 I

Speaker 9 covered all those investigations, and I supervised a team that covered those investigations.

Speaker 9 I sat personally through the New York criminal trial, which is not at issue in Trump's demands for gratuities from the Justice Department. There were a lot of counts.

Speaker 9 It was 91 total, 33 of which he was convicted of in New York. Let's leave those aside.

Speaker 9 Eileen Cannon threw out some stuff on

Speaker 9 garbage grounds that had nothing to do with the merits of the matter.

Speaker 9 No count against Donald Trump has been dismissed because it lacked merit.

Speaker 9 And in fact, the government presented on the January 6th matter something like 160 pages of evidence in the wake of the Supreme Court opinion trying to show how stuff was not covered by the immunity decision.

Speaker 9 So it is one thing to demand compensation for having been put through the ringer in an investigation of which you've been cleared.

Speaker 5 Yeah, sure. Hey, how about if we're going to give somebody a quarter billion dollars? How about George Reddis?

Speaker 5 He did nothing except try to show up to work and we put him in solitary confinement for 48 hours without access to a lawyer. Donald Trump never left his gilded mansion in Mar-a-Lago or New York.

Speaker 9 You know, there are a lot of people. There are even Trumpist people, right? Stephen Hatville, who was the principal suspect in the anthrax case, who's now a Trump advisor.

Speaker 9 on, I don't have a problem with compensating Stephen Hatville, which happened, I believe. You don't get compensated for things of which you do not get cleared.
That's number one. Number two,

Speaker 9 if you

Speaker 9 happen to be president,

Speaker 9 you don't get to demand that your own Justice Department pay you for not getting cleared. much less to the tune of $230 million.

Speaker 9 And number three,

Speaker 9 if you staff your Justice Department with, at the leadership levels, with your personal lawyers, you really don't get to demand that they, your lawyers who have a fiduciary obligation to you,

Speaker 9 direct the Justice Department to give you money.

Speaker 9 So I don't know what else to say about this other than I think it's even more outrageous than bulldozing part of the White House, which also, you know, happened at the same time.

Speaker 9 Other than to say it is outrageous and it is outrageous that they are contemplating doing it. I assume because nobody is able to say no to him that some of them will even try to do it.

Speaker 9 I don't know what to say. Well, I hope he gets it.

Speaker 5 I'm just saying, I hope he gets it.

Speaker 5 There's no better finger in the eye of the people that voted for him on the grounds that life was too expensive for them than for him to take $230 million of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars and give them to himself while

Speaker 5 he's a self-proclaimed billionaire. He probably is an actual billionaire now for the first time ever because of his crypto scam.

Speaker 5 And he's going to take hardworking Americans' money and give them to himself for restitution because he had emotional damage and do nothing to help make things more affordable for them.

Speaker 5 And I just, I think it would be perfect. It's a nicely packaged box, nicely wrapped story.
And I hope that Ahid takes it.

Speaker 9 Just as a matter of principle, feel called to disagree with you

Speaker 9 because it is $230 million of the taxpayer's money.

Speaker 9 But I don't disagree that there's an elegance to it at a political level from your point. On a serious note, however, I will say that any

Speaker 9 attorney who participates in this decision, who has been an attorney for Donald Trump or in another circumstance in which they have a client interest, the head of the civil division, Stan Woodward, for example, represented one of Trump's co-defendants and a number of witnesses across the

Speaker 9 needs to have bar discipline because you actually don't get to represent both the United States and a criminal defendant who is demanding money from the Justice Department at the same time.

Speaker 9 You don't get to do that.

Speaker 5 Maybe they'll be prosecuted by the next Justice Department. A topic for another day.
The Mike Johnson, I should just mention, the Speaker of the House said that

Speaker 5 that's great. This is good for him.
Good on him. As far as he's concerned, he knows Trump believes he's owed that reimbursement.
And Mike Johnson is for what's just and right.

Speaker 5 And he thinks it's just absurd that people attack him for everything he does. So there you go.
That's the position of the Speaker of the House.

Speaker 9 Well, there you go. By the way, I also want the Justice Department to give me $230 million.

Speaker 5 I've got a lot of complaints. I got a rash, as the dude would say.

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Speaker 5 I want to talk to you about the January 6th pardons a little bit and the recent news on that.

Speaker 5 34-year-old Christopher Moynihan, who had been convicted for rioting at the Capitol on January 6th, has now been accused of sending text messages in which he wrote, Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC.

Speaker 5 I cannot allow this terrorist to live. Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated.
I will kill him for the future. Not really subtle there.
David Mastio over at the Kansas City Star, shout out to him.

Speaker 5 He's got an article out this morning that's gone through kind of legal filings and has identified now more than 30 cases of re-offense among the January 6th partners, including child porn, alleged assault on a police officer.

Speaker 5 Again, multiple weapons violations, and rape. So, there you go.

Speaker 5 The reoffenses are offensive in their own right, but the one with Moynihan is particularly apt because I think it's the first example of someone that was convicted for attempting political violence, getting pardoned, and then attempting to reoffend on the same, you know, in the same vein.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so I will point out that in the other direction, however, you see, this reflects your bias, Tim, that

Speaker 9 you're only reporting the examples where the convicts who Trump has released reoffended.

Speaker 9 You're not pointing out that the QAnon shaman has written a letter saying that Trump is not the legitimate president, that he is the legitimate president.

Speaker 9 And, you know, and so some

Speaker 9 people are

Speaker 9 truly reformed and are showing a love of their fellow man that out Gandhi's Gandhi. And all you want to focus on is, you know, the rapists and the, and the people who are doing political violence.

Speaker 9 Shame on you, Tim.

Speaker 5 Good point. I haven't been following Jacob Chansley's recent material that closely.
So thanks for bringing that to us.

Speaker 9 Let me pull it up here.

Speaker 9 I will read it to you. Oh, great.

Speaker 9 He's filed a $40 trillion lawsuit against America, against Trump with a plan to revolutionize America.

Speaker 9 Vice reports, Jacob Chancely, better known as the shirtless bison horned QAnon shaman from the Capitol cosplay riot, is unfortunately back in the news.

Speaker 9 This time he's filed a lawsuit that either definitively proves that he and everybody involved in the riots were not of sound mind or that he is just another performatively crazy crank trying to hop on the right-wing.

Speaker 9 gravy train.

Speaker 9 The Phoenix New Times reports that his 26-page single single-paragraph legal complaint names everyone from Donald Trump and Elon Musk's S-Corp to the NSA, Israel, and Warner Brothers Studios as co-conspirators in a vast conspiracy that was set on trampling his constitutional rights for his extremely vague infraction.

Speaker 9 He is seeking damages of upwards of $40. trillion.

Speaker 5 Oh, more than Trump.

Speaker 5 I wish Chansley good luck in that, in his suit against the government.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I wish him well.

Speaker 5 There's been so much happening in Ukraine.

Speaker 5 You know, with our posture towards them, you know, obviously, this is something you've been a staunch advocate for, defending the folks in Ukraine.

Speaker 5 There was a story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that people were getting excited about that maybe Trump had flipped back and was going to let the dogs of war loose.

Speaker 5 And Trump called that story fake news and walked it back.

Speaker 5 So it feels like we're, you know, there's a lot of Sturm and Drag, a lot of Trump flip-flopping over the place, but we kind of always land at the same place, which is Trump letting Putin continue to run the clock.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so a few things have happened. The first is that the scheduled meeting between Trump and Putin in Hungary has been canceled, and Putin responded to that with a renewed set of attacks on Kyiv,

Speaker 9 which have been very destructive. The second thing is that, you know, the people who get excited every time Trump makes a noise in one direction have gotten very excited because

Speaker 9 some sanctions went into effect against certain oil companies on the Russian side. Look, I do not let my emotional reaction to anything hinge on Trump's attitude toward Ukraine or Russia.

Speaker 9 That's not healthy for me. And he is, at the end of the day, does what he does.

Speaker 9 It is a disaster. And Ukraine is fighting on anyway.

Speaker 9 And so I think the only thing we can do is take the good when it happens, like these new sanctions is constructive, criticize the hell out of the much more frequent bad, and

Speaker 9 understand

Speaker 9 that

Speaker 10 when

Speaker 9 you vacillate like this,

Speaker 9 Putin's reaction is going going to be to double down and kill more Ukrainians. And that's exactly what he's done.

Speaker 9 And, you know, these people who say you have to show strength and who love talking about machismo love to show weakness to Vladimir Putin, and it's getting a lot of people killed.

Speaker 9 You know, other than to say do not get your hopes up when Trump momentarily sounds like he's doing the right thing, ever, you know, with respect to this set of issues at at least, and maybe with respect to all sets of issues, pocket the good and don't stop criticizing the bad.

Speaker 9 I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 5 Wise guidance. You didn't have to say anything else.
It's a great place to leave it. That's Ben Wittis.
Thank you, as always, for your time. Shout out to folks at Law Fair.
A great

Speaker 5 scoop, I guess we'll call it,

Speaker 5 falling in the lap.

Speaker 9 Everything I've ever said to you on this platform has been off the record. And shame on you for publishing so much of it.

Speaker 9 You're not really a journalist, so maybe I don't really, it's a waste of time to say that, but I,

Speaker 9 you know, just wanted to give you a heads up.

Speaker 5 I appreciate that, Ben, and you're not the first to say that to me. Carrie Lake has said that, several others.
I appreciate you and Anna Bower's time.

Speaker 5 Everybody else will be back for another fake news edition of the Bulwark podcast tomorrow. See you all, Ben.
Peace.

Speaker 5 Sorry about the things that I'd say, and I'll make it up to you right now at the penny I gave

Speaker 5 in an open car, wherever you are.

Speaker 5 Push yourself too far and like it all.

Speaker 5 Worrying over the confusion,

Speaker 5 and you know, just take time.

Speaker 5 Get all wrapped up in the illusion

Speaker 5 of doing something out of it. Fright, cry, cry,

Speaker 5 cry, cry.

Speaker 5 You got to hold to reiterate it. Keep it up the record,

Speaker 5 up the record. You got to know that we will change it.
Keep it up the record,

Speaker 5 of the record. Come on.

Speaker 5 In a crowded room near the boxing pool. To an audio official too,

Speaker 5 I'll see you soon.

Speaker 5 When you do all this, would it turn to missed? If your idea wasn't kissed, why are you so missed?

Speaker 5 Well, I know you don't need the confusion.

Speaker 5 And I know you just ain't the time

Speaker 5 to get all wrapped up in the illusion.

Speaker 5 I'm doing something that you know ain't right, right, right,

Speaker 5 right, right,

Speaker 5 right, right,

Speaker 5 right, right, right. You've got to want to reunage it, keep it up the record,

Speaker 5 forever record. You've got to know that we will change it, keep it up the record,

Speaker 5 of the record. You've got to want to reunage it, keep it up to record

Speaker 5 for all the record.

Speaker 5 You've got to know that we will change

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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