Jonathan V. Last and Carol Leonnig: The Danger of a Weakened Bully

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Speaker 18 Hello, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got got a double header up today.

Speaker 18 Could not be more excited about the second block with Carol Lennig, one of my favorite reporters who's moved over to MS Now from the Washington Post.

Speaker 18 She's got a new book out about the Justice Department that I've been devouring.

Speaker 18 But first, my buddy, my co-host on the Next Level podcast, author of the Triad newsletter, your favorite, Jonathan Victor Lass, JVL. What's up, JVL?

Speaker 18 Hey, man, it's nice to be here when things aren't like totally terrible.

Speaker 18 That's the first in a while.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Though we're going to do some feelings at the end.
I'm having some mixed feelings. I'm going to save that for people.
We're going to do happy talk at the beginning.

Speaker 18 Then we'll go over my mixed feelings about everything. JBL, I wanted to grab you because it was just such a big win for the Democrats on Tuesday night and such a big wave.
And

Speaker 18 we were talking on the next level, kind of live as it was coming in, kind of processing everything. So I want to just have a little bit of a deeper.

Speaker 18 both analytical and emotional kind of recap of where things stand right now. And you did a newsletter yesterday on the Hispanic vote that was a banger, as they all are.

Speaker 18 So I want to start talking about the Hispanic vote and then we'll get into some more big picture stuff.

Speaker 18 Pretty stunning, just the degree to which the Republicans tanked all of their gains and then some with Hispanic voters. You know, again, admittedly, these are in blue states.

Speaker 18 Maybe things are a little bit different in the border states. But

Speaker 18 why don't you talk about what you found? Yeah, so here's what we found. I was looking at Union City, which is the most heavily Hispanic township in New Jersey.
It's like 81, 82% Hispanic.

Speaker 18 So overwhelmingly Hispanic. And it's a pretty big place.
They're up in Hudson County. And here is how Trump's vote share grew.
He went in 2016, 19%.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 18 2020, 28%.

Speaker 18 2024, 41%.

Speaker 18 So this is like the big

Speaker 18 Hispanic realignment. The Hispanics in Union City were like, Man, the more I see of this guy, the more deportation.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we're into that. That sounds like a great idea.
So, I mean, you've read the things, I won't like pretend like, can you guess, Tim, what it was? But the answer is 15.1%.

Speaker 18 The Republican Jack Chitterelli dropped from the Trump share of 41 to 15.1%.

Speaker 18 So, like,

Speaker 18 he lost 25% off of Trump's 2016 total.

Speaker 18 Mikey Sherrill was plus 50 in this county. And Steve Cornicai over at Cornicai? I guess not.
Yeah. This shows you that you're not a TV watcher, which I love about you.

Speaker 18 J-BL does not consume cable TV. So he only is consuming TV.
He's not on MS. No, he's not anymore, actually.
We've lost him off of MS now. He's on NBC.
But it's pronounced Cornacky. Oh, okay.

Speaker 18 Steve Cornacky, the gay man with the khakis. Khaki Kornacki.
It rhymes.

Speaker 18 I always knew him as a guy who wrote for Salon back in the day. I know.

Speaker 18 It's been a minute.

Speaker 18 Anyway, so he went through and pulled the municipalities in Jersey with more than 60% Hispanic demographics. And there were one, two, three, four, like nine of them.

Speaker 18 And on average, they swung about 50 points against where they had been. It's truly crazy.
I'm just going to read a couple of them.

Speaker 18 You mentioned Union City already, but Passaic County, which is what a lot of folks focused on, That had been a longtime Democratic stronghold. Trump actually won it by seven.
Cheryl won it by 26.

Speaker 18 It's only a 33-point swing there only. Perth Amboy, Harris plus 9, Cheryl plus 56.
Yeah, I mean, it's just an unbelievable turn. West New York, Harris plus 13.
Cheryl plus 57.

Speaker 18 Patterson, Harris plus 28. Cheryl plus 71.

Speaker 18 It's hard to win a place by 71 points. It's really hard.
I mean, when you just do the math on what that means, I mean, Zoron did it in Bushwick. Sure.
Most of the time. Sure.

Speaker 18 Most of the time, it is tough. Trump does it out in West Texas.
Again, that is a 12-month swing. Yeah.
That is not a like four years to now. That is a 12 months ago to right now.

Speaker 18 There's some caveats to this. It's just important to say because I know that people will push back.
So like we should just go through them. Like for starters, it's an off-off year.

Speaker 18 So there's kind of a self-selecting group of every voter, including Hispanic voters. Like it probably is such that it's a higher college-educated percentage, right?

Speaker 18 It's probably such that it's a higher percentage of people who are really engaged in what's going on in the news.

Speaker 18 Like the types of people that tend to be more Democrat are going to vote in an off-off year than a presidential year. So, you know, there's some elements to that.

Speaker 18 You know, in Union City, in particular, there's a big article. This guy, Brian Stack.

Speaker 18 Jersey is one of the few places where they still have machine politics stuff. And he is a friend of Cheryl.
They went in big, right?

Speaker 18 Like, so there are some caveats, but like 50 points is not you know what I mean like okay let's say he's down 20 points instead if you if you if you put it up against a general uh a presidential electorate and you put it into a different state where there isn't as much kind of union machine politics happening even still you know the swing is remarkable and you saw in Virginia for example in Manassa City which is a highly concentrated Hispanic precinct out by Dulles Airport and you know you saw a similar story there well and this also matches up with with the polling, right?

Speaker 18 And so this is one of the big questions we had going into Tuesday was,

Speaker 18 wow, the polling on two particular groups, 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters, has looked post-apocalyptic.

Speaker 18 So we've seen like almost like zombie apocalypse level collapses for Trump within both voters 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters over the last 10 months.

Speaker 18 And some of the Hispanic polling suggested he had lost like like 45 points with Hispanic voters, which seemed crazy, right? Except that it shows up in a lot of surveys.

Speaker 18 And this was the first test of, well, is it, can you see it in the wild as well? And it turns out you can.

Speaker 18 And so that, I think, is a little bit of confirmation. It's going to make polling 2026 really hard.
Right.

Speaker 18 Because polls are always modeled on the things that have happened reasonably close before them.

Speaker 18 When there are big shifts happening, especially big shifts happening very quickly, it's hard for models to catch up with them yeah it's one of the reasons why chitterelli like really his polls were way out of whack with where he actually performed in jersey and it was because of hispanic voters the other thing you pointed out in the article which is i mean just i think everybody who listens to this show knows it's kind of obvious but it's just worth kind of sitting on the implications is that like the thing that is driving this is obviously the deportation campaign in addition to the costs you know staying high you don't have to do deep analysis to figure this out neither of those things are going to get better and trump is pot committed to his deportation campaign, was the phrase you used

Speaker 18 in the column.

Speaker 18 And I think that is obviously the case. And it's not like he's going to replace Stephen Miller with Javanka next year because they decide to do a softer, kinder version of the Trump administration.

Speaker 18 Like, this is, they're in on this, on the deportation effort. Trump said it himself.
If we have deflation, he's going to have other problems on his hands.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 I think that just this kind of projecting out, it's hard to see what would reverse the trend for him, at least with this demo. The best he could hope for is that the Supreme Court overrules tariffs.

Speaker 18 He'll just declare victory at which one will say, see, it worked. The tariffs worked.
I got all the best deals.

Speaker 18 And then he sends everybody a check for $600 or something that he says, here is your big, beautiful tariff check.

Speaker 18 Like, none of that will actually do anything to costs, really, because costs ain't coming down.

Speaker 18 And the ice thing, I mean, just think about they're in the process of hiring 10,000 people.

Speaker 18 Once you have committed those budgetary dollars to this and you're in the process of staffing up like that, will you have to keep doing the enforcement?

Speaker 18 Because otherwise, what do you do with these bodies? Right.

Speaker 18 And so I just don't see

Speaker 18 how they stop that.

Speaker 18 All right. That takes us to the one of the other topics I wanted to kind of mull over with you, which is what is Trump's next move to this? I mean, you look at it and lame duck talk is going to start.

Speaker 18 His ability to bully is going to weaken somewhat, like not entirely, right?

Speaker 18 And he still has a lot of levers that he can use with the Department of Justice and tariffs for as long as those go or other, you know, ways to, you know, threaten companies.

Speaker 18 But some of his levers to bully, I think, are going to be weakened here. If you're looking at.

Speaker 18 You know, imagine the Jimmy Kimmel situation happening next week. You kind of think that Disney probably would have, would have not folded, right?

Speaker 18 And it wouldn't have taken them the time to come around. I'd have been like, okay, buddy.
You know, how does he combat that, right?

Speaker 18 Like, do you have anything in your crystal ball on how Trump is going to deal with this stuff? On the Hill, I guess I should just say one more thing.

Speaker 18 You know, there's these conversations we talked about with Weigel yesterday about killing the filibuster when we were talking, and this is very fast moving.

Speaker 18 So, like, who knows by the time this publishes, but like initially, it was kind of like John Thin was like, no way. Then all of a sudden, some cracks were starting to leak.

Speaker 18 Ron Johnson, John Cornyn, some pretty traditional Republicans were like, eh, maybe we can figure out something. So maybe they do something with that.

Speaker 18 What else do you think might be in his set of reactions to such a big rebuke? I mean, I assume something will involve New York City. Yeah.
Right. He's got Momdani there.

Speaker 18 He would like to pick Momdani to be a foil. So you wait till he's sworn in, then maybe you send the National Guard or, you know, send ICE.
You give, give New York City the Chicago treatment.

Speaker 18 and see what happens. And this is what Trump is really good at.
Vince McMahon used to say, just get it in the ring. You You know,

Speaker 18 whatever the problem was that you're having with the company or with the law or with anything else, just get it in the ring. Make it part of the show.

Speaker 18 And once you are in there doing it, you can make moves. You can maneuver.
You can find an angle. And I think that's basically how Trump has always viewed politics.
And

Speaker 18 I imagine he'll keep doing that. Don't you? Like, you know, like, okay, let's push some buttons on ice.
Let's blow up some more people in Venezuela.

Speaker 18 See if we can, you know, see if that will make threats against nigeria i guess that was my point is i think that

Speaker 18 the

Speaker 18 alarmist side of me thinks well

Speaker 18 the more he starts to kind of feel like the like he's not riding high like that he can see the end game the more maybe there's some lashing out on his on his behalf and so i don't want to overstate what yesterday is but it's like you know you see though he sees those losses maybe takes this supreme court defeat as you mentioned on tariffs You know, he feels like the midterms, like the plan to rig the midterms of the gerrymandering, doesn't seem like that's going that well.

Speaker 18 What are other things you can do? You know, and he flow, he floated the Insurrection Act to Nora O'Donnell and she didn't ask him about it, for example.

Speaker 18 That's something that stands out to me as something that obviously is on his mind.

Speaker 18 I think that for Trump, like obviously we're all agreed on the curve, like for Trump, it was kind of a quiet two weeks, kind of like he went to Asia and he does the China deal.

Speaker 18 I suspect that

Speaker 18 he will feel like he needs to do something else to shake up the snow globe in the coming in the coming weeks.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and I don't know that we can know what that is, but don't forget we also have like the birthright citizenship decision coming down, right? We've got a whole raft of Supreme Court decisions.

Speaker 18 Just on the Supreme Court thing, for example, just he wanted to buck them on Snap. Yeah.
And it's kind of, and it's still kind of unclear. It's like

Speaker 18 the functionaries working for the administration are getting snap out while Trump's bleeding that

Speaker 18 he's not going to follow the Supreme Court. And so it's maybe he likes it that way, actually.
So it feels like he's fighting them. I don't know.
It's hard to understand exactly what's happening.

Speaker 18 But if he does get rebuked on birthright citizenship, on tariffs,

Speaker 18 you know, a Supreme Court showdown also seems like something. Yeah, why wouldn't he?

Speaker 18 And the undercurving, I know you're not going to like this and you're going to make fun of me, but the bedrock beneath all of this is 2028. Oh, I don't know.
know. And

Speaker 18 how long he can

Speaker 18 maintain the position that actually I might run. They need me, actually.
Look at how bad it is when I'm not on the ballot. You have to have it.

Speaker 18 And, you know, well, maybe the Constitution says one thing, but I don't know. What if we have an emergency? Maybe you can't have it.

Speaker 18 You know, or maybe we need to push it to the Supreme Court and see if maybe it's really just two consecutive terms is what it's all about. I don't make fun of you.

Speaker 18 I make fun of the notion of like, it's inevitable. Nothing is inevitable in life.
And I think that this is probabilistic. Nothing is inevitable.
There's a probabilistic element to all of this.

Speaker 18 And, you know, sometimes everybody has a different judgment on what the level of probability is. But I think we can all agree it's not zero that he's going to flirt with that.
And it's not in 100.

Speaker 18 So it's a question of where it is in between there. I heard from my old friend Steve Bannon the other day.
You ready for this?

Speaker 18 I was unhappy that I was making fun of him over the 2028 stuff that he does to get attention. And he's like, we have five different ways we could do it.

Speaker 18 So again, I don't know. It's worth noting, I guess, that it's on a private message channel that he floated that.
So that's not for attention per se. I mean, he's not wrong.

Speaker 18 He probably does have five different ways that they could try it. Right.
Yeah. Right.
I mean, I can think of four of them off the top of my head.

Speaker 18 But what this is really about is about freezing the Republicans, though, right? I mean, really, it's about what can be said publicly and can he prevent, because this is the other thing to realize.

Speaker 18 For Donald Trump, Being president is less important than owning the Republican Party. But the thing is, you can't

Speaker 18 own the Republican Party if you or your child aren't president, right? If some other Republican is president,

Speaker 18 then you are no longer the main character, just by definition.

Speaker 18 And like, that's his business.

Speaker 18 You saw the tracker that Cap has out where, you know, he put like $2 billion just in liquid assets and probably another seven, I think, billion in unrealized gains so far.

Speaker 18 That's just in the first 10 months.

Speaker 18 Like this is, you know, we're going to be talking about tens of billions of dollars that are dependent upon him being the owner of the Republican Party.

Speaker 18 You think he's just going to say, well, going to be great to see a primary. Good luck to JD and Marco and Marjorie Taylor Green.

Speaker 18 And I'm just going to go back to my ballroom and, you know, we'll see who the future is. Yeah.

Speaker 18 This other thing about that is Trump might have avoided jail for himself, thanks to his friends with the Supreme Court, but

Speaker 18 his kids and grandkids have it. We can pardon them all, right? He can preemptively pardon them for all of the the, will that, will those hold? A preemptive pardon

Speaker 18 unlimited crimes. With this Supreme Court, you better believe it will.
Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 18 Anyway, I just think it's something to monitor, especially if you have a series of things where he doesn't get his way. He's gotten his way on basically everything for about 10 months now.

Speaker 18 If he doesn't get his way on this election, he doesn't get his way from the Supreme Court. Jon Thune doesn't give him his way on the shutdown.
I just think that's something to monitor.

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Speaker 18 I mentioned this, I interviewed Pat Ryan, Congressman, over about the inshitification of sports TV right now and how you can't watch ESPN on YouTube TV and you have to turn on the peacock, you know, to get a certain game, like how stupid it all is, and kind of how he's using that as an antitrust fight.

Speaker 18 Anyway, folks are going to check that out if they want. I'll put a link in here.
But as part of that conversation, I was telling them, I have a little bit, this is PTSD from

Speaker 18 recent elections.

Speaker 18 I have a little bit of nerves seeing some of the chatter from the Democrats, chatter for some of my friends on MSNBC about that sounds a lot like after 2022 when the Democrats, you know, the red wave didn't come into fruition and they were kind of like, oh, look at this.

Speaker 18 Look at this. Things are going good.
Dobbs and et cetera.

Speaker 18 And, you know, they won blue states in, they won a couple states, Kamala won, and they won New York City, and then they won some down ballot places. And it's good.
It was good. It was good.

Speaker 18 Good night. Really good night.

Speaker 18 But I don't know.

Speaker 18 I just, is this just me being a rain cloud? I have a little bit of concern.

Speaker 18 It's like all of the structural issues that were, besides maybe Hispanic men, all the other structural issues that existed for the party, the Democratic Party going after 2024 still exist today, with maybe the exception of their standing with Hispanic men and the fact that the party at least understands they should talk a little bit more about affordability.

Speaker 18 Donald Trump has an enormous amount of power. right now, right?

Speaker 18 He probably has as much or more power than any American president since FDR, just in terms of his totally unified control of the country and of the federal government.

Speaker 18 And like, even if all of the stuff that you and I hope happens comes to fruition, his capacity to do damage is still like almost unimaginable. And he does still have room to maneuver.

Speaker 18 Like it's not written anywhere that he can't turn this around, that

Speaker 18 God knows, it's not written anywhere even that you can't have a bunch of shenanigans in 2026

Speaker 18 that result in

Speaker 18 things which are quasi-legal, right? You know,

Speaker 18 a close election where the House is being decided by like two or three seats and maybe, you know, some the Missouri Senate or the Ohio Board of Elections is like, huh, we think that in this district where Democrat won, we're not sure we can certify those results because reasons.

Speaker 18 Right. And all of that, God knows, is

Speaker 18 independent of the possibility that Trump could legitimately keep winning, right? Maybe we wind up with, maybe the AI bubble bursts, we go into a recession and

Speaker 18 people

Speaker 18 blame Democrats. Like, I think that's the less likely of the two possibilities, right? Normally they blame the incoming president's party, but that's not like a rule of physics.

Speaker 18 You know, that's not inevitable.

Speaker 18 Lots of things could happen. Here's what I say.
Yesterday turned out as well as you could have asked for it to turn out.

Speaker 18 If you and I had sat down and say,

Speaker 18 what are the results that would be the best possible case scenario? It would have looked basically like what we got. Like that's necessary, but not sufficient for rolling back all this stuff.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 And that takes me to my final thing I missed. Sarah, when we were on with Sarah live and TNL, isn't Sarah the best? God love her.
And Sarah is just in the fight, you know, and it's like next man up.

Speaker 18 She's exactly who you want on your field hockey team. That is a lesbian joke or whatever.
Any sports team, you know, focused. That's not me.
I'm an emotional wreck, which you can relate to. Sure.

Speaker 18 And I don't know. I felt myself

Speaker 18 the last 24 hours like

Speaker 18 trying to convince myself I should be happier.

Speaker 18 It was objectively good. Objectively good.

Speaker 18 And yet he's still in there. And I'm talking to Carol Lennig next.
And it's just like, how is the Department of Justice ever fixed? And he is going to get away with this no matter what. Oh, yeah.
And

Speaker 18 I don't know. There's something about maybe just hearing the election music on MSNBC and whatever, looking at my numbers.
And I just,

Speaker 18 I don't know. I got a little, I felt like I needed a anti-SSRI a little bit, despite

Speaker 18 I felt like I should want to do shots instead. I felt like I needed an SSRI.

Speaker 18 Does that land with you at all? No, but I would say that's. Good.
We are never going to be able to go back to where we came from, which is bad.

Speaker 18 Like, you know, Sarah's like, oh, we'll just build something that's new, but even better, that fixes all the faults of the old systems. And I'm like, that's not how these things work.

Speaker 18 Like, we might get the chance to build something new, but it'll still be a slightly crappier version of what we used to have. That's just how it always is.
In shidification. It's inshittification.

Speaker 18 The inshitification of America. And that's the best case scenario, right? The best case scenarios.
But I have given up the hope that we could ever go back to American political life as it existed

Speaker 18 for my entire lifetime from essentially like 1980. I was a kid, a little kid in 1980 to 2015.

Speaker 18 And I think that world is gone. This is, Noah Smith had wrote a long essay about this and how like this is, we have spent down the inheritance.
that the World War II generation created for us. And

Speaker 18 that's just all all gone now. And we live in a different world, which is going to have like moral and political austerity to it.
And that is not going to be fun. And it kind of sucks.
I wish that

Speaker 18 it didn't happen. But that's just where it is.
And I, so I don't feel the way you feel. I feel sort of more hopeful in that, like, I have made my peace with never getting back there.

Speaker 18 But if there's a chance that we could just get inshittification instead of authoritarianism,

Speaker 18 I will take inshitification over Victor Orban's Hungary every day of the week. You know how when there's a crisis.
Does that work for you? Yeah, because this is why.

Speaker 18 You know, I don't know if this is how it works in your marriage, but if there's a crisis of some kind, I do better if Tyler is panicking, is in a bit is dark, you know, because then I'm like, okay, he's carrying the darkness for me.

Speaker 18 And so that'll balance me. So your answer right there

Speaker 18 really kind of made me feel lighter, you know, because it's just like a sin eater. Yeah.
So it's like, you know, you're, yeah,

Speaker 18 GVL's carrying the burden of this, right? Like,

Speaker 18 things are inevitably horrible, and so I shouldn't have to worry about you baby. That's nice.
What about, can I get you on the just a little mad at the voters on Tuesday?

Speaker 18 Can I also get you on that one? I had one more feeling I had to get off my chest. A little mad at them, kind of like, fuck you, fuck you, you fucking people in Passeau County.
What do you think?

Speaker 18 What were you thinking? A little bit of that. So this is a, I mean, it's not a productive thought, but yes.

Speaker 18 It is one thing if somebody says, I don't believe that driving my car into a wall will hurt my car, and they do it. And then you're like, you fucking idiot.
Look what you did. You wrecked your car.

Speaker 18 This is more like they took our car and drove it into a wall. Yeah, or drove into our house.
Right. And

Speaker 18 so that makes me pretty mad because it isn't the case of, and again, this is in 2016. It isn't the case.
They all saw a million people die.

Speaker 18 Well, like I just, I happen to go back and reread some of the stuff that we wrote in the after action report of COVID.

Speaker 18 And it was the greatest failure of the federal government in any of our lifetimes.

Speaker 18 I mean, just top to bottom, somebody should have gone to jail for the way the federal government handled the response to COVID.

Speaker 18 Everybody saw this. Everybody knows somebody who died from COVID.
And

Speaker 18 these people. in Passaic County, these very nice people in Passaic County, who listened, who watched people die, who all had pretty good jobs.

Speaker 18 And I am sorry that like prices went up a few percent, but your wages caught up with them. Your real wages outstripped the increase in inflation.
I'm sorry, but that's real. That's the reality.

Speaker 18 And these people saw COVID. They saw all that happen.
They saw the insurrection.

Speaker 18 They heard him talk about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation and how he wanted to deport 20 million, 25 million people, criminals and thugs.

Speaker 18 And these people people in Passaic County thought, yeah, you know what?

Speaker 18 Let's fucking roll the dice. I like him.

Speaker 18 I like him. Let's give that a whirl.
I'm glad they've come home and realized that the stove was hot and they would like to not touch the stove.

Speaker 18 It would have been nice if they couldn't have wrecked the car for America and wrecked the rest of the country in the midst of their idiocy.

Speaker 18 I really needed this. I hope Sarah doesn't listen to this.

Speaker 18 She never does. It's like, it's a double roll.
It's a roll of the dice. Yeah, Yeah, it's like 20% chance.
One a week. All right.
That's Jonathan V. Last.
Sign up for his newsletter if you had it.

Speaker 18 It's just gold like that. It's just gems every day you're getting from him.
And up next,

Speaker 18 we got Carol Lennig. Stick around.

Speaker 21 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 23 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 26 And you won't believe their prices.

Speaker 35 Just wait till you see what else is in there.

Speaker 33 It's basically a one-stop shop for everyone you know.

Speaker 24 I started bookmarking half the list for myself, honestly.

Speaker 35 This is the guy for the 2025 holiday gifting season.

Speaker 22 Check out the guide on marshalls.com.

Speaker 18 It's giving gifts. Gift the good stuff at Marshalls.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houghton.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 15 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 18 All right, we are back with one of my faves senior investigative reporters at MS Now. We're about to be MS Now, a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Speaker 18 Her latest book out this week is Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department, which she co-authored with Aaron Davis. It's Carol Lenig.
What's going on, Carol?

Speaker 20 Tim, I'm so glad to be with you. I love it when you say one of my favorites because all of my friends just think I'm so cool that I know you.

Speaker 18 Okay,

Speaker 18 great. Now I'm blushing.
And it's true. You know, I have a lot of,

Speaker 18 you know, I can argue and I can spin, but I can't really bullshit.

Speaker 18 People know, if I tell you you're one of my favorites and I'm faking it, you can see it on, you can see it on my face, as anybody knows who watches like a Piers Morgan performance that I do.

Speaker 18 Anyway, I want to get into the book. When did you write this book, by the way? Your breaking news stories?

Speaker 18 Did Aaron do most of the work?

Speaker 20 Yeah, he did it all. He wrote the whole thing.
I just do the TV.

Speaker 20 You know, we started this book in 2023.

Speaker 20 I mean, the reporting for it, obviously,

Speaker 20 a subject we were really interested in generally as reporters.

Speaker 20 But we decided to like step back from the dizzying headlines and try to figure out why is DOJ acting so differently than we have expected? Why are we, it kind of started with a tip I got that

Speaker 20 there was no investigation of Donald Trump's potential effort to overturn the election in 2021. Like there was people were saying to me, you know, you think there's an investigation, there's not.

Speaker 20 And when we got going on that road, we realized DOJ was really acting oddly. And then we thought

Speaker 20 we need to go deeper and a book lets you.

Speaker 18 I thought it was kind of an interesting way to start the book with the

Speaker 18 Attorney General's Honors Program, kind of explaining what that was. I didn't know anything about that.

Speaker 18 And then kind of go into a couple of examples of some regular just line prosecutors who are doing their job, Camille Shields and David Kent.

Speaker 18 And so I want to get into kind of the big stories that you covered during this decade, but just talk about why you wanted to focus on

Speaker 18 that element of it, like the types of people that go in, the talent, like what it is that is driving them.

Speaker 20 I'm so tickled that you zone in on those two people and the honors program, because we wanted to introduce the Department of Justice to people who don't cover it, don't know its norms, don't know

Speaker 20 how venerable an institution it is, don't know the kind of calling that prosecutors and investigators have that people this place.

Speaker 20 So it's a living, breathing institution of these people with this shared mission.

Speaker 20 You know, that no matter their ideological views, no matter which party they vote for, which most of them don't know among each other, whether who their party affiliation is, what their party affiliation is.

Speaker 20 These people kind of have a shared

Speaker 20 notion of what's right and why we bring prosecutions, why we bring cases.

Speaker 20 And it's not because we don't like people and it's not because we have some evidence, We can do it. It's very thoughtful.

Speaker 20 So when we open with Camille Shields and David Kent, they are being browbeaten by Donald Trump indirectly.

Speaker 20 I mean, he's not coming at them specifically, but he is pushing, pushing, pushing the Department of Justice to criminally charge former acting FBI director Andy McCabe, who opened an investigation of Donald Trump, right?

Speaker 20 That's his crime. But Donald Trump wanted him charged for other things.
Is it a righteous case? Like, is it in the public interest

Speaker 20 to

Speaker 20 charge this guy with misleading or lying to some federal investigators when he was asked a question about a leak in a newspaper story?

Speaker 20 But we also wanted to explain how do people get this shared vision and how do they get these values?

Speaker 20 And the honors program is the way so many of them, the people who led the Department of Justice under Joe Biden and even in the first Trump administration, so many of them came up through that program.

Speaker 20 It's like the youngest, best, brightest lawyers that came out of law school.

Speaker 20 We're grabbing them, we're training them young, and we're going to teach them what it means to represent the United States of America.

Speaker 18 Obviously, just huge changes in the reputation of the Justice Department and the mores and how it's worked, but like the actual people, since you've been covering this, how many of them are still there?

Speaker 18 Like, how much of this has cycled through? Like,

Speaker 18 who are the new people that are coming in in those types of roles?

Speaker 20 Huge fast forward. And wow, I mean, there's an estimate out there that 4,000 FBI agents and federal prosecutors have left the Department of Justice since January 20th.

Speaker 20 You know, the afternoon of January 20th, I saw a century worth of DOJ leadership be reassigned and essentially pressured to resign.

Speaker 20 People who were in charge of counterterror, George Toskis had led most of the counterterror investigations of the last two decades for the Department of Justice. And poof, he's out.

Speaker 20 The people that are still there, and I do talk to quite a few of them,

Speaker 20 are holding on to something, and that is

Speaker 20 that this department needs them, that there are bread and butter cases, not the sexy, you know,

Speaker 20 grab the headlines, politically tinged cases like Eric Adams, a New York mayor charged with taking bribes, or Donald Trump charged with hoarding and concealing and obstructing justice with classified records.

Speaker 20 They're bread and butter cases, and these people are

Speaker 20 saying somebody with integrity and with our shared values has to do this work. Some of them also want to bear witness to

Speaker 20 the corruption and manipulation of the department and make sure there's someone there to see it.

Speaker 18 Wow.

Speaker 18 So you think there are people staying like really that have that like three-year horizon in mind, four-year horizon in mind of like, we need to be here for this because eventually this thing will have to be rebuilt?

Speaker 20 Yes. I mean, I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day who said,

Speaker 20 I'm just holding on. I'm just holding on because this can't stand.

Speaker 18 I want to get back into some of the specific cases you're going in the book. And, you know, and folks should obviously get it.
And some of this stuff, I have to admit, I was reading it yesterday

Speaker 18 at the local cafe. And, you know, some of it's triggering.
So I had to fast-forward through a couple of the cases.

Speaker 18 So everybody can choose which ones they can revisit. The one that I was digging in the deepest on, though, because I've been obsessed with this.

Speaker 18 I was so happy you wrote about it, was the Egypt bribe case, something a lot of folks have forgotten about. But this was just a small part of the Mueller investigation.

Speaker 18 was that there's been a kind of mysterious $10 million in U.S. cash that's been taken out of an Egyptian bank that we don't know what happened to it.
Maybe coincidentally, maybe not.

Speaker 18 Donald Trump put in $10 million into his campaign around a similar time. So, for folks who aren't familiar with that, just give us the reader's digest on that investigation.

Speaker 20 You did a good summary. You know,

Speaker 20 we were kind of gobsmacked, Aaron and I, my co-author Aaron Davis, when

Speaker 20 we learned that there was this investigation that got shut down. And the investigation began actually

Speaker 20 because of a really unusual referral from the CIA. There was a informant

Speaker 20 who reported to his intelligence handlers,

Speaker 20 if you can imagine this, Tim, that he had information

Speaker 20 that LCC had ordered his folks to get $10 million to Donald Trump in the form of a illegal campaign contribution, a friendly campaign contribution in 2016.

Speaker 20 Now, you'll remember LCC met with the Egyptian president, met with Trump in an interesting sidebar during Trump's campaign and the United Nations General Assembly private meeting, initially public, but then private.

Speaker 20 It was during this time that everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Duh, that didn't work out.

Speaker 20 Everyone in Donald Trump's campaign was like, this guy will not put any more of his money into the campaign because he thinks he's going to lose. And this was all a marketing brouhaha anyway.

Speaker 20 and we don't have enough money to get to the end with TV advertising. So anyway, the investigators got this information from the CIA that LCC was going to try to give Trump $10 million.

Speaker 20 And interestingly, at that same time, in the late, late, late, late 2016, right before the election, Trump writes a check for $10 million to his campaign.

Speaker 20 But Bill Barr, when he got wind of this as the new attorney general, he questioned, do you really have the basis, the predicate for doing this investigation?

Speaker 20 And he scolded FBI Director Chris Ray and said, you better have

Speaker 20 some serious adult supervision of this investigation because I've got my doubts. And within

Speaker 20 a matter of a few weeks, the U.S.

Speaker 20 attorney in D.C., Jesse Liu, told the FBI agents she was not going to authorize them to pull Donald Trump's financial bank records to help establish, did he get the 10 million?

Speaker 18 So I was,

Speaker 18 you know, eating my biscuits and like frantically pushing through the book, doing the DC read of the book, going to the index to see like when Egypt comes back in and it doesn't.

Speaker 18 It was within the statute when Biden wins again.

Speaker 18 So I know we're about to get into the Merritt Garland of it all, but did they not open back up the Egypt investigation when they took back over the DOJ?

Speaker 20 Hey, by the way, your quick read is quite good. You're getting all the juicy bits with your biscuits.

Speaker 18 Yeah,

Speaker 20 you nailed it.

Speaker 20 The statute of limitations had not run, and the Biden DOJ did not open that investigation. There were people who told us that Merrick Garland was never briefed on it,

Speaker 20 but like it's kind of a big deal. So, and it was in the news.

Speaker 20 And, you know, it's not like it should have been a surprise to anyone that there was this scuttlebutt about LCC writing this huge check, allegedly writing this huge check check that ended up being,

Speaker 20 you know, 200 pound bags taken out of an Egyptian bank. That's part of the evidence that the investigators had.

Speaker 20 And they were trying to trace when it left that bank in Egypt in duffel bags, did it eventually go to Trump? But no, the Biden DOJ did not look.

Speaker 18 And I guess Jesse Liu was not in the DOJ then? She didn't left?

Speaker 20 She had been essentially shoved out of her U.S. attorney position by Bill Barr when she got nominated for a higher job.
He was like, okay, you got a nomination? Get out. I want to put my person in.

Speaker 20 And that was at the end of 2020.

Speaker 18 Okay. This is going to be my Candace Owens.
This is my, the Egyptian $10 million bag is going to become my Brigitte Macron. I'm going to be doing

Speaker 18 I'm going to be doing this podcast from Cairo after reading the book again.

Speaker 21 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 23 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturalistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 24 Hey, Bowen, it's gift season.

Speaker 36 Ugh, stressing me out.

Speaker 25 Why are all the people I love so hard to shop for?

Speaker 18 Like me? Exactly.

Speaker 26 Honey, I'm easy.

Speaker 27 But you're right.

Speaker 28 Holiday gifting is stressful.

Speaker 19 And all the gift guides out there are boring and uninspired.

Speaker 30 Wait, what about the guide we made? In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts mean incredible value?

Speaker 18 It's giving gifts!

Speaker 32 A series of guides filled with premium gifts at great value for everyone on your list.

Speaker 34 Yeah, because if I see one more for the dad who likes golf list, I'm out.

Speaker 18 Right?

Speaker 21 How about something for the people who actually surprise you?

Speaker 36 With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto, ps, she wants a pair of stilettos.

Speaker 28 Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn't have.

Speaker 23 Dying to see what those are.

Speaker 26 And you won't believe their prices.

Speaker 35 Just wait till you see what else is in there.

Speaker 33 It's basically a one-stop shop for everyone you know.

Speaker 24 I started bookmarking half the list for myself, honestly.

Speaker 35 This is the guide for the 2025 holiday gifting season.

Speaker 22 Check out the guide on marshalls.com.

Speaker 18 It's giving gifts. Gift the good stuff at Marshalls.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 15 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 18 Speaking of things that Merrick Owen didn't look into that quickly. So the Biden DOJ takes over in 2021 after, you know, we all saw the attempted coup in front of our eyes on the television.

Speaker 18 So it didn't really take subpoenas to figure out what was, what had happened on January 6th.

Speaker 18 We already knew that the DOJ decided to focus on the folks that had entered the building and that actually the rioters themselves rather than the organizers of the effort.

Speaker 18 Your reporting includes that there were specific agents that pressed multiple times to investigate the Trump part and were rebuffed by senior DOJ leaders basically until after the select committee with Liz Cheney and that crew.

Speaker 18 Talk to us a little bit about that.

Speaker 20 So I want to start by saying there is no comparison between Merrick Garland and Pam Bondi in terms of the way they ran the Department of Justice. I mean, I have separate complaints.

Speaker 18 I have different complaints about both. Yes, yes.

Speaker 20 But it's important to note one guy was an institutionalist trying to protect its independence from the White House and its credibility. And the other says, basically, Donald Trump gives me my

Speaker 20 orders in the morning and I follow them.

Speaker 20 So what we learned in Injustice in our reporting for the book was kind of made my hair stand up, which was that starting in December of 2020, a little known team of investigators at the National Archives were noticing that these fake elector certificates had been sent into the archives and to the Senate, and that they all looked boilerplate, phony, bogus, and they also looked the same, coordinated, right?

Speaker 20 And they came from swing states where a bunch of Republicans from those states, party officials said that they were

Speaker 20 the sworn electors, which was false. And they said that Trump had won the election, which was also false.
So these investigators at the National Archives went to the Department of Justice and said,

Speaker 20 hey, not sure, but this looks like a conspiracy. This looks like a potential crime.

Speaker 20 base like mail fraud, wire fraud. They submitted things that were bogus.
What was their intent?

Speaker 20 DOJ is in the middle of investigating the riots and a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C.

Speaker 20 eventually gets back to the National Archives investigators and says, yeah, we don't see a case here. So that was the first missed opportunity because they could have started looking there.

Speaker 20 It's not like you're looking at a violent riot and you're going to get to eventually building the brick one by one as Merrick Garland wanted to do.

Speaker 20 You're not going to get from the rioters to the fake electors coordinated in swing states.

Speaker 20 A lot of people who are inside the Justice Department told us, sources told us, like we should have been walking and chewing gum, right? We should have been doing both things.

Speaker 20 That's the first missed boat. The next missed ball is Thomas Wyndham, who is plucked out of a U.S.

Speaker 20 Attorney's Office in Maryland by the Deputy Attorney General's office in November 2021 and basically instructed, you're the lone prosecutor on this.

Speaker 20 Go into DC and try to figure out, out, start looking around to see if there are ties between Trump's orbit and this riot.

Speaker 20 And as he begins to do that, he asks the FBI chief in the Washington field office to start a grand jury investigation with him.

Speaker 20 He wants to pull the financial records for the Willard, where Rudy Giuliani and the campaign were all based in the days before January 6th. And, you know, oath keepers were there with Roger Stone.

Speaker 20 Like there was all this smoke that had never been looked into.

Speaker 20 And the head of the FBI's DC office tells Wyndham, I'm not subpoenaing the friggin' Willard. His exact words.
It's weird.

Speaker 20 He thinks it's inappropriate to start looking at a political campaign and also to pull the records of a hotel where a lot of swanky people probably have affairs.

Speaker 20 So he concludes, no, and he blocks that grand jury. It is not for 15 more months, Tim, after Biden takes office that the Department of Justice finally, I saw your hand on your face, finally

Speaker 20 investigates these fake electors.

Speaker 18 Here's the other one with the hands on my face. I've got it in all caps on my notes here.

Speaker 18 And I guess it's September of 22 when I forget which element of the case it is.

Speaker 18 They go to Garland and want to move forward. And he says, no, we're going to wait till after the midterms.
He doesn't want to politicize it. Now, I should just state,

Speaker 18 the investigation was against Donald Trump. He wasn't running in the midterms.
He was a private citizen in Mar-a-Lago, but he was planning on running in the 2024 election. So the idea that

Speaker 18 they didn't want to have any appearance of political impropriety, they decided to not do the investigation before the midterms, but save it until 2023 when Donald Trump is obviously going to be a candidate for office.

Speaker 18 That seems like a pretty big judgment error to me by Merrick Garland.

Speaker 20 I'm not a prosecutor.

Speaker 20 I only play a lawyer on TV, but I'll tell you that

Speaker 20 a very senior former DOJ official, when he read that passage in the book, called me yesterday. I was like walking in Hell's Kitchen trying to look for a piece of pizza that didn't cost $10.

Speaker 20 And he said,

Speaker 20 I cannot believe that happened.

Speaker 20 You know, Merrick Garland, again, like Caesar's wife, like just wants to be so above board, doesn't want to play any games and errors on the side of caution every time and errs on the side of giving Trump the benefit, essentially.

Speaker 20 I want to say the benefit of the doubt, but like the benefit of the Justice Department's carefulness and thoroughness and apoliticalness.

Speaker 20 But freezing that case for 60 days when Trump is not a candidate really makes a lot of prosecutors' hair blow back when they find out about it.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and then we go through to the January 6th committee. And, you know, obviously we have a lot of friends of the pod who are involved there with Jean Cheney Cheney and Kinzinger and others.

Speaker 18 And they had said at the time, and Chiff and were asking you that essentially their investigation had spurred on the DOJ and that they had a lot of stuff that DOJ didn't have.

Speaker 18 And, you know, being an outsider, it was hard for me to tell whether that was just like bravado or what, you know, whether maybe there were things DOJ had that they didn't know.

Speaker 18 And then I'm reading your book and it's like DOJ literally didn't know about Cassidy Hutchinson until they saw her on TV.

Speaker 18 So I guess it was not bravado. They were correct though the you know Kinziger and that crowd talking about that was correct that it was their work that you and I to advance the kids.

Speaker 20 You and I were in the same boat.

Speaker 20 I was watching this in you know real time watching you know various sources say to me especially in the house like you know we're the first footprints in the snow and we're we're doing this work and DOJ isn't and I was like huh it's hard to prove a negative, right?

Speaker 20 But when we really got down into it for the book, it was so clear that key moments of the House investigation,

Speaker 20 either through embarrassment or through how public it all was, there were two or three really key moments when the House investigation spurred DOJ to do things that exact same freaking day.

Speaker 20 So it's like hard to say that it didn't impact them. Here's an example.

Speaker 20 The week of January 10th, 2022, there's a story that comes out in Politico that is about a very good story, by the way, about how the House investigation has put together the fake electors scheme and the information they're getting back from swing states because they had actually subpoenaed information and records and they're getting back this.

Speaker 20 pretty damning evidence about the way it was coordinated. Rachel Maddow, now my colleague at MS Now,

Speaker 20 did like a week of programming that was about just this. Like, these electors look coordinated.
Where is Merrick Garland? She literally said, where is the DOJ?

Speaker 20 And a day later, Thomas Wyndham, we now know from records and interviews, reached out to that investigator from December 2020 and said, hey, I think we're going to investigate this.

Speaker 20 Would you like to be on board? I'm paraphrasing, obviously.

Speaker 21 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 23 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturalistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 24 Hey, Bowen, it's gift season.

Speaker 22 Ugh, stressing me out.

Speaker 25 Why are all the people I love so hard to shop for?

Speaker 18 Like me? Exactly.

Speaker 26 Honey, I'm easy.

Speaker 27 But you're right.

Speaker 28 Holiday gifting is stressful.

Speaker 19 And all the gift guides out there are boring and uninspired.

Speaker 30 Wait, what about the guide we made? A partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts mean incredible value?

Speaker 18 It's giving gifts!

Speaker 32 A series of guides filled with premium gifts at great value for everyone on your list.

Speaker 34 Yeah, because if I see one more for the dad who likes golf list, I'm out.

Speaker 18 Right?

Speaker 21 How about something for for the people who actually surprise you?

Speaker 36 With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto, ps, she wants a pair of stilettos.

Speaker 28 Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn't have.

Speaker 23 Dying to see what those are.

Speaker 26 And you won't believe their prices.

Speaker 35 Just wait till you see what else is in there.

Speaker 33 It's basically a one-stop shop for everyone you know.

Speaker 24 I started bookmarking half the list for myself, honestly.

Speaker 35 This is the guide for the 2025 holiday gifting season.

Speaker 22 Check out the guide on marshalls.com.

Speaker 18 It's giving gifts. Gift the good stuff at Marshalls.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 15 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 18 There's a whole section on Jack Smith, and I want to get up to kind of looking forward stuff and a couple other news things. But so I encourage you to actually read the book.

Speaker 18 Is there anything about the Jack Smith investigation in particular that really stood out to you or that section that made you kind of that you hadn't expected when you were doing the reporting on it?

Speaker 20 I mean, first off, watching it from the outside, and bionic man,

Speaker 20 no prosecutor has brought a case that fast, and certainly not one involving a former president. And he brought two of them.
And, you know, the guy was

Speaker 20 to say rigorous is really understating.

Speaker 20 how fast the guy moved and how fast he was whipping everybody on his team to move to.

Speaker 20 Not because he was trying to indict Donald Trump, but he would say to his team, we can't leave these questions unanswered for Donald Trump or for the public. If they're bogus, we need to answer them.

Speaker 20 If they're real and there's evidence, we need to bring them before

Speaker 20 there is a decision about whether or not to return him to the White House.

Speaker 20 So he had a very different way of approaching this than Merrick Garland, which was, yeah, there's a political calendar, but yeah, we got to answer the question.

Speaker 20 So bionic is a word I would use to describe Jack.

Speaker 20 The other huge surprise to me was was that he tried to get Judge Cannon removed from the case, and the Solicitor General turned him down and he did not appeal that to Merrick Garland.

Speaker 20 He accepted that rejection.

Speaker 20 The truth is that if the Solicitor General turned down a motion to remove Eileen Cannon from the case, it was probably likely that Attorney General Merrick Garland would also reject that.

Speaker 20 She, a former clerk, incredibly trusted by Merrick Garland. I don't know.

Speaker 18 Maybe if if the president was awake, we would have had a different attorney general by then, but I guess that's a different problem.

Speaker 18 No need to comment on that. Carol, that's what we call editorializing.
I want to go forward.

Speaker 18 The long-term fixing of this is hard for me to figure.

Speaker 18 And you've talked about all the people who have left, but now, even if you imagine a situation where a Democrat or a...

Speaker 18 a reform-minded Republican, that seems unlikely, but who the hell knows, like wins in 2029. It's kind of hard to imagine them like

Speaker 18 not, you know, and who the hell knows like what crimes will be done by this administration during that time. You know, so the question is, do you go the Merrick Garland route?

Speaker 18 Do you try to investigate any corruption related to the crypto schemes or anything else of this administration?

Speaker 18 What do you do with the people who've come into this administration who have acted improperly or not acted to the code of the Department of Justice? It feels like a pickle.

Speaker 18 And I think one of the people in your book basically said it's not going to get fixed in our lifetimes. And that's sad, but it's kind of what it seems like to me.

Speaker 20 Yeah. The hit the department has taken, as we learned in the book, is it's just not recoverable in the near term because two things.

Speaker 20 You brought up at the beginning, you've lost centuries' worth of experience and you can't replace them with, you know, a lot of Lindsey Halligans

Speaker 20 and expect,

Speaker 20 speaking of the

Speaker 20 former personal assistant and insurance lawyer that Donald Trump installed in the U.S.

Speaker 20 Attorney's Office in Virginia in order to indict James Comey and Letitia James, career prosecutors wouldn't do it.

Speaker 20 It's impossible to recover and expect that those folks are going to get replaced appropriately if you're inserting these lieutenants who, you know, salute to the commander and say, sure, we'll charge whoever you want us to charge.

Speaker 20 The second thing that's hard to recover from is the credibility gap. Like,

Speaker 20 if you you go the Merrick Garland route, you can see some dangers ahead of not holding people to account for their actions.

Speaker 20 The Department of Justice's mantra is: without fear or favor. Like, who cares who it is, who cares how important they are, who cares what their party is?

Speaker 20 We charge based on the evidence and the public interest. But if you go the hardcore route, I can see some dangers too, because where's the credibility for the DOJ?

Speaker 20 Is everybody going to assume that criminal prosecutions have been directed or manipulated by the party in power?

Speaker 18 Two other news items that have happened since the book. It's the problem of

Speaker 18 book timing, scheduling. Is this one a news item? I don't know.
I guess this is what I'm asking you. Is this real news or is this fake news? It's hard to know these days.

Speaker 18 Mike Davis, who's a very unhinged gentleman. He was the one that during the campaign was tweeting about

Speaker 18 how he's going to put me in the women's gulag.

Speaker 18 It was kind of like a yeah kind of a homophobe little gay joke a little funny gay joke between pals if trump had won so funny yeah so hilarious so anyway he's friends with bondi and he's been out there doing a lot of mega podcasts recently and and in one of them he said or several of them i think he said a federal grand jury has been impaneled in florida and they'll begin meeting in january to investigate a decade-long conspiracy against Trump.

Speaker 18 The grand jury will consider whether to bring criminal charges against top Democratic figures that Davis claims have colluded to hurt Trump, blah, blah, blah. Is that true? Do we do we know?

Speaker 18 Do you know anything about this?

Speaker 20 Can I just take a beat and say, yes, that's true. And stay tuned.
There's more. You know, I'd rather break news at my actual news organization.

Speaker 18 Well, you got me the bulwark. We're kind of all pals.
We're all family here. I'm just

Speaker 18 okay. So you're telling me I have to have a little, I have to have a little alarm bell from the Carol Lennig tweet, Twitter, or X or MSN.

Speaker 20 I'm not bringing like sillily. I'm just like, you and I are friends, so I can say

Speaker 20 you should tune into MS now at some point soon because there is more there. And I just think we should wait.

Speaker 18 It's pretty alarming. I guess I'll just say,

Speaker 18 what can I say on this? That Davis lists the things that they'll go into, Russia investigation,

Speaker 18 2020, et cetera. It's kind of this broad effort to claim there's some conspiracy against Trump.
So there are a lot of people that are caught into that dragnet.

Speaker 18 And I've heard from some of them who are like, we've we've heard from people who are in the know who are like, you should talk to lawyers, et cetera. So that's pretty alarming.

Speaker 20 It is alarming because if you think about it, it's part of the overall rainbow pattern, which is

Speaker 20 let's charge everybody with a crime for doing their jobs. They were doing their jobs when they looked into a fraudulent conspiracy.

Speaker 20 to overturn the election by claiming that swing states actually voted for Trump when they obviously did not. Let's charge people who opened an obstruction investigation into me when I fired Jim Comey.

Speaker 20 Let's criminally charge the former director of the FBI, Jim Comey, for lying to Congress, but really because he would not absolve Donald Trump publicly of any impropriety in his campaign, having repeated contacts with Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign.

Speaker 20 Next, let's charge Letitia James, the first person, the New York Attorney General, the first person to actually get a civil fraud case against him.

Speaker 18 To your point of the book, though, tying it in, and not having to speak specifically to the case Davis is talking about, like, where are they finding all the prosecutors to do these things?

Speaker 18 And obviously, we've seen in Virginia that a bunch of people have been pushed out and that Halligan comes in. And presuming this is actually happening in Florida and

Speaker 18 that there's other things happening. That's like a lot.
And that speaks to the future. It's like, what do you do with the folks who signed up to go along with like sham prosecutions?

Speaker 20 It's really a bloodbath, right? I mean, if you're a prosecutor in any U.S. attorney's office that happens to own one of these grand juries, Virginia, Philadelphia, New York,

Speaker 20 Maryland, D.C., now the Southern District of Florida, there's another one I'm forgetting. If you're a prosecutor in one of these offices, we are learning.

Speaker 20 You are going to resign if you're forced to do something.

Speaker 20 Remember in our book, we have all this cinematic detail of how Danielle Sassoon and her team deal with being ordered to dismiss the bribery charge against Adams.

Speaker 20 And then every single supervisor of an elite unit in DOJ called the Public Integrity Section, created after Nixon to protect us from corrupt public officials, every single one of those leaders in the course of 48 hours resigns rather than dismiss a case they know is righteous, Dismiss a case where they know the evidence is extremely powerful.

Speaker 20 Dismiss a case that Donald Trump wants gone so he has some

Speaker 20 hand over Adams to make him help him with his deportation policies in New York.

Speaker 18 All right. So last thing, the other news you broke since you've been over at MS was the Tom Homan kava bag story.

Speaker 18 I guess at this point, there's not It's sort of like there isn't much to advance in that story because the Trump administration isn't going to look into it.

Speaker 18 But, you know, I'm just wondering if there's any

Speaker 18 sort of follow-up or any sense of what you think the situation is. I guess Homan, it's interesting.

Speaker 18 Homan is also sort of in this internal political fight in the administration where he's the moderating force, apparently, according to some reporting, on the deportations. But I'm just wondering if

Speaker 18 your reporting is tied in at all, if there's any people are looking at him differently.

Speaker 20 I would just say that there's some prosecutors who remind me that there's a five-year statute of limitations on bribery. And

Speaker 20 the meeting that we revealed in September of 2024, where Holman accepted and was taped, accepting a kava bag full of $50,000 in cash, that tape still exists. That evidence still exists.

Speaker 20 And the five-year statute of limitations for 2024 is September 2029.

Speaker 18 Well, hopefully we won't redo the Egypt investigation. People will use the nine months to look into potential, who knows, alleged bribery.

Speaker 18 And if you're listening from Cairo and have any information, you can be sure because you have me and Carol can find us on Signal.

Speaker 20 Tim, did you just say Cairo if you're listening? Yeah,

Speaker 18 Cairo.

Speaker 18 Cairo, if you're listening, call me or Carol. Carol Lenning, the book's Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department.
Appreciate it.

Speaker 18 And we'll be talking to you soon, all right?

Speaker 20 Tim, this was great. Thanks for focusing on our book, Injustice.

Speaker 18 Happy to do it. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.
See you all then. Peace.

Speaker 18 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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