Walter Dellinger (4:34)

Amicus. Thank you.

Dahlia Lithwick (4:35)

Dalia. And I think maybe the very first thing we can do, Walter, in this conversation is just put some meat on the bones for listeners who've just been hearing a lot of noise this week. As I Understand, it takes 218 yes votes in the House to vote on articles of impeachment. We have, as of this recording Friday morning, 221 members who say they support impeachment, regardless of what we're calling it today. Walter, whether it originated in the Judiciary Committee or in Nancy Pelosi's statement last Monday, is it fair to assert that the impeachment process has.

Walter Dellinger (5:13)

Begun? The impeachment process has begun. Be careful, though. A slight majority of the House membership has said they support beginning the impeachment process proceedings. They have not yet committed to how they would vote on any article of.

Dahlia Lithwick (5:29)

Impeachment. Good clarification. This is why we pay you the big bucks, Walter. Now, now, my second just clarifying question. Can Mitch McConnell just decide that he refuses to hold a trial in the.

Walter Dellinger (5:42)

Senate. Yeah, that is a good question. And because we've only had two Senate trials of presidents, that is Andrew Johnson who was undercutting the, the Civil War victory and, and Bill Clinton who lied in a deposition about his sexual relationship with an intern, we've only had those two. So we have very little in the way of precedence. There's, there's virtually no case law except case law that says to that the court is going to stay out of the substance of these issues and leave it all to, to Congress. The big question is, is it true that McConnell can, I think the current term is garland the impeachment process, that is to say, ignore the House's articles of impeachment the way he had a majority of the Senate, simply ignore the fact that the President of the United States had made a nomination to the Supreme Court. I tend to think the answer is that it would be very hard for him to avoid a roll call vote because what few people realize is that in the case of an impeachment of the president and not all the other civil officers are subject to impeachment, in the case of the impeachment of the President, the presiding officer is the Chief justice of the Supreme Court. Now that's actually quite important. There are 53 Republicans, but it's normally thought that you needed more than three Republicans to come over on any vote in the Senate because Vice President Pence would break the tie. Now, Vice President Pence is not going to be there to break the tie. So while it takes 2/3 of the Senate to convict on articles of impeachment, it only takes a majority to pass on rulings of the chair. And if you think about the number of senators who are from states where they're just not solidly committed to the protection of Donald Trump at any cost, you know, you've got Senator Romney who has already been critical of what President Trump has done. You've got Susan Collins, who is up for election in a moderate state. You've got the, the senator from Colorado, Cory Gardner. You've got a pretty moderate senator from North Carolina too. In fact, Tillis and Senator Burr has been a fair co chair of the Intelligence Committee. You only need three of those to have a 50, 50 tie on a procedural question to be ruled on by the vote of the Chief justice and the chair. And that's important because if a well thought out, well crafted article of impeachment supported by nearly incontrovertible evidence, including in the most recent case, the actual assertions by the President himself, and that comes over it's unclear to me who decides when to convene the Senate since the Chief justice is the presiding officer the House. When an article of impeachment is voted, the House appoints House managers who present the articles of impeachment to the Senate and who would notify the Chief Justice. The House managers would propose a briefing schedule and debating schedule. The President's attorneys would have their own counter briefing schedule. And the Chief Justice, I think would confer with certainly the majority and minority leaders in the Senate about when it would be convenient. But it's not clear to me that it's Mitch McConnell rather than John Roberts, Chief justice, who decides to commence the proceedings. Now, political friends tell me that Majority Leader McConnell would wish to avoid a roll call vote. He's got too many members who might be exposed that time either to say what is clearly established to have happened, didn't happen, or to acknowledge that it happened, but say it's okay for a President to do things like are detailed in articles of impeachment. I don't think the Majority Leader can make motions. It has to be the President's lawyers could move to dismiss without any further proceedings and avoid the Senate trial. So on that motion to just simply dismiss all the charges, which I believe they could make, and if it carried by a majority vote, I believe that's the end of the matter in the Senate as a matter of sheer the Senate sheer power to try all impeachments. But I think that the Chief justice would call the question and listen to the A's and nays, and almost certainly they would be close enough A's and nays that the Chief justice would say, the voice vote being inconclusive, the clerk shall call the roll. And Senators would have to vote without hearing any evidence or testimony or briefing or presentation. And I think that would be a tough vote, particularly since the Chief justice would have the deciding vote to decide whether to proceed or not. The framers didn't contemplate that there would be a political party that had one member that could control how every member of that party voted. That is the, the present system where McConnell controls his caucus with the Chief justice in the chair. I am not at all confident that the Majority Leader of the Senate can successfully make this go away without having at least an initial.

Dahlia Lithwick (11:10)

Vote. Because the Chief justice presides over this. Folks sometimes have the notion that he has immense power. Now you've just flagged the fact that he has the power to break a tie. But for instance, you. We have Donald Trump tweeting last April Quote, if the partisan Dems ever tried to impeach, I would first head to the U.S. supreme Court in a statement to reporters, even this week. What are these guys doing? There should be a way of stopping this impeachment, maybe through the courts. We have to be totally clear. There is no recourse to the courts if the Democrats initiate and vote on articles of impeachment. The courts have no role in this other than the Chief justice who presides.

Walter Dellinger (11:57)

Correct? That is correct. I mean, the Chief justice is in a different role. He is there as the presiding officer of the Senate, you know, not in his judicial capacity. And the court has made it very clear that they want to stay out of impeachment processes. That is, the House of Representatives is the body that determines whether to bring charges called articles of impeachment. And the Senate has, quote, the sole power to try all articles of impeachment. And the Supreme Court has made it clear, even in the case of a federal judge who happened to be named Nixon, Judge Nixon, that they are not going to decide what constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor. And I think they may stay out of procedural issues as well. This is a bit of a double edged sword for those that are seeking to press ahead with impeachment. I think the Supreme Court is not going to intervene and stop the process, but it could be that they're not going to help it out either. I think that if the House or Senate has subpoenaed witnesses or information and there is stonewalling and a refusal to comply, I'm not sure they can go to court to enforce that. They certainly have a completely legitimate right to seek the evidence as part of an impeachment proceeding. And theoretically that makes their position seeking witnesses, testimony and documents stronger. But I think the Supreme Court's gonna say, we're not gonna get into the business of enforcing subpoenas either. You can do what the House did at the time of the Nixon impeachment, which is they made Nixon's refusal to comply with evidentiary demands itself a separate article of impeachment. So the court could say, you've got your own enforcement mechanism. You don't need an order from the court. Now there is in a criminal defense trial, in a trial, a criminal trial of U.S. vs. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, two of President Nixman's leading staff members and alleged henchmen. The court did order the President to turn over incriminating tape recordings, and they did that by a unanimous court in U.S. versus Richard Nixon. But that's because it arose in a federal criminal trial where the criminal defendants correctly said they needed the information and the tapes in their defense. If it's just a matter of impeachment, the court might even say on the enforcement of subpoenas, you've got your own power to make it an article of impeachment and remove a president who refuses to cooperate with the impeachment.

Dahlia Lithwick (14:27)

Process. There's a little bit of a race against time now because Democrats want to do a thorough job, but they also don't want to be having an impeachment trial in the Senate in October before the 2020 election. And so I think that has sparked some real internal deb within the members of the House about whether it makes sense to look at all of the impeachable offenses, including obstruction of justice episodes that were flagged in the Mueller report, the emoluments violations, or does it just make sense to narrow, narrow, narrow the scope of this inquiry into these recent this Week developments, where we have a whistleblower in the intelligence community divulging details about a July phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine in which it seems as though Trump conditioned the delivery of a reported $400 million in military aid on getting a, quote, favor back, which would be Ukraine reopening investigations into the Bidens. So does it make sense to go big or go small? Do you have some sense in terms of process, which is the way to.

Walter Dellinger (15:44)

Go? I think going small is the way to go. I don't have any particular expertise on this, but I think a single article of impeachment focused on the president's call and interaction with the chief official of Ukraine as a single article of impeachment is the way to go for the following reasons. First, let's look at the broader scheme and then come back to what we know about the phone call to Ukraine's leader. On the larger issue. I think what happened is that the Democrats simply totally blew it in the 36 hours after the release of the Mueller report. I was thinking, sadly, that when the history is written of this, that Trump would have escaped being called to account because of how badly the reaction to the Mueller report was handled. It was and is, remains a mystery to me. I wrote a piece about it called the Redaction Distraction in the Washington Post that went like this, that the country, obviously people being too Busy to read 500 pages of dense Mueller reportage, looked at the political leadership and the responses were mendacious from one party, timid from the other, and both were wrong. The Republicans Said, no collusion, no obstruction, case closed. Which was a completely false narrative. And the Democrats responded by saying, we need to see the redactions, we need to hear from some witnesses, we need to see the grand jury testimony. You didn't need any of that. The, the statement should have been that even on, quote, collusion, where Trump was most reported to have been vindicated, that alone. The President clearly welcomed foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election. And the Mueller report stopped short of asserting that his conduct was, or that of others in the campaign was criminal by saying they could not find an express agreement between Russian military operatives and campaign officials to believe that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt the element of a conspiracy. But the President's own welcoming actions were no. And then obstruction of justice. You know, every prosecutor you know is going to tell you that there are somewhere between five and nine dead bang, obstructions of justice, felonies by the President. But what the Democrats said was, we don't know enough. And that, I think, allowed the voices chanting, no collusion, no obstruction to. To carry the day. And it was hard to go back and say, I thought, no, wait a minute. Actually, it turns out if you read the report, everything, there was massive criminality on the part of the President of the most profound kind, an attempt to subvert democratic governance. But the moment passed. So now I thought, you know, we'll never call him to account when here we have a whistleblower come up with a single instance of his continuing to do as President of the United States, with all of that power, to be completely complicit, conspiratorial and collusive in an effort to interfere with the presidential election. So I think they have to reluctantly give up because the public erroneously thinks the Mueller report was largely a vindication, which is exactly backwards. But now we have a fresh thing, and what is most useful about it is we have one very key witness to presidential attempt to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. And that key witness is Donald J. Trump, who is on the record about what he did and is defending it. And defending what? What he did. It maps on exactly to what was so profoundly wrong about what Nixon did in Watergate. Both Watergate and the Ukrainian situation are attempts by a sitting president to distort and control the outcome of a presidential election, which is a crime against democracy. In Nixon's case, he was running two years out, even behind Ed Muskie of Maine, a moderate. And Watergate was an attempt to use burglars and every other method of disruption to make sure that The Democrats nominated a far left just like George Vancouver instead of a moderate centrist like Ed Muskie. And they basically succeeded in doing that. It wasn't just a third rate burglary. It was an attempt to subvert the Constitution and to use corrupt means to influence a presidential election. And that is exactly what is happening. And I think why we sent such shock waves through political Washington when the whistleblower complained about the intervention with the Ukrainians is that it demonstrated that Donald Trump is going to use that whatever foreign interference he can. And if he gets away with this, he wouldn't have stopped there. He can call upon the North Koreans, who inexplicably has made love to a gruesome, brutal dictator with hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps in his country. He's, he's made up nicely to the butcher of Saudi Arabia. And so that he was going to go all out to use corrupt means to influence the 2020 presidential election in a way that is going to be much more serious than what Nixon did to try to influence the 1972 presidential.

Dahlia Lithwick (21:41)

Election. That has to be the answer to people who are saying, ugh, can't we just not do the impeachment? Can't we just Wallop Trump by 10 million votes in 2020? Why do we have to do this in an impe process? Can't we just do it at the ballot box? And what you're saying is, no, because he's broken the ballot box. That doesn't work.

Walter Dellinger (22:03)

Anymore. The idea that we would count on winning while we stood back and Congress and the Democratic leadership in the House took no action. It's no accident that it was the day after Robert Mueller's public congressional testimony that Donald Trump was on the phone saying to Ukraine, it's a shame if you didn't get this defense money to protect you from the Russians. And by the way, you haven't been reciprocal. And here's the favor I need to open an investigation where there was nothing to investigate. Look, I mean, it means that they were going to expose the Democratic nominee if he keeps this up. Using foreign sources of highly sophisticated. The North Koreans put all of their money into their cyber capacity. They were going to make sure that the Trump people, they're running against a felon of some kind by making it up with foreign help. That's when everybody realized they had no choice but to.

Dahlia Lithwick (22:58)

Proceed. And now back to our conversation with Walter Dellinger. Walter Dellinger was an Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton. I want you to respond to what seem to be the two principal efforts at dismissing the whistleblower complaint from this week. And the first one was the whistleblower can't be trusted because he wasn't to, quote, quote Hamilton the Musical in the room where it happened. You know, he got reports from several very, very high level officials, but he wasn't there. There was a lot of testimony from the Intelligence Committee hearing suggesting that, oh well, therefore it's just hearsay, it's just a bunch of bunk and it can't be trusted. Can you respond to that one.

Walter Dellinger (23:42)

First? If you actually read the report that the whistleblower submitted, it has such a feel of professional credibility to it. It's full of verifiable or facts that could be disproven and none have been. It would be ironic if the defense was, we don't have firsthand testimony from the people in the room and the White House were to say, and you cannot question the people who were in the room. Right. That's a real catch 22. Right. But, but more importantly, his essential bottom line is not being contested by the President or by his, quote, lawyer, unquote, Rudy Giuliani. They're saying that the conversation essentially occurred. So I think there is all they need to work with. The House and the Senate are entitled to make a judgment. They will definitely hear from the whistleblower and they also will hear from the surrounding circumstances. Is this call really about corruption in general? Is this corruption fighter Donald Trump at work when the only places in the entire world where he appears to care about corruption are in Kiev and in Baltimore City? He's never, he's never shown any interest in corruption. And it turns out we have the transcript of the phone call. We don't need the whistleblower. They haven't challenged the summary of the call. So why are they talking about how he wasn't in the room when they've got the exact readout of what was in the.

Dahlia Lithwick (25:12)

Room? Okay, so then let's do their second. And this is the one that I think they've settled on in the last two, three days. And that is, Walter, there's no quid pro quo. Like, even if we stipulate that the readout is true, there's no quid pro quo being offered. It doesn't sound as though Donald Trump is conditioning this military aid on the investigation being reopened. He's just, you know, talker's gonna talk. What's the answer to.

Walter Dellinger (25:45)

That? Two answers, I don't know which one comes first. One, There is a clear suggestion of a quid pro quo. And two, it doesn't matter whether there is a quid pro quo or not. I don't know which one comes first. The whole idea of was there a quid pro quo? Comes from the completely erroneous notion that we're about to bring some kind of criminal charge. And I'll come back to that in. In a moment of why that's the exactly the wrong way to decide what is an impeachable offense to look at what would be the elements of a federal crime. But first, I mean, anybody who reads this knows that there is no other explanation. He talks about the military aid, and he immediately says, we need a favor from you and here's the favor we need. What. What else would you. Would you want? This is. This would be enough to convict any. Put Tony Soprano in jail and any other mafia member, you know, for the rest of their rest of their lives. But even without a quid pro quo, his suggestion that. That a foreign government interfere in the American election process by opening an investigation when he knows there is no basis for it is itself a profound offense against the political order. And that's what you need. It is neither. Not all crimes by any means should be impeachable offenses that would lead to the potential removal of a president, but neither is it necessary that there be a. A crime. For heaven's sakes. There wasn't much of a federal criminal code for the first 50 years of the American republic. So of course, they didn't think it had to be a crime. It had to be quite serious. It has to be more than maladministration, which was rejected as a standard. And it has to be something like treason and bribery that is very, very serious and an offense against the public order. The idea that you look to the technicalities of criminal law is demonstrably erroneous. So I think that there's no need to show a quid pro quo and laughable to think that there isn't one. Both the House and the Senate get to be triers of fact and to draw their conclusions. And the fact that Trump was making this call because he was deeply concerned about the fact that there was corruption in the Ukraine leadership. When he is embracing Kim Jong Un, who has imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people just to. Just to siphon money off. He's buddies with Vladimir Putin, which some think to be the richest man in the world because of the endemic corruption. He's never raised a word about it. So everybody who knows this, that's why it's put in the hands of, of people who are elected political leaders. They all know that he doesn't care about corruption. And the idea that there's one case, of course, he was attempting to interfere in the election. You can draw that conclusion. I think that the erroneous search for some legalism, like whether there was a quid pro, and the fact that even if, even if you thought erroneously, you needed to show that, that you also needed to have an explicit thing. Do we have this right, Mr. Ukraine? Do we have a contract? Is it true that if I release the money that Congress has appropriated and stop holding this, that you will in turn do whatever you can to smear Hunter Biden and my political opponent? Do we have a handshake on that? You're never going to find that. And there's plenty of basis in what was said to find a quid pro quo. But more importantly, that's not.

Dahlia Lithwick (29:29)

Necessary. And it is, I think, for relevant campaign finance statutes. It is fair to say we know that he was seeking something of value. Right. And Mueller has already told us help getting oppo research on your opponents. That is sufficient. So I completely agree with you. We don't have to tag this to anyone's statute. But it is clear that he was asking for a thing of value. And we could be done and done without the quid pro quo if we go that way.

Walter Dellinger (29:59)

Right. And the fact is it's a, it's a violation of the campaign finance laws to knowingly seek contributions, that is things of value from foreign governments or foreigners of any kind, governmental or not. So seeking campaign assistance from Ukrainians is clearly itself a violation of the campaign finance laws. But, you know, I, I think you don't have to go there. And the reason I, I would push back, though I don't disagree at all with you, is that this is so much more serious than whether you can find this kind of investigative assistance to be, quote, a thing of value or contribution. This attempt to use foreign interference to turn a potentially winning candidacy into a losing candidacy and to distort the outcome of the American people's Democratic vote is so profoundly wrong. Whether or not it was under the construction of a thing of value under the campaign finance laws becomes, I think, not the central question and not necessary to resolve it, I think, correctly, as you.

Dahlia Lithwick (31:13)

Suggest. Well, maybe one thing I've been trying to keep in top of mind because this week has been so confusing is I just look back at the articles of impeachment against Nixon and you've got obstruction of justice here. We've got literally people moving the evidence of this phone call onto private secret computers that are supposed to be only used for classified information. So, okay, we're now hiding stuff. We've got abuses of presidential power, which you've just described. He's using the office of the presidency to try to thwart a political opponent. And then three, and you said this at the top, defiance of subpoenas, boom, boom.

Walter Dellinger (31:55)

Boom. No, right, Correct. That's plenty of fodder. And to shape that into a well crafted article of impeachment. I think it is so premature to predict what the Senate will do. The notion that we know that, quote, Mitch McConnell will just ignore this and he'll go nowhere, I think is way off base since we don't know what the Chief Justice's rulings will be. And if the Chief justice ruled that they should proceed, I'm not sure that there are not three Republicans that would not vote to sustain the ruling of the Chief justice of the United.

Dahlia Lithwick (32:34)

States. Now, I have to ask you about Rudy Giuliani. Please, please, because what, how to put this in the form of a question, Walter. He seems to be serving in some sort of amorphous, inchoate capacity as the president's like personal attorney slash fixer, slash Roy Cohn. And I don't know, he may or may not have security clearance. We learned from the dni. And he's just swanning around the world doing little back channel diplomacy and getting dirt on the President's rivals. What is, what the, what do people just get to task a personal attorney with talking to the President of Ukraine about maybe doing him a favor? Is that, is that a.

Walter Dellinger (33:23)

Thing? Walter, listen, the undertakings by Rudy Giuliani raise so many questions of law and ethics that one doesn't know how to unpack them. I think anybody who advises lawyers or board members on their own potential liability, the first thing they would say is, you need to be very clear about what your role is. You're either acting as an attorney for the board or as a board member. You're either giving legal advice or you're receiving legal advice. Make up your mind what your role is and stick to it in your lane. And here it is so confusing. First of all, he says he's a private citizen out doing foreign policy and national security matters. Apparently one would assume without security clearance, but he says, no, the State Department has authorized what I'm doing. He's not supposed to be doing, doing work for the State Department unless he is a special governmental employee and if he is, and this is something I've seen nobody mention, I don't understand how he could have any lawyer client privilege with respect to these matters with Donald J. Trump if he's a government employee, his only client is the United States of America and all of us that have been in this role. When I had conversations with, with President Clinton, while case argued Clinton against Jones, argued on behalf of the United States, I had to say, now remember, I'm not your attorney. Whatever you say your attorney is, you know, is, you know, Robert, Robert Bennett is arguing for you personally. I'm there as amicus, is acting Solicitor General for the United States. Let's keep that clear. You know, and, and it's totally muddled. I'm not even sure that Giuliani could assert attorney client privilege. You might say, well, I was actually his personal attorney. They said, well, what do you, you can't be a State Department asset and a personal attorney at the same time. So it's just such a muddle sense that it's almost as if Giuliani has to have liability one way or the other. But you wouldn't want to be the company carrying his malpractice.

Dahlia Lithwick (35:27)

Insurance. I very glibly asked you about Giuliani, but I'm now very somberly going to ask you about Bill Barr, because he is similarly mentioned by name several times in the July phone call. He is noted time and time again by name as one of Trump's lawyers, who President Zelensky of Ukraine really needs to work with to reopen investigations. And so, at minimum, I feel that we could at least agree that Barr should have recused himself from making any kind of determination about the whistleblower report. Right. Like now he's named in it, and yet he's still somehow overseeing just fundamental decisions about whether that is.

Walter Dellinger (36:11)

Privileged. One of the questions that people ask each other who have served in the Department of Justice and have been around the federal government in both Republican and Democratic administrations, they asked each other, what's going on with Bill Barr. How do you explain Bill Barr? How do you to explain the, I can almost say mendacity with which he characterized the Mueller report, for example. What is he doing? Bill Barr had an excellent reputation in Washington. Conservative, to be sure, but someone who, when I took over olc, he was one of the most helpful people in giving me advice on how to do the job. And I don't understand, you know, what's, what's happening when the department should have announced already that he recused himself from reviewing the olc opinions on this, on releasing something where he has mentioned multiple times and there has been deadly silence about his recusal. Why haven't we heard about his recusal from these matters? It's, it's a mystery to me at this point point, he has no business being involved in any way. Even if he was wrongly named by President Trump in communications with the Ukrainians as someone who would be playing a role in and working on the investigation into Hunter Biden, even if that's something that Trump made up, it's still a matter that he's named in there and he has to step aside while people are making those determinations. So I honestly don't understand what's going on. Did who knew, for example, about putting the information about the whistleblow report on a special server or the readout of the conversation between Trump and the president of Ukraine? There's nothing in there that requires that that be put in a special server where they put code name that is the most highly secretive things. There's nothing in there that reveals sources and methods, nothing that would require that level. And so it's really an attempt to keep that information from Congress that led them to put it on a special server to make sure it couldn't be read. I just don't know what's going on with the lawyers in this administration. I would be frightened as I could be to be one of the lawyers serving Donald.

Dahlia Lithwick (38:35)

Trump. And that leads me to just ask briefly, Walter, you served in the Office of Legal Counsel. We all know that the legitimacy of the OLC really turns on the kind of appearance of being above politics. I mean, it doesn't work if you are fully in the tank for the President. And I know you know that better than anyone. And so I don't even understand. You know, Joseph Maguire testified on Thursday, he's the Acting Director of National Intelligence, that he just, even though he had this whistleblower statute that said I shall pass the IG's report on, I shall pass the whistleblower's complaint on, that he ran to OLC is its own question. And I know that was litigated ad nauseam on Thursday, but can we at least agree that why is OLC putting a thumb on the scale to block this and claiming some kind of crazy, expansive privileged slash. This doesn't cover the president. So what? It's dead in the water. I mean, that just. Just seem so outside the bounds of what OLC ought to be.

Walter Dellinger (39:44)

Doing. You know, first of all, there really is a tradition of legitimacy on the Part of olc. I know that often it's tie goes to the President. But in the administrations of both parties, OFC has stood up to presidents, and far more often than people realize, because when they've said no, the program doesn't go forward or when OLC has vetoed it. So it never sees the light of day. But I can tell you from Republican administrations across the aisle from me, I know instances where they stood up and said no against fierce political pressure, that the President needed something politically. So this played a very important role in being a check on the executive branch, often with regard to matters that will never be litigated. So they're the only check. And. And the bottom line of the memorandum might actually not be erroneous, that the matter wasn't a matter within the intelligence community. But what's distressing is that the memo reads like an advocacy document, like they're finding every way to avoid presenting this information and even at one point saying that they weren't asked a particular question about a different statute. It's almost like the whistleblowers waived a certain argument, which would be a kind of posture you would take in hostile litigation. And what's missing is the 12 people said to be in the room during the conversation between the presidents of the. Of the US And Ukraine and all the lawyers involved. Why isn't there an army of whistleblowers who hear that the President is attempting to have a foreign interference distorting the outcome of the election? Why are you limiting yourself to writing a highly technical memo saying in the particular subsection they cited there's not necessarily a mandatory reporting requirement? Why not saying this needs to go to the congressional leadership immediately today, today, whether or not is under that statute or not, because it's an attempt to subvert a presidential election. And that's what's distressing about the lawyers defining their role in such a narrow and technical way that there have not been a cacophony of whistles being blown that you can hear on the streets outside the Department of Justice and the White.

Dahlia Lithwick (42:08)

House. Donald Trump, in response to all of this on Thursday, starts to make claims in front of people that the whistleblower is, you know, not legitimate. He's called the whistleblower a hack. But then he's really made, I think, very deadly serious claims that the folks who spoke to the whistleblower, the many people that were in the room, as you say, who came forward, they maybe weren't brave enough to blow a whistle, but they certainly came forward to this individual and said this happened over and over, multiple accounts of the same truthful thing, which, as you say, also is in the readout of the phone call. And Donald Trump starts saying that they're behaving like spies and that the remedy for treason, we should go back to the old fashioned way. The implication being execution that in and of itself is so profoundly serious. And the fact that we treat it as one of a hundred threats that Donald Trump makes against the press or against judges or against journalists every day, what he has done is chilled. And every single person who ever thought to do the thing you just said, to blow a whistle and to report bad conduct, he's quite literally saying, those people are spies. And I just wonder if part of what is just so difficult in this tsunami of teasing out what are the concrete articles of impeachment, we could settle on, you and I, in this conversation. My God, doesn't threatening CIA agents and, and government officials who are trying to do the right thing, threatening them, that they should be treated as spies and summarily punished as spies, doesn't that rank way up at the top of the things that we should be looking at very seriously.

Walter Dellinger (43:59)

Today? What Donald Trump said on Thursday about the whistleblower should be subject to a unanimous bipartisan condemnation, a vote of censure from both houses of Congress without further ado. Because he has really put in danger the life of an American who did everything he could to do it exactly by the book. And now Donald Trump has said, we knew how to take care of this in the olden days. We knew how to take care of spies and traitors, which everybody know is that they were hanged by their neck until they were dead when you were found to be a spy or a traitor in time of war. And what enrages me is the predictable response of his defenders that he was joking when it's a move that is made recurrently, but in this time it's not a defense. Because the people who would act upon his suggestion that would we know what to do with spies and traitors are not people who have the subtlety to think that, oh, he was just joking. The kind of people that have a basement full of weaponry and assault rifles are not the kind of people that would make a distinction between something made in quote, jest unquote and something not. It's simply inexcusable that he has put this person's life in danger and that he is deeply chilled. This is witness tampering and it should be universally and easily condemned by every member of both parties. In the House and Senate, and I haven't seen that forthcoming yet. Where are the members of the President's party on this.

Dahlia Lithwick (45:41)

One? Walter Dellinger is head of the appellate practice at o'. Melven. Ian Myers, he's an emeritus professor of law at Duke, served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton, and as Acting Solicitor General of the United States. Walter, this was unbelievably sobering and also unbelievably helpful. Thank you very, very much for joining.

Walter Dellinger (46:06)

Us. I enjoyed it greatly. As always. You asked the most incisive questions and let's see what.

Dahlia Lithwick (46:14)

Happens. I want to take a moment to talk to you about our membership program, Slate Plus. If you are hearing this, you're listening to the regular version of our show and it's great, isn't it? But imagine how much better it might be to enjoy this show totally and utterly commercial free. That's just one of the things you'll get with your Slate plus membership. You'll also get access to bonus segments and extended versions of your favorite Slate shows. And Slate plus members will be getting an extended version of this next interview with former federal prosecutor Jim Zirin about all the ways Trump's previous thousands of lawsuits inform how he governs and how he might fight impeachment. Slate plus is only $35 for your first year. You can sign up free for two weeks to check it out first. And on top of all that, by signing up for Slate plus, you'll be supporting this show and all of the journalism we do here at Slate. We know that you value our work and our coverage and you know how urgent this work is. Now, this week more than ever, we need your help to do it, sign up for Slate plus and help secure Slate's future. To learn more and to begin your free two week trial, go to slate.com amicusplus so often on this show over the last couple of years, we have talked about the law and Trump. And then occasionally we've had this substratum of Trump and the law, how he thinks about the law, how he thinks about the rule of law, how he thinks of lawyers. And this is a subject, I have to confess, that has always fascinated me, how he treats the law and the rule of law. And in a terrific, terrific new book called Plaintiff in A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits, James Zirin takes a deep, deep dive into this question of what does the law mean to Donald Trump himself? The book is published by All Points Books, and essentially it is A probe into Trump's lifelong weaponization and use of the law itself as a tool to get power and as a tool to promote himself. Jim Zirin is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He's the author of two previous books, and his writing has appeared all over. His basic thesis is that Trump has actually never seen the law as an adversarial quest for the truth. He has always used it as a cudgel to bully and to silence and to overmaster his opponents. And I have to say, this explains so much about the contempt he's shown for the legal system throughout his presidency. And it also explains how we got here this week to an impeachment inquiry. And so as impeachment is in the news in a meaningful way, it seems like a really good time to reflect on the limits of the law and the rule of law as an organizing force on somebody who doesn't believe in the law or the rule of law as anything other than a weapon. So with that huge wind up, Jim Zirin, welcome to.

Jim Zirin (49:17)

Amicus. I'm delighted to be here, Dalia, and thank you for having.

Dahlia Lithwick (49:20)

Me. Let's start with that overarching theory. Did I essentially get it right that you're saying this is a person who does not have lofty ideas about the law as a quest for truth seeking or justice? He just thinks law is something. Something. It's almost a commodity in and of itself. You can buy law and you can sell law and you can use it for.

Jim Zirin (49:40)

Power. I think that's a fair statement. Trump weaponized the law. Part of it was something he inherited from his father, Fred Trump, who was actually censured by the United States Senate for his machinations with FHA loans when he was a developer in Queens and Brooklyn. Fred Trump, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was arrested at a Klan rally where people wore robes, even though Trump denied that he was ever charged with anything. It's hard to be arrested without being charged with something. And Fred Trump was totally unscrupulous. He was a tax evader. He managed to get a billion dollars in wealth down to his children without paying taxes. So that was the first inspiration for Trump, that the law was something which you could circumvent and ignore and that charges against you might not necessarily stick. The second great mentor for Trump was Roy Cohn, of course, whom Trump met in a Bar in 1973. It was quite an auspicious attraction that the two had for each other. Cohn, of course, had been one of the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs. On the backs of the Rosenbergs, he became chief Counsel to Senator McCarthy. He was totally unscrupulous in smearing people. He was a hypocrite. He was a closeted gay. And when he was with Senator McCarthy, he instituted investigations designed to root gays out of the State Department. He'd been indicted three times by Robert M. Morgenthau. He'd been acquitted three times. The attraction that Cohn had for Trump was here was a guy who had beaten the system. Now, this coincided with a race discrimination case that had been brought by Nixon's Justice Department against Trump and his father, which alleged they had discriminated in.

Dahlia Lithwick (51:28)

Housing. Before we get to that, before we get to the lawsuit, I just want to ask you if I think what you do in this book is essentially solve a mystery that has really plagued me since the advent of the Trump era. I, believe it or not, worked at a family law firm before I started doing journalism. And I remember very wealthy, powerful men treating their divorce attorneys the way you describe Trump treating his attorneys, which is, this is not a person who's helping me through trials. This is somebody who's helping. I pay money. They're a plumber. They make problems go away. They're fixers and plumbers, and. And they just do what I tell them to do. And this is not about prevailing in a court of justice. It's about bullying, wearing down, spending money, exhausting, intimidating, chilling opposition. And the reason that has been a mystery to me is because I feel like unless, you know, people like that who transact with attorneys like that, it's almost impossible to understand how Donald Trump thought about the Office of Legal Counsel, how he thinks about White House Counsel, how he thinks about his own Attorney General. But once you think of it in that frame, what you're describing as either mob lawyers or New York real estate lawyers, that whole world opens up an understanding of how Trump treats every single attorney he comes in contact with.

Jim Zirin (53:01)

Right. Well, the legal system is filled with many contradictions. It's supposed to be a search for truth and justice. One of the crown jewels of our legal system is the adversary system. And the idea is that the best way to get at the truth, unlike the European system, is to have two sides represented by Knights Templar, in effect, the lawyers who are advocates for the client's position and argue the client's position of the court. And from that, somehow or other, the truth emerges. Cohn and Trump perverted the system. Cohen had often said that his job as a lawyer was to get the best possible result for his client by whatever means. Trump bought into that. So here we have the race discrimination case. Trump and his father were charged with discrimination in housing. Many reputable lawyers had advised them to settle the case. It would have been easy to negotiate a consent decree with the Justice Department where you neither admit nor deny wrongdoing and you agree not to discriminate again. Cohn said, you've been misadvised by these other lawyers. We've got to fight this thing, and we'll win. And Trump bought into that. And so the first thing Cohn did was call a press conference, because he taught Trump that a very important element in any controversy is to try your case in the press. So they called a press conference, and Trump borrowed some words from the McCarthy era. He accused the Justice Department of a witch hunt, and then he turned around and counterclaimed against the government of the United States for $100 million. Well, that counterclaim was dismissed by the court in very short order. The next thing that happened was they made all sorts of allegations and affidavits before the a court signed by Cohn, in which they accused the two female Justice Department attorneys. And there weren't so many in those days of being overbearing, of browbeating witnesses, of using Gestapo like tactics. Well, the Justice Department, of course, responded, saying that wasn't true, and it was such a falsity, that conversation went to court and said, let's mark this off the calendar. The Justice Department said, no, judge, we want a hearing so that these lawyers can be exonerated. There was a hearing, and the lawyers were exonerated. Now, that's all that happened in the case. And five years later, they entered into a consent decree with the government without admitting or denying they settled the case. Trump said they won the case because that's another precept that he learned from Cone. No matter what happens to you in the litigation, claim victory and go home. So he claimed a great victory. Of course, the evidence against them of discrimination was overwhelming. So that was the. The second precept that he learned and how to weaponize the law. And there were others as well. Deflecting, delaying, creating a smoke screen, but basically undermining the adversary accused, accusing the adversary of partisanship, which was just what Cohn did with Morgenthau, saying it was a personal vendetta, it was political, and trying to sidestep the rule of law in that.

Dahlia Lithwick (56:14)

Fashion. And it's so staggering to layer that against even events we're seeing this week. Right this is exactly the playbook. Going after the whistleblower, suggesting that the whistleblower's lawyers are corrupt, and they all worked for Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. I mean. I mean, this is just the playbook, the language of witch hunt, the language of personal attacks, because the enemy, deep state enemy, this stuff is decades.

Jim Zirin (56:40)

Old, you're saying, and people tend to believe it. I mean, Cohn used it because he found it to be effective. Of course, he was eventually disbarred for stealing money from his clients and lying to the court and doing other things that were.

Dahlia Lithwick (56:55)

Reprehensible. So one of the things that this New York Fair Housing act litigation from 1973, one of the ways it becomes a template for everything we see after is the. You spin it out, you delay it, you attack the lawyers. No matter what happens, even when you enter into a settlement agreement or a consent decree, you say you won. And one of the mysteries to me of the Trump era is because everyone believes he won. That's, again, the playbook. After the Mueller report, we won. No collusion. That was the answer. And so I guess, again, it goes to this question. I have this undergirding question about the limits of the law. If the law can just be spun on television the way Bill Barr spun the Mueller report on television, or the way Roy Cohn typically spun losses as wins, then it. It does suggest that there's just a limit to what the law can do. There's this, forgive the word, but trumping factor here, which is how you spin.

Jim Zirin (57:57)

It. Yes, well, the law has its limitations. Mr. Bumble said the law is ass, and there can be a tremendous injustice. I happen to believe that sooner or later, however it catches up with you, you can't play the game indefinitely. And I think I close my book with a quotation from the honorable or dishonorable Roy Cohn, where he said, no public man can indefinitely survive in the center of controversy. And I think it applies in spades to Donald Trump. And I think you see now that he himself realizes that he's in deep, deep.

Dahlia Lithwick (58:36)

Trouble. Any New York real estate person who's worked with Trump at any point in the past decades says the same thing, which is he stiffs his contractors.

Jim Zirin (58:48)

He counters, he stiffs his lawyers, he stiffs his. Even stiffed his.

Dahlia Lithwick (58:51)

Dentists. He just sues everybody and then declares victory, even, no matter what happens.

Jim Zirin (58:58)

Drops the suit and declares.

Dahlia Lithwick (58:59)

Victory. Yeah, I mean, these patterns go way back. So I want you to describe, if you would, your chapter, when you recount for us the Arc of how he comes to Manhattan from his humble roots in Jamaica.

Jim Zirin (59:13)

Queens. They weren't so humble. They lived in a large house in Jamaica States. His father rode around in the Cadillac. His father was a billionaire, and so not so humble at all. But his father had made his mark with these, with the program of borrowing and build in the boroughs in Queens, Staten island in Brooklyn. And Trump wanted to make his own mark. That's always been a touchy thing with him. His father was irrelevant, and he did it all.

Dahlia Lithwick (59:45)

Himself. And then enters into sort of one disastrous enterprise after another. And still, despite the fact that he stiffed everyone and pays, nobody still manages to end up at the top of Trump.

Jim Zirin (59:59)

Tower. Well, one of the types of litigation that he had was litigation with his partners. He never had a partner whom he didn't have a lawsuit with. It started with the Pritzkers, with whom he had a joint venture on the Commodore Hotel. Why the Pritzkers went to Trump, no one really knows. Trump didn't put a dime into the deal. Later, he bragged about it. The Pritzkers put in about $400 million. And then the idea was, in effect, to get some green mail. So Trump sued the Pritzkers for a billion dollars, and to get rid of him, they gave him 20 or 30 or $40 million, and he went away. So he had kind of some seed money for his further operations. Everything he touched seemed to be bad. He was involved with some Chinese partners on the west side Yards. He sued them for a billion dollars. That suit was dismissed. And the Chinese had much more money than Trump to litigate the case. And at the end of the day, Trump's case was dismissed. And the Hong Kong Chinese partner said, you've got to understand Donald Trump. He likes litigation for lunch. He was in partnership with some Japanese interests over the Empire State Building. They owned the the ground lease. The strategy was to charge the prime tenants, who were Lawrence Wein and Peter Malkin and Leona Helmsley, with mismanagement of the building. So they made all kinds of allegations that it was rat infested and that it was deteriorating and it was decaying. And what they were trying to do was break the ground lease and take it over because it was highly profitable and the building was well run. And so that case was eventually thrown out. He had litigation with his partner, Concico, over the General Motors building, which he lost. And he was squeezed out of the ownership of the General Motors building, which later became very profitable for Zuckerman and the other Realtors, who eventually acquired the building, so he could never. He didn't hold on to the Plaza Hotel. So it was one business failure after another. But in each one of them, he used litigation as a tactic in order to try to suppress his partner, to try to squeeze some money out of him, and to try to move on to the next.

Walter Dellinger (62:19)

Deal. So that.

Jim Zirin (62:20)

Was. Those were his adventures in New York. He's hailed himself as a great success. He hailed himself as the greatest real estate developer in the country. He was far from that. And he actually had as much litigation in his career as the five top real estate magnets in the country.

Dahlia Lithwick (62:38)

Combined. Right. That's your subtitle of your book, 3,500.

Jim Zirin (62:42)

Lawsuits. That may be an understatement. I was afraid critics of the book might say this is fake news. How do you know there were 3,500? And actually, you've completely overstated and exaggerated. Actually, the American bar Association counted 4,000, 4,000. And others have said that the American Bar association understated that there were really more cases than.

Dahlia Lithwick (63:02)

That. Can you talk a little bit about the Polish Brigade case at Trump Tower just because it's so.

Jim Zirin (63:07)

Incredible? Well, Trump Tower was an adventure in itself. At the time of its construction, most developers in New York were using structural steel. The reason was it was much less expensive as a building material than poured concrete. Poured concrete New York at the time was controlled by the Mafia, the Five Families, all clients of Trump's friend Roy Cohn. And the principal mobsters in the poured concrete business were Paul Castellano, who was murdered outside the Sparks restaurant, and Fat Tony Salerno. And he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. And he died while still serving his sentence sometimes in the 1990s. But Salerno met with Trump in Cohn's office. Cohn used to have was a consulary to the mob. He used to have mob meetings in his conference room, which was in his townhouse, confident that the feds would never bug a lawyer's office. And they never did. And there they could plot their skullduggery with Cohn anyway, through Cohn, Trump was connected with these mobsters and also with a man named John Cody, who was head of the Teamsters union in New York. And while there was a citywide Teamster strike, the construction went forward, and the poured concrete trucks, which have to go in immediately or else the gels had access to Trump Tower for the construction to begin. Now, Trump tried to cut corners, and he hired to do the demolition a window washing company in Buffalo, the employees of whom were undocumented Polish Aliens. And Trump was quoted as saying, I love these Polacks. They really know how to work. Later, he denied that he knew there were Polish workers at the construction site. Turned out he wasn't providing protective helmets, he wasn't providing protective glasses, and he wasn't paying money into the union pension fund as he was legal in required to do. Of course, there was litigation over this. It raged on for years. The federal judge who presided over the case said Trump testified in his testimony, they didn't know what was going on, was completely incredible and unworthy of belief. And it ended in a settlement. And the settlement was sealed. About 15 years later, a federal judge unsealed the settlement papers and it revealed that he'd settled for 100 cents on the dollar. That was the Polish so called Polish Brigade.

Dahlia Lithwick (65:38)

Case. So you talk at length about basically same pattern airlifted to Atlantic City casinos, you know, catastrophic decision after catastrophic decision. And yet somehow he's untouchable and says that he's this great casino magnet. But I wonder if you would focus for a minute on his war on Native Americans and part of that because again, it is a pattern with him that has roots that go way.

Jim Zirin (66:06)

Back. Well, he had a thing about Native Americans, whom we of course called Indians. One of the reasons being that Native Americans were granted by Congress an exemption to the gambling laws so that they could have casinos on their reservations, which he saw as a threat to him. And he began to make all sorts of comments like, how do you know this is an Indian? I looked at him, he didn't look like an Indian to me. He said, I was introduced to him and I asked him what his name was and he said, chief Sitting Bull, but you can call me Johnny Jones. And he derided them, he belittled them, he made fun of them, and he tried to drive them out of business. And he actually hired Roger Stone to smear an Indian tribe. And they had all sorts of ads that on their reservations there were drugs, same thing as he later did with the Mexicans. There were drugs and they were rapists and they were killers. And then there was a hearing before a committee of the House of Representatives and Trump testified. And he said that the crime is rampant among these Native Americans, these Indians, and the they should be allowed to have casinos. And they. And you look at them, you can't even tell that they're.

Walter Dellinger (67:26)

Indians. They don't look like Indians to me. And they don't look like Indians to Indians. And a lot of people are laughing at it. And you're telling how tough it is how rough it is to get approved. Well, you go up to Connecticut and you look. Now, they don't look like Indians to me.

Jim Zirin (67:41)

Sir. And there was a member of the House who came down.

D (67:44)

Hard. Thank God. That's not the test of whether or not people have rights in this country or not. Whether or not they pass your.

Walter Dellinger (67:49)

Look. Test. Depends whether. Yeah, depends whether or not you're approving it.

D (67:53)

Sir. No, no, it's not a question whether I'm approving it. It's not a question whether I'm approving it. Mr. Trump, you know, you know, in the history of this country where we've heard this discussion before, they don't look Jewish to.

Walter Dellinger (68:03)

Me. Oh.

D (68:04)

Really? They don't look Indian to me. They don't look Italian to me. And that was a test for whether people could go into business or not go into business, whether they could get a bank loan. You're too black. You're not black.

Walter Dellinger (68:18)

Enough. I want to find.

Jim Zirin (68:19)

Out. But Trump was very happy because he thought he'd made his case that Indians were bad and they competed with his casinos. Interestingly, he later partnered with Indian tribes on casinos because he thought he could make money. And he was also denied by one Indian tribe the possibility of partnering with them because of his testimony before the House of.

Dahlia Lithwick (68:46)

Representatives. So, Jim, we've talked a lot about the ways he weaponizes the law for his business and real estate interests. But the other point you make, which is sort of obvious but subtle, is that he also weaponizes the law to protect his name and his brand. And for that he uses, instead of real estate law, he uses libel, he uses defamation suits, he uses these non disclosure agreements and.

Jim Zirin (69:15)

These. And he uses trademark law. Now, one of one of the prize cases he brought was against a mother and father who had a small business in Syosset, Long Island. It was called Trump Travel. It was called Trump Travel because they booked bridge tours for people to go on a boat and play bridge. And also Trump kind of connotes excellence like Ace Hardware or Primacy. So Trump had never been in the travel business in any way, shape, manner or form. And somehow or other this was called to his attention, so he sued them to and joined them from using the name Trump. There's an old joke about Otto Kahn, who was a great German Jewish financier. And he was walking in a certain neighborhood and he passed a tailor shop and it said, Joe Kahn, Tailor, Otto Khan's cousin. And he stormed into the shop and he said, I am Otto Kahn and you are not my cousin. I demand you get that sign down. And so the next week, he was walking in the same neighborhood and passed the tailor shop, and there was a sign. Joe Kahn Taylor, formerly Otto Kahn's cousin, and Trump tried the same thing with the travel agency. They lost their life savings defending the case. Eventually it was settled, and the settlement was they had to drop the sign Trump down 5 points in type, but they could continue to use the name and have it in the window. And then Trump sued them again for violating the settlement agreement. The judge dismissed the case. He said it had been settled, and that was the deal. But he said that the type was still not small enough. Then, being a bully that he was, he took on someone that really was in a position to defeat him. There were two brothers named Trump from South Africa, and they were in the pharmaceutical business, and they used the name Trump in their pharmacies. And somehow or other, there was an article in Pharmaceutical News that talked about Trump Pharmaceuticals. Trump had never been in the pharmaceutical business in any way. And he sued them for a billion dollars, and they sued Trump for a billion dollars. And the case raged on, and eventually Trump's case was dismissed. They had the money. They were richer than Trump. They had the money to fight the case, and they eventually prevailed. So he did use litigation as a weapon for no real reason, where he couldn't have made money on the case, where he had no real injury to be redressed. And it was simply to teach people a lesson and. Or to make a statement. I mean, he sued a critic for the Chicago Tribune who wrote an article saying that one of his planned buildings would be an excrescence on the skyline. And Trump sued, and the case was dismissed because of the rule of opinions. Of course, the expression of opinion can't be.

Dahlia Lithwick (72:13)

Libelous. So I guess this brings me to the ugly underbelly of the book, which is time after time, he uses his litigation to just grind people down. I mean, this is a person who, as you say, almost always punches down, rarely punches up. And I'm thinking of the woman in the Trump University suit whose life he destroyed to the point that she just wanted to withdraw, and then he wouldn't let her withdraw because he wanted to keep destroying her life. And there's a way in which the cost of being in litigation with him, literally the cost financially, but also the emotional toll and the physical toll and the hours and years of your life given over to this, means he wins. Even when he loses, he wins. And that is just a disparity of wealth and power that now feels when I look at it in the aggregate in the book baked into the.

Jim Zirin (73:13)

System. Well, of course he didn't win the Trump University case. He settled for $25 million. The students, so called students, got their money back, or most of their money back. It was an outrageous case. It was brought as a class action. And as you, you say, he centered his vitriol on the class representative. Now there's nothing he could have achieved in a class action by discrediting the class representative. That's the way class actions are constructed. And actually the class representative, who I think her name was Tarla Makif, had prevailed in a procedural round against him and had gotten almost a million dollars in legal fees. But he took off on her and she said she couldn't stand it anymore emotionally, she wanted to get out of the case. And he took the position she's the key witness, she has to testify and it's outrageous that she wants to get out of the case. And he opposed it. Eventually she was allowed by the judge to get out of the case. She was entitled to get out of the case. And another class representative came in. So she didn't really lose. She got a large award in legal expenses and she got her wish to get out of the case. She really couldn't conduct it anymore and she couldn't stand the fact that Trump was trashing her all the time. And he lost that case. He settled it on the eve of his taking the oath of office on the advice, I think, of political supporters. The President of the United States should not have to testify in a court defending himself against fraud. And there was no defense because they held out that he constructed the curriculum, he picked all the teachers, it was his program and he really had nothing to do with.

Dahlia Lithwick (74:49)

It. And we should just flag in case listeners forget, of course, the judge in that case was none other than Judge Curiel, the judge that he tried to discredit as a so called Mexican judge who was too biased to be able to judge his case fairly. So there was nobody who didn't get the stink on them, including the judge who ended up ruling against him. So I'm going to ask you the hard question which has plagued me from page one of your book, which is much of what you do is surface that which was kind of known about him all along. And yet, and yet when Hillary Clinton says, you don't pay taxes and he answers, because I'm smart in the debates, we all say, yeah, this is how business is conducted in America. He's not doing anything that Rich people don't do every day. This is how people get rich. We, in a sense, colluded. And I don't mean we, you and I necessarily. But I think Americans have fully bought in to the principle that you weaponize the law and lawyers to get rich, and that what he's doing is, in fact, no different from what any other rich person does, and that makes him smart. Am I too.

Jim Zirin (76:06)

Cynical? Well, I think it may be slightly cynical. Cohn was a notorious tax evader. There was a judgment for $6 million against him for the IRS at the time that he died. He wrote a book in which he said, no one who is smart pays taxes. And this was the template for Trump and his attitude and his father's.

Walter Dellinger (76:30)

Attitude.

Jim Zirin (76:30)

Actually. They were notorious, flagrant tax evaders. They saw loopholes. Now, is that smart? Is that how rich people get rich? Maybe it's true of some of them. But the fact is there were, in my view, there were so many horribles paraded before the electorate about Donald Trump in articles in the Washington Post, articles in the New York Times and other media, not even necessarily the mainstream media, people became anesthetized people, and maybe some of them are still anesthetized, and they don't see the evil that's involved in someone who's willing to violate the law and play the system and who believes that the means justifies the ends. And you see that in this repeated attempt to get foreign help in smearing his political opponents. And he did it in 2016 with the Russians, and he did it, and it came out just this past week. They did it with respect to.

Dahlia Lithwick (77:34)

Ukraine. James Zirin is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He is the author of two prior books. His writing has appeared in Forbes, the LA Times, and myriad other places. The book is Plaintiff in A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits, published by All Points Books, available this week. It's just come out. And Jim, I cannot thank you enough. This has been an incredibly useful.

Jim Zirin (78:03)

Conversation. Dalia, I can't thank you enough. I've been a fan of yours for a long time, and it's wonderful to meet you and it's wonderful to talk with you about this subject.

Dahlia Lithwick (78:10)

Particularly. Thank you. And that is a wrap for this episode of Amicus, the Extra, Extra Long Edition. Thanks for sticking with us. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in touch, our email is amicuslate.com and you can always find us@facebook.com amicus podcast and we love your letters and we love your feedback. Tell us how you want us to cover impeachment. Today's show was produced by Sarah Burningham. Gabriel Roth is editorial director of Slate Podcasts and June Thomas is senior managing producer, producer of Slate Podcasts. And we will be back with another episode of Amicus. Not in two weeks, in one week with our long overdue term opener. Thanks for.