← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
"The 2020 election was the most secure in America's history"
00:40:57
July 22nd, 2026; 5pm: Nicolle Wallace on new reporting from MS NOW revealing how Chris Krebs’ former agency has been gutted in Trump’s second term.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:05]
Political Commentator 1
We did a good job. We did it right. I do it a thousand times over. The President says you're dead wrong about election security. And to him you say, what? There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There's no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.
- [01:31]
Host Nicole
Hi again Everybody. It's now five o'clock in the east. Viewers of this program are now well aware that the 2020 election was the most secure election in America's history, in very large part thanks to that guy. That was Chris Krebs. Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The shorthand that is CISA. As its first director beginning in 2018, he served there until he was fired in late 2020 by Donald Trump. He was fired for doing what he said in the 60 Minutes interview, successfully effectively succeeding at safeguarding American elections and then telling the truth about doing that, doing the job he was appointed by Donald Trump to do. Now new reporting from msnow reveals how Chris Krebs former agency, has been gutted by Donald Trump in his second term. After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk's Doge fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisors. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buyouts. While administering elections is the responsibility of each state, CISA provides federal resources to assist in election security. More from the Reporting quote Under Trump, CISA halted its funding of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis center that provides local governments with free access to election security operations centers, election security training, technical support and threat monitoring. Now, the irony of all of this. Trump made a special primetime address last week in which he stressed the need for urgent action to protect our voting systems against foreign interference, the exact thing that CISA was built to protect against. And now, ahead of the 2026 midterms, the Trump administration is threatening to withhold protection from states if they don't comply with the overhauls Trump wants to make. The Trump administration is telling states they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful. In its current form, that database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or save, which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate and could disenfranchise voters. Donald Trump's attempts to control our elections ahead of the midterms that will determine which party controls Congress is where we begin today with some of our favorite reporters and friends. Senior contributing editor Michelle Norris is here. Also joining us, PAC News senior political columnist and national affairs analyst, our friend John Heilman is here. I want to start with one of the journalists whose byline is on that reporting. We read from White House reporter Laura Baron Lopez. Laura, it seems like John Solomon just came in and backed up what Chris Krebs said there. John Solomon said in an interview with our own colleague Vaughn Hilliard, quote, the intelligence makes clear no votes were flipped. What is the difference between how John Solomon sees 2020 and how Chris Krebs saw 2020?
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Reporter Laura Baron Lopez
Well, John Solomon also added to Vaughn Hilliard that he is still searching, that he is still looking for irregularities, and that he is still on the Hun, some kind of voter fraud. And John Solomon was key behind that push of the declassification of these intelligence documents alongside Bill Pulte, the acting dni. So that's, I guess the big difference here is that he is still encouraging the president to keep going down this route in this rabbit hole and to keep pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, despite the fact that he admits that they have found nothing. But I think what's so key about the reporting that David Rhoden and I did was just the sheer impact of, yes, while the president is saying that he's extremely worried about election interference from foreign actors, last year he not just gutted cisa, which is the key partner for states when it comes to helping them with identifying threats, with giving them real time intelligence. Some of these election officials are even given security clearances so that way they can access real time threats to their voting infrastructure. Some cybersecurity threats that may be posed to them, but also other teams across the government were gutted across the FBI, the State Department, DOJ teams that were focused on countering election interference. And many of those teams would feed information to cisa. And then CISA had regional people, election security advisors across the country, who, who were tasked with being in regular communication with states to share all this information. And right now election officials have told me and former senior intelligence officials say there is no one providing that information and states aren't getting it at all.
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Host Nicole
Let me read that part of your reporting. You write partisan election work. Tim Harper, who leads the elections team at the nonpartisan center for Democracy and Technology, explained included granting security clearances to state election officials to give them real time information to stop threats before they spread. His organization has direct knowledge of officials receiving no response when they have asked the federal government to provide assistance on cyber and physical security. Expecting local election officials to handle nation state cyber attacks without federal support is not common sense policy, he said. It's a national security failure, I guess. Laura, my question is if there is a, quote, national security failure happening in real time, ahead of time, what can be done to help protect election workers at a state level where a lot of people, if you look at the results of the last three elections, vote for Republicans too?
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Reporter Laura Baron Lopez
That's right. I mean, the election workers and states secretaries of state have not just been waiting, they haven't been waiting for this plan that cisa, the current makeup of CISA and DHS says that they're going to release within 30 days. Within 30 days means that that election infrastructure plan isn't going to come out until about three months out from the midterms. That's too late. But these states have been working for the last 15 months or so to fill the gaps that they've lost with with their lack of a federal partner. They have been looking to commercial vendors, they've been looking to cybersecurity experts outside of the federal government. Some of those cybersecurity experts outside of the federal government are actually former CISA workers because they were fired or pushed out. And so they are actually some of the people that maybe were regionally across the country that now work in the private sector and are trying to help these states. But again, one of the election officials I spoke to in a swing state said that what keeps them up at night is the idea that maybe the IT infrastructure at a local county or a local clerk's laptop could be hacked. And how do we help that local clerk to make sure that it doesn't happen? And that that's something that is a concern to many states because they don't get that real time information. But there are things, there are people that are trying to help the states and experts across the country. But again, one thing that they say even those vendors and those private experts are helping with that is missing is this the whole puzzle. Because the thing that the federal government offers is being able to see what's happening from state to state. And that's something that those private cybersecurity experts can't offer.
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Host Nicole
John Heilman, YouGov the economists in YouGov asked a question in June before his primetime flop last week that was undermined 15 minutes after it ended by John Solomon saying there is no evidence that a foreign power flipped a single vote. Among independents, almost 80% think that Trump is simply trying to sow down the legitimacy of elections. At what point, I mean, we use the word fringe to describe, I think, in a derisive manner, the wackiest things Trump does. But the central animating thesis of his second term as president, the sort of governing thesis around which everything else is sort of spoke out of this election denialism that he didn't win in 2020, that the election the investigations run by Jack Smith were bunk, is a fringe conspiracy theory that 80% of independent voters in this country know to be false. What do you make of how much sort of force or oomph is behind it heading into the midterms for its future application?
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Political Commentator 1
Well, Nicole, I think there are a number of ways in which all of this, you know, a lot of the reporting that we do and a lot of the discussion that we do about things like this are kind of premised on the notion, even if we don't say it out loud, that there's some good faith behind what Donald Trump is doing. For instance, when we talk about gutting cisa, we sort of say, well, they've gutted CISA and Donald Trump. There's a contradiction between saying you want election security and cutting an important agency that was involved in providing election security. But of course, Donald Trump doesn't actually want election security. What Donald Trump wants is to be able to rig the midterms and wants to be able to claim on the basis of false claims to be able to make have a pretext for things he's going to do, planning to do, intends to do directionally, if not specifically at this point. And so, I mean, there's nothing. This is not in any way to kind of criticize the reporting, but it's sort of because it highlights the hypocrisy here. But, you know, from the moment in 2025 when you and I were on set, literally when it happened, when Donald Trump decided to go after Chris Krebs, who had run CISA in 2020 and had basically, Trump had forgotten what that organization was called. He'd forgotten who Chris Krebs was. So we see this in Swan Book. He's like, who is that guy who said the election in 2020 was legit? And one of the Trump flunkies starts looking on his phone, oh, you're talking about Chris Krebs. And Trump's like, well, okay, let's investigate that guy. Let's strip his security clearances. Right? That's what was giving the game away right there. You knew that CISA was going to get degraded. We knew it was going to get dismantled. And not only is he dismantling it because he has no respect for it, and not only is he dismantling it because it said something in 2020 that was true, and that undermined his claim that he won the 2020 election and Joe Biden lost the 2020 election, that it was rigged back then. But he was already thinking. We know the extent to which Trump has been focused from a very early part of the second term on the midterms and was starting to lay the groundwork for whatever it is he's going to do this come this November. And I think that also goes to the political point, which is he is not making the arguments in good faith. I mean, in the sense that he. He's not trying to persuade the public of his rightness about our elections all being rigged. He's trying to lay down the predicate for whatever he's gonna do next. I don't think he particularly cares whether this is falling on deaf ears to 80% of the public or 80% of independents. I think he's just trying to lay down the tracks on which he can make false claims in the future. And for him, it's enough to have said those things publicly so that when he does what he's going to do, whatever that turns out to be in November, he can look back and say, I told you so. I said this was rigged. You didn't believe me. You didn't listen to me. But it was rigged then and it's rigged now. Now, these election results that have taken Republicans and ostensibly, if you believe the polls, out of control of The House and maybe of the Senate, those this is an illegitimate election. Here's what we're going to do going forward. So all of this is about pretext, not about persuasion and not about some kind of good faith attempt to govern. It's about, I guess I say again, laying the groundwork for what comes next.
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Host Nicole
You know, this is where Trump relies on despair setting in. And there is, you know, we think we're special. We actually cover ourselves as though we are special, Michel. But Orban had a lot longer than Trump had. Orban, dare I say, was a lot more competent than Donald Trump will ever be, even in his deepest, most delirious autocratic fantasies. And the Hungarian public corrected for that. They corrected for the rigging of elections. They corrected for the takeover of media. They corrected for the essential oligarchy that the economy had become by turning out. And the danger for Trump in a primetime address about foreign interference, where the chief adviser on foreign interference comes out and tells Von Hilliard there was no foreign interference, the intelligence says not a single vote was flipped by Venezuela or China or any foreign power, is that the opposite will happen. What the electorate will hear is such a brazen and fact avoid campaign to take away their agency and right to vote that Trump becomes his own worst nightmare in terms of turning out the vote against him.
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Political Commentator 2
That, that absolutely could happen in the States. You know, we've spent a little bit of time talking about Trump's motivations for doing this. You know, the hypocrisy is, if the elections are in danger, why would you undermine the, the, the agency that is supposed to keep our elections free, fair and safe? It's because he wants to rig the game. I say this every time we talk about this, Nicole, you can say it with me. If you can't win clean, you don't play fair. And he is not trying to play fair at all. He wants to control the system and he wants to control the states, even though the states have the constitutional authority to run our elections. It's important also to remind the American public, and this may impact their turnout also is, you know, you're comparing us to Hungary and that country, people realized they were not safe. Their economy was in shambles. They were not. Their standard of living was falling. And when people start to see these things happen in the States and they see someone at the top of our leadership who's not paying any attention to the economy, not paying enough attention to the wars that we're fighting, that also will perhaps help drive turnout. But the reality is that when an agency like CISA loses funding, loses ground. You have to remember it's called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration infrastructure. So it impacts not just our election security, but our overall security. This is the agency that also helps protect our grid, our electrical grid, our air traffic control system. They work with local governments in terms of large scale events and security. And so what he's, he's, he's trying to undermine their ability to control or monitor elections, but he's also eroding our overall public safety. And I hope that people understand that and I hope that people take that into account when they make decisions in the film.
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Host Nicole
It's such an important point. It's such important reporting. Thank you, Laura Baron Lopez, to you and David Rhode for bringing that reporting to us. Michelle. Michelle and John, stick around. When we come back, the political cost of Donald Trump's obsession with this big loss in 2020 to Joe Biden. The Republican Party is now dominated by big lie truthers. More election deniers won GOP primaries last night in a key battleground state. Voters everywhere demanding their leaders focus on the issues that matter to them. And they have nothing to do with relitigating 2020. We'll have that conversation next. Also ahead, Congressman Jason Crow will be here on the rising toll of Donald Trump's war in Iran and the growing sense that Trump has no plan for ending the war and the dangers of capitulating to Donald Trump. How Democrats are turning up the heat on one of the big law firms that cut a deal to avoid Donald Trump's wrath. There's brand new reporting on that to bring you. We'll get to all of it later in the hour. Deadline White House continues after a quick break, so don't go anywhere.
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Commercial Narrator
Watch Disclosure Day at home now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? Well, now the truth belongs to 7 billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Koepp, starring Emily Blunt, Josh o', Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required. Also in theaters.
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Host Nicole
Wrong.
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Host Nicole
A stone around your neck. That's a direct quote and how One former Arizona Republican congressman describes election denialism Former Congressman Matt Salmon told Politico that even though election deniers won three significant Republican primaries in the state of Arizona last night, come November's general election, that specific position may cost them. From Politico's report, quote, running as an election denier has not been a successful strategy for the Arizona GOP once November rolls around. In 2022, Arizona Republicans nominated hardline election deniers up and down the ballot. Carrie Lake for governor, Blake Masters for U.S. senate, and Mark Fincham for Secretary of State and saw losses in each race even as Republicans nationally enjoyed an otherwise strong year. And in 2024, Kari Lake lost again, this time for U.S. senate even as Donald Trump won the state by more than 5 percentage points. Michelle and John are still here. I mean Halman, this is I guess the point and I think you're right. These aren't good faith actions that we should cover as oh, who done it? Why gut? I mean, he's gutting it so that he can cheat.
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Commercial Narrator
Right.
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Host Nicole
Like he's doing it all in public. At some point we should take it as seriously as he seems to. There are no actions that point to anything else. But on the political loserdom, I feel like there isn't anyone around him to deliver that message anymore that if you're gonna steal the midterms, stop doing it in prime time. Like this sucks as a political issue. People hate it and they hate it when you talk about being such a sore loser.
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Political Commentator 1
Yeah, I mean, you know, we're a long way away from the there's going to be so much winning, you're going to get sick of winning, Nicole. You know, I mean, all Donald Trump does now is talk about is talk about how much is talk about losing. Yes. I mean, I think to slightly just expand that point. You know, one of the things that we talk a lot about on this show and in other places is the extent to which. What's different between Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 is that the guardrails have been removed. We talk about that in the context of governance, right, where the handful of people, either in the White House or Republicans in the Senate, who would stop Trump from doing things that were unconstitutional, that were illegal, that were immoral, that were shattering of Democratic norms, those people are all gone. He built this administration around him, filled with enablers. We talk about this all the time. We don't talk about the political corollary to that, which is that there once were people around Donald Trump who were politically savvy in the sense that they recognized that they tried to keep Trump. They recognized the things that Trump wanted to do by instinct that would be damaging to him and by extension of the Republican Party politically and would try to reel him in from those worst excesses. They would be things. If you go all the way back to 2016, it's Steve Bannon telling Trump to talk about trade and talk about immigration in the last month of the campaign. And, you know, think what you will about Steve Bannon. That was good political advice. He didn't want Trump to be talking about, even about election rigging at that point. He was like, if you just drive the election on the messages on trade and jobs and manufacturing and immigration, you'll be able to win the election. There's no one around Trump right now who is just being a political guardrail for him and keeping him. If there was someone like that, there would have been signs much earlier of the fact that, hey, you know, it's not a good idea to keep saying that affordability is a hoax, that it's a Democratic. It's a fantasy, it's not real. It's obvious that this is the animating feature of our electorate heading into the midterms. You have to at least pay lip service to it, sir. Someone would have tried to dial him off of that. And instead, we've seen him over and over and over again kind of crap all over and disrespect voters by claiming delusionally that these issues that they feel in their lives aren't real issues. And I think this is another example of that, where the craziest of Trump's kind of manic, delusional, conspiracy, addled brain around the notion that he can't accept that he's ever lost anything, ever on the level, leads him into this political territory where there is no Republican, no Republican in a contested election, in the House or in any of these Senate races that matter, there's not a single one of them that would have said it's a good idea to ask for prime airtime right now, this close to the election and start talking about this crap which will not help me win a single vote and will, if only, if anything, will have force me to answer questions about a losing issue for us and will make it harder for me to get reelected rather than easier. I swear, there's not a single one who is like, hey, this is a great idea. This will help us in this purple state or in this purple district. Not one. And Trump just goes ahead and does it anyway.
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Host Nicole
You know, Michelle, to broaden it even more, I mean, I guess it ushers in a few questions like is Steve Bannon just on the outside now, or is his advice to wave around pictures of a gold ballroom one, but two, did Donald Trump ever care about the kinds of issues that propelled him to the White House twice? The forgotten men and women, the commitment to never enter the United States of America into a forever war in the Middle east, or the economic plight of everyday Americans who flocked to him in 2016 and came back to him in 2024?
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Political Commentator 2
Well, let's address the second question, because it's interesting how we have all covered politicians who will say what they need to say to do what they need to do. They will make opportunistic statements to get in office. And Donald Trump is no different. But one of the things that I think will forever be a curiosity and a conundrum is how he took a party and just destroyed it from the inside. He is a political equivalent of a bunker Tom, for the Republican Party and how they allowed him to do it. And I don't know if Steve Bannon is still whispering in his ear or is being heard if he is whispering in his ear. But Donald Trump probably doesn't care. And what you see with his focus, you know, constantly looking over his shoulder at the 2020 election and trying to pedal a lie that the 2020 election was right for fraud, that it was stolen. I think most Americans, the polls show this, believe that, that, that, that there's just no truth to that. And yet he still is like driving a freight train down the road instead of looking forward, always looking over his shoulder at this 2020 issue that he let go of is it shows his extreme selfishness and his self centeredness. And that has always been a feature of his life, going back to his time as a businessman in New York. But it is so clear now and in his last years in office, you would think that someone in the Republican Party, or at least some small faction in the Republican Party would start to look at life after Donald Trump and start to think about what the party needs to do to have some measure of credibility. Forget about election credibility. I'm talking about political credibility with their voters in a MAGA world, that will be very different with Donald Trump at the top. And there's no one that seems to be able to penetrate his total self absorption with this one issue, which the American public just does not care.
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Host Nicole
I mean, and to another proof point of what you're saying, Michel, we just had Jake Layton testify in an act of contortion to refuse to say the word won that Joe Biden won. I mean, it's almost going in the other direction as our politics move away from Trump. It is a conundrum's a perfect word. Michel, thank you so much for joining us today. John sticks around. When we come back, another chance for Congress to stand up to Donald Trump's deeply unpopular war with Iran. Congressman Jason Crow joins our coverage after a short break.
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Host Nicole (interviewer)
How is your strategy different than what we've seen in the past? So far we have not seen a strategy that's been successful. You mentioned nuclear material is the primary goal of the war. It still exists. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, reminding everybody it was open before the war. Prices were lower for everybody until the war. And it still remains closed. And of course, tragically, people, service members, our war fighters who we care deeply about, are still dying. So what's different?
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Host Nicole
That was the beginning of the most humiliating takedown yesterday of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It revealed a complete lack of a US Strategy in Donald Trump's deeply unpopular war in Iran. As Pete Hegseth testified that Donald Trump deserved our, quote, praise and requested tens of billions of dollars more for defense spending. Today, House Democrats are preparing a war powers resolution against Trump's deeply unpopular war in Iran, hoping to force a vote this week. I want to bring in Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado. He served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. First, your top line reaction to what you saw from Pete Hegseth yesterday.
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Congressman Jason Crow
Well, the one correction I would make, Nicole, is that it wasn't humiliating for Pete Hegseth because that would imply that the man has some sense of pride and dignity and shame and is capable of feeling humiliation, which of course, he does not. So, you know, the rest of the country is humiliated for him. But, you know the joke's on him, I guess, because the man doesn't understand the world that he lives in and what's going on. But, you know, putting that aside, you know, I am extremely concerned, I remain extremely concerned about the fact that we have a president and a secretary of defense and an entire national security infrastructure that is either incompetent or is completely beholden to a president who wants to weaponize them for political vengeance or to try to suppress elections like that is what's going on. Meanwhile, we have over 50,000 service members in the Middle east who remain at great risk. And answers have not been given to me or anyone else that I'm aware of in Congress as to how we're going to secure and protect those men and women.
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Host Nicole
Donald Trump said this of soldiers who lost their lives fighting in the war in Iran. Quote, they were very strong on Iran not having a nuclear weapon. What do you think of a president putting words in the mouth of soldiers who have paved their lives for a war that no one asked them their opinion of before they served in it?
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Congressman Jason Crow
Well, it's disgusting. And why would we be surprised? A president who maligned POWs, you know, John McCain, who wouldn't show up at an event at an American military cemetery because it was raining, who said that soldiers who get captured in battle are suckers and losers, who maligned our veterans. I mean, the man has no sense. Not only does he have no decency, but he has no sense for service. The very notion that there would be people out there who are willing to give their life for something bigger than themselves, something grand like this country, and to give their life for their brothers and sisters. The man can't even comprehend that. Right, because he treats everything like a series of business transactions that have to serve him and his family and his political cronies. So he doesn't even understand the entire concept, which is why he put out a true social post yesterday, I think it was, Nicole, where he said he listed the number of killed in action for our last few wars, and it ended with only 18. Only 18. You know, do you. What do you think the family members of those fallen warriors are thinking when we have a president that says, hey, it's just only 18 people, it's just disgusting and it's got to come to an end, which is why we're trying to end it.
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Host Nicole
Take me through how you can stop him. I mean, how you continue to communicate with the country so that public pressure builds and you bring around Republicans. Is that the strategy? Or wait until after the midterms Just take me through the strategy.
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Political Commentator 3
Yeah, that's the strategy.
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Congressman Jason Crow
This is all about public pressure right now on Republicans who have failed to stand up and do their job. So let's start with this. The job of a member of Congress is to take a vote and to be held accountable for sending people to war.
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Political Commentator 3
Right.
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Congressman Jason Crow
That is a duty. It's not even a choice. It's a duty that we have in the Constitution to take votes on these things, to appropriate money for them, and then to be held accountable. Many Congresses over the last 20 years have ceded that duty and that responsibility to presidents. This should be the most bipartisan thing in America because we've had both sides that have abused it at one time or another. Well, here we are. We have a war once again. So we have to create enormous public pressure on those folks who are unwilling to take that vote and actually do the right thing that their constituents are demanding that they do. So, yeah, it's about pressure and it's about sending people home. Send them packing if they're not willing to do the right thing. This is overwhelmingly unpopular. America does not want this war, period. I mean, the data is very clear on that.
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Political Commentator 3
Right.
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Congressman Jason Crow
And I've been going around the country as the battleground chair for House Democrats and I see very clearly red areas, blue areas, purple areas, urban, rural. Nobody wants this.
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Political Commentator 3
Right.
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Congressman Jason Crow
We've already spent trillions of dollars in the Middle east, thousands of American lives. It's yet again a quagmire which we knew it would be from the very beginning. It is irresponsible, it's reckless. And we're going to hold people accountable who are unwilling to do their job to end it.
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Host Nicole
Congressman Jason Crow, we really appreciate having time to talk to you today. Thank you so much.
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Congressman Jason Crow
Thank you.
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Host Nicole
When we come back, Democrats are tipping their hand just a little, signaling who they plan to investigate when and if they take control of Congress in November. They're already moving in on one big Trump capitulator. We'll tell you about it next.
- [34:03]
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- [35:22]
Host Nicole
So as we've been talking about, all our Donald Trump's deeply unpopular policies and personal conduct are putting Republicans in grave danger of losing their majority, potentially setting up Democrats to take control. And on their own control, they will open up the kinds of investigations into corruption that Donald Trump has been broadcasting. Those investigations will also include looking into the capitulation by nine top tier law firms in this country, something we've covered many times in this program. The New York Times is out with brand new reporting that reveals that top Democrats are pressing for information now from one of those firms about its agreement with the White house to do $100 million in quote, unquote, pro bono work on Trump backed causes to avoid the threat of Trump's executive order. From that new reporting, quote, in a letter to the firm, Congressman Jamie Raskin, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Adam Schiff asked Scadden, the law firm, to provide a variety of information about the deal and its government work. In interviews, according to the New York Times report, quote, Raskin and Blumenthal said that if they had subpoena power, they would seek to force the firms to explain why they entered into the deals, what the deals entailed, what work they did for the Trump administration, whether they refused to take cases because they feared retaliation from the White House and any potential conflicts of interest the deals created with other clients. I want to bring in the reporter whose byline is on that reporting, New York Times investigative reporter Mike Schmidt. John Heilman is still here. Mike Schmidt, something Jack Smith said to me was that when he was attacked by Donald Trump, he left the Justice Department. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to find lawyers. And that's Jack Smith, sort of Donald Trump's apex political opponent. He also made the point that a lot of people less well known struggle to find lawyers and law firms to represent them. And it seems like that sort of underbelly of an issue that's gotten a lot more attention, which is the capitulation of these top tier law firms. Tell me what the Democratic senators and members of Congress are looking for in these deals.
- [37:37]
Political Commentator 3
So in many ways, this letter that they sent is something that doesn't mean a lot. No one has to really. I mean, the Democratic lawmakers will say people should respond to them, but these law firms do not really have to respond to them because the Democrats do not have the subpoena power. But the larger message of what is going on here, and what I talked to the lawmakers about was that, was that if they retain control, if they gain back control of the House or the Senate, investigating the law firm deals would be one of their top priorities. And one of the reasons, one of the things that they want to investigate is exactly what you're getting at, which is what was the effect of these deals? What did it mean? Because they did these deals, did it mean that they were unwilling to represent clients who might be adverse to the administration? How did it impact them? How did these officers of the court who were supposed to represent clients, no matter their political beliefs or such, how did they respond in, you know, as part of the deals? And part of the thing about the deals is that there hasn't been a lot of oversight on the deals because Democrats don't really control that much and Republicans don't want to ask questions about it. But if the Democrats got back the House or the Senate, one of the first things they would want to do, as Blumenthal said to me, was get someone like Brad Karp under oath to testify about these deals. And that would give us insights into a lot, a lot of these things that we haven't been able to get up until now.
- [39:08]
Host Nicole
If a federal judge who looked at the executive orders attacking the law firms described them as illegal, how are the deals inversely legal? Are they not bribes?
- [39:21]
Political Commentator 3
That's a great question. I would leave it to the legal beagles to determine what is exactly legal or illegal or in the eyes of whomever. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of the law firms that entered into these deals knew that if they went to court, they would quickly receive an injunction, that a judge would quickly issue a temporary restraining order stopping the executive order from going into effect against them. What happened, though, is that these firms were so afraid to be seen as adverse to Trump and the impacts that that could have on them, that what they did was that they went and made the deal because they knew even if they were to succeed in court, it would be too difficult to be Persona non grata in this administration and be someone who the administration did not want to deal with. Because whether you are on the corporate side trying to make deals or you're a litigator trying to, you know, be in opposition to the government, it would be too hard for these firms to operate, being out of favor with the Trump administration.
- [40:26]
Host Nicole
Mike, you know better than me, but in our world, the defamation law and cases seek to prove known falsity. In the legal world, if you do something that's knowingly illegal, is that the same kind of peril for their professional associations?
- [40:44]
Political Commentator 3
I don't know, and I don't know who would make a determination like that. I think the. What you're getting at is the larger sense that in many ways, the deal, the deals have aged. It's been over a year since the deals happened. In many ways, deals have been, you know, backfired on some of the firms in the sense that the amount of public, you know, outcry it is created about them and the amount of people that have left the firm like a place like Paul Weiss, at the same time, many of these firms have continued to flourish. They've continued to make an enormous amount of money, and they've continued to be successful. So. So to them, the cost, whatever public, public cost there was to this has been worth,
- [41:29]
Host Nicole
worth the bottom line. I mean, Heilman, this gets into the bigger conversation about brands, right? And you see it. I mean, media companies are the ones that we pay the most attention to, maybe because we're in the media. But Paramount destroying 60 minutes in service of Donald Trump just seems like something, to Mike's point, about not aging well that isn't going to age well. Like, this moment will pass and all the destruction, the law firms that made deals. And again, I don't know if a lawyer can do something knowingly illegal and stay a lawyer. That's, I guess, for lawyers to figure out about other lawyers. But just the brand piece of this seems like it has aged terribly.
- [42:05]
Political Commentator 1
I think it has aged terribly, Nicole. I think there is. And one of the things that Mike's pointing to is that the question of brand, we think about it largely in terms of, in business, you would call a B2C company, where you have a brand that you're hoping appeals to a large, large audience of people. And if you're seen poorly, it hurts your bottom line. Law firms are mostly B2B businesses. Right. And so you have a much smaller audience that's evaluating your brand. And especially for those firms that were primarily focused on transactional work, I'm not sure how much their brand has suffered from this because the size of the audience is so much smaller and more specialized.
- [42:49]
Host Nicole
Maybe, but maybe if you're trying to attract the best and the brightest at universities, young people who go to anywhere, maybe they don't want to go to a place that did an illegal deal with Donald Trump. We'll see. Mike Schmidt, thank you for bringing us your recording. John Heilman, thank you for spending the hour with me. One more break. We'll be right back. It is increasingly important for us to zoom out to see where we are in this moment, where we stand. And there's no one better at doing that than historian Heather Cox Richardson. I had a chance to speak with her for this week's episode of the Best People podcast. She's in a league of her own. She is brilliant. Her substack Letters from an American is indispensable. Take a listen to what she told me about Donald Trump's decision to address the nation about an election he lost six years ago.
- [43:41]
Historian Heather Cox Richardson
The fact that he is now going for a national address to the American people to say, oh, look, it looks like there's been this terrible fraud. I'm gonna have to do something huge in order to combat that happening in 2026, which is the whole point, after all. That suggests to me that he is desperate. And the question is how much people will put up with how much will state. It's Republicans at the state level pushing back against him as well as Democrats. And I'm always looking for the pressure points. The pressure points right now for the American people are how do you pressure elected officials to do the right thing, to stand by the laws?
- [44:25]
Host Nicole
The rest of the conversation is out now. You just scan the QR code to listen now or download. The Best people. Wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to let me know what you think of this one on Instagram or bluesky. One more break. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for letting us into your homes tonight. We are grateful.
- [44:45]
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- [45:01]
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- [46:08]
Shaquille O'Neal (Zepbound Advertiser)
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