← Deadline: White House
Deadline: White House
“Who could be next?”
00:44:09
Nicolle Wallace on breaking news that the Justice Department plans to seek charges against former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton.
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- [00:01]
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Nicole Wallace
Hi there, everybody. It's four o'clock in New York. Here we go again. We come on the air this afternoon with breaking news again. In the last 15 minutes, we have learned that John Bolton, former national security adviser turned sharp critic of Donald Trump, is expected to be the subject of a complaint or even an indictment as early as next week. MSNBC, citing two sources, is reporting exclusively that the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland is moving forward quickly to seek criminal charges against Bolton. They reportedly relate to claims that he improperly kept classified national security information in his Maryland home. His home was searched in August. Bolton's lawyer insists that his client, John Bolton, did nothing improper. It is the second instance of targeting a prominent Trump critic in two days and the third in the past two weeks. It certainly fuels the perception that Donald Trump is deliberately making his way down a to do list having to do with his promise of political retribution. It is where we begin today with former Department of Justice pardon attorney Liz Oyer. She was fired by Trump's Justice Department in March. Also joining us, former assistant special agent in charge at the FBI, MSNBC national security and intelligence analyst Michael Feinberg. He's also a fellow at lawfare. Also joining us, NYU law professor, MSNBC legal analyst Melissa Murray. And with me at the table, investigative reporter for the New York Times, Mike Schmidt is here. Michael Feinberg, I want to start with you because I think there will be a reflexive instinct to dive immediately into the facts, which is an important part of anything that all of us do. But I do think that the forest is perhaps more newsworthy at the moment. This is the third stated enemy of Donald Trump indicted in less than two weeks. There is clearly direction and because Donald Trump mistakenly posted it on social media instead of in the dm, where he planned to send it, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, that he wanted, quote, Pam, to move quickly with his targeted enemies.
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Michael Feinberg
Yeah, that's very true. And I've heard from a couple of different sources that with respect to Letitia James indictment, that the Acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia did not even notify the main Justice Department that she was doing it this week. They were expecting it to happen next week. So that sort of at least implies she was communicating or taking orders from somebody other than her direct chain of command at doj. The alacrity with which the Bolton complaint or indictment is moving forward is also a little bit alarming because normally in a case involving the mishandling of classified information, you have to do something called an original classification authority determination, where you take the supposedly classified information, you send it to the owning agency, and they make a determination about whether it is in fact classified. That is a process that usually takes months. And it is something beyond the control and outside of the Department of Justice's chain of command. So I don't see how they could have gotten that OCA classification without direct intervention from the White House ordering the other agencies to speed up the usual process.
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Nicole Wallace
That's a fascinating thing that certainly someone like yourself would be able to flag for us. I want to ask you about John Bolton's sort of arc as a national security figure. I worked in the Bush administration. He was the US Ambassador to the United nations. Politically a polarizing figure in both parties. He became a sharp critic of Donald Trump's. And that might be the most familiar that many of my viewers are with him. But in the middle, there was an effort by Bill Barr to prosecute him or to stop the publication of a book. And one of the things he wrote about in his book called the Room Where It Happens was the issue over which Donald Trump is indicted the first time, the pressure campaign against Zelensky. Just talk about his profile as someone who has this long story going back to Bill Barr of political retribution and malicious prosecution. If that's an argument his lawyers choose to make.
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Michael Feinberg
Yeah, well, I mean, John Bolton has had a very long and journeyed path within conservative foreign policy circles, starting out as some sort of a mid period neoconservative in the Bush administration, to his role in the Trump administration, where reportedly he often got into disagreements over the sort of America first isolationist posture that that administration often took. And so he wrote his book, the Room where it happened as a direct criticism of that point of view. And it was incredibly uncomplimentary to the President, many of his supporters. So, you know, Bill Barr and the then DOJ began an investigation into whether he had inadvertently or purposely released classified information. And one of the things that came out during that tumult was that he had submitted the book to pre publication review, as former government officials are required to do, and they approved it. But then that approval was somehow overruled by a different figure in the chain of command and he was asked to resubmit it. And he resubmitted it and never got a response, supposedly to the second submission. And ultimately he and his publishers decided to release the book. And so Bill Barr launched an investigation. The investigation never really went anywhere in that. After the change in administrations, Merrick Garland and his Justice Department, who it should be very clear, are not natural allies of John Bolton, determined that there had been no wrongdoing. And this was not a charge worth pursuing. But I should hasten to add, we don't know for certain. In fact, we've heard reporting to the contrary that these new charges have anything to do with the publication of that book.
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Nicole Wallace
And we'll dive into what we do know on the fact pattern of what he's expected to be indicted for next week. I just, I see some of the instinct to separate this case out, and that will be important at one level, but the way that it's the same sounds to me like as with Jim Comey, Bill Barr looked at Bolton and tried to prosecute him. And ultimately that case doesn't go as far as Trump wanted it to. And this Justice Department seems to be barreling full speed ahead. Mike Schmidt, this is a chapter you've written about and reported on extensively. Your thoughts?
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Mike Schmidt
The reason that we're having this conversation is that presidents are told in normal times, and Donald Trump was told this during his first term, that they should not talk about criminal investigations, they shouldn't talk about who should be criminally investigated and who committed criminality, because if they do that, it creates a perception that the prosecution is being done at the behest of the president. And it raises the question, oh, is this being done for political reasons or is this being done based on the law? And the fact obviously Donald Trump has not kept his mouth shut about John Bolton. So because of that, we cannot sit here as people trying to understand this moment and accept on the face of it that this is being done based on the law and the fact, because the most powerful person in the United states who has picked not only who his attorney general is, but it looks like picks, you know, who his line prosecutors are on prosecutions is, has been so open about this. And during his first term, aides and lawyers told him time and time again, don't talk about this, because when they really do get one of your enemies, it could potentially undermine it. So if he is charged and it does move forward, we will see, first of all, we'll get a sense of what the evidence is and we will also see what is a question that has emerged in the Comey case and I'm sure will emerge in the James case and the Bolton case, which is where is the line on vindictive prosecution? So a lot of people that get indicted go to court and they try and file motions and they say, I'm being unfairly prosecuted and I'm being persecuted for that. And those things usually fall flat. They usually do not get, get ruled on in their favor. We now have people that the President of the United States has openly said, I want prosecuted. And it looks like they are going, they are being prosecuted. And there's not a lot of case law on this. This is not something that we see play out a lot. So we are going to see what vindictive Prosecution means in 2025 in the United States. Is that something that would stop a criminal prosecution or is it something that it doesn't matter to the court.
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Nicole Wallace
You did a big body of reporting ahead of the election about the different ways that Trump sought to punish his critics in his first term. And there was investigative journalism involved, going through the IRS audits, the most severe ones, and stitching together what had happened to different people who happened to be on the target list. If you compare that body of reporting with the posts, Pam, hurry up. Indict Tish, James Shifty, Adam Schiff and Jim Comey, you know, their whatever he said in that post. It's such a different process where it's all happening in full view.
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Mike Schmidt
Yeah. So the first term is Donald Trump jumping up and down on Twitter and, you know, to the press and to his aide saying, I want people prosecuted. A lot of that happens, not necessarily always publicly. It happens behind closed doors where he tries to get the department to do things. What emerges from that are a bunch of criminal investigations into his enemies. None of those prosecutions turn into what he wants them to be. His last meeting with Bill Barr. He's still very mad at Bill Barr, that James Comey is not going to be indicted. That is sort of the pattern that emerged from the first term that to appease him, it looks like some criminal investigations were done into his enemies, but they never led to prosecutions. What's different now is that the Don McGahns and the John Kellys are not there. They are purposely not there because people like Russ Voight did not. You know, they have said, we don't want the lawyers here to be slowing us down. And because of that, because of the fact that there aren't guardrails there, you're seeing an unshackled Trump who is able to do a lot of the things that he told John Kelly and Don McGahn he wanted to do, but were never done. And that is the difference between the first term and the second term. And that's why we're seeing the prosecutions. We're seeing. You know, I think someone like Bill Barr saw himself as someone that stood between Trump and the US Attorneys and thought that the line prosecutors were ones that would hold the line and would prevent these types of prosecutions from happening. And under Bill Barr, they didn't happen. Now, you could say that it was wrong for the department to have gone out and investigated these people because Trump wanted them investigated or whatever.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, and to be fair, Jeff Berman writes in his book that they did happen. They didn't happen under Jeff Berman's leadership at sdny. But there were political prosecutions that were moved from US Attorneys. I mean, Bill Barr didn't protect all the US Attorneys.
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Michael Fanone
No, no, no.
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Mike Schmidt
And look, the point I'm making is that there are a lot of investigations that happened that Donald Trump wanted to have happened, and cases that were shopped around to different U.S. attorney's offices. Those cases which were probably handled, you know, at the case level by career prosecutors, never turned into indictments, prosecutions. So you had a big body of investigations that had gone on, you know, a lot. You know, all these people getting that Trump didn't like, got investigated, but they were never charged. What you're seeing here is the charging. That is what's different here. They are going out and getting charged, and they're not just getting charged. In the case of the reporting on Comey and Letitia James, it looks like they're getting charged. The career prosecutors don't want to charge them. It is the hand picked prosecutor that is doing it.
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Nicole Wallace
Liz, you lived this, what we're talking about. Your thoughts to the second report of a political enemy being indicted or likely indicted and the third in two weeks.
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Liz Oyer
Yeah, this is just having incredibly damaging effects on the perceived legitimacy of the justice system. And that's really problematic in and of itself. Even if there is some legal merit to some of these cases, which is is in question, the way in which these prosecutions are proceeding creates the perception that the President is just swooping in and pulling strings in the criminal justice system. And that undermines confidence in the whole system. We're now learning that the Justice Department is largely governed by nor and traditions, and those have been in place for over a century and have largely been abided by, by the leadership and the career workforce of the department. But at the end of the day, those things don't have any teeth. So if Donald Trump wants to disregard all of the norms and traditions that have kept our justice system functioning and created a sense of legitimacy for over a century, then there's really very little there to stop him. It goes hand in hand with the mass firings of career experts within the department like myself. He has, through Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, rooted out career professionals who are standing in the way of accomplishing his political agenda. And he is claiming a very broad constitutional power to do that without any checks, without any limitations. And as a result of pulling out people who are experienced in prosecuting and putting in place people like Lindsey Halligan, who has no idea what a criminal prosecution normally looks like, he is able to do a tremendous amount of dam to the legitimacy of our entire justice system.
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Nicole Wallace
Melissa Murray when you think about what these three people have in common in the medium that matters most to Donald Trump is that they aggressively and charismatically poked at all of his soft tissue, if you will. Jim Comey described his organization like a mob family, La Cosa Nostra, in his first book and his first interview about it. The criticisms were really not launched by Attorney General Tish James. She went out and proved they were true in the fraud case, the civil case, and held up a multimillion dollar judgment against his company. Another pride point, I suppose, for him. And then John Bolton came in from the far right of the ideological spectrum and said not only all that, but he's, he's an idiot. I mean, Bolton basically said he was too stupid to be a dictator. That was his line of attack against Donald Trump repeated over and over and over again on television. So whatever the question or the answer is to Mike's question about finding a line around vindictive prosecutions, there is copious evidence that these were people that got way under Donald Trump's skin.
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Udemy Announcer
This is a very thin skinned administration in a lot of respects, and these prosecutions make that very clear. But I want to emphasize it's not simply about seeking retribution from those who you believe have wronged you over time, whether it's John Bolton or Letitia James or Jim Comey. It's about sending a message to other people who would similarly stand up and dissent against your administration that this is what happens when you stand against the machine. So these are typical strong man tactics that we have seen in authoritarian governments the world over. They're just being exported now to the United States and he's using every lever of power to do this. So now it's the criminal justice. A few weeks ago, it was simply the president's now expansive power to remove individuals from multi member commissions like the FTC or the National Labor Relations Board.
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Nicole Wallace
Or the Federal Reserve.
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Udemy Announcer
He's using every lever of power to create a government in his image.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, ask all of you to stay with us. There is much more ahead for us on this topic. Thank you. Donald Trump's retribution campaign, the one that he himself promised at his campaign launch in Waco, Texas, when he said, I am your retribution. Could his next target be people who tried to hold him accountable for the January Six insurrection at the Capitol? Retired D.C. police officer Michael Phenome will join us here at the table to talk about that later in the broadcast. Cracks in the Republican wall are starting to show up in surprising places when it comes to Donald Trump's militarized raids in American cities. We'll talk with the Chicago pastor attacked by masked ICE agents on the streets of Chicago. We'll have all those stories and more when Deadline White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere.
- [19:21]
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Chris Hayes
Continues implementing his ambitious agenda. Follow along with MSNBC's newest newsletter, Project 47. You'll get weekly updates sent straight to your inbox with expert analysis on the administration's latest actions and how they're affecting the American people.
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Nicole Wallace
The American people are basically telling the president that they are not okay with any of this.
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Chris Hayes
Sign up for the Project 47 newsletter at msnbc.com project47. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts for early access. Add free listening and bonus content to all of MSNBC original podcasts, including the chart topping series the Best People with Nicole Wallace. Why Is this Happening? Main justice and more. Plus new episodes of all your favorite MSNBC shows ad free and ad free listening to all of Rachel Maddows original series, Ultra Bagman and Deja News. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
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Michael Fanone
Of course, after two years of Watergate, Nixon resigned. We are now at a deadlock period. And it's even worse than that. I mean, I think we have really reached the point where Trump has destabilized the government so it can't function normally.
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Nicole Wallace
We're back with Liz Michael, Melissa and Mike Michael Feinberg. You know that wasn't just anyone, right? That was Bob Woodward saying that we're in a less stable place that we were in during Watergate, which I think at the time felt every bit as dire and cataclysmic as anything we're all living through. But to hear him say this is worse because the checks on Nixon's criminality and corruption, the government's been destabilized. Congress has taken itself off the field. Courts are holding largely, but people are holding their breath, I guess, on the ultimate question. And the Supreme Court has already weighed in granting Trump immunity. So there is no Watergate parallel in a post immunity world. What do you make of historical references like that and how can they help us through these days?
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Michael Feinberg
Well, I would issue one caveat, and I don't want to give false hope to anyone, but I do think we need to keep it in mind. When Watergate initially broke, much of Congress, including the President's own party, was not quite ready to push back to colloquially indict him to pursue impeachment charges. It's only as more and more came out, the flood couldn't be held back in terms of the public knowing what happened happened that Congress itself began to really reassert its authority. So I'm not ready to give up completely yet. The other thing that I would really note here is that there's a big difference between Nixon's Cabinet and Trump's current Cabinet. Nixon's Cabinet was still full of institutionalists with extensive government experience and they were fairly intelligent people. The people populating the Cabinet now are, generally speaking, inexperienced and at a complete loss in how to manage their own departments. And I just think in terms of intellectual candle power, they're not as bright as those we had in the Nixon administration or even in the first Trump administration. So I think we're going to see more and more mistakes made by this administration and in terms of just managing the machinery of government. And when you combine that with increasing destruction of norms, we might reach the point where other branches are willing to push back more than they currently are. I don't have a lot of hope, but I have some.
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Nicole Wallace
It's good. I'll take it, especially on a Friday. Mike Political retribution is opposed by 70% of Americans. It's not popular. The Doge cuts were so unpopular, they cost the Trump musk partnership feels like 11 years ago, but cost them a Supreme Court race, state supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Trump's overall approval rating is hovering between 37 to 39%. This stuff is not popular, and yet he keeps doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on it.
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Mike Schmidt
Yeah, I think one of the more interesting, the most interesting political question about Trump is that can you, at the same time that you're in charge of the government, use the government for things that are unpopular and also do, you know, severe damage to the government? Now, it is pretty clear that they have hollowed out the ranks of the Justice Department and the FBI. It's clear from the Doge stuff that there was a lot of damage done to the actual federal government politically. Are they setting themselves up for that to really come home to roost? If there were some sort of major law enforcement or national security thing, would the FBI and Justice Department be in place to deal with that? If there was some, you know, larger catastrophe or some sort of disaster, would the damage that has been done to the government be something that has ramifications for them? And I think that's a pretty risky place to be. And sure, it may seem fine now and the consequences of it may not be apparent, but in the end, are they setting themselves up for that really to be damaging to them? At the same time, I'm not sure that Trump really cares. I don't think he cares whether retribution is C plus popular or B minus or A minus popular. I think he is intent on it. He believes that people should go through what he went through, and he doesn't really care. He's shown no interest in stopping any of that. If anything, he has shown a stick to itness to follow through on retribution, like really reaching his hand down into the Justice Department to find the actual prosecutor to go and do the indictment. I mean, that is a level of attention that Trump is giving to an issue that we don't always see.
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Nicole Wallace
I mean, Liz, pick up on that. And Michael's point earlier that Pam Bondi was out of the loop on the timing of some of the presentation of evidence to the grand jury in the Tish Shames case that obviously Lindsey Halligan may be reporting to some other building, maybe the one at the other, you know, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Liz Oyer
Yeah, it's really shocking to think that the Attorney General would not be the first person to know that something like that is coming down the pipeline. There are a couple of people operating behind the scenes who have not gotten the amount of attention they deserve. That I find to be very concerning figures in all of this. One is Ed Martin. Ed Martin is an extreme MAGA connected person who was determined even by Republicans in the Senate to be too fringe to be confirmed as U.S. attorney for D.C. so instead he got got dual roles in the Justice Department where he seems to have basically no supervision. He is the pardon attorney, which is my old job, and he is also the director of the Weaponization Working Group and he has got his fingerprints all over this case. He appears to have been collaborating with another individual named Bill Pulte, who is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a little known agency that oversees the mortgage industry. And the two of them have been apparently rifling through mortgage files of Donald Trump's enemies. Trump trying to build cases against them with seemingly very little supervision. There is really no adult supervision in the room. They, you know, Martin is not a serious attorney. He's a political operative masquerading as an attorney. And he has been able to do quite a lot behind the scenes. He posts prolifically on X and he posted a picture of himself meeting with Lindsey Halligan this week. He posted again after the indictment of Tish James was returned, something saying, promises made, promises kept. So he clearly views himself as someone who is pulling a lot of strings behind the scene. And he seems to be operating totally out of sync with the Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General, which is very alarming.
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Nicole Wallace
Melissa, let me just remind you what the Republican senators thought was okay. Right. So the line that Liz is talking about is between Hegseth Patel and RFK Jr. For whom the Republicans in the Senate are Yay, yay. Give me more. Ed Martin's on the other side of that line. That's who Liz is talking about. And let me just read you the things that Trump has said about Attorney General Tish James in addition to that social media post that we're learning was perhaps something he intended to type as a direct message, quote, tish James is guilty as hell, quote, corruption complete and Total disaster. All caps, scum, incompetent, a criminal who should be forced to resign, quote, a Trump deranged lunatic, corrupt and incompetent wacky crook. These span about a three month period between late spring and her indictment. What she is accused of doing is basically saving about $49 a month because of a box that was checked in one document. But clarifications made to whether or not this property would be a primary residence in all caps and subsequent documents. So again, there's a trial. A jury will determine if all of the aspects of criminality, including clear intent to commit those crimes, exist. But at least an office full of career and political appointed prosecutors didn't think so. Where do you put this moment?
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Udemy Announcer
I think it is a scary moment and we are seeing the weaponization of the justice system in many different ways. And now this is through the criminal justice system. But we have seen the justice system used in other ways. The fact of investigation, the fact that Pam Bondi has said that, you know, she is going to be the one to carry out this agenda. The withholding of the Epstein files, I mean, this is a DOJ that has become the president's personal law firm in a lot of ways. And, you know, this was always the fear in the first Trump administration. It didn't quite come to fruition because there were guardrails. But that's not the case now. And so we are definitely seeing this with regard to the charges against Attorney General James. Again, I think most prosecutors would say this is pretty small potatoes. And actually proving that an individual had the mental state for this particular crime would be difficult, which is why I think you had to go to Lindsey Halligan, who is installed in that position, so she could bring about the president's agenda when the prosecutor who had previously been in that post refused to do it in the context of the Jim Comey indictment. So there's a pattern here. This pattern is also extended to Lisa Cook. This mortgage fraud allegation is the same set of allegations that the president is using in his bid to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. And so part of this is, you know, hangers on in the administration like Bill Pulte, who are using their positions to dig up this information, try and cobble together a case, and then pass it along to a very willing interim U.S. attorney who will make hay of it.
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Nicole Wallace
Liz, Lawyer Michael Feinberg, Melissa Murray, thank you so much for starting us off on this today. Michael sticks around ahead for us. Former police officer Michael Phenome will join us here at the table over the widening, quickly widening revenge campaign being led by Donald Trump. The connection between the guests on the show is the show. All that we do is put together people who are smart, people who are brave, people who are honest and long, lots of times people who've never met each other to have a conversation that has never happened before. But on that day deepens everyone's understanding about the moment in which we gather.
- [32:55]
Chris Hayes
Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, weekdays from 4 to 6pm Eastern on MSNBC. Start your day with the MSNBC Daily newsletter, sharp insights from voices you trust, standout moments from your favorite shows, and fresh perspectives from experts shaping the news. Sign up now@msnbc.com hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes.
- [33:19]
Michael Fanone
This week on my podcast, why Is this Happening? Cultural anthropologist Richard Grinker on why the.
- [33:24]
Mike Schmidt
Autism discourse has become so political.
- [33:27]
Michael Feinberg
The truth of the rise of autism as a diagnosis and the truth about what causes the whole autism spectrum isn't satisfying if you're looking for a single cause and effect, because you gotta go into, well, there are more child psychiatrists now and we've improved our special education and they broadened the criteria and on and on. And all of those things are what act in concert. But the single bullet, the magic bullet is so seductive.
- [33:58]
Michael Fanone
That's this week on why Is this Happening? Search for why is this Happening? Wherever you're listening right now, and follow.
- [34:05]
Nicole Wallace
Donald Trump has very publicly sought to exact revenge on his perceived political enemies from the moment he entered Politics and Trump 1.0. It was reported by the New York Times that Trump made it clear he wanted to order an investigation into his former director of the FBI, Jim Comey, but he was stopped or slowed largely by then White house counsel Don McGahn, who, quote, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. To underscore his point, McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment. But alas, there are no Don McGanns in Trump 2.0 to squash Trump's insatiable appetite for revenge. Instead, we have Trump telling his attorney general in a public post to charge his perceived enemies, which he apparently meant to send in a dm. In the weeks since, we have seen two of those publicly stated enemies, Jim Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, indicted on charges brought by his former personal attorney. Now today, news of criminal charges expected against Trump's national former national security adviser turned critic John Bolton, when you go down the list, who could be next? It could very likely be the people who sought to hold Trump accountable for the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol. Here is what Senator Adam Schiff, member of the January 6 committee, had to say about being a potential target.
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Michael Fanone
Those of us on the president's enemies list, and it is a long and growing list, will not be intimidated. We will not be deterred. We will do our jobs. We will stand up to this president. And I would also say to my other colleagues across the aisle that this president's animosity, his vengeance, his disregard for the democracy that has been our proud legacy will not protect you from the president's vengeance. He wants you to know that.
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Nicole Wallace
Joining our conversation, former D.C. metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone. He was one of the officers who defended the Capitol from the insurrectionists on January 6th. Mike is still here. I've watched you continue to speak out, and not a lot of people are the same today that they were in the period when it was possible that Trump wouldn't come back during the campaign. And I just wonder if you can speak about what keeps you sort of in the arena fighting when you have all legitimate claim to being sort of cynical and disillusioned about our politics.
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Michael Fanone
Well, I actually, I did an interview with the Washington Post on election night. They had a reporter come sit with me and a photographer, and we watched the election results turn in. And I intended for that to be the last interview that I ever gave, the last time I ever appeared publicly. I was ready to ride off into the sunset, so to speak. And what got me reengaged was January 20th, Donald Trump takes office. And the first thing he does is he pardons every single insurrectionist, every single individual that assaulted police officers at the Capitol on January 6th with a stroke of a pen. And at that point, I think it became, for me at least, it became less about advocating for the preservation of democracy and more about defending my family and making sure that my children were safe, making sure that my mother and my father, all of whom have experienced death threats over the past four plus years. Now, because I said then, and I'll say it again today, every day that Donald Trump is in office is a day that my family is not safe.
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Nicole Wallace
How do you see this moment specifically with two, perhaps a third next week of Donald Trump's stated political enemies indicted?
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Michael Fanone
I mean, looking back on my two decade career in law enforcement, I worked very closely with the U.S. attorney's office. I counted many of them to be close personal friends. The line Prosecutors and career public servants. And it's sad to look at the state of the Department of Justice as it is today. And going from this institution so invaluable to our democracy, be corroded and corrupted by Pam Bondi, who to me is nothing more than a corrupt political operative of this president. To see this again, this institution be weaponized against Donald Trump's political opponents and against his perceived enemies and against the American people. I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, we're talking about American citizens that are being targeted by their government for their political viewpoints or their opposition to this administration.
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Nicole Wallace
We cover the swipe of the pen and the pardons of the insurrectionists for the horror that it is for a democracy. But for you, it was literally freeing the person who tased you.
- [39:33]
Michael Fanone
Yeah. Daniel Rodriguez. He was sentenced to over 12 years in prison for driving a stun gun into my neck numerous times while I was restrained and being beaten. Kyle Young, who attempted to take my firearm from its holster, again while I was being restrained and beaten. Thomas Sibic, who stripped me of my badge and my radio and then buried my badge in his backyard like it was some kind of a souvenir. Albuquerque, Casper head, who in my body worn camera footage you can see, yells out, I've got one. I've got one. Pulled me from the police line and dragged me out into the crowd. I mean, it's. And again, I mean, I'm one of hundreds of police officers that were assaulted that day. And there's countless stories of police officers who overcame their trauma to participate in the criminal justice process. Go testify as witnesses, testify, you know, to the extent of their injuries and to what that experience was like. And Donald Trump, you know, again, in the stroke of a pen, dismissed all of that, dismissed all the hard work of, you know, these career FBI agents and federal agents who worked these cases for months and months and months and years, many of whom now have been terminated from their positions simply for doing their jobs and having the back of their fellow law enforcement officers, which is why it's such so utterly ridiculous that this Republican Party would have the audacity to claim that it somehow supports law enforcement. It's nothing more than pathetic pandering, and it makes my blood boil.
- [41:18]
Nicole Wallace
Put a pin in the boiling blood for a second. I have to sneak in a break, and we'll bring Mike in on the other side. Don't go anywhere. We'll be back. We're back with two Michaels. Michael Fanone. Would the National Guard have been helpful on January 6th.
- [41:34]
Michael Fanone
I mean, honestly, yes. I mean, to answer that question, yes, unequivocally, we could have used any help that we could have possibly received that day. That being said, I still think that you would have experienced a tremendous amount of injuries on behalf of law enforcement. I mean, maybe having them there would have changed the minds of a few of the insurrectionists. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I think you still would have had a similar outcome.
- [42:10]
Nicole Wallace
Well, and I guess I ask because Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to American cities to protect law enforcement buildings might have been useful to protect law enforcement and the United States Capitol. I mean, what's the difference between the deployment.
- [42:30]
Michael Fanone
Well, I mean, obviously, on January 6, 2021, you had an active insurrection. You had thousands of violent Americans assaulting police officers, pushing through barricades, damaging property, making their way into the Capitol complex in an attempt to subvert an election. What's happening right now is purely performative. I mean, if you take Washington, D.C. for example, I mean, I was out in the streets of Washington, D.C. i saw what the deployment of the National Guard looked like. And you pretty much had two things happening. You had National Guard troops that were acting as gardeners that were engaged in picking up trash, that were mowing the lawn, that were using, you know, weed whacker. And then you also had National Guard troops that were armed tourists that were taking in the sights of downtown Washington, D.C. i saw hundreds of troops kind of aimlessly milling about the World War II memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall, you know, and it, when you talk about, you know, Pam Bondi cited these crime, you know, statistics and the amount of arrests that were made during that time period and how crime went down dramatically. Well, I mean, listen, every year at the Metropolitan Police Department, we have a summer crime initiative, and we select neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. where there's, you know, spike in crime and violent crime particularly. And we deploy every single asset that we have available to us to include, you know, utilizing federal partnerships. I mean, it's overkill. But does it reduce crime? Of course it does. When there's a cop on every single street corner, you know, criminals are not stupid. It displaces the crime. I mean, obviously, when you, if you were to go back and do a study and say, like, okay, look at the street and outside of that area, crime goes up significantly, but in that area where we're focused on, it goes down and they can report that to the public. It's the same premise. Here in Washington, D.C. you had this deployment of the National Guard, which really had no public safety function whatsoever other than the fact that they had a command presence in an area. But then you also had the deployment of all these federal resources, which I would argue as somebody who worked in a numerous federal task force while I was a police officer, that that's a good. Those partnerships between state and local and federal agencies are invaluable to public safety and fighting crime the way they were deployed. You're taking career FBI agents who are investigators, that's an investigative agency. And you're having them walk a footbeat in a neighborhood, going out and doing, you know, jump out style policing, probable cause arrests. This is not what they are trained to do and this is not what they do in practice as career FBI agents. And so what you saw was a surge in arrests, 80% of which were misdemeanor arrests. Bullshit. And then of the 20% of arrests that were felonies, a lot of those cases, they couldn't get an indictment or the cases were thrown out because of shaky or shoddy probable cause. Because that's what happens when you engage in these kind of archaic tactics in policing. Rather than allowing professionals police professionally, rather than allowing investigative units conduct investigations and surgically remove the most violent criminals from our streets, rather than going out and casting a wide net and stopping 100 people a night, of which maybe two or three are actually engaged in some type of criminal conduct, and then further eroding the trust between the community and the law enforcement agencies that are charged with keeping it safe, which is how.
- [46:29]
Nicole Wallace
You get most of your tips for the serious criminals anyway.
- [46:32]
Michael Fanone
Tips, witnesses. I mean, who's going to want to participate in the criminal justice system when they see agents and officers engaged in this type of policing?
- [46:43]
Nicole Wallace
It's so good to have you back at the table. Will you come back?
- [46:45]
Michael Fanone
Yeah, of course.
- [46:46]
Nicole Wallace
Mike Schmidt, thank you for being here. For the hour ahead for us, Donald Trump following through on a promised threat to indict or inflict even more pain on the American people as the already painful government shutdown enters its second week. Don't go anywhere. White House budget director, often referred to as the Grim Reaper, but better known from Project 2025, famed Russ Boat, announced today that the promised mass layoffs of federal workers has begun as we enter the 10th day of the government shutdown. No other details have been released as of yet, but a senior White House official told MSNBC that number would be in the thousands. So far, we know it will impact a wide range of departments, including Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the Education Department, and cisa, that's the cybersecurity agency that protects the integrity of our elections, just to name a few. It is important to note that this may not hold up in court. And labor unions representing federal workers have already filed lawsuits arguing that the firings are illegal during a government shutdown. We'll stay on top of that story. We'll have a chance to ask a member of Congress about it in the next hour. Up next for us, the pastor attacked by ICE agents as a result of Donald Trump's attempted takeover of the streets of Chicago joins us next. Quick break. We'll be right back.