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Federalist Radio Hour
Everything You Need To Know About The Charlie Kirk Assassination Trial
00:47:15
On this special edition of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist White House Correspondent Breccan Thies joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss the preliminary hearings for Tyler Robinson, the man accused of...
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- [00:18]
A
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist and as always, your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. And as always, you can email the show@radiothefederalist.com Follow us on XDRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and of course to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is the Federalist owned roving reporter Breckenthies, our White House and Pentagon correspondent Brecon. Last week it's covering the preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson, man accused of assassinating conservative icon Charlie Kirk. Brecken has provided some of the best coverage out there in this nationally watched case. And he joins us now. Welcome, sir, to the Federalist Radio Hour.
- [01:13]
B
Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
- [01:15]
A
What a week, huh? Ever a, a dull moment in this job, but I mean, you spent what, eight plus hours a day coming covering the Tyler Robinson case. Just wanted to get your first impressions of, you know, you've covered trials before, but I don't know too many trials quite like this.
- [01:36]
B
Yeah, I don't either. I think, you know, one of the big takeaways people have, and certainly I did as well, is, is how long and grueling this process is. And it is not over yet. You know, we've talked about this before, too. It's this last week wasn't even the full preliminary hearing. The next scheduled date for the preliminary hearing is September 1st, where they're gonna, there's gonna be four more hours of argument from either side. And we don't know if the decision on probable cause, which is going to be whether or not this actually goes to trial, is going to be made that day. That's one big glaring thing in this, I believe Utah might be unique in having a process like this. If I'm not mistaken, that is, it is a lot more drawn out. It basically forces the prosecution to sort of show its cards to the defense. And that obviously gives the defense a big, a big advantage going into a potential trial. But I mean, another thing that stood out of course as well is the sheer amount of evidence pointing to Robinson being guilty of, of murdering Charlie Kirk, you know, whether that's DNA, whether that's time and place, his own text messages to his alleged transgender boyfriend. We don't know if he's transgender still. That's sort of up in the air. You know, the, the, the interview and testimony of the transgender boyfriend. I mean, it all points to Robinson pretty unequivocally already. And in this trial or this rather, preliminary hearing, didn't even go over all the evidence that is likely to be presented at trial. It also didn't allow the public, meaning like the news media to, to see everything that the judge, for example, Judge Tony Graff, is going to be able to see when he makes his probable cause determination. So there's a lot more to come. It's just coming very, very slowly. And that's extremely frustrating for, for people who want justice to be done here,
- [03:36]
A
no doubt about it, and none more so than Erica Kirk and the Kirk family. We'll talk more about that coming up in just a bit. But yes, this is a little different system. I know preliminary hearings are fairly common in the criminal justice system and a number of states use them, but not really quite this way. Why is that? Why is Utah so different on this front?
- [04:02]
B
I don't actually know why Utah's so different, and I'm not even sure that it's part of their official statutory requirement that, that it take this long. It almost seems more of a cordiality thing between defense and prosecution is what I've heard. I might be wrong about that, but that, that's my understanding, is that Utah just does this as a sort of a gentlemanly thing to do, I think,
- [04:26]
A
and we talked about this before, but the judge in this case, as you mentioned, it's about showing the hand of the prosecutor. And the prosecutor has a lot of cards here, it seems to me, anyway, based on what you have reported on and what we've seen over the span of that week in the preliminary hearing. But this judge seems very, very cautious, wants to make sure that everything goes to plan and everything as it should, everything is covered under the confines of the law. But did you find striking at all just how meticulous he was and again, how cautious the judge was?
- [05:12]
B
Yeah, I think that, I mean, that's obviously going to this part that's very frustrating for people who want to see this done quickly and done properly. And it isn't to say that the judge isn't doing anything improperly or is doing anything improperly, but he does seem to be extraordinarily cautious and not kind of weighing, waiting one side or another, which he shouldn't do. That's his job as a magistrate, and he's mentioned that numerous times. That's why he's denied motions from the Kirk family attorney, which it's important to recognize out of the gate that the Kirk family isn't actually a party in this case, but they do have legal rights in this case being the family of the victim.
- [05:58]
A
That is strange though. Why isn't the Kirk family party to this case?
- [06:03]
B
I think it's because it's a capital murder case. So the state would be the one prosecuting in a capital murder case. The Kirk family, I think if they wanted to, could be part of a civil case. But because it's a murder case, they're victims, but not part of the actual prosecutor, prosecutorial team here, because it's for the state.
- [06:26]
A
At the end of the day, this is a, if it goes to that, it will be a trial for the state, for the citizens of Utah. And not to say that the victims do not have a voice in this, but it is interesting in these capital cases that they are not party to the process.
- [06:49]
B
Yeah, that's right. And so you've seen that play out in certain motions from the Kirk family who want some of these exhibits that were presented. Namely, you know, the, this video that the prosecution actually created that has some like zooming in features and, and some like highlights and circling who's alleged to be Robinson on the campus at Utah Valley University, you know, wanted that to be played in full. And the judge denied that, although a non edited video was allowed to be played in full. This is for the news media. All of it's being seen, by the way, by Judge Graff. It's just the stuff that the news media is allowed to see has been redacted pretty heavily. Another example is the Twigs. The Twigs, he's. He's the boyfriend of Tyler Robinson, Lance Twigs. His full interview with authorities, one of two of them was presented as an exhibit. It's I think around 30 or 40 minutes long, but something like 20 minutes of it was cut out by the judge, not for the judge's own consideration. He's considering the entire video himself, but he won't allow it to be seen by the public. And so there's this kind of battle between the judges allowed cameras into this hearing because these hearings are supposed to be public. And that usually means court gallery, by the way. Oftentimes it's a little bit more archaic now that we have cameras. Public means what can be broadcast nationally. So the judge has had to weigh what is in the interest of the gallery versus what's in the interest of the national news media versus what's in the interest of just simply him making the probable cause determination on how to allow and to what extent to allow people to see different exhibits. And I guess you could look at it two Ways to my mind, having watched every single minute of this over the course of the last five days last week. And you could see it as grandstanding, maybe, I know some people do. You could also see it as, he doesn't want there to be any accusation of impropriety at the end of this. That might suggest something like, I know this isn't a trial, but I'm sure there's some kind of equivalent in a preliminary hearing for a mistrial. The defense was treated unfairly. We already know the defense is probably going to try to make those arguments because they've been making those arguments about Graph's decision to open this to the news media anyway. And meanwhile, by the way, I mean, Graft did overrule basically every single objection from the defense on putting a lot of these exhibits into consideration and for public anyway. So there's a lot of dynamics that it seems like Graph is struggling to weigh here. And he, he seems to want to get it right. In my estimation. Reasonable people can disagree about that. I know people a lot of have said that he's being unreasonable, he's dragging this out, he's not capable of making this a streamlined process. And I get those arguments, and there's probably some truth to that too. But I think that he is just struggling to figure out how to make sure that this seems like Robinson's getting his fair hearing. And he keeps mentioning the defense's constitutional rights and things like that.
- [10:15]
A
Well, I can appreciate it is a fine line to walk, certainly, and I understand the criticisms too. But I also understand if this judge is doing his due diligence and is doing what he should be doing, he a, does not want to present something that will create a biased jury pool. That's an issue should this come to trial. And no judge wants to see the results of that trial dismissed because there was something wrong in that. And so that is human nature. And in this case, it should be the way that it is guiding this case. Because the worst thing in the world would be if you get through all of this and the verdict is eventually thrown out because of some sort of process issue. As heartbreaking as all of this has been to anybody who knows Charlie Kirk, particularly his family, that would just be ripping open the scab again.
- [11:24]
B
It would be. And to the frustrations about how long this has already taken, you know, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, what, 10 months ago. The end of the preliminary hearing is scheduled to be, you know, nine days before the one year mark. To that point, I mean, this is going to take even longer than that, that's the preliminary hearing. The trial could be scheduled for months away from that. The, the trial could take a very long time. The jury could deliberate for a very long time. And then, of course, the appeals process from the defense is going to start happening. Say he gets convicted. Let's say they do actually, he does actually get sentenced to death, which is what they're seeking here. You know, that appeals process often takes decades in the United States. So, yeah, there's a lot that needs to go right here. It seems on its face like it's a slam dunk case as far as the evidence goes, but as far as the procedure goes, I think it's probably right to err on the side of caution here to make sure that all of those things can either be, you know, an appeal can be thrown out if it's saying, oh, you, you know, the jury pool is tainted or something like that, these processes are going to matter for that kind of appeal later on where a judge can say, well, there's not, there's no reasonable reason you would believe that the jury pool is tainted based off of these arguments, you have no case here. I'm not going to even hear it.
- [12:52]
A
In your summary piece that was published Friday, you can find all of this great coverage@the federalist.com the federalist.com you wrote this. The defense introduced one new witness Friday, Caitlyn Oliver, a forensics by a forensic biologist for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who worked on the DNA analysis of evidence pertaining to the gun and ammunition allegedly used by Robinson. You go on to write, Robinson's attorneys have exclusively called for forensic analyst as witnesses in an attempt to create a level of doubt about forensic and DNA science as a whole. This is an interesting strategy to me. Interesting. I think it's a generous word. You know, we're seeing some of the same kind of stuff we, we've seen in previous very famous murder trials. The O.J. simpson trial comes to mind immediately to me. You know, I, I, I am that I remember the world fixated on this. I remember driving through the streets of San Francisco at the time of the verdict in the O.J. simpson trial, and I heard horns blaring across the city. They were celebrating in his hometown, O.J. simpson's hometown, the verdict of not guilty. So, you know, that that dream team defense lawyers, they tried to do everything they could to, you know, discredit the scientific forensic evidence. This team, though, doesn't seem to be such a dream team on that front. Give us, walk us through their strategy and what they attempted to do.
- [14:47]
B
Yeah, it was mostly spearheaded by an attorney named Michael Burt, who of the defense team. He does actually have some very interesting former clients, like Lyle Menendez, one of the Menendez brothers. He. And by the way, when he was his attorney, that first trial in 1993, I believe it was, did end in a mistrial. So that's just something to kind of keep in the back of your mind. Bert also represented Eric Robert Rudolph, who was the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics pipe bomber, and he also represented Richard Ramirez, who's the Night Stalker serial killer. So he has, he has an interesting track record himself. Now, what the strategy has been. And it is true that the only defense witnesses called are all forensic examiners. You just mentioned one. There's also Amanda Baker, who's a forensic examiner in DNI casework, DNA casework unit for the FBI, and Samantha Carner, who is a forensic firearms and tool mark person at the atf. All of them worked on this case and all of them were brought to the stand and asked by Bert. Bert would, would go through standard operating procedures of, of forensic analysts controlling textbooks of, of, you know, researchers in the field, things like that, and read them aloud and, and try to develop this narrative that forensic science isn't basically what it's cracked up to be and that there really is no way of being 100% certain. Which, by the way, I mean, the forensic analysts say that, and that is actually part of their standard operating procedure. They can't actually assign a level of certainty in terms of like, rhetoric certainty, if that makes sense. Like, you can't say I'm reasonably certain or I am very certain, or I am, you know, extraordinarily certain. Those kinds of descriptions are not actually allowed to, to be made when you're talking about DNA evidence, for example. That's why all assertions of likelihood are being made at this statistical level. So you'll hear some very odd phrasing for any normal person listening to it, like, this item is 1 trillion times as likely to be Tyler Robinson as it is to be three other unrelated individuals. Is the kind of language that they use.
- [17:17]
A
No, no, no, hold on a minute. That seems extraordinary. It is extraordinary certainty because those numbers are just out of the ballpark.
- [17:28]
B
You know, they are. And it's, it's, they actually are the most extraordinary because 1 trillion is where the top limit stops according to, to some of the people who are testifying. So although there could be a higher statistical likelihood, you know, in octillion or something like that, that's higher than a trillion. The range that they've set stops at a trillion because as someone testified in the trial, that's where human beings kind of stop being able to really quantify or perceive what that level of likelihood even means. Like your perception of a trillion versus an octrillion is not exact, is not that much, even though it's astronomically higher. Right. So they, they actually say we don't even put it above a trillion because there's no real reason to do that in terms of having it matter descriptively.
- [18:28]
A
Well, because we don't even have a trillion, nowhere near a trillion people on the face of the earth. You know, you'd have to start matching life outside of the galaxy or wherever, wherever it may. May exist, if indeed it does exist elsewhere. So, I mean, it just incredible. So this is pretty damning though, isn't it?
- [18:47]
B
It is, yeah. I mean, you know, you look at where this level of likelihood exists. I mean, it's all over the gun, different parts of the gun. The butt stock, the bolt, the butt plate, the trigger, the trigger guard, you know, the forend of the rifle, multiple cartridges, you know, the barrel, the optic, everywhere. I mean, every. Everything I just named, except for the optic has the one trillion, and then the optic has something like six and a half billion.
- [19:16]
A
Well then who could trust one in six and a half billion? Right?
- [19:19]
B
Right. Optic, famously. Also the part of the gun that you touch the least because you don't want to smudge it and things like that. But anyway, whatever. So that, that has the least amount of likelihood, but it is still six and a half million. And, and it's. Most of these things have a couple of different people's DNA on them. That's another thing that the defense is pointing out is that yes, Tyler Robinson's DNA is on the gun, for example, but so I believe is his father's and maybe even his grandfather's as well, because it was a family gun. And so multiple people's DNA is on it. In terms of the screwdriver that it seems like he brought up there to put the gun together when he was on the roof. Allegedly, that has Tyler Robinson's DNA and Lance Twiggs's DNA and the, the towel that was used to conceal the gun when you jumped off the roof that the gun was found in ultimately also had both Robinson's and Twigs DNA on it as well. And so something that the defense was trying to do was say, well, it has multiple people's DNA on it. You can't be 100% certain that it is this person. And also the presence of DNA doesn't actually tell you the circumstances by which the DNA got there. So they're saying that the DNA being there can't tell you the activity that was being done when the DNA ended up on the item itself. In other words, they're saying that the DNA doesn't tell you that Robinson shot Kirk. It can't. It can't tell you how it got there. And that's the kind of argument they're trying to make to, to basically say that the DNA evidence is not fully reliable. To explain the story, our guest today
- [21:03]
A
is the Federalist own Brecken thieves White House and Pentagon correspondent. But he does so much more. And last week Brecken was covering from start to finish, every minute of the preliminary hearing for Tyler Robinson, a man accused of assassinating conservative icon and evangelizer Charlie Kirk. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, really, it just boils down to the old case of, you know, reasonable doubt. And that's the thing where reasonable comes in here, right? You, you can't use reasonably certain about this evidence for forensic experts. You don't use those kinds of terms, as you noted. But reasonable doubt is something that is very much a significant part of this trial. In fact, it is ult where the rubber hits the road in this trial. So all of that said what the defense is arguing, at least to put some doubt in the minds of the judge in this case and if it goes to trial, ultimately a jury is that, well, sure, Tyler Robinson's DNA is all over this, but you know, there could have been some kind of a conspiracy behind this and Lord knows there are plenty of conspiracy theories out there, right?
- [22:29]
B
There are a lot of conspiracy theories and I've told you, I haven't kept up with all of them, if I'm honest, because I'm not sure that it's a worthwhile use of my time necessarily. I mean, I watched this, saw what was presented and came away with the impression that the evidence is pretty damning here. Other people will say that Tyler Robinson wasn't even on the campus at UVU when this happened. And there's other, other things people point to that. And again, I can't even get into them because I'm not really sure what they are. But I know that there's a lot of theories out there online. I have them, I have some of them in my, my comments on social media when I've been posting about this, this trial. And people will get into these rabid arguments online about how this is impossible. That's not possible. You know, Egyptian planes, I guess, is a thing that Candace Owens has brought up. I'm not really sure what that is.
- [23:27]
A
Yeah, Yeah, I don't understand that at all.
- [23:29]
B
No, I. So all that noise, I think, got silenced in a pretty meaningful way. Not. Not to say that people are going to stop saying those things. I'm saying that they got delegitimized by what was brought forth in the exhibits over the course of this trial. And. And hopefully it can kind of start bringing people on the side of just looking at this for what it seems to be, which is Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk.
- [23:57]
A
You got to see some, not all of the video evidence that they have. What was the most striking to you? I know they did a very lengthy interview, law enforcement officials, with Tyler Robinson's paramour, this fella apparently pretending to be a woman. I know that was a pretty big day in the trial. Was that the thing that stood out to you the most in terms of the video evidence submitted?
- [24:28]
B
Yes, and one other thing. So on the day that the Twigs interview was released, and again, heavily redacted portion of the interview was released, it was the first thing in sort of a litany of big pieces of evidence. So they had the. The Twigs interview, and then they had these text messages between Robinson and Twigs where Robinson literally confessed to it. I mean, like three or four times. And then you had the engravings on the. The cartridges. You know, famously, infamously, Robinson engraved a lot of the cartridges that were found in the gun with sort of online, like, antifa slogans. Hey, fascist, catch, ciao bella. Things like that. Those are. Those are antifa slogans. And then you had the DNA evidence that you had a picture of the gun. You had the DNA evidence that went along with the. The cartridges and the gun. So that was all kind of in one big sequence on, I believe, the fourth day of the trial. But in the Twigs interview, he said a couple of really interesting things. He said that Robinson had been asking about the Dremel tool that he allegedly used to engrave these cartridges a month prior to September 10th. Around a month prior to September 10th, which is the day, of course, that he allegedly shot Charlie Kirk. So it suggests that he was planning this for a month or maybe more. But then in text messages that were presented later on, Twigs asked, how long have you been planning this? Robinson replied, about a week, I think, or something like that. Or a week, I believe, is what it was. So those are unclear. But the fact that he was thinking about engraving these bullets a month prior suggests that the, the premeditation could be longer than what he said in, in the text messages. Another thing that Twig said in the interview is that on September 11, which is the, the, of course, the day after Kirk had been assassinated, Robinson was in their apartment, they shared an apartment, and he was sort of acting erratically, walking around, doing lots of things around the house, almost like pacing and being very nervous. That, of course, is the day that later on that evening around 9pm Robinson would turn himself into the Washington County Sheriff's Office, along with, you know, his parents went with him for that. And then he was. He and his parents were all separately interviewed, and then he was ultimately officially detained at around 4am Sept. 12. So he had remained at the, the sheriff's office for that whole time, and they officially decided to detain him in the early hours of the next morning. And then the last, the last thing that I think is probably the most consequential thing that Twigs said in the part of the interview we were allowed to see is that he recognized the person as the footage, the school security camera footage at uvu, that there's a video that I mentioned earlier that shows Robinson on campus. And we can get into that because it's the other piece of evidence I was mentioning. But Twig said that he recognized Robinson, particularly in the parts of the video where Robinson visited campus three of four times. The third time was the time that he allegedly took the shot. It was the time where he had different clothing on, where he had this new limp. That didn't happen on the two previous times he had visited the campus. And the limp is thought to be him having concealed a gun in his pants. And that, that time, Twigs was shown an image, a very clear image of someone who looks a lot like Robinson. Yes, he's wearing a hat and sunglasses, but he also has a pretty distinctive face. And Twigs of, of all of the pictures shown to Twigs, he said that, that one, that third time where he is thought to have this gun and that. And where he's alleged to have taken the shot, that's the one that he seemed to have the most confidence that that was Robinson on campus in that video.
- [28:41]
A
Interesting. Twigs is singing like a bird. I don't know what people expected he might do in all of this. This is, after all, according to the prosecution, according to emails that we've seen, they were romantically involved. But he has something seriously to lose here. More than just a, you know, a lover, so to speak. Right? I mean, he faces. His fingerprints are on the weapon. He was there and knew what was going on, at least according to some of these communications. Do you get a sense that Twigs is trying to save himself from a long prison sentence and even perhaps capital punishment in this case?
- [29:37]
B
Yeah, it's actually a bit of an interesting situation with Twigs. And he does, given what the prosecutors, investigators have done, actually have a huge incentive to say as much as possible in these interviews about what he knew, when he knew it, all those kinds of things, because Twigs was given a thing, what's called use immunity. Use immunity is this level of immunity that a person is given who is knowledgeable of crime where they can't be prosecuted on the things and the information they give in these official interviews, in these, you know, ones where you're, you're, you're swearing in and, and all that stuff that, the kind of interview that we're talking about now. So anything he says in that interview, and I know that there were at least two of these, one done very quickly after sometime in the days, a couple days after September 10th of 2025, and then another one done earlier this year, I believe in April or May. Those interviews, he has use immunity, and so he can't be prosecuted for any of the information there. He can be prosecuted, however, for information they find outside of those interviews. And so that's how he has both been incentivized to say a lot. It's a bit of a tacit threat, I guess you could say, where it's like, if you don't say as much as, you know, we can find something later and we can prosecute you on it. And so that is, that's the interest that you have in telling us everything you know. So he does, he does have that, but he, you know, and again, we haven't seen that entire other interview and also most of this one interview we're talking about. So I have no idea what kind of other details are in there. Another thing that is sort of related to that, I think, is if there's any evidence or, or any kind of line to suggest that other people in this. It wasn't just DMs between twigs and Robinson. There's this discord chat that was entered into evidence where there's multiple people on that chat, you know, that's going to be a different case than, than the Robinson case we're talking about. But investigators, if they haven't already, probably should look into who in that kind of network of people, because I don't know how many people were in that, but it's not Just two might have known something as well. They probably have started doing that, and that's not part of this case, once again. But that kind of network, it's sort of like the antifa or the anti ice networks that destroy cities and they're all very coordinated. That needs to be looked into as well.
- [32:13]
A
One of the more striking things of a very striking case to me is the involvement of the father of Robinson's father. When I say involvement, I mean this is a guy who had to make a. A decision about his son and about his son's future, a future that could hold death in the not too distant future. We're talking about a capital punishment case. But how much of the father's contact with the police was part of this
- [32:48]
B
preliminary hearing in terms of it being brought up? I mean, it was sort of a smaller detail. I mean, you know, when Robinson said he wanted to turn himself into police, my understanding is that that was because his father and I guess both of his parents kind of made him do that. Or maybe Robinson also wanted to do that because he kind of said that at the same time. I think that's probably why Robinson ended up telling his parents about this in the first place, which is in a text message he said he's going to turn himself in to twigs prior to having done so. It seems like. So in terms of it being brought up in the hearing, not that much. But what I will say, which I guess is sort of an obvious point, is that I don't know that any of this would be happening at all if Robinson's father didn't do what he did, because I'm not sure that we would have any evidence to suggest that any, you know, we would have evidence that we couldn't compare anything to the DNA evidence. Maybe there was DNA, but I mean, the likelihood that Robinson's DNA was in the system is probably really low. I don't think it was. So without Robinson's father, we would not have a suspect right now, probably. You know, I. I don't know that the FBI would have known where to look. I don't know that they would have been able to find the discord chat that sort of suggests he did a thing. And they made a. They made a point about this as well. In the beginning parts of the hearing. All of the kind of investigative work that was done basically broke loose after Robinson turned himself in. I mean, there were. Obviously there was, you know, securing the crime scene and all that initial crime scene response stuff that was happening, gathering evidence, things like that. But I'M not sure that that would have led to what we have right now, which is a pretty clear suspect with pretty clear evidence against him.
- [34:35]
A
What about the victim's point of view? Again, the Kirk family is not party to this case, but they were, they were there. There were some family supporters, good family friends. The son of the President of the United States was there. It goes without saying just how painful this revisitation is. And they're going to have to go through this pain later on this summer every day. Of course, they have to deal with a profound loss that they shouldn't have to be dealing with. But how did they handle this week in terms of the emotional impact and, of course, the, the media circuit surrounding it?
- [35:16]
B
Yeah, well, from, from what I've heard from people who were with the family, you know, Jack, so big was there, you mentioned The Donald Trump Jr. Was also there that, you know, they, they stood strong. They handled this as well as you probably could in this kind of situation. You know, there were times when it was pretty evident that Erica Kirk, of course, Charlie Kirk's widow, would seemed like, leave the room before certain video was about to be played. One of the first videos entered into evidence was the video that, where Kirk was actually shot. And so, you know, a lot of people saw that video on the day that it happened because it was going all over social media. And I'm sure even the sound of that is extremely painful, obviously. So I, you know, I, I think it's just as, as well as you could. I'm not really sure that there's any kind of thing you could do one way or the other. I'm not sure there's a proper way to handle it either. I know so many people want to have said that about Erica Kirk, the proper way to handle this, which is a really bizarre thing to say about anybody in that situation at the same time. I mean, you know, the, the Kirk family, one of the last motions, maybe it was the last motion that they, they put forth for the judge was to have a more expedited decision as to whether this meets the probable cause standard and will go to trial. And so that's one of these things where it's extremely frustrating that it took as long as it is, and we're looking at September, and they're saying, please, at the very least, have a decision as to whether this is going to go to trial on September 1, the last day of the preliminary hearing when the final arguments are being given, because the judge's job is to look at the full breadth of evidence that was presented to him at this litany of last week and consider the final arguments and then make a determination as to whether there is probable cause to let this go to trial. I think everyone who saw this looks at the evidence and says, I mean, it's not just probable cause, it's like an insanely overwhelming amount of evidence that suggested this should, at the very least, go to trial. That's part of the frustration. So the Kirk family asked that the decision be made at the latest on September 1st. And I think the suggestion in the filing was that ideally that would be earlier.
- [37:44]
A
How likely do you think that will happen? Because you're right, you think about this. If indeed the judge makes a decision on whether this goes to trial on September 1, that is a mere 10 days to the date, the anniversary of the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of thousands at that university and so many more watching that clip.
- [38:13]
B
I don't know. I mean, given Judge Graff's demeanor and the way he kind of consider. Seems to consider these things, at least as. For as far as I was able to witness watching, seems to me that he. He could decide to make that decision that day, because I think that he probably understands how, you know, elongated and seemingly cruel this process seems to be to the victims, despite it being. That's. That is the process, I guess, and that's kind of what we have to deal with. On the other hand, he might not want to be seen as. As sort of like acting upon the preference of the victim here in order to, again, be cautious about this potential for. For mistrial or. Or, you know, argument that the defense was mistreated in this way, and so the jury pool was necessarily tainted and all the rest of the things we talked about already, I could see him making that decision, too. I don't. I couldn't put it one way or the other. And I think that's sort of. Seems to be the way that Judge Graff would want it, is that you can't tell what he's going to do. And despite that being frustrating now, that's going to be beneficial procedurally later on.
- [39:22]
A
I think Bracken, here's a question that a lot of people have asked. I think it's a good one, and that is, why hasn't Tyler Robinson taken a deal? Because, again, we look at the evidence and a lot of folks see that as overwhelming. He faces a very difficult proposition, to say the least. It's either going to be life in prison or it's going to be his death. There is incentive if he wants to live to make a deal. But, you know, obviously he is arguing that at least his defense team arguing that he's not their man. But what do you think about all of that? That there has been no at least overture of a deal so far?
- [40:16]
B
Yeah, I think there's maybe a couple of threads to think about that one might be procedural. I'm not sure how much, and I guess I don't know, there's 100%, but I'm not sure how much the kind of plea deal negotiations happen prior to the determination that this goes to trial. I think there's probably some conversation about that, but I think there might be more conversation about that afterwards. If, you know, if you are indeed going to go to trial, then, you know, you start talking about pleading down to whatever the, you know, prosecution is willing to give. But prosecution being willing to give anything is the other side of that coin. Right. So the fact that the prosecution, to me, I don't know this. I haven't heard anyone say this in the prosecution's team, but the fact that the prosecution is seeking the death penalty in this case suggests to me that they're not really interested in doing a deal. You know, if you seek the death penalty in a case, that's as much a statement as it is a pursuit of justice. And so that suggests that there's kind of no wiggle room that we're willing to give here on the pursuit of justice. And so I'm not sure that they're open to it. And that is a necessary thing that the prosecution be open to that. Now, I don't know what could happen. I mean, if there is evidence that Robinson turns over that suggests a wider, you know, network of, like, maybe he was involved with some antifa networks that we're aware of or something like that. I have no idea how those conversations are going to go. And I guess we could see anything happen. But, you know, I don't. I don't know what he has, what he's willing to do. There's obviously the possibility that they pursue a insanity defense as well, and then they're going to have to prove that, which I believe is pretty hard to prove as well. So I feel like they are going to maybe try to plead down, and I don't know that the prosecution is going to be. Is going to have the appetite for that, especially given how prominent and public this case has been.
- [42:21]
A
Final question for you. You're a human being. I mean, you have to do your job, and you have to do your job As a reporter should take a look at the facts and write your pieces about that, inform the public, all of that. But in the conservative media universe, I mean, Charlie Kirk was a friend to so many of us. So many of us knew Charlie Kirk personally. I mean, we have people at the Federalist who were dear friends of Charlie Kirk. As you were watching all of these videos, particularly of that day of that shooting, what was going through your mind?
- [43:03]
B
Mostly remembering, you know, kind of first of all, unfortunately, and how horrible that was to see that video on that day. I mean, it took me right back to there. You know, we were all, we were all working, of course, at the Federalist when this was happening and talking about it real time and, you know, videos were coming out and is that fake? Is that not fake what's happening? And watching that was, was really horrific. And I just remember watching that came all right back to my memory. And then, you know, of course, the fact that, that Charlie Kirk was this larger than life figure to so many people who helped the conservative move, not just help the conservative. I mean, really drove a lot of the conservative movement, a lot of kind of re finding or, or remolding of conservatism, especially among younger people, Gen Z people, of which I am, I am a part college students, kind of making it so that it can be, you know, you're not this sort of like stuffy, dorky dweeb that the conservative movement has had that thing over their head for forever. It can be fun and it can be cool. And you have, you know, he shows that you can have a good time engaging with people and, and he did it all also while evangelizing and bringing people back to or into Christianity. He showed what a real statesman looks like and how being unafraid in public is a good thing and a virtuous thing. And so losing that, just like how shocking and horrible it was back then. I mean, I think that we've really felt since then how fragile losing a person like that is to the movement because we've had this splintering and this, you know, some of it's come in the podcast wars, some of it's just a policy disagreement. There's all this splintering on the right that happened after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And I think a lot of people on the right look at that and say, you know, that was. Everyone wanted to come together and have a, have a unified voice in condemning this sort of thing, but really what happened is we got splintered. And, you know, there's something to be said that unfortunately that's proof that assassinations work. And that's what we have to deal with now is we are in a dangerous world where you see that happen, you see it do the thing that the people the assassin wants it to do. And you can't help but think that there's going to be more of that. And you know, we've seen President Trump face several different threats and there's going to be I can't imagine there won't be more.
- [45:42]
A
Yeah, very good points. All because that's the ripple effect here when the the sick and twisted take out someone like Charlie Kirk. As you said, Charlie Kirk made conservatism cool again, even to dorky, dweeby old conservatives like yourselves, myself, excuse me, not you. You're in the cool crowd. I am on the older side of the conservative crowd and definitely in the dorky zone, as my wife will surely tell you. But your coverage has been fantastic and I encourage everyone who appreciates the Federalist work. I'm sure they already have. But go back online, read the coverage full five days Brecken was not only, you know, delivering daily content on the site here at the Federalist, he was sending out real time information that I think was so important and we all appreciate it very much. Thanks to my guest today, Brecken, thieves, Federalist, White House correspondent, and so much more. We'll be back soon with more on the Federalist Radio Hour. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
- [47:03]
B
The table working two jobs, ready, willing, enable Jeff in the love Lord.