Alan Rosenstein (18:16)
Anna, I believe drug cases in Maryland. I was very bad at my. It was remarkable how bad I was. But that's a. But that, that. That's for a Patreon exclusive episode and look, I should also say probably by way of disclosure that I am not exactly an unbiased commentator when it comes to Comeygate. You know, I'm close friends with his daughter Maureen, who went through her own purging, of course, and she was fired earlier this summer at scny. We're friends from law school and I've met Comey a few times. So again, I am not unbiased. I don't think you have to be, though, particularly biased. Just all that said to think that there is a lot of bad stuff going here. I mean, this is, I mean, the polite way of saying this is that this is very unusual. The more accurate way is that this is the wholesale collapse of the Justice Department as a rule of law institution. And I and so, you know, we can wordsmith whatever we want. So I'd say just a couple of things of how bizarre this is. So the first thing is how bare bones the indictment is, right? Like if you're going to go, if you're going to go after one of the most polarizing, let's say it, right, high profile political figures of like the last decade, right? You don't do it in a page. You do what's called the speaking indictment, right. It's long, it's beefy, right. It gives all the details, right. I mean, I remember there have been a million of these, many of them against Trump. But but to give us sort of more, less politically charged version. I mean, we all had a good laugh as we were reading through this, the indictment against Bob Menendez and the gold bars and like that's how you do it, right? And part of that you do it because it's a show of strength. But part of that you do it because, especially when there's such a politically salient prosecution, you want to from the very beginning reassure the public that you're not just doing this for LOLs, like you have an actual case. And of course, just because it's in the indictment doesn't mean it's true, right? It's all alleged and stuff like that. But the Department of Justice is not in the habit of putting stuff in speaking indictments that are then false, right? So the fact that you end up with this one page or two page, however long it is, indictment just shows it's another example. There's probably not a lot going on there, right. Another point is, of course, the refusal of any career prosecutor to have anything to do with this, right? Which is an indication of just their professional judgment, of their sense of ethics, of their sense of not wanting to get disbarred after all of this, right? Then you have the reports about Pam Bondi not wanting to be involved in this. And that's important not because the Attorney General should actually be involved in a, necessarily a prosecutorial discretion made by some U.S. attorney's office, but because in a situation like this, this would be relevant. Pam Bondi is, of course, very tied to Trump. So you'd think she'd want part of this to make her boss happy. And again, to be polite, Pam Bondi has not distinguished herself either in her commitment to the rule of law or basic legal competence. I won't go on a TikTok tangent here, but I've ranted about this before. So the fact that this is too far for Pam Bondi, right, is a hell of a thing. And then of course, you just have, I mean, the public, I mean, that's the thing about Trump, right? And we've been talking about this for a decade now. He does it in public, right? Which almost makes it harder to pin something on him because, you know, there's this like, well, if he's doing it in public, has nothing to hide. I mean, he's just shameless. So that's the issue here. Putting pressure on the Department of Justice, you know, announcing all of this, installing a completely unqualified former, you know, defense counsel of his right, who may very well honestly not have any confidence in this case either, to the extent that she even, and I'm not trying to be mean here, because being a prosecutor is hard and I don't pretend to have expertise, but, but neither does she. So, like, I just think she's. When I say she's incompetent at this job, I actually don't mean that as a criticism generally, for she is, technically speaking, incompetent at this job in the way that I would be incompetent at this job. So she may literally not know whether this is a winnable case. Now, everyone around her has told her that it's not. So like, presumably that says something. But she may not know. And even if she does know, she may not care because I think it would not surprise me, especially given Trump's extremely short attention Spanish. He just wants what he wants now, right? He's not so different than my 2 year old toddler in this respect. He wants it, he wants it now. And he doesn't really care about what happens five minutes from now. So he got to indict Comey, right? He got to. This is a family show, so they're not. I will, I will, I will let the audience think of the vulgarities that I'm thinking.
