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- [00:02]
Aaron Blake
To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to
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Harry Littman
face each threat head on.
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Aaron Blake
We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.
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Harry Littman
Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Littman. There were few tears shed in Washington over Pam Bondi's abrupt firing. Bondi had secured a position as the worst attorney general in DOJ memory, having slavishly sacrificed the law department norms, civility and the truth in favor of absolute loyalty to Donald Trump. In the end, it didn't savor. Earlier in the week, Trump gave a primetime speech on Iran that only contributed to the growing sense that he doesn't have or can't articulate a reason for the war and consequently, a marker for leaving. And for all the remarkable success of the breathtaking rescue that ensued, Iran's downing of two US jets brought home the growing cost of the already unpopular war. The birthright citizenship case in the Supreme Court became one of the rare cases that captured the focus of the country. The consensus among court watchers was that the court would strike down Trump's executive order and that Trump's presence and conduct at the oral argument and did him no favors. To discuss the explosive developments in Iran at the Supreme Court and especially at the Department of Justice. It's great to welcome three all star journalists, and they are Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for cnn, where he writes daily analysis of this administration's moves. Before cnn, he spent a decade as a mainstay at the Washington Post, where we were colleagues after stints and his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Welcome back to Aaron Blake.
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Liz Landers
Thanks, Harry.
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Harry Littman
Liz Landers, Liz covers the White House and Trump administration for PBS NewsHour. Prior to PBS, she was the national security correspondent for Scripps News and before that, spent a decade reporting on politics in D.C. always happy to be able to say it's her first time on talking feds. Welcome, Liz Landers.
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Scott McFarland
Thanks, Harry. Excited to be here.
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Harry Littman
And speaking of which, Scott McFarland, the brand new chief Washington correspondent and anchor at Midas, touch he's made the big move over to the Independent Channel, where we now pretty much ply our trade. Scott, congratulations on the new gig before Midas. Though Scott reported on Congress and the Justice Department for CBS News, his reporting on January 6 and the criminal investigation that followed was unmatched. And it's also his first time on talking Feds. Welcome. Scott McFarland, new chief Washington correspondent and anchor at Midas. Touch.
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Aaron Blake
It's nice to be here. This is. See, I moved from the CBS News Washington bureau to my basement.
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Liz Landers
Yeah.
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Aaron Blake
And I've discovered my kids have broken everything in the basement. This is the only spot that's left that's still standing.
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Harry Littman
Yeah. Being at home, I'll just say, gives rise to all kinds of interesting situations. And my two dogs might, might come in screaming if we talk about Pam Bondi. But it's not going to deter us because it really was a week of big news, culminating in alster of Pam Bondi. The leading narrative for the ouster was supposedly her failure to secure convictions of Trump's enemies. The irony here is pretty thick, as she seemed to pull out all the stops in the process, damaging the department possibly beyond repair. What were her failings, exactly? What was she supposed to have done?
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Aaron Blake
It's not that she didn't secure convictions. She didn't get the cases really steadied or off the ground. I mean, get rejected by a grand jury twice in Virginia in the Letitia James case. To have a judge so quickly swat down James Comey's case to come up flat on Jerome Powell, potentially on Adam Schiff. And they're still trying to get a John Brennan case going in Florida. They may do that soon. And to get smacked down by grand jurors and by trial jurors on other cases, it's just a whole series of losses. But I'm not sure that's just a fraction of what went wrong there.
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Harry Littman
I'll just make the quick, clearest point that thank God that all happened because it was the other sort of safety valves in the system that she hadn't been able to arrest.
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Scott McFarland
I would also say that I think a lot of the Epstein reporting has been really damaging for the President and also for the Department of Justice in the last, really, six months or so that the Epstein Transparency act passed, and then it had to be implemented. And we saw from the beginning of this that the Department of Justice could not successfully keep to the timeline that they were obligated to stick to by that congressional law that passed. And from there, it just sort of became a bigger and bigger issue. We saw when the initial tranche of documents came out in January that there were all kinds of redactions. And then on top of that, there were also all kinds of personally identifying information about victims. And we saw Bondi had to go to Capitol Hill to defend some of this. And there was that really striking moment. I thought it was a particularly impactful moment to see the Epstein survivors on the Hill, and these women were sitting behind her and got no recognition from her up there. And just covering this White House, I really see how bothersome this Epstein issue is for the President as well. So I think that that certainly factored into this dismissal.
- [06:29]
Harry Littman
Yeah, that tends to be the second count. And what an indelible moment. She didn't even make eye contact. But you could put it another way. I mean, it's true the department's performance has been abominable in all kinds of legal violations and real feckless exposure of victims and redactions improperly. But what it hasn't been, of course, is any sort of spectacular revelation about President Trump that so many people had been holding their breath for. But nevertheless, she's tagged on this as well.
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Liz Landers
Yeah, yeah. I don't know how much the Epstein files was a problem necessarily for Donald Trump specifically. I think it was a problem as far as a lot of the people around Trump were concerned. I'm thinking back to the Vanity Fair interview that Susie Wiles gave last year. It was actually a course of interviews over several months. And in that interview, she mentioned that Bondi had, quote, completely whiffed on the Epstein files. I think this became a really big headache for those around Trump. And the reporting that we have at CNN is that there was a lot of pressure on Trump from the people around him that Bondi maybe wasn't up to the job. But then I think you get to the thing that probably really matters more to Trump, which is the retribution that he sought to get against his foes. And really, it was a kind of an unwinnable war for Pam Bondi. The problem with these cases, as we've seen over the last several months, is that there is no evidence that there's actually the evidence there to make these cases successful. And so when you actually pursue them, you're put in the position of either trying to talk the President out of these things, which is what we think happened in a number of cases during his first term, or you pursue them and they wind up blowing up in your face, which seems to be what's happened in a lot of these cases. It's very rare to go to a grand jury and not have that grand jury give you an indictment. And that's happened over and over again in these cases. And so it was kind of a thankless job. It was kind of an unwinnable job for her. She tried to go farther than previous attorneys general had for Trump and it didn't work out just like it didn't work out for them before.
- [08:44]
Harry Littman
Yeah, look, first, vanishingly rare not to have grand jurors return indictments. And to me, it is an unwinnable war. That's a good thing because the grand jury actually served as a bulwark. But one way of looking at it is Trump is not very sophisticated legally. And it's a simple what Bond movie is it? This is the price of failure, Ms. Bondi. He knows only about results. But of course, that raises the question, do we think Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney general, is going to be able to make these cases? Presumably not. And what happens to him when James Comey still is not in the stocks?
- [09:28]
Liz Landers
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Blanche winds up being in that job in an acting basis for a long time. We remember back in the first term, Trump kept acting officials in a lot of capacities, including Attorney General. He had Matt Whitaker in that job for a number of months. But it's a really interesting question here about who he can get confirmed to that job full time if he does go with a full time replacement. Because when Bondi was being confirmed, a lot of this stuff was in the realm of the hypothetical. You know, they were talking about whether Trump would pursue retribution. Well, now he has. He was talking about, you know, would he potentially pardon all these January 6th defendants? Well, he pardoned virtually all of them. So the next person that gets nominated for this job is going to have to talk about those things in a much less hypothetical way. And we have certain Republican senators who have raised concerns about those issues and would seemingly, you know, could seemingly hold a harder line than they did before. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see if he's going to be able to even get somebody in who would be as friendly to his inclinations as Pam Bondi was.
- [10:32]
Harry Littman
And that's why, I think, by the way, one person it won't be is Todd Blanche. I mean, it's on his watch. He goes back to the Emil Beauvais era, and I think it would be a bloodbath. Lee Zeldin has been mentioned, but I tend to agree with Aaron. Nothing's going to happen too quickly there. They're happy with Blanche in the acting position. Remember, he represented Trump at the criminal trial. Democrats still want to follow through with the subpoena to Bondi. Do you have a sense, Scott, what happens now with this planned deposition about her handling of the Epstein disclosure?
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Aaron Blake
Well, I can guarantee you what's going to happen politically. First of all, Democrats have been unequivocal over the first 24 hours after her firing that they expect her to show on April 14th. It's closed door deposition. You know, each side takes turns asking questions. They do this and then they release either the video clips or a transcript or both. Republicans seem to be ambiguous about what they're going to do. They oversight committees. Republicans have said they want to review matters now that she's not the attorney general anymore. But Democrats say the subpoenas for Pam Bonney, it's not for the U.S. attorney General. So you see where this is going, whether there's a legally binding component to the subpoena that when it comes from Congress and whether that can be overturned by another majority vote of the Republicans on the committee, we'll see that over the next 11 days. But Democrats expect her to show up. They expect her to be questioned and they'd make the argument pretty compellingly that if she doesn't show up, if somehow she gets out of the subpoena come 2027, if they control the committees, they'll bring her in then for questioning when they control who gets subpoenas directly, if not unilaterally as a party.
- [12:12]
Harry Littman
Sticking with Bondi a little bit more, you know, she seemed to take her job besides doing whatever Trump wanted and totally steamrolling the law. She really had this like, I think performative, her sort of contempt for everyone, her nastiness in hearings and the like.
- [12:32]
Aaron Blake
You mentioned something important, Harry. This new genre that Tam Bondi invented of going to congressional hearings and personally and menacingly attacking the questioner versus answering the question. I'm not sure that displeased the president. I didn't hear any reporting that he was concerned about that. But I'm wondering if her prompt firing means that's the last we've seen of that new genre or if she really is a pioneer for years to come.
- [12:58]
Harry Littman
You know, it is a really good question because it was a classic Washington takedown, right? You know, from rumors that he's not so happy with her. And then little by little and all at once the great quote, she's an excellent person who's doing a good job. Everyone understood she was a dead attorney
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Liz Landers
general walking damning with faint praise if I've ever heard it right there, really.
- [13:21]
Harry Littman
And he's not a guy. I don't think he knows words that aren't superlatives. Normally we're going to be evaluating her short tenure for a long time, I think. But in the immediate Aftermath of her Ulster. How do you see Bondi's legacy as Attorney general? Our colleagues, Carol Lanigan, Kandelini. I don't know if you saw their scoop about an hour ago, a picture of the Bond Bondi portrait in a wastebasket at the Department of Justice. What's Bondi's legacy?
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Liz Landers
I think it's pretty clear that it is the complete and utter breakdown of the wall between the president's personal politics and the actions of the Justice Department. Now, there's always been a little bit of kind of a fuzzy line there. We talk, of course, about during the Obama administration, about Eric Holder saying he's the president's wingman. We had the first Trump administration where William Barr certainly did a lot of things that pushed that line when it came to helping Trump's allies in their criminal cases, doing things that were very helpful for the president's political agenda that went further than previous attorneys general had gone. But I think the difference that we saw in this administration was not just the volume of these investigations and attempted prosecutions of Trump's political foes. It was also the direct line that we saw between Trump coming out with that post that was addressed to Pam Bondi personally. That was soon deleted. And some people had reported that it was sent mistakenly, that it was intended to be a direct message. The direct line that we saw between that and James Comey and Letitia James being indicted, the U.S. attorney being thrown out, somebody else being installed. There were two instances where Trump ordered investigations publicly, one time in an executive order early in his tenure. Later on during the Epstein files, he said that, I want to see investigations of these Democrats, of Bill Clinton and Pam Bondi responded to that and said, okay, yes, we're doing this right now. That is a line that now has been crossed. It has been out in the open that this has been ordered, and she did it. And so the question now is going to be, does that get pulled back in the future, or is this to some degree the new political normal that we're going to be seeing moving forward? And I think Pam Bondi's name is always going to be attached to that threshold being crossed.
- [15:46]
Scott McFarland
I would also just add on two issues that have roiled the country in the last six months or so, these ICE and immigration operations that have gone on around the country. The Department of Justice had to justify some of those things in court alongside the Department of Homeland Security. When Alex Preddy and Renee Goode were shot in Minnesota, she sent a letter asking for voter rolls in that state on the same weekend Which I think many people were very confused by why the attorney general was asking for that. I think some of the legacy also has to do with something we haven't talked about yet, but the voting investigations that this administration has sprinkled to all of these federal agencies that do not typically have purview over election administration or investigations in this country. The Department of Justice has been heavily involved in asking states all across the country for their voter rolls, which almost every state has denied access to. And they have won in three separate federal judges have upheld that. These states do not have to turn over that kind of information. And then I would just add on the Epstein survivors, and I think we saw a statement from some of those women yesterday saying that this will be a stain on her legacy, the way that she handled and did not address these survivors and the powerful men that many of these people feel have still not been held to account.
- [17:11]
Aaron Blake
I'm actually looking, in addition to those great points, at the more fundamental blocking and tackling of the Department of Justice right now. She oversaw, Harry, this remarkable purge of many, many experienced agents, investigators and prosecutors. They're down 5000 people from where they were at the start of 2025. Those are not 5000 rookies. Those are 5000 people who were trained to chase terrorists, child pornographers, drug runners, gun runners. They're gone. And they have acknowledged staffing shortages in the federal prosecutor's offices in Minneapolis. As Liz mentioned, there were some things going on in Minnesota that Pam Bondi was viewed poorly for D.C. here in Washington, they're short dozens of prosecutors, and in part because they fired so many who had any fingerprints on the January 6th cases and on the investigations of Donald Trump, including the special counsel investigations. Others were forced to resign, pressured out for running afoul of something politically. Others just peaced out and said, I want nothing to do with this Department of Justice. This is not what I signed up for. And then there are those who took Elon Musk's fork in the road, which was there for reasons beyond understanding because it didn't cut costs. So put all that together and you have a drained Department of Justice. And Pam Bonney will have that, will own that as part of her legacy. Because, Harry, you can't just fill those jobs. You certainly can't fill them promptly, and you certainly can't fill them with the experience that was lost.
- [18:41]
Harry Littman
And you also can't just replace them, because the old Department of Justice and everything that it stood for ran on a bunch of norms that took generations, 40, 50 years to really set in concrete. And she just sandblasted the whole. She ruined the place. And in addition to the cohorts of people you just mentioned, Scott, who quit, there were others who Minnesota is a good example. After Renee Goode was shot, they're ordered to investigate the widow. And that really resulted in the exodus of nearly half the criminal section in Minnesota, which of course also adds up to all kinds of public safety implications. But this is going to be a problem throughout government. But it's the worst, I think, at the doj. How do you reconstruct step by step, especially because, and this is a point you made, Scott, it's disproportionately the kind of gray beards and sort of counselors at the department that, that the way the place functions is you really go to, they, they really set their sights on them. And so many of them just said, that's it, I am out of here. The place is a total shambles. It's like a zombie land. And of course, it's not going to change overnight with Todd Blanche now being installed. So you've mentioned certain tensions with Barr or Hold or whatever, but she is laps and laps ahead of them for having really completely shredded everything that made the department the place that it was. And it's that tragedy remains. Okay, well, I think that's a fair epitaph, at least for now. Let's move on to the war and Trump's big speech that seemed to be sort of a two faced mess. On the one hand we're bombing them to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the war's winding up. What was it even? Why a primetime address? Did he say anything at all and what the heck was he doing?
- [20:52]
Scott McFarland
My sense of what the speech was on Wednesday night was it was the speech that a commander in chief gives before they get into a military conflict or execute some kind of military intervention like we did in Iran. It was making the case to the public and that is what the White House told us. I spoke with a White House official a few hours before to try to get a sense of what to expect. And this person said it was going to be an operational update, which it was. And he discussed some of the military actions that have taken place so far. He glossed over, I would say, for the most part, some of the economic issues and pain at the pump that people are experiencing. I have in my notes here he had just one line about the short term increases that Americans would be feeling, but that the United States was never better prepared economically to handle this because the economy is already in such a good position place. But there was not much that was new, I think, in that speech. And the President and this White House have used these primetime addresses. There was one back in December where it was about the economy or something along those lines. And again, there was not much news in that speech either. But it gives the platform of, you know, all of the network coverage and legitimacy to the President in a moment where we've seen his poll numbers are floundering on this issue of the war, and now that's also dragging down his economic approval rating as well. So I thought that he was finally 32 days in. That's what it was on Wednesday when He delivered it 32 days into the conflict, explaining to the public why we were in it.
- [22:38]
Liz Landers
It's hard to say what the goal was just given that everything that was said was so familiar. You know, it was kind of pieces of everything that he's been saying for several weeks kind of reassembled and put forward in a primetime address. Now, maybe a lot of people who are watching hadn't heard those things before because they're not watching these things as closely as we do. But I was really struck by the fact that in the days before this address, a lot of the talk that he was giving was about the end game, about how this was wrapping up, how we were almost there. And then he has this address, and that was kind of absent. He didn't talk about how that was going to take place. And I think if you looked at the way that the markets reacted, they actually had kind of the opposite reaction. They viewed this as a potential ramping up. You know, the gas, oil prices went up, stock market went down, you know, erasing the gains that it had just made. And so I think that just kind of reinforces something that we've seen from the very beginning of this war, which is that there's not any message discipline. You know, to the extent they're getting out there and actually making the case, it's not consistent. It's like on a 24 hour news cycle where he's trying to rescue the markets on one day and then the next day he's talking about a potential ramping up. There doesn't seem to be much of a plan here. And I think that's reflected in the entire process. They've laid out a very inconsistent series of objectives over the last several weeks. They didn't make much of a case to start the war, as Liz mentioned, and they just kind of seem to be flying by the seat of their pants throughout this whole thing. And that's really cost them when it comes to public reviews of this war.
- [24:14]
Aaron Blake
I like looking at it through the media prism because it really shows the sea change in how we consume our information and consume our news. First of all, the networks all signed off on giving him airtime without any sense he was going to make an announcement. I'm not sure he can continue to get that luxury over four years.
- [24:30]
Harry Littman
That's a really excellent point.
- [24:32]
Aaron Blake
Yeah, I mean, usually you have to have something to declare to get access to the nation's airwaves, especially in primetime, especially when there actually are first run programs you're preempting. Let's see if he keeps getting the blank check on that. The networks might be concerned he's going to dunk on them if they don't give it to him. But that's an open question. But I think it's a much different dynamic now. The network's airwaves aren't what they used to be. They aren't worth what they used to be. And I'm not sure everybody is sitting down to watch the president at 9pm Just because he's going to be addressing the nation the way they would 20 years ago, 30 years ago or 50 years ago. And I think you saw this, all of us saw this at the State of the Union address. People are wondering, why did dude speak for two hours at the State of the Union address? Because he has a recognition. People aren't sitting down and watching things start to finish on television the way they used to. Two hours gave him a capacity and a bandwidth to get things that are clippable, to say different nuggets of things that can be socialized throughout the week and month ahead from that dais, from that audience, from that platform. And he's treating these primetime addresses the same way, like Liz mentioned in December and like he did this week. These are clippable, socialable things that live well beyond the broadcast ending. He gets that. I'm not sure all of us are as attuned to where media is as he is at this moment.
- [25:50]
Harry Littman
And as best as we can tell, it seems to me the same kind of erratic, seat of the pants approach is governing the war effort itself. So, Aaron, you mentioned the lack of message discipline. I think no one could really argue with that. Is there anybody that passes for a grown up? So I'm taking Pete Hegseth off the table, but you know, Susie Wiles or anyone there who is imposing anything by way of either message discipline or mission discipline on this what seems to be a kind of improvised day by day, week by week effort, I'd say if
- [26:26]
Liz Landers
there's one person who's certainly capable of that, it would be Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the problem is when you're seeing other people who are involved with this process complicate that message, it makes your job that much more difficult. So I'm thinking in recent days, Rubio and the State Department feeds on X have put out a number of lists of the four objectives for this war. Well, they haven't always been the same ones, and these are basically coming from the same source. Sometimes they'll echo what Hegseth is saying, sometimes they'll echo what the President is saying. Sometimes they'll echo what Carolyn Levitt is saying. It hasn't been the same list of four for basically the entire war. And I think so I think what's happening is, you know, you can put Rubio out there and he can have his talking points and he can say what you want him to, and he'll probably do a better job of that than Trump or maybe even Hagseth. But if then you have Trump go out and put out a truth social post that says something different that undercuts Marco Rubio. And we've already seen that happen a number of times over the course of this war, including very early on when Rubio made some comments about how, you know, the reason that this was an imminent threat was because Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran was going to attack the US Kind of weird comments at the time. And Trump immediately said something different after that. So it's kind of an unwinnable battle for whoever is doing this, even if they are a good messenger.
- [27:51]
Scott McFarland
I would just add that one very stark contrast that I've noticed in the messaging in particular of this conflict so far has been between what we see at these Pentagon briefings with the Secretary of Defense and then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Kaine and Dan Cain. I have watched these briefings and it's a very awkward situation for him because Hegseth is very aggressive and forward leaning and frankly a little bit violent in how he describes the conflict, the enemy, how the US Is conducting this warfare. And then you have Kaine, who has been asked during these briefings, and I think reporters are specifically asking him these questions to see what he'll say about threats of hitting civilian related targets like energy infrastructure, which is a war crime in international law. And he gets asked these very specific questions about, well, would you execute that kind of attack and strike. And he, you can see, see him answering in those moments we always follow by international law and by US Law. And he has to be much more measured in how he's talking about this as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs than the president, secretary of Defense, secretary of state, and the other political appointees that we've seen talk about this.
- [29:23]
Harry Littman
It's fairly stunning. I mean, they seem to be touting their commission of war crimes of, you know, the bombing of infrastructures, et cetera. Scott, I cut you off. Sorry, go ahead.
- [29:34]
Aaron Blake
I just can't get past how different this is and what we used to watch the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and the war in Iraq in 2003. There were journalists embedded with whatever US forces were in the vicinity, much less in the country. And CNN became such a thing in 1991. And in 2003, they used the technology to embed reporters that we now use in media to go live from any place we want. The United States, we pioneered stuff during war. We don't know what the hell's going on in Iran. And these 8am briefings in which the questions to the Joint Chiefs give us information, but the questions to the Defense Secretary give us usually attacks on the media or some type of jingoistic championing of tactics, not strategy. I don't think we're really flying with much of visibility about what's happening in Iran. And I know this because it's members of the Armed Services Committee in the US House who say they need a briefing here, a real briefing, something more meaty, so they know what's happening. They need to have a public hearing on this war because they're not getting good information from the ground. And they're well situated to get information. They have technical oversight of the military, so they're not hearing things. We're not hearing things. We don't know what's happening. So these 8am briefings are not really checking the whole box.
- [30:51]
Harry Littman
And there's a looming risk here. I mean, look, as of now, the war is very unpopular. Notwithstanding that the US Is having its way, it seems to me if there's any kind of counterpunch that's at all effective by Iran, that could change the whole dynamic. So this Friday morning, as we tape, Pentagon has said that Iran downed a US Fighter jet and that American forces are conducting a search and rescue mission. One of the crew members, thankfully, has been rescued. What happens if the other is killed or captured? To the whole war effort, I would
- [31:29]
Liz Landers
say one thing about the strike. And we're still learning about exactly what happened here and what's going to happen next. As we tape this on Friday afternoon, the fact that a US Fighter jet was struck down is itself contrary to how both Hegseth and Trump have been billing our air dominance over the last few weeks here. There was a briefing back on March 4th where Hegseth said that in a matter of days the United States would basically have free reign to fly anywhere it wants in Iran. Trump on March 24 was talking about this and said that basically Iran had no means of combating the US Planes that were flying over Iran. He said they can't do a thing about it. As recently as Tuesday of this week, Trump was talking about how Iran had no navy, no military, no air force and no anti aircraft systems. So he's cast this as a complete and utter military victory. And there is no question that the United States military and the Israeli military are dominant vis a vis the Iranian military. But again, what we're seeing is a little bit of an overselling of just how much that dominance is. And to the extent that the American people see things like this happening, see the possibility for more American casualties and possibly even deaths, that's going to make this war a very difficult sell moving forward. And it's already been a very difficult sell to this point.
- [33:00]
Scott McFarland
Harry. I would just add that I did an interview about two weeks ago. So we were just a few weeks into the conflict with a family from the Elizabeth Dole foundation. And this husband and father have a daughter who suffered a traumatic brain injury during the war on terror. And one of the things that they said to me was they were very nervous and sort of on edge about the fact that there had been so few casualties so far. Of course, it's a good thing that we're not seeing huge numbers of Americans who have been killed yet in this conflict. But they were worried that it made the conflict seem less real to the American public because we weren't seeing these huge numbers of casualties yet. And also the Pentagon has not really been updating the public about that either. I called Central Command this week and finally got a hard number on the number of wounded soldiers, which is 300 and something people at this point. Most of those people have suffered from these traumatic brain injuries. So I do think that this news development this afternoon is probably going to reach the American public in a way and bring this to the forefront of of the news again as it has perhaps faded for some people as this has kind of dragged on and trickled on through the news in the last
- [34:25]
Aaron Blake
few weeks, how many bad poll numbers can come out all at once? The Iran war is not polling well across the board, at least at the latest numbers the four of us have seen. And Trump hasn't polled this poorly in this term. So those two perfect storms politically come together with seven months until the general election and on the eve of primaries and referendums and special elections across the country that could very much impact November. I'm not sure how politically tenable it is to continue with this unpopular war. Unless some dynamic changes in the public sentiment in the results on the ground, or how the administration is either communicating or administering the war. This is not politically tenable. Not that that's the priority here, but it's a reality nonetheless.
- [35:13]
Harry Littman
And let me stick with that aspect for just a second because, Liz, you've been following how young Republicans are feeling about the war. Some of them identified with the non intervention plank of Trump's campaign. You know, we often think that his hardcore support's invulnerable. He can say any kind of shit and they're still with him. Do you see real erosion in this part of his base?
- [35:36]
Scott McFarland
There are some cracks that are beginning to show, especially with young voters. We've seen that in some polling so far. And actually last night on Thursday evening, I attended a GW event here in Washington that was a Turning Point USA event. And we went to this specifically to speak with young conservatives about how they felt about the conflict. And we got mixed reviews from some of these students, you know, 18 years old, who say one of these young men said, I have been looking at joining the Marines. I think it's great to serve your country. I don't see see the reason why we got involved in this conflict. Another young man who was Iranian American, from New York is a student at gw, saying that he felt that Israel had gotten the United States involved in this Middle east war right now. There were some other young people who were supportive of this, though. There was a young woman, Lila, from Michigan, important swing state. She says she's going to vote in that state in November in the midterms. And she said that overall she supports what she's seen so far. And she did seem to think that Iran was a threat to the United States. But she didn't like the way that the President has gone about this. It sounded like she didn't truly understand the messaging and think that he had been forthcoming with the public about why the US had gotten involved. So this has been a highly covetable part of the President's support in the last few years, in 2024, I think most people would say he did a very good job of capturing young men, and his campaign ran on trying to capture that younger, especially male, vote. And they did that to some success. We're starting to see that success is waning, and those voters are not as enthusiastic about this war.
- [37:28]
Harry Littman
And just to bring two points together, we've got reporting saying Susie Wiles is getting nervous, Trump is getting bored, and yet each week we see the same round of strikes, the same promises by Trump just a little bit longer. Why are they unable to get out of this holding pattern that everyone seems more and more frustrated with, and they've gotta cut bait on sooner or later. What are they hoping to achieve with this prolongation?
- [37:59]
Liz Landers
I've gotta believe that no matter what Trump says occasionally about not caring if he reopens the Strait of Hormuz, you know, basically leaving that to other people, it becomes pretty clear at other points that he does care about whether he leaves that behind and not because he necessarily feels bad for NATO allies who would then have to deal with the situation, or Middle Eastern allies who would then have to deal with the situation. I think to some degree, this might go just to his personal pride, you know, that if he leaves this war and that issue is not resolved, I think it is going to make it a lot harder to argue that this has been a success and a net benefit. And so I think that's a problem when it comes to pulling out of this war for him. And I think we see that. You know, occasionally he'll say it's something he's happy to leave behind, and other times he'll make clear that he really wants some help with this, that he needs somebody to show up for him and assist in this very important mission.
- [39:00]
Harry Littman
And, of course, oil and stock market is deeply connected, right? Things he actually cares a little bit about.
- [39:06]
Scott McFarland
If you believe what the White House laid out at the beginning of the year as to what the priorities were going to be for the President, it was all about affordability. And the White House Chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told reporters as the President was on Air Force One one day, that he was going to be hitting the road about once a week, going to various parts of the country, talking about how they're trying to bring housing prices down and ban institutional banks from buying up homes so your home costs less, and working with Mom Donnie on lowering rent prices in New York City and bringing down the cost of beef. All of these things were supposed to be the main priority and policy objectives going into this huge, consequential midterm year. And Republicans that I talk to say that that is still the campaign issue that the president has to focus on or else they're going to be even more wiped out than what the polls are already predicting. So I think that this Iran conflict has taken the White House on a detour that is longer than they maybe thought it would be and more difficult to extract from than something like the Venezuela operation was at the very beginning of the year.
- [40:28]
Aaron Blake
The gas price thing doesn't go away on its own. And if you've broken this Pottery Barn item in the Middle east, you think the gas prices are going to fix themselves or you're going to look like you're being casual about it. There's all kinds of problems there. And I'm still trying to work my way through a couple things he said from the primetime address this past week, in which he said the Strait of Hormuz will figure itself out or that other countries will go in there and salvage it or that Iran will let the oil out because it's their lifeblood. I talk to experts. They say yes, Iran does need the oil exports for its finances, for its economy. Doesn't mean they have to let the oil go to anything tied to America, though, and how America will just make its own oil. We may have the domestic capacity, but the world market is what dictates the price of oil and gasoline. So we can do as much domestic production as we like it unless we can swing the world markets $5 a gallon, $6 a gallon. Gasoline still haunts us in the summer, and that is just a political cancer that metastasizes far and wide. Nobody roots for it. But for Democratic candidates, if you're not campaigning on gas prices and affordability, you are missing the moment.
- [41:46]
Harry Littman
All right, it is now time for a spirited debate brought to you by our sponsor, Total Wine and more. Each episode, you'll be hearing an expert talk about the pros and cons of a particular issue in the world of wine, spirit and beverages.
- [42:04]
Total Wine and More Sponsor
Thank you, Harry. Today's spirited debate comes with a bit of a twist as we look to the very top of the wine bottle and ask which is better, cork or screw top? At face value, people think screw top equals sheep wine, which, as it turns out, isn't exactly true. The reason for screw tops is to ensure the wine tastes as the winemaker intended. Cork, which has been used to seal wine bottles for over 100 years, is a proven way to age wine effectively by allowing minute amounts of air to come in contact with the wine. This slowly develops a softer texture and enhances flavor. Now cork, traditional as it is, has a downside called tca, which causes something called cork taint. Now cork taint, while affecting a very small percentage of wines, can be a big disappointment, causing a musty aroma similar to the smell of wet cardboard and contaminating a great bottle of wine. We turn back again to screw caps, which are cork taint proof, of course, not to mention much easier to open, especially in a kitchen surrounded by witnesses. How the aging process affects wines with a screw cap is yet to be known. As wineries continue to test whether it's a cork or screw top at Total Wine and More, our guides will help you find the perfect wine to match your tastes. After all, it's not just about what's on top of the bottle, it's what's inside that counts.
- [43:31]
Harry Littman
Thanks to our friends at Total Wine and more for today's a spirited debate. What a 36 hour period we have, starting with an argument in the Supreme Court, then the address, and then the Bondi firing. I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the birthright citizenship case. Let me just set it up as the lawyer in the room and say that the argument I think went poorly for the administration. I think they're going to lose. I wrote a long substack about it and we'll put a link to that here. But there were many aspects to the argument and became perhaps the most closely watched argument the term. So let me start there. What is it about the issue that so sort of captivates the country and made this the round the clock kind of point of coverage? Why is this such a marquee item for the Supreme Court?
- [44:24]
Liz Landers
It's a really good question because the birthright citizenship case was never thought to be the most winnable one for the administration. Certainly the tariffs case, they didn't win that one. But the birthright citizenship case from the very beginning was thought to be kind of a Hail Mary of an attempt by the administration to try and overturn an understanding of the 14th Amendment that has existed for more than a century and has previously been it wasn't exactly the same case, but has previously been upheld by the Supreme Court itself back in the late 1890s. But you know, we did see recently the Supreme Court ruled against Trump in a high profile way on the tariffs. We also saw, crucially, I think in this case, the president decide to break with precedent in showing up to the oral arguments himself, which is not something that modern presidents had done before. And so I think all of that kind of ratcheted up the attention on a case that was a little bit sleepier than it was before. And now it's gonna be really interesting to see whether the President decided to show up for the right case. Because if the intent was to show up and send a message to these justices that they should rule in his favor, this might have been the wrong case to do that with. Because this is probably the toughest one to win them over on, given the precedent that exists on this issue.
- [45:43]
Harry Littman
Look, he's gonna lose. And again, as the lawyer and former Supreme Court clerk here, I wanna say any attempt to kind of stare him down could only backfire. But leaving in the middle of the other person's argument was incredibly gauche, I'm here to tell you. But is there an argument that he's already sort of won by making the court and the country just consider the notion of changing citizenship and tearing up the 14th Amendment because of the impact on immigration is, you know, we sort of expanded the Overton window about it. And is that the political victory he was looking for, even if he loses the case?
- [46:28]
Aaron Blake
I talked to Glenn Ivey, Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee. He says he's still gobsmacked that they took the case and that there was a value statement in taking this case at all about what is potentially a preposterous notion that the 14th Amendment doesn't say what the 14th Amendment clearly says. And there's so much subtext, so much subtext to the issue of birthright citizenship. It's unavoidable. I also spoke with Sidney Kamlinger, Dove Judiciary Committee member from California, who says, yet the birthright citizenship arguments coming in concert with in the same week as Trump's mail in voting executive order, which is going nowhere, we might as well write things on cocktail napkins with crayons to try to change how states do their mail in voting is a disenfranchising pair of things to do, to do them in concert with each other. The types of things that do potentially chill or suppress votes in the future.
- [47:20]
Scott McFarland
Scott just mentioned something interesting. Tying those two actions, these two policy ideas that the President has had and that he has lied about both of these things. By the way, he says over and over that we are the only country that does birthright citizenship. We fact check this in some reporting that we did earlier this week. Both our neighbors to the north and the south, Canada and Mexico, allow this, as do a host of other countries around the world. There are a lot of countries around the world that also allow mail in voting and mail in ballots. And I think, more broadly, looking at the birthright citizenship case fitting into the administration's overall immigration priorities, this administration has taken a real cudgel to both illegal immigration, which they have cracked down on successfully at the southern border. We've seen, you know, almost no border crossings there. The president touts that all the time. The administration has also gone into American cities to crack down on illegal immigration, and that is where we have seen ICE and CBP officers in American streets. And sometimes American citizens have been caught up in those actions. And then the administration has also gone after immigration, legal immigration, in a huge way. And we have done a number of reports about this, about people seeking green cards and how difficult it is about cracking down on immigration from specific countries, which the administration has done now in a series of orders in the last year or so. At this point, birthright citizenship has been a part of United States law for more than 100 years now. And that is just another example of a legal pathway that they think that they can challenge. And the Supreme Court, as Scott pointed out, they heard the challenge to this law.
- [49:13]
Liz Landers
Yeah. And I think, just to put a real fine point on that, Liz is exactly right. And I think that the way you need to view this court case is it's part of a completely maximalist attempt to crack down on, especially illegal immigration, but immigration more broadly. And we've seen the administration back away from that a little bit in the last few months. But this was very much a feature when this case was taken up by the Supreme Court. We were still seeing these real aggressive crackdowns that haven't necessarily stood the test of time. But that was what the administration was clearly going for at the time.
- [49:48]
Harry Littman
Look, I think that's exactly right, and they are on the wrong side of it. Remember, Trump has continually tried to sell all these aggressive moves as going after serious murderers and rapists and pet eaters and the like, and the. The stats have not borne it out. This is an issue that there really is a national consensus on. It was represented by the bill that would have passed before the election, but Trump wanted to run on it as an issue. And I think for the American people, the notion that people want to come here so their children will be citizens, that's like an attractive American idea, sort of democratic idea in the wake of the Civil War, and not the sort of bugaboo that they wish it were. So this is the soft side, if you will of immigration. That's coming up in other cases where they've gone after people who've been in the country for 40 years and saying they're still applicants for admission. And I think that side of it remains unpopular and this case necessarily emphasizes it. Okay, hey, we are just about out of time, except for Five Words or Fewer where we take a question and we often answer it in five words or fewer. Today it is A federal judge has blocked construction on Trump's East Wing ballroom in a bid to save the project. Trump is making the case that the ballroom is desperately needed for White House security. What vital security features does the new plan include? 5 words or fewer please.
- [51:29]
Scott McFarland
Okay, I'm going to take a crack. Harry Bunker, drone proof and bulletproof 5 on the money.
- [51:39]
Aaron Blake
Judges can still stop Trump.
- [51:42]
Liz Landers
That's a good one. I also included the word bunker in mine, but mine was a bunker for Brian Gnome, maybe. Is it too soon for that? Too soon.
- [51:53]
Harry Littman
And I'm going with Underground Theater playing Melania non stop. Thank you so much, Aaron, Liz and Scott. And thank you very much listeners for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review the show. Check us out on substack@harrylittman.substack.com where I'll be posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law. Paid Substack subscribers can now get Talking about Feds episodes completely ad free. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube, where we are posting full episodes and my daily takes on top legal stories. Talking Feds has joined forces with the contrarian. I'm a founding contributor to this bold new media venture committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Find out more@contrarian.substack.com thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking. Talking Feds is produced by Lou Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian, sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie, Dawn Griffin, David Lieberman, Hansam Hadrenathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers and production assistants by Akshaj Turbailu. Our music, as ever, is by the Amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Doledo, llc. Hey, I'm Harry Littman. Talk to you later.
- [54:12]
Aaron Blake
Quick interruption worth hearing. If you love sports, TikTok is for you. Game highlights, expert breakdowns and fan reactions.
- [54:21]
Harry Littman
Just the moments that matter. Download TikTok now.