← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
Unknown Intro/Outro Speaker
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Tim Miller
Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a Lawfare doubleheader today. Your friend Ben Whittis will be up here in about 15. But first we had to talk to the woman of the hour, senior editor at Lawfare, Anna Bauer. You got some interesting texts, some signal messages last week.
- [00:31]
Anna Bauer
Yeah, it's been a weird, weird, weird two weeks. And it started with me on a Saturday afternoon. I say this in the piece. I was in my pajamas at like, 1:20pm in the afternoon because I was having a very rare day off of just kind of like, lounging around.
- [00:52]
Tim Miller
That's a great life. What's that like? Talk to me about that.
- [00:56]
Anna Bauer
Well, it never happens for me. And then right in the middle of it all, finally relaxing, about to watch the Netflix, I get a message from someone who says that they are Lindsey Halligan, the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who is prosecuting the President's perceived political enemies. So that took my Saturday for a very interesting turn indeed.
- [01:20]
Tim Miller
When you got that message that came in on Signal where she says, hey, it's Lindsey Halligan, did you think it was a prank call? Do you think it was Ben Wittes pranking you? Like, what you make of that?
- [01:31]
Anna Bauer
Yeah. Okay, so I didn't think it was been Witness pranking me, but I. I definitely thought that it was some kind of troll or like, even maybe like a disinformation campaign. You know, you have to be careful as a journalist about who you're talking to because, you know, sometimes you never know who is on the other end. And, you know, I just wasn't sure, but. But I also had a weird kind of feeling that, like, it's worth trying to figure out, you know, earlier that morning, I'd been tweeting about the Letitia James case. And Letitia James is the New York Attorney General who is one of the people who, you know, President Trump had pushed for Lindsey Halligan to prosecute. She was put in this position in significant part specifically to prosecute Letitia James, in addition to James Comey and some other folks. And, you know, I had been reading this New York Times article about that case. So I fired off a few tweets, as I, you know, usually do, that one of them kind of just summarized this New York Times article, which included a part that was about grand jury testimony in the case. To me, the grand jury testimony read as being pretty exculpatory for Letitia James, because the case, you know, the indictment alleges that she committed mortgage fraud, false statements. And the way that they're saying that she, you know, fraudulently entered into this mortgage was that she claimed she was going to have a second home when in fact she was going to use it as a rental investment property. The New York Times reporting was that the person who lives in the home, who is her grand niece, had lived there for many years and did not pay rent. That, to me, suggested that she wasn't using the house as a rental investment property. So I, I, you know, posted some twee tweaked about that, and then when I get, get the text from this person saying they're Lindsay Halligan, even though I did think it wasn't real, you know, I, I did wonder, maybe this is a response to those tweets. And then the way that we kind of found out that actually maybe it might be her was I asked her as one of the first questions, you know, where did we first meet and who were you with? I knew that that was an answer that only she would be able to really know or only a handful of people in the world would know. Because I've never really spoken publicly about the fact that three years before I was eating dinner in a restaurant after a hearing that I covered in Trump's criminal cases. This, at the time, was right in the aftermath of the surge at Mar a Lago. I went to cover a hearing before Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida and go to a restaurant and lo and behold, who's there but Trump's attorneys, Lindsey Halligan and James Trustee. I introduce myself, we speak for 10 minutes, and then all these years later, I was able to ask her, where did we first meet? And she remembered. And so that's the first sign that, oh, this really probably is Lindsey Halligan.
- [04:36]
Tim Miller
It was funny to read it, read the whole text exchange because it was like, we met at the breakers with Trustee. I was like, is Trustee somebody's code name? I'd forgotten about Jim Trusty. I was like, is that like a nickname? It felt a little bit like a Scooby Doo plot kind of.
- [04:52]
Anna Bauer
Yeah, he's, he's one of the people who was a Trump attorney. He exited the legal team at one point, so he, he still makes a few media appearances here and there, but he's not one of the former Trump attorneys who's been placed into a senior government role.
- [05:09]
Tim Miller
The texts continue once you've confirmed her and she, she is objecting to your, your tweets. I'm curious when you both, like, this is extremely unusual, right, for a prosecutor to start texting somebody about, you know, their statements about an ongoing case, is it not? And then what were, like, the merits of her complaints?
- [05:30]
Anna Bauer
So this is super unusual for a few reasons. The first is that it becomes clear that what the reason that she's reaching out to me is, in fact, those tweets that I'd posted about this New York Times article. But keep in mind, like a. It's unusual in itself for a U.S. attorney to reach out to a reporter who they don't have some kind of, you know, ongoing, like, reporter source rapport relationship. But it's not unheard of, right? Like, prosecutors do reach out to reporters. US Attorneys sometimes reach out to reporters, although typically it goes through, you know, kind of more official channels, but sometimes it is informal, whatever. But a few things that were unusual about this is that, one, she's reaching out to me about something that I didn't report on myself, but about someone else's reporting, and it was just the tweets that I'd posted summarizing it. Two, it's about an ongoing prosecution, which is quite unusual because there's a lot of DOJ norms and policies where typically prosecutors just don't talk about ongoing prosecutions. There's all kinds of things that can go wrong if you make public statements about an ongoing prosecution. It relates to a defendant's fair trial, right? Prejudicial, pretrial publicity, all those things. And then the third thing is that the thing that I was summarizing in the New York Times article was about grand jury testimony. And that's really unusual for prosecutors to get anywhere near the subject of grand jury matters, because not only are there DOJ policies that prohibit the disclosure of grand jury matters, there's also, under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, prohibition against an attorney for the government disclosing anything that's occurred before the grand jury. And it's a really strict rule. So typically, prosecutors don't even go anywhere near that subject matter with members of the media because, you know, it's super risky to do so. So all of those things surprised me about this conversation that carried on over the next 33 hours, in which Lindsey Halligan, you know, told me that my reporting wasn't fair, something about it was inaccurate, but never would actually tell me what even was inaccurate about it.
- [07:52]
Tim Miller
So I will say it's worth mentioning that if there's a strict rule against disclosing grand jury information to the media, this administration, as you had noted in the James Comey case, taking a pretty hard line on alleged leaks to the media. So you would think that maybe Lindsey Halligan might be worried about that.
- [08:11]
Anna Bauer
This is one of the things that we found to be really newsworthy about this unusual community between a U.S. attorney and a reporter about an ongoing prosecution is that at the same time that she is reaching out to me unsolicited to talk to me about this case, there's, you know, a lot of kind of ironies to that, because while she's doing that, there are report. There's reporting just a few days after she texted me that she had fired a number of career prosecutors in her office for allegedly unauthorized leaking to the media. And, you know, Chad Gilmartin, the DOJ press guy, puts out a statement like, we only speak through our filings. We don't talk about ongoing prosecutions. And then also there's the Comey case, where, as you've pointed out, you know, at the heart of that case is this question of interactions between federal law enforcement officials and the members of the media. Lindsey Halligan is personally handling that case herself. And so there's just kind of like all these different, you know, ironies to which, like, she's doing one thing of talking to the media in this really strange way, but then at the same time seems to be super willing to punish people for allegedly speaking out of turn. So, yeah, I mean, it's very strange.
- [09:34]
Tim Miller
I'd encourage people to read the whole text exchanges at the bottom of the article that you linked to the screenshots of the text, because it is very strange. The manner in which she's arguing, in addition to being, like, inappropriate and is just. She seems like a very scattered person. Her arguments to you don't make any sense. And that seems like a weakness in a prosecutor that they can't make a. They can't make a sensible argument about the point that they're trying to make.
- [09:59]
Anna Bauer
It seem to me like she was trying to tell me something by implication or. Or there were things that she said, I can't tell you. And so I. I like, really don't know if maybe that's. That's part of what was going on with why everything was so confusing. But at the end of the conversation, you know, I still have no idea what it is that I allegedly got wrong or. Or said in my tweet that she, you know, specifically was taking issue with, despite my best efforts to get an understanding of it. But I think you're right, Tim, that it's. It speaks to, like, if you look at the content of the conversation as a whole, you know, part of this story is about what seems to be a real lack of experience here and a real lack of apparently, you know, competence. It just. It just does not seem to be the type of thing that you would see in just in the Justice Department in the past from a U.S. attorney. And to make sure that we were right about that, we spoke to former prosecutors, we spoke to legal journalists in the days leading up to the publication just to like, make sure that our gut instinct about this was right, that this is a really strange and bizarre type of communication, and none of them had ever seen anything like this. So, yeah, it is very strange.
- [11:21]
Tim Miller
Another thing that speaks to the incompetence is. Or maybe just malice, I don't know, is they're supposed to be preserving all these communications. And the other subplot to this story was that, you know, after you published it, they tried to claim that this was off the record. You know, she says to you in the text messages I sent you on this on signal, which has disappearing messages, because if you. As if you send a disappearing message, that means it's not on the record. There were two issues with that. Like, one is that's not how off the record works. So it shows just, again, an incompetence and how to deal with the media. But two, it makes it seem like she's not following the rules about preserving communications if she was happy for the messages to be disappearing.
- [11:57]
Anna Bauer
Yeah. So. And this is an issue that this administration had. Has faced in the past, right, with the. The signal gate that the Atlantic reported on. And there's been some questions raised around the administration's use of signal, because typically, if you're carrying out official business, which arguably, you know, speaking to the media about doing press relations, about an ongoing prosecution is official business, then it raises questions around federal records acts, you know, preservation. It's possible that she was, like, screenshotting or printing out these communications as a way to preserve them. But, like, it doesn't seem like it. That seems like a very small possibility, but it's still possible, I guess. But. But yeah, so it raises questions about that and. And to your point, about lack of competence around media engagement, it was quite surprising that at the end of this conversation, after we'd, you know, been communicating on signal for, you know, a significant amount of time, there'd been a long period of us not speaking to each other right before we're about to publish. When she becomes aware of it, she suddenly claims that everything was off the record. Well, for people who have engaged with the media as public officials, and especially in Washington, very well know, you know, you have to set at the outset of a conversation the basis on which you are speaking. And the default is that if there's, if there's no discuss about going off the record or going on background, then you just assume that you were on the record. And she tried to come back and say, oh, no, that was all off the record. And that's just not how it works. And it's strange because this is a woman who has a degree in broadcast journalism, was on Trump's legal team, and so very much should have experience engaging with the media.
- [13:55]
Tim Miller
Just one last little funny note on competence. The spokesperson for the DOJ did spell her name wrong when pushing back on you. And I encourage you to read the article for how you handled that. It gave me a good chuckle. Last thing, just biggest picture on the case you're heading down to Norfolk. What is your sense for the status of the Tish James case overall?
- [14:16]
Anna Bauer
I mean, look, I could very well be wrong. But looking at, and we've written about this on the site, I encourage people to look at my colleague, Molly Ro Roberts, some of the work that she's done on looking at what we know from the public evidence and from the indictment itself. To me, I have very little confidence that what Lindsey Halligan was telling me in these text messages, which is that I'm all wrong and that the case, the evidence is going to come out and prove me wrong. I don't have a lot of confidence in that. The indictment is very vague. Everything that I have seen in terms of the public evidence suggests that this is a weak case. Again, possible that I'm wrong, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a case in which I would be betting a lot on it even going to trial, much less being successful at trial. I expect that in this case, we're going to see, like we have in the Comey case, challenges to the appointment of Lindsey Halligan, selective or vindictive prosecution motions. And much like the Comey case, I think that those are going to be very strong motions. You know, you have public evidence of the president himself urging the prosecution of Letitia James and James Comey. If there's ever been, you know, a selective or vindictive prosecution motion that should be successful is probably in these two cases. So, you know, I'm skeptical that it'll even go to trial, but if it does, I'm also skeptical of the evidence that will be presented.
- [15:59]
Tim Miller
All right, well, keep us posted. We'll be following the progress on this as you're heading down to Norfolk to cover it. And who knows? Keep an eye on your signal feed. Who knows who'll be incoming next? Anna Bauer, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Up next, your colleague Ben Witts. All right, we are back. In addition to being the editor in chief of Lawfare, he also writes Dog Shirt daily. It's hard for me to tell if that's a dog shirt that looks like an animal shirt of some kind.
- [16:40]
Ben Wittes
Dochins, it's dogs.
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Tim Miller
Dochins, it's a docheon shirt. It's Ben Wittes. Ben, you caught the end of your colleague Anna's reporting there, and she mentioned kind of the parallels between the pushback that Tish James will be offering to her prosecution, as we've already seen in the filings from Comey. And so I kind of wanted to start with you there on what, what your sense is of the Comey case and any, any additional thoughts you had on what Anna was reporting.
- [17:06]
Ben Wittes
Yeah, so I was. I supervised that reporting and thus had almost as weird a week as Anna did. But I don't have much to add, honestly. It's. I've been doing this for 30 years across a lot of administrations now. I have never seen a text exchange remotely like that one. And to, as Anna said, to sort of gut check that reaction, she and I spent the weekend last weekend that is sort of talking people through it from various walks of life that have insight into these interactions. You know, prosecutors as well as journalists who cover, you know, major investigations. And we could not identify anybody who could who had seen anything like that. And not to mention, quite apart from the, the fact and substance of it, the weird mean girls tone of it, which I, I just thought was like, this was somebody who had an impulse control issue and couldn't saw some tweets she didn't like and just couldn't help herself from reaching out to essentially a stranger to tell her, I really don't like you. And I felt like that is something that I don't know how to get my hands around that.
- [18:32]
Tim Miller
Moving over to the Comey case, what do you make of what he's been filing?
- [18:36]
Ben Wittes
Right. So he filed two major motions this week that are actually interacting with each other. So one of them is the vindictive prosecution motion, which got the vast majority of the attention, and rightly so. It is the most powerful such document that has ever been filed in American court. Not because Pat Fitzgerald and the Comey legal team are especially good, although they're very talented lawyers, but because the record of Trump's promises to and machinations to get Jim Comey is so long and so extraordinary that merely lining it up in an organized way creates this kind of breathtaking sense of, whoa. You know, like, this is a heck of a record. And I actually think the more interesting document is going to be the government's response to this, which is due on November 3rd. And. And I was reading it with the question, like, okay, how do you respond to this if you're one of these poor schlubs from North Carolina that Lindsey Halligan has dragged up, because nobody in her office will actually prosecute this case. So she's brought in two AUSAs from North Carolina. And you've got to write a response to this motion, and you've got to argue that the President's conduct and the circumstances that led to this prosecution are sufficient, sufficiently normal that we should have a sort of presumption of regularity about the prosecution. And you've got to answer for the fact that you're from North Carolina, not from the Eastern District of Virginia, because nobody in the Eastern District of Virginia will litigate this matter. And that Lindsey Halligan herself had to present it to the grand jury alone because nobody would help her. And that, by the way, she's only in the job at all because her predecessor, who was a Trumpist himself, wouldn't bring the case, and Trump removed him and installed her. And, oh, by the way, here's 20 pages of Trump tweeting or saying bile against Jim Comey, including that he should be prosecuted, that he's a sick individual, that he's a, you know, a leaker, that he's a, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so how do you answer that? And so the documentary, and I'm really, really interested in, is the one that the government is going to have to file in response to this one on November 3rd. So that brings me to the second matter, which is that one of the points that Fitzgerald and Comey's legal team makes in their document is that, by the way, Lindsey Halligan wasn't even legally appointed. She was, you know, the president hates Comey so much that he appointed a prosecutor illegally to bring this case. And that gives rise then to this second document, which is a quite technical legal argument, though not a difficult one, that Halligan, in fact, is not legally occupying the office that she's indicted him from. That one is going to be tricky to answer, too. And in fact, Alina Haba has lost such arguments as have a couple of other U.S. attorneys. So you know, the Comey team, like, it is not the hardest job in the world because the procedural irregularities are extreme. The indictment may be, on its face deficient, but is certainly weaker than hell. And by the way, Jim Comey is not guilty of this, whatever else reason people may have to dislike him.
- [22:37]
Tim Miller
Not asking you to betray private conversations, but I mean, have you talked to Jim? I know you guys are friends. Like, just at least what his mental state is on all this.
- [22:45]
Ben Wittes
So for reasons that I don't want to go into, I have made a point of not being in touch with him since the time of the indictment. And part of that is so that I am free to comment on the case without. Without people thinking that I'm speaking for the legal team or that. So I'm just sort of making a point of being an independent actor here. That said, I don't. Do not. We're friends, and I care about him and I'm concerned about it for all the obvious reasons.
- [23:21]
Tim Miller
His video response is really, really excellent. Just the way in which he was trying to use this to encourage other people to stand up and fight. I was really impressed by it. The last time we spoke was when the government was raiding John Bolton's house. The early morning raid of his home. Since then, he has also been indicted by a grand jury. The Bolton case feels, at least in the way it's been treated by the press, a little different than the James and Comey cases, which are just manifestly ridiculous political prosecutions. The Bolton case feels more like a obvious political prosecution that also might have some legitimacy to it. And so I'm just wondering what you make of what we've learned since. Since we last spoke.
- [24:08]
Ben Wittes
Well, I have very complicated feelings about this case. So the first is, let's make the case for the case and then make the case against it. People are indicted for this sort of activity. If you take the allegations in the indictment as true, this is the kind of activity for which senior officials do, in fact, get prosecuted, whether it's, you know, General Cartwright or David Petraeus or John Deutsch. Right. And there are any number of examples of senior officials behaving recklessly and carelessly or in a sloppy fashion with classified material because they are not because they're spies or. But because they're just arrogant and they don't act like the rules apply to them. And the government's general posture is to take that pretty seriously. And it does prosecute these cases. It sometimes cuts them special deals, as in the Petraeus case, but it doesn't Ignore that stuff. And so some of the stuff that is alleged in the Bolton indictment is, I think, pretty egregious. And the. The stuff that is particularly troublesome is not merely that he was allegedly, and I want to emphasize the word allegedly, sending detailed notes on his. In sort of diary form to two family members, but then when his email was hacked by an Iranian connected actor of some kind, seems to have not disclosed the magnitude of the breach to the FBI at the time. And so I do think there's reasons to question John Bolton's conduct. And I'm not suggesting, at the end of the day that an indictment would not be appropriate. I will say the following. We. We live in a society with a presumption of innocence for everybody, and the presumption of innocence is intended to protect you against malicious government conduct. And whatever John Bolton might have done, there is definitely malicious government conduct here. In response, and let's tick off some of it. So, number one, we know that the President and the Vice President have been commenting on this investigation in a way that is. It's not quite at the level. Level of what they're doing with Letitia James and Jim Comey, like, sort of demanding it. But the president wants John Bolton prosecuted. The president wants revenge against John Bolton, even though John Bolton didn't participate in his first impeachment. Right. John Bolton, like, left. The rule of law, people hanging on.
- [27:11]
Tim Miller
That, just on this point, like, the easy counterfactual to this is if John Bolton was doing what Mark Meadows did and like going on to Fox and defending Trump and talking about how great Mr. Trump was doing in the second term, how impressed he is by all.
- [27:26]
Ben Wittes
The peace deals, this case would not.
- [27:27]
Tim Miller
Have happened, obviously, and everyone agrees with that. I don't think you could find anybody that would say that, no, that there was still a. That this is still such a serious national security matter that it would have gone forward.
- [27:39]
Ben Wittes
Number two, we know that while this case generated during the Biden administration, the search warrant didn't happen during the Biden administration. There was a caution about handling it. And that's not to say it wouldn't have developed, but let's just say it didn't develop. Right. And then you get the Trump people back into office on their revenge campaign, which we know includes malicious activity against other people, including lying about them. And they get a, you know, warm, as you would say, a warm, tingly feeling in their legs about. About this case. And upper leg. The upper leg, yeah. That includes Kash Patel tweeting about a search while it was ongoing and it includes the fact. And I know this because I was physically there when that search warrant took place. As you know, the New York Post was not there and they had the story that it was happening. I know they weren't there because I was there. And moments after I went live from the scene, the New York Post had the story and Cash Patel was tweeting about it and Pam Bondi responded. And that is, you know, I don't know what more evidence that you could have that the Justice Department, both on the investigative side and on the, the legal side, is actively trying to humiliate John Bolton. And then we have serial stories about how there is pressure to go through the seized material in lightning speed and bring this case really fast. Normally this stuff takes months to go through. The material that you take in a, in a search when it's, some of it may be classified. This is a months long process. The FBI is very meticulous about it. They got this done in a few weeks under extreme pressure from the White House and from the Justice Department. Mockety mucks. In those circumstances, it seems to me you have to amp up the presumption of innocence and you say it is there to protect us against the government cheating, lying and trying to humiliate somebody. And we know that the government is cheating and trying to humiliate somebody here. And so I actually feel under these circumstances, I have no particular love for John Bolton. You know, not the nicest guy in Washington. But I do think it is important to take seriously that he is presumed innocent until they prove every fact in this indictment.
- [30:33]
Tim Miller
It's funny that literally every person that defends Bolton in this case begins their defense with a throat clearing about how they have no love for John Bolton. Bolton, I don't like his policies. He's not very nice. He's not an enjoyable person to be around.
- [30:51]
Ben Wittes
And of course he has that mustache. And the mustache. I think if he, like, there might be a whole different attitude about John Bolton if he shaved. But the Constitution is there to protect people you don't like. It's not merely there to protect the people you do like. And I feel very strongly about John Bolton's civil liberties.
- [31:13]
Tim Miller
I want to go on to the Trump settlement. Donald Trump is demanding that his Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him. There were two ongoing lawsuits before he won the 24 election. One was a 2023 lawsuit about the Russia investigation. There was another one which is a lawsuit that they're filing over the classified doc search at Mar a Lago, arguing that that was inappropriate. This is insane on so many levels. You wrote on Tuesday, I want to read you to you. I am sufficiently enraged by Trump's demand for hundreds of millions of dollars in gratitudes from a department now run by his personal lawyers to compensate him for warranted and merited investigations and prosecutorial activity that the better part of valor is to refrain from comment until my blood cools. I'm hoping the blood is still hot. And I would like to hear from you about the this.
- [32:05]
Ben Wittes
I mean, look, I covered all those investigations and I supervised a team that covered those investigations. I sat personally through the New York criminal trial, which is not at issue in Trump's demands for gratuities from the Justice Department. There were a lot of counts. It was 91 total, 33 of which he was convicted of in New York. Let's leave those aside. Eileen Cannon threw out some stuff on, you know, garbage grounds that had nothing to do with the merits of the matter. No count against Donald Trump has been dismissed because it lacked merit. And in fact, the government presented on the January 6th matter something like 160 pages of evidence in the wake of the Supreme Court opinion trying to show how stuff was not covered by the immunity decision. So it is one thing to demand compensation for having been put through the wringer in an investigation of which you've been cleared.
- [33:17]
Tim Miller
Yeah, sure. Hey, how about if we're going to give somebody a quarter billion dollars, how about George Reddes? He did nothing except try to show up to work and we put him in solitary confinement for 48 hours without access to a lawyer. John, Donald Trump never left his gilded mansion in Mar a Lago or New York.
- [33:31]
Ben Wittes
You know, there are a lot of people, there are even Trumpist people, right? Stephen Hatfill, the who was the principal suspect in the anthrax case, who's now a Trump advisor on I don't have a problem with compensating Stephen Hatfill, which happened, I believe you don't get compensated for things of which you do not get clear cleared. That's number one. Number two, if you happen to be president, you don't get get to demand that your own Justice Department pay you for not getting cleared, much less to the tune of $230 million. And number three, if you staff your Justice Department with, at the leadership levels, with your personal lawyers, you really don't get to demand that they your lawyers, who have a fiduciary obligation to you, direct the Justice Department to give you money. So like I don't know what else to say about this other than I think it's even more outrageous than bulldozing part of the White House which also you know, happened at the same time.
- [34:43]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [34:44]
Ben Wittes
Other than to say it is outrageous and it is outrageous that they are contemplating doing it. I assume because nobody is able to say no to him that some of them will even try to do it. I don't know what to say.
- [35:00]
Tim Miller
Well I hope he gets it. I'm just saying I hope he gets it. There's no better finger in the eye of the people that voted for him on the grounds that life was too expensive for them than for him to take take 230 million of their hard earned taxpayer dollars and give them to himself. While he's an alleged, he's a self proclaimed billionaire, he probably is an actual billionaire now for the first time ever because his crypto scam and he's going to take hardworking Americans money and give them to himself for restitution because he had emotional damage and do nothing to help make things more affordable for them. And I just think it would be perfect. It's a nicely packaged box, nicely wrapped story and I hope that he takes.
- [35:43]
Ben Wittes
It just as a matter of principle. Feel called to disagree with you because it is $230 million of the taxpayers money. But I don't disagree that there's an elegance to it at a political level from your point. On a serious note however, I will say that any attorney who participates in this decision who has been an attorney for Donald Trump or in another circumstance in which they have a client interest, the head of the civil division, Stan Woodward for example, represented one of Trump's co defendants and a number of witnesses across the needs to have bar discipline because you, you actually don't get to represent both the United States and a criminal defendant who is demanding money from the Justice Department at the same time. You don't get to do that.
- [36:47]
Tim Miller
Maybe they'll be prosecuted by the next Justice Department. A topic for another day. The Mike Johnson I should just mention the speaker of the House said that it's great. This is good for him. Good on him as far as he's concerned. He knows Trump believes he's owed that reimbursement and Mike Johnson is for what's just and right and he thinks it's just absurd that people attack him for everything he does. So there you go. That's the position of the speaker of the House.
- [37:12]
Ben Wittes
Well there you go. By the way, I also want the Justice Department to give me $230 million.
- [37:18]
Tim Miller
I've got a lot of complaints. I got a rash, as the dude would say. I want to talk to you about the January 6th pardons a little bit and the recent news on that 34 year old Christopher Moynihan, who had been convicted for rioting at the Capitol in January 6, has now been accused of sending text messages in which he wrote, Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in nyc. I cannot allow this terrorist to live even if I am hated. He must be eliminated. I will kill him for the future. Not really subtle there. David Mastio over at the Kansas City Star. Shout out to him. He's got a article out this morning, has gone through kind of legal filing things and has identified now more than 30 cases of re offense among the January 6th partners, including child porn, alleged assault on a police officer, again, multiple weapons violations, and rape. So there you go. The reoffenses are offensive in their own right, but the one with Moynihan is particularly apt because I think it's the first example of someone that was convicted for attempting political violence getting pardoned and then attempting to reoffend on the same, you know, in the same vein.
- [38:32]
Ben Wittes
Yeah. So I will point out that in the other direction, however, you see, this reflects your bias, Tim, that you're, you're only reporting the examples where the convicts who Trump has released reoffended. You're not pointing out that the QAnon Shaman has written a letter saying that Trump is not the legitimate president, that he is the legitimate president. And you know, and so some people are, are truly reformed and are showing a love of their fellow man that out Gandhi's Gandhi. And all you want to focus on is, you know, the rapists and the, and the people who are doing political violence. Shame on, shame on you, Tim.
- [39:20]
Tim Miller
That's a good point. I haven't been following Jacob Chansley's recent material that closely, so thanks for bringing that to.
- [39:26]
Ben Wittes
Let me pull it up here. I will read it to you.
- [39:30]
Tim Miller
Oh, great.
- [39:31]
Ben Wittes
He's filed a $40 trillion lawsuit against America, against Trump with a plan to revolutionize America. Vice reports Jacob Chancely, better known as the shirtless bison horned QAnon shaman from the Capitol cosplay riot is unfortunately back in the news. This time he's filed a lawsuit that either definitively proves that he and everybody involved in the riots were not of sound mind or that he is just another performatively crazy crank trying to hop on the right wing gravy train. The Phoenix New Times reports that his 26 page single paragraph legal complaint names everyone from Donald Trump and Elon Musk's S Corp to the nsa, Israel and Warner Brothers Studios as co conspirators in a vast conspiracy that was set on trampling his Constitution Constitutional rights. For his extremely vague infraction, he is seeking damages of upwards of $40 trillion.
- [40:38]
Tim Miller
Oh, more than Trump. I wish Shansley good luck in that, in his suit against the government.
- [40:44]
Ben Wittes
Yeah, I wish him well.
- [40:45]
Tim Miller
There's been so much happening in Ukraine, you know, with our posture towards them. You know, obviously this is something you've been a staunch advocate for, defending the folks in Ukraine. There was a story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that people are getting excited. Maybe Trump had flipped back and was gonna let the dogs of war loose. And Trump called that story fake news and walked it back. So it feels like we're, you know, there's a lot of sturm and drag, a lot of Trump flip flopping all over the place. We kind of always land at the same at the same place, which is Trump letting Putin continue to run the clock.
- [41:19]
Ben Wittes
Yeah. So a few things have happened. The first is that the scheduled meeting between Trump and Putin in Hungary has been canceled. And Putin responded to that by with renewed set of attacks on Kyiv, which have been very destructive. The second thing is that, you know, the people who get excited every time Trump makes a noise in one direction have gotten very excited because some sanctions went into effect against certain oil companies on the Russian side. Look, I do not let my emotional reaction to anything hinge on Trump's attitude toward Ukraine or Russia. That's not healthy for me. And he is, at the end of the day, does what he does. It is a disaster. And Ukraine is fighting on anyway. And so I think the only thing we can do is take the good when it happens like these new sanctions is constructive, criticize the hell of out of the much more frequent bad, and understand that when you vacillate like this, Putin's reaction is going to be to double down and kill more Ukrainians. And that's exactly what he's done. And you know, these people who say you have to show strength and who love talking about machismo, love to show weakness to Vladimir Putin and it's getting a lot of people killed. You know, other than to say, do not get your hopes up when Trump momentarily sounds like he's doing the right thing ever, you know, with respect to this set of issues at least, and maybe with respect to all sets of issues, pocket the good and don't stop criticizing the bad. I don't know what else to say.
- [43:21]
Tim Miller
Wise guidance. You didn't have to say anything else. That's a great place to leave it. That's Ben Wittes. Thank you as always for your time. Shout out to folks at Lawfare a great scoop. I guess we'll call it falling in the Lap.
- [43:35]
Ben Wittes
Everything I've ever said to you on this platform has been off the record. And shame on you for publishing so much of it. You're not really a journalist, so maybe I don't really. It's waste of time to say that, but I just wanted to give you a heads up.
- [43:52]
Tim Miller
I appreciate that, Ben, and you're not the first to say that to me. Kari Lake has said that, so several others. I appreciate you and Anna Bauer's time. Everybody else will be back for another fake news edition of the Bulwark Podcast tomorrow. See you all then. Peace.
- [44:22]
Unknown Intro/Outro Speaker
Too far to knock it home in the confusion and I just take the time to get wrapped up in the illusion of doing something I know it Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock you got too old to rearrange and keep it up the record you an artificial tune I see you soon when you knew all this would have turned to piss if your idea wasn't kissed why you so pierced? Well I know you don't need the confusion and I know you just ain't tired to get wrapped up in the immune lose you I'm doing something that you keep it up the record off the record you got to know that we will change it keep it up the record off the record you got to make.
- [46:20]
Tim Miller
The board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.