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- [00:00]
Matt Rogers
This is Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
- [00:02]
Tim Miller
From Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. JBL Tour Pro3 earbuds are for those who don't conform to the standard. Yeah, I mean if you want to get into some touchscreen technology, how about the smart charging case Clear sound? These are not standard things. You're only gonna get them with the JBL Tour Pro 3, baby. And I love the sound of JBL when it goes. These earbuds are packed with innovation because you can't stand out by following others. Touchscreen Smart charging case for one touc instant EQ customization, true adaptive noise canceling and the one of a kind audio transmitter which can plug and play with everything from game consoles to in flight entertainment. What more could you want? First doesn't follow grab a pair at.
- [00:45]
Matt Rogers
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- [01:29]
Tim Miller
Hello, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We've got a double header up today. Could not be more excited about the Second Block with Carol Leonig, one of my favorite reporters who's moved over to Ms. Now from the Washington Post. She's got a new book out about the Justice Department that I've been devouring. But first, my buddy, my co host on the Next Level podcast, author of the Triad newsletter, your favorite, Jonathan Victor Last JVL what's up JVL hey man.
- [01:54]
Jonathan Victor Last
It'S nice to be here when things aren't totally terrible. That's a first in a while.
- [02:02]
Tim Miller
Yeah, though we're going to do some feelings at the end. I'm having some mixed feelings. I'm going to save that for people. We're going to do happy talk at the beginning then. Then we'll go over my mixed feelings about everything. Jbl I wanted to grab you because it was just such a big win for the Democrats on Tuesday night in such a big wave and we were talking to the next level kind of live as it was coming in, kind of processing everything. So I wanted to just have a little bit of a deeper Both analytical and emotional. Kind of recap of where things stand right now. And you did a newsletter yesterday on the Hispanic vote that was a banger, as they all are. So I want to start talking about the Hispanic vote, and then we'll get into some more big picture stuff. Pretty stunning. Just the degree to which the Republicans tanked all of their gains and then some with Hispanic voters. You know, again, admittedly, these are in blue states. Maybe things are a little bit different in the border states, but why don't you talk about what you found?
- [02:56]
Jonathan Victor Last
Yeah, so here's what we found. I was looking at Union City, which is the most heavily Hispanic township in New Jersey. It's like 81, 82% Hispanic. So overwhelmingly Hispanic. And it's a pretty big place. They're up in Hudson County. And here is how Trump's vote share grew. He went in 2016, 19%. Okay, 20, 20, 28%. 2024, 41%. So this is like the big Hispanic realignment.
- [03:32]
Tim Miller
The Hispanics in Union City were like, man, the more I see of this guy. Nasty quotations.
- [03:39]
Jonathan Victor Last
Yeah, we're into that. That sounds like a great idea. So, I mean, you've read the things I won't, like, pretend, like, can you guess, Tim, what it was? But the answer is 15.1%. The Republican Jack Cittarelli dropped from the Trump share of 41 to 15.1%. So, like, he lost 25% off of Trump's 2016 total. Mikey Sherrill was plus 50 in. In this county. And Steve Cornucai over at Ms. I guess not.
- [04:12]
Tim Miller
Yeah. This shows you that you're not a TV watcher, which I love about you.
- [04:15]
Jonathan Victor Last
I'm not.
- [04:16]
Tim Miller
JBL does not consume cable tv, so he only is consuming. He's not on Ms. No, he's not anymore. Actually, we've lost him off of Ms. Now he's on NBC. But it's pronounced Kornacki.
- [04:26]
Jonathan Victor Last
Oh, okay.
- [04:26]
Tim Miller
Steve Kornacki, the gay man with the khakis. Khaki Kornacki. It rhymes. It's a bit.
- [04:31]
Jonathan Victor Last
I always knew him as a guy who wrote for Salon back in the day.
- [04:34]
Tim Miller
I know, it's been a minute.
- [04:36]
Jonathan Victor Last
Anyway, so he went through and pulled the municipalities in Jersey with more than 60% Hispanic demographics. And there are 1, 2, 3, 4, like, 9 of them. And on average, they swung about 50 points against where they had been.
- [04:55]
Tim Miller
It's truly crazy. I'm just going to read a couple of them. You mentioned Union City already, but Passaic county, which is what a lot of folks Focused on that had been a long time Democratic stronghold. Trump actually won it by seven. Sherrill won it by 26. It's only a 33 point swing there. Only.
- [05:10]
Jonathan Victor Last
Perth Amboy. Harris plus nine. Sheryl plus 56.
- [05:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I mean it's just an unbelievable turn.
- [05:19]
Jonathan Victor Last
West New York Harris plus 13. Cheryl plus 57. Patterson Harris plus 28. Cheryl plus 71. It's hard to win a place by 71 points.
- [05:32]
Tim Miller
It's really hard when you just do.
- [05:33]
Jonathan Victor Last
The math on what that means.
- [05:34]
Tim Miller
I mean Zo Run did it in Bushwick. Sure. Most of the time. Most of the time it is tough. Trump does it out in West Texas.
- [05:41]
Jonathan Victor Last
But again that is a 12 month swing.
- [05:44]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [05:45]
Jonathan Victor Last
That is not a like four years to now. That is a 12 months ago to right now.
- [05:50]
Tim Miller
There's some caveats to this. It's just important to say because I know that people will push back so we should just go through them. For starters, it's an off off year, so there's kind of a self selecting group of every voter, including Hispanic voters. It probably is such that it's a higher college educated percentage. Right. It's probably such that it's a higher percentage of people who are really engaged in what's going on in the news. Like the types of people that tend to be more Democrat are going to vote in a off off year than a presidential year. So you know there's, there's some elements to that. You know, in Union City in particular, this big article, this guy, Brian Stack Jersey is one of the few places where they still have machine politics stuff and like he is a friend of Cheryl, they went in big. Right. Like, so there are some caveats but like 50 points is not, you know what I mean? Like okay, let's say he's down 20 points instead. If you, if you, if you put it up against a general presidential electorate and you put it into a different state where there isn't as much kind of Union machine politics happening. Even still, you know, the swing is remarkable. And you saw in Virginia for example in Manassa City, which is a highly concentrated Hispanic precinct out by Dulles Airport and you know you saw a similar story there.
- [07:01]
Jonathan Victor Last
Well, and this also matches up with the polling, right? And so this is one of the big questions we had going into, into Tuesday was wow, the polling on two particular groups, 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters has looked post apocalyptic. So we've seen in like almost like zombie apocalypse level collapses for Trump within both voters 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters over the last 10 months. And some of the Hispanic polling suggested he had lost, like, 45 points with Hispanic voters, which seemed crazy.
- [07:36]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [07:37]
Jonathan Victor Last
Except that it shows up in a lot of surveys. And this was the first test of. Well, is it. Can you see it in the wild as well?
- [07:44]
Tim Miller
In a term?
- [07:45]
Jonathan Victor Last
Turns out you can. And so that, I think, is a little bit of confirmation. It's going to make polling 2026 really hard. Right. Because polls are always modeled on the things that have happened reasonably close before them. When there are big shifts happening, especially big shifts happening very quickly, it's hard for models to catch up with them.
- [08:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [08:04]
Jonathan Victor Last
It was one of the reasons why Cittarelli, like, really, his polls were way out of whack with where he actually performed in Jersey, and it was because of Hispanic voters.
- [08:12]
Tim Miller
The other thing you point out in the article, which is, I mean, just. I think everybody who listens to this show knows it's kind of obvious, but it's just worth kind of sitting on the implications is that like, the thing that is driving this is obviously the deportation campaign in addition to the costs staying high. You don't have to do deep analysis to figure this out. Neither of those things are going to get better. And Trump is pot committed to his deportation campaign, was the phrase you used in the column. I think that is obviously the case. And it's not like he's going to replace Stephen Miller with Jvanka next year because they decided to do a softer, kinder version of the Trump administration. Like this is. They're in on this. On the deportation effort. Trump said it himself. If we have deflation, he's going to have other problems on his hands. So I think that just this kind of projecting out, it's hard to see what would reverse the trend for him. At least with this demo, the best.
- [09:06]
Jonathan Victor Last
He could hope for is that the Supreme Court overrules tariffs. He'll just declare victory. At which we'll say, see, it worked. The tariffs worked. I got all the best deals. And then he sends everybody a check for $600 or something that he says, here is your big, beautiful tariff check.
- [09:22]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [09:23]
Jonathan Victor Last
Like, none of that will actually do anything to costs, really, because cost, cost ain't coming down.
- [09:28]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [09:28]
Jonathan Victor Last
And the, the ICE thing, I mean, just think about, they're in the process of hiring 10,000 people. Once you have committed those budgetary dollars to this and you're in the process of staffing up like that, will you have to keep doing the enforcement? Because otherwise, what do you do with these bodies? Right. And so I just don't see how they, how they stop that.
- [09:51]
Tim Miller
All right, that takes us to the. One of the other topics I want to kind of mull over with you, which is what is Trump's next move to this? I mean, you look at it and lame duck talk is going to start. His ability to bully is going to weaken somewhat. Like, not entirely. Right. And he still has a lot of levers that he can use with Department of Justice and tariffs for as long as those go, or other ways to threaten companies. But some of his levers to bully, I think, are going to be weakened here. If you're looking at, imagine the Jimmy Kimmel situation happening next week, you kind of think that Disney probably would have not folded, right. And it wouldn't have taken them the time to come around. I'd have been like, okay, buddy, how does he combat that? Do you have anything in your crystal ball on how Trump is going to deal with this stuff on the Hill? I guess I should just say one more thing. There's these conversations we talked about with Weigel yesterday about killing the filibuster when we were talking, and this is very fast moving. So, like, who knows by the time this publishes? But, like, initially it was kind of like Jonathan was like, no way. Then all of a sudden, some cracks were starting to leak. Ron Johnson, John Cornyn, some pretty traditional Republicans were like, maybe we can figure out something. So maybe they do something with that. What else do you think might be in his set of reactions to such a big rebuke?
- [11:09]
Jonathan Victor Last
I mean, I assume something will involve New York City.
- [11:13]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right.
- [11:13]
Jonathan Victor Last
He's got Mamdani there. Or he would like to pick Mamdani to be a foil. So you wait till he's sworn in, then maybe you send the National Guard or, you know, send ice. You give, give New York City the Chicago treatment and see what happens. This is what Trump is really good at. Vince McMahon used to say, just get it in the ring. You know, whatever the, whatever the problem was that you're having with the company or with the law or with anything else, just get in the ring, make it part of the show. And once you are in there doing it, you can make moves, you can maneuver, you can find an angle. And I think that's basically how Trump has always viewed politics. And I imagine he'll keep doing that, don't you? Like, you know, like, okay, let's push some buttons on ice. Let's blow up some more people in Venezuela, see if we can, you know, see if that make threats against Nigeria.
- [12:04]
Tim Miller
I guess that was my point is, I think that the alarmist side of me thinks, well, the more he starts to kind of feel like the. Like he's not riding high, like that he can see the end game, the more maybe there's some lashing out on his. On his behalf. And so I don't want to overstate what yesterday is, but it's like, you know, you see, though, he sees those losses, maybe takes a Supreme Court defeat, as you mentioned, on tariffs. You know, he feels like the midterms, like, the plan to rig the midterms of the gerrymandering doesn't seem like that's going that well. What are other things you can do? And he floated the Insurrection act to Norah o' Donnell when she didn't ask him about it, for example. That's something that stands out to me as something that obviously is on his mind. I think that for Trump, obviously, we're all grading on the curve. For Trump, it was kind of a quiet two weeks. He went to Asia and he does the China deal, and just there hasn't. I suspect that, you know, he will feel like he needs to do something else to shake up the snow globe in the coming weeks.
- [13:12]
Jonathan Victor Last
Yeah. And I don't know that we can know what that is. But don't forget, we also have, like, the birthright citizenship decision coming down.
- [13:20]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [13:20]
Jonathan Victor Last
We've got a whole raft of Supreme Court decisions.
- [13:23]
Tim Miller
Just on the Supreme Court thing, for example. Just he wanted to buck them on snap. Yeah. And this kind of. And it's still kind of unclear. It's like the functionaries working for the administration are getting snap out while Trump's bleeding, that he's not gonna follow the Supreme Court. And so it's. Maybe he likes it that way, actually. So it feels like he's fighting them. I don't. It's hard to understand exactly what's happening, but if he does get rebuked on birthright citizenship, on tariffs, you know, a Supreme Court showdown also seems like something.
- [13:53]
Jonathan Victor Last
Yeah. Why wouldn't he? And the undergirding. I know you're not gonna like this, and you're gonna make fun of me, but. But the. The bedrock beneath all of this is 2028. No, I don't. And how long he can maintain the position that, actually, I might run.
- [14:11]
Tim Miller
They need me, actually. Look at how bad it is when I'm not on the ballot.
- [14:14]
Jonathan Victor Last
You have to have it. And, you know. Well, maybe the Constitution says one thing, but I don't know, what if we have an emergency? Maybe you can't have. Or maybe we need to push it to the Supreme Court and see if maybe it's really just two consecutive terms.
- [14:25]
Tim Miller
Is what it's all about. I don't make fun of you. I make fun of the notion of it's inevitable. Nothing is inevitable in life. And I think that this is probabilistic.
- [14:33]
Jonathan Victor Last
Nothing is inevitable.
- [14:33]
Tim Miller
I've never said it was probabilistic element to all of this. And, you know, sometimes everybody has a different judgment on what the level of probability is, but I think we can all agree it's not zero, that he's going to flirt with that. And it's not in 100. So it's a question of where it is in between there. I heard from my old friend Steve Bannon the other day. You ready for this? I was unhappy that I was making fun of him over the 2028 stuff, because that he does to get attention. And he's like, we have five different ways we could do it. So, again, I don't know. It's worth noting, I guess, that it's on a private message channel that he floated that. So that's not for attention, per se.
- [15:07]
Jonathan Victor Last
He's not wrong. He probably does have five different ways that they could try it.
- [15:10]
Tim Miller
Right? Right.
- [15:11]
Jonathan Victor Last
I mean, I can think of four of them off the top of my head. But what this is really about is about freezing the Republicans, though, right? I mean, really is. It's about what can be said publicly and can he prevent. Because this is the other thing to realize. For Donald Trump, being president is less important than owning the Republican Party. But the thing is, you can't own the Republican Party if you or your child aren't president. Right. If some other Republican is president, then you are no longer the main character, just by definition. And that's his business. You saw the tracker that Cap has out where he put $2 billion just in liquid assets and probably seven, I think, billion in unrealized gains so far. That's just in the first 10 months.
- [16:01]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [16:01]
Jonathan Victor Last
Like, this is, you know, we're going to be talking about tens of billions of dollars that are dependent upon him being the owner of the Republican Party. You think he's just going to say, well, going to be great to see a primary. Good luck to JD And Marco and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I'm just going to go back to my ballroom and, you know, we'll see who the future is.
- [16:20]
Tim Miller
This other thing about that is Trump might have avoided jail for himself thanks to his friends with the Supreme Court, but his kids and grandkids haven't.
- [16:29]
Jonathan Victor Last
We can pardon them all right.
- [16:30]
Tim Miller
He can preemptively pardon them for all of the Will those hold a preemptive.
- [16:34]
Jonathan Victor Last
Pardon the Supreme Court? Unlimited crimes with this Supreme Court, you better believe it will.
- [16:40]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that's a good point. Anyway, I just think it's something to monitor, especially if you have a series of things where he doesn't get his way. He's gotten his way on basically everything for about 10 months now. If he doesn't get his way on this election, he doesn't get his way from the Supreme Court. John Thune doesn't give him his way on on the shutdown. I think that's something to monitor. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me does the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. They know your privacy is worth protecting and they send you personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it and what they removed. It's not just a one time service. Deleteme is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want. Was just talking actually to the lawyers here at the Bulwark about the Delete Me service because who the hell knows what kookies are out there these days, you know, looking for our information, unhappy with a tweet that I sent. Don't understand the jokes. You know, I've been doing more going into into hostile turf on the commentary space and some of the people watching that may not like me none too much may not like the Pearl. So it's important to just make sure your online presence is as clean as possible whether you're popping off on social media like me or not. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com Bulwark and use promo code bulwark at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com bulwarkcode bulwark I interviewed Pat Ryan, Congressman, about the inshitification of sports TV right now and how you can't watch ESPN on YouTube TV and you have to turn on the peacock to get a certain game how stupid it all is and how he's using that as an antitrust fight. Anyway, folks can check that out if they want. I'll put a link in here. But as part of that conversation, I was telling them I have a little bit. This is PTSD from, from recent elections. A little bit of nerves seeing some of the chatter from the Democrats, chatter for some of my friends on MSNBC about that sounds a lot like after 2022 when, when the Democrats, you know, the red wave didn't come into fruition and they were kind of like, oh, look at this, look at this, things are going good, Dobbs and etc. And you know, they won blue states in, they won a couple states, common one and they won New York City and then they won some down ballot places. And it's good. It was good. It was good. Good night. Really good night. But I don't know, is this just me being a rain cloud? I have a little bit of concern. It's like all the structural issues that were, besides maybe Hispanic men, all the other structural issues that existed for the party, the Democratic party going after 2024, it still exists today with, with maybe the exception of their standing with Hispanic men. And, and the fact that the party at least understands they should talk a little bit more about affordability.
- [19:52]
Jonathan Victor Last
Donald Trump has an enormous amount of power right now, right? He probably has as much or more power than any American president since FDR just in terms of his total unified control of the country and of the federal government. And like, even if all of the stuff that you and I hope happens comes to fruition, his capacity to do damage is still like almost unimaginable. And he does still have room to maneuver. Like, it's not written anywhere that he can't turn this around, that God knows it's not written anywhere even that you can't have a bunch of shenanigans in 2026 that result in things which are quasi legal, right. A close election where the House has been decided by two or three seats and maybe the Missouri Senate, the Ohio Board of Elections is like, huh? We think that in this district where Democrat won, we're not sure we can certify those results because reasons.
- [20:55]
Tim Miller
Right?
- [20:56]
Jonathan Victor Last
And all of that, God knows, is independent of the possibility that Trump could legitimately keep winning, right? Maybe we wind up with a maybe, maybe the AI bubble bursts, we go into a recession and people blame Democrats. Like, I think that's the less likely of the two possibilities, right? Normally they blame the incumbent president's party, but that's not like a rule of physics, you know, that's not inevitable. Lots of things could happen. Here's what I say. Yesterday turned out as well as you could have asked for it to turn out.
- [21:31]
Tim Miller
If you.
- [21:32]
Jonathan Victor Last
If you and I had sat down and say, what are the results? That would be the best possible case scenario. It would have looked basically like what we got. Like, that's necessary but not sufficient for rolling back all this stuff.
- [21:46]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And that takes me to my final thing on this Sarah. When we were on with Sarah Live and tnl, isn't Sarah the best? God love her. And Sarah is just in the fight, you know, and it's like, next man up next. She's exactly who you want on your field hockey team. That is a lesbian joke or whatever. Any sports team focused. That's not me. I'm an emotional wreck. Which you can relate to. Sure. And I don't know, I felt myself the last 24 hours trying to convince myself I should be happier. It was objectively good. Objectively good. And yet he's still in there. And I'm talking to Carol Lennig next. And it's just like, how is the Department of Justice ever fixed? And he is going to get away with this no matter what?
- [22:36]
Jonathan Victor Last
Oh, yeah.
- [22:37]
Tim Miller
And I don't know, there's something about maybe just hearing the election music on MSNBC and whatever, looking at my numbers, and I just. I don't know, I got a little. I felt like I needed a. Anti. An SSRI a little bit. Despite the fact I felt like I should want to do shots instead. I felt like I needed an ssri. Does that land with you at all?
- [22:58]
Jonathan Victor Last
No, but I would say this good. We are never going to be able to go back to where we came from, which is bad. Sarah's like, oh, we'll just build something that's new, but even better, that fixes all the faults of the old systems. And I'm like, that's not how these things work. We might get the chance to build something new, but it'll still be a slightly crappier version of what we used to have. That's just how it always is. And ification, it's in ification. The insidification of America. And that's the best case scenario. Right? The best case scenarios.
- [23:30]
Tim Miller
And.
- [23:30]
Jonathan Victor Last
But I. I have given up the hope that we could ever go back to American political life as it existed for my entire lifetime from essentially, like 1980. I was a kid, a little kid in 1980 to 2015. And I think that world is Gone. This is. Noah Smith had wrote a long essay about this on how like this is. We have spent down the inheritance that the. The World War II generation created for us, and that's just all gone now. And we live in a different world, which is going to have, like, moral and political austerity to it. And that is not going to be fun. And it kind of sucks. I wish that it didn't happen, but that's just where it is. So I don't feel the way you feel. I feel sort of more hopeful in that. Like, I have made my peace with never getting back there. But if there's a chance that we could just get inshitification instead of authoritarianism, I will take inshitification over Viktor Orban's Hungary every day of the week.
- [24:39]
Tim Miller
You know how when there's a crisis.
- [24:40]
Jonathan Victor Last
Does that work for you?
- [24:40]
Tim Miller
Yeah, because this is why, you know, there's. I don't know if this is how it works in your marriage, but if there's a crisis of some kind, I do better if Tyler is panicking as dark, because then I'm like, okay, he's carrying the darkness for me, and so that'll balance me. So your answer right there really kind of made me feel lighter, you know.
- [25:00]
Jonathan Victor Last
Because it's just like a sin eater.
- [25:01]
Tim Miller
Yeah. JBL's carrying the burden of this. Right. Like, things are inevitably horrible, and so I shouldn't have to worry about it.
- [25:10]
Jonathan Victor Last
Gotcha, baby.
- [25:10]
Tim Miller
That's nice. What about. Can I get you on the. Just a little mad at the voters on Tuesday. Can I also get you on that one? I had one more feeling I had to get off my chest a little mad at them. Kind of like, fuck you, fuck you, you fucking people in Passaic County. What do you think? What were you thinking? A little bit of that.
- [25:28]
Jonathan Victor Last
So this is a. I mean, it's not a productive thought, but yes, it is. One thing if somebody says, I don't believe that driving my car into a wall will hurt my car. And they do it. And then you're like, you fucking idiot. Look what you did. You wrecked your car. This is more like they took our car and drove it into a wall.
- [25:46]
Tim Miller
Or drove into our house.
- [25:47]
Jonathan Victor Last
Right. And. And so that makes me pretty mad because it isn't the case of. And again, this isn't 2016. It isn't the case. They all saw a million people die. Well, I just. I happen to go back and reread some of the stuff that we wrote in the After Action Report of COVID And it was the greatest failure of the federal government in any of our lifetimes. I mean, just top to bottom, somebody should have gone to jail for the way the federal government handled the response to Covid. Everybody saw this. Everybody knows somebody who died from COVID And these people in Passaic county, these very nice people in Passaic county who listen, who watched people die who all had pretty good jobs. And I am sorry that, like, prices went up a few percent, but your wages caught up with them. Your real wages outstripped the increase in inflation. I'm sorry, but that's real. That's the reality. And these people saw Covid. They saw all that happen. They saw the insurrection. They heard him talk about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation and how he wanted to deport 20 million, 25 million people, criminals and thugs. And these people in Passaic county thought, yeah, you know what? Let's fucking roll the dice.
- [27:08]
Tim Miller
I like him.
- [27:09]
Jonathan Victor Last
I like him.
- [27:10]
Tim Miller
Let's give that a whirl.
- [27:11]
Jonathan Victor Last
I'm glad they've come home and realized that the stove was hot and they would like to not touch the stove. It would have been nice if they couldn't have wrecked the car for America and wrecked the rest of the country in the midst of their idiocy.
- [27:26]
Tim Miller
I really needed this. I hope Sarah doesn't listen to this.
- [27:28]
Jonathan Victor Last
Don't worry, she never does.
- [27:30]
Tim Miller
It's like it's a roll of the dice. Yeah, it's like 20% chance, one a week. All right, that's Jonathan V. Last sign up for his newsletter if you had. And it's just gold like that. It's just gems. Every day you're getting from him. And up next, we got Caroline Sticker.
- [28:01]
Matt Rogers
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- [29:01]
Tim Miller
Hey, this is Sarah.
- [29:03]
Carol Leonnig
Look, I'm standing out front of a.m. p.m.
- [29:05]
Tim Miller
Right now and, well, you're sweet and all, but I found something more fulfilling, even kind of cheesy.
- [29:10]
Carol Leonnig
But I like it.
- [29:11]
Tim Miller
Sure, you met some of my dietary.
- [29:13]
Carol Leonnig
Needs, but they've just got it all.
- [29:15]
Tim Miller
So farewell o meal so long, you strange soggy.
- [29:19]
Matt Rogers
Break up with bland breakfast and taste.
- [29:21]
Tim Miller
AM PM's bacon, egg and cheese biscuit.
- [29:23]
Matt Rogers
Made with K tree eggs, smoked bacon and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit.
- [29:27]
Tim Miller
AM P M. Too much. Good stuff. All right, we are back with one of my faves, senior investigative reporter at Ms. Now. We're about to be Ms. Now, a four time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book out this week is How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department, which she co authored with Aaron Davis. It's Carol Lennig. What's going on, Carol?
- [29:49]
Carol Leonnig
Tim, I'm so glad to be with you. I love it when you say one of my favorites because all of my friends just think I'm so cool that I know you.
- [29:58]
Tim Miller
Okay, well, great. Now I'm blushing. And it's true. You know, I have a lot of, you know, I can argue and I can spin, but I can't really bullshit. People know. If I tell you you're one of my favorites and I'm faking it, you can see it on my face as anybody knows who watches like a Piers Morgan performance that I, I want to get into the book. When did you write this book, by the way? You're breaking news stories. Did Aaron do most of the work or you just kind of.
- [30:25]
Carol Leonnig
Yeah, he did it all. He wrote the whole thing. I just do the TV. We started this book in 2023. I mean, the reporting for it obviously a subject we were really interested in generally as reporters. But we decided to step back from the dizzying headlines and try to figure out why is DOJ acting so differently than we have expected. Why are we. It kind of started with a tip. I got that there was no investigation of Donald Trump's potential effort to overturn the election in 2021. Like there was. People were saying to me, you know, you think there's an investigation? There's not. And when we got going on that road, we realized DOJ was really acting oddly. And then we thought we need to go deeper. And a book lets you.
- [31:16]
Tim Miller
I thought it was kind of an interesting way to start the book with the Attorney General's Honors Program kind of explaining what that was, I didn't know anything about that. And then kind of go into a couple of examples of some regular just line prosecutors who were doing their job, Camille Shields and David Kent. And so I want to get into kind of the big stories that you cover during this decade, but just talk about why you wanted to focus on. On that element of it, like the types of people that go in, the talent, like what it is that is driving them.
- [31:47]
Carol Leonnig
I'm so tickled that you zone in on those two people and the Honors program because we wanted to introduce the Department of Justice to people who don't cover it, don't know its norms, don't know how venerable an institution it is, don't know the kind of calling that prosecutors and investigators have, that people, this place. So it's a living, breathing institution of these people with this shared mission. No matter their ideological views, no matter which party they vote for, which most of them don't know among each other who their party affiliation is, what their party affiliation is, these people kind of have a shared notion of what's right and why we bring prosecutions, why we bring cases. And it's not because we don't like people, and it's not because we have some evidence we can do it. It's very thoughtful. So when we open with Camille Shields and David Kent, they are being browbeaten by Donald Trump indirectly. I mean, he's not coming at them specifically, but he is pushing, pushing, pushing the Department of Justice to criminally charge former acting FBI Director Andy McCabe, who opened an investigation of Donald Trump. Right. That's his crime. But Donald Trump wanted him charged for other things. Is it a righteous case? Like, is it in the public interest to charge this guy with misleading or lying to some federal investigators when he was asked a question about a leak in a newspaper story? But we also wanted to explain how do people get this shared vision and how do they get these values? And the Honors program is the way so many of them, the people who led the Department of Justice under Joe Biden and even in the first Trump administration, so many of them came up through that program. It's like the youngest, best, brightest lawyers that came out of law school. We're grabbing them, we're training them young, and we're going to teach them what, what it means to represent the United States of America.
- [33:57]
Tim Miller
Obviously, just huge changes in the reputation of the Justice Department and the mores and how it's worked. But the actual people since you've been covering this, how many of them are still there? How Much of this has cycled through. Who are the new people that are coming in in those types of roles?
- [34:15]
Carol Leonnig
Huge fast forward and wow. I mean, there's an estimate out there that 4,000 FBI agents and federal prosecutors have left the Department of justice since January 20th. You know, the afternoon of January 20th, I saw a century worth of DOJ leadership be reassigned and essentially pressured to resign. People who were in charge of counterterror. George Toscas had led most of the counterterror investigations of the last two decades for the Department of Justice, and poof, he's out. The people that are still there, and I do talk to quite a few of them, are holding on to something, and that is that this department needs them. That there are bread and butter cases. Not the sexy, you know, grab the headlines, politically tinged cases like Eric Adams and New York Mayor charged with taking bribes, or Donald Trump charged with hoarding and concealing and obstructing justice with classified records. There are bread and butter cases. And these people are, are saying somebody with integrity and with our shared values has to do this work. Some of them also want to bear witness to the corruption and manipulation of the department and make sure there's someone there to see it.
- [35:37]
Tim Miller
Wow. So you think there are people who are staying, like, really, that have that, like, three year horizon in mind, four year horizon in mind of like, we need to be here for this because eventually this thing will have to be rebuilt.
- [35:50]
Carol Leonnig
Yes. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day who said, I'm just holding on. I'm just holding on because this can't stand.
- [35:59]
Tim Miller
I want to get back into some of the specific case you're going in the book and folks should obviously get it. And some of this stuff, I have to admit, I was reading it yesterday at, at the local cafe and, you know, some of it's triggering. So I had to fast forward through a couple of the cases so everybody can choose which ones they can revisit. The one that I was digging in the deepest on, though, because I've been obsessed with this. I was so happy you wrote about it. Was the Egypt bribe case something a lot of folks have forgotten about, but this was just a small part of the Mueller investigation, was that there's been a kind of mysterious $10 million in US cash that had been taken out of an Egyptian bank that we don't know what happened to it? Maybe coincidentally, maybe not, Donald Trump put in $10 million into his campaign around a similar time. So for folks who aren't familiar with that, just give us The Reader's Digest on that investigation.
- [36:51]
Carol Leonnig
You did a good summary. We were kind of gobsmacked, Aaron and I, my co author, Aaron Davis, when we learned that there was this investigation that got shut down. And the investigation began, actually because of a really unusual referral from the CIA. There was a informant who reported to his intelligence handlers, if you can imagine this, Tim, that he had information that LCC had ordered his folks to get $10 million to Donald Trump in the form of a illegal campaign contribution, a friendly campaign contribution in 2016. Now, you'll remember El Sisi met the Egyptian president, met with Trump in an interesting sidebar during Trump's campaign and the United Nations General assembly private meeting, initially public, but then private. It was during this time that everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
- [37:55]
Tim Miller
Duh.
- [37:56]
Carol Leonnig
That didn't work out. Everyone in Donald Trump's campaign was like, this guy will not put any more of his money into the campaign because he thinks he's going to lose. And this was all marketing brouhaha anyway, and we don't have enough money to get to the end with TV advertising. So, anyway, the investigators got this information from the CIA that El Sisi was going to try to give Trump $10 million. And interestingly, at that same time, in the late, late, late, late 2016, right before the election, Trump writes a check for $10 million to his campaign. But Bill Barr, when he got wind of this, as the new Attorney General, he questioned, do you really have the basis, the predicate for doing this investigation? And he scolded FBI Director Chris Wray and said, you better have some, some serious adult supervision of this investigation, because I've got my doubts. And within a matter of a few weeks, the U.S. attorney in D.C. jessie Liu, told the FBI agents she was not going to authorize them to pull Donald Trump's financial bank records to help establish did he get the 10 million.
- [39:15]
Tim Miller
So I was eating my biscuits and frantically pushing through the book, doing the D.C. read of the book, going to the index to see when Egypt comes back in. And it doesn't. It was within the statute when Biden wins again. So I know we're about to get into the Merrick Garland of it all, but did they not open back up the Egypt investigation when they took back over the doj?
- [39:37]
Carol Leonnig
Hey, by the way, your quick read is quite good. You're getting all the juicy bits with your biscuits. Yeah, you nailed it. The statute of limitations had not run, and the Biden DOJ did not open that investigation. There were people who Told us that Merrick Garland was never briefed on it, but like it's kind of a big deal, so. And it was in the news and you know, it's not like it should have been a surprise to anyone that there was this scuttlebutt about El Sisi writing this huge check, allegedly writing this huge check that ended up being, you know, 200 pound bags taken out of an Egyptian bank. That's part of the evidence that the investigators had and they were trying to trace. When it left that bank in Egypt in duffel bags, did it eventually go to Trump? But no, the Biden DOJ did not.
- [40:29]
Tim Miller
Look, and I guess Jessie Liu was not in the DOJ then. She hadn't left.
- [40:34]
Carol Leonnig
She had been essentially shoved out of her U.S. attorney position by Bill Barr. When she got nominated for a higher job, he was like, okay, you got a nomination, get out. I want to put my person in. And that was at the end of the day of 2020.
- [40:49]
Tim Miller
Okay, this is going to be my Candace Owens. This is my. The Egyptian ten million dollar bag is going to become my Brigitte Macron. I'm going to be doing, I'm going to be doing this podcast from Cairo after reading the book again.
- [41:04]
Matt Rogers
Tis the season for identity theft. This time of year most of us are checking off our holiday gift lists. But guess what? Identity thieves have lists too. And your personal information might be on them. Protect your identity with LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss by yourself. Even if you keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements. If your identity is stolen, your own US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. And all plans are backed by the million dollar protection package. The last thing you want to do this holiday season is face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or other financial losses from identity theft all alone. Make this season about joy, not identity theft. With Lifelock, save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code iheart or go to lifelock.com iheart for 40% off. Terms apply.
- [42:04]
Tim Miller
Speaking of things that Merrick didn't look into that quickly. So the Biden DOJ takes over in 2021 after, you know, we all saw the attempted coup in front of our eyes on the television. So it didn't like really take subpoenas to figure out what had happened on January 6. We already knew that the DoJ decided to focus on the folks that had entered the building and that actually the rioters themselves rather than the organizers of the effort. Your reporting includes that were specific agents that pressed multiple times to investigate the Trump part and were rebuffed by senior DOJ leaders, basically until after the Select Committee with Liz Cheney and that crew. Talk to us a little bit about that.
- [42:45]
Carol Leonnig
So I want to start by saying there is no comparison between Merrick Garland and Pam Bondi in terms of the way they ran the Department of Justice.
- [42:56]
Tim Miller
I mean, I have separate complaints. I have different complaints about both.
- [42:59]
Carol Leonnig
Yes, yes. But it's important to note one guy was an institutionalist trying to protect its independence from the White House and its credibility, and the other says, basically, Donald Trump gives me my orders in the morning and I follow them. So what we learned in injustice in our reporting for the book was kind of made my hair stand up, which was that starting In December of 2020, a little, little known team of investigators at the National Archives were noticing that these fake elector certificates had been sent into the archives and to the Senate and that they all looked boilerplate, phony, bogus. And they also looked the same, coordinated. Right. And they came from swing states where a bunch of Republicans from those states, party officials, said that they were the sworn electors, which was false. And they said that Trump had won the election, which was also false. So these investigators at the National Archives went to the Department of Justice and said, hey, not sure, but this looks like a conspiracy. This looks like a potential crime at the base, like mail fraud, wire fraud. They submitted things that were bogus. What was their intent? DOJ is in the middle of investigating the riots. And a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in D.C. eventually gets back to the National Archives investigators and says, yeah, we don't see a case here. So that was the first missed opportunity because they could have started looking there. It's not like you're looking at a violent riot and you're going to get to eventually building the brick one by one, as Merrick Garland wanted to do. You're not going to get from the rioters to the fake electors coordinated in swing states. A lot of people who are inside the Justice Department told us, sources told us, like, we should have been walking and chewing gum, Right? We should have been doing both things. That's the first missed boat. The next missed ball is Thomas Windom, who is plucked out of a U.S. attorney's office in Maryland by the Deputy Attorney General's office in November 2021 and basically instructed, you're the lone prosecutor on this. Go into DC and try to figure out, start looking around to see Are there ties between Trump's orbit and this riot? And as he begins to do that, he asks the FBI chief in the Washington field office to start a grand jury investigation with him. He wants to pull the financial records for the Willard where Rudy Giuliani and the campaign were all based in the days before January 6th. And, you know, Oath Keepers were there with Roger Stone. Like, there was all this smoke that had never been looked into. And the head of the FBI's D.C. officer tells Windham, I'm not subpoenaing the friggin Willard. His exact words. It's weird. He thinks it's inappropriate to start looking at a political campaign and also to pull the records of a hotel where a lot of swanky people probably have affairs. So he concludes no, and he blocks that grand jury. It is not for 15 more months, Tim, after Biden takes office, that the Department of Justice finally. I saw your hand on your face. Finally investigates these fake electors.
- [46:25]
Tim Miller
Here's the other one where the hands on my face. I've got it in all caps on my notes here. Then I guess It's September of 22 when I forget which element of the case it is. They go to Garland and want to move forward. And he says network wouldn't wait till after the midterms. He doesn't want to politicize it. Now, I should just state the investigation was against. Donald Trump wasn't running in the midterms. He was a private citizen in Mar a Lago, but he was planning on running in the 2024 election. So the idea that they didn't want to have any appearance of political impropriety, they decided to not do the investigation before the midterms, but save it until 2023 when Donald Trump is obviously going to be a candidate for office. That seems like a pretty big judgment error to me by Merrick Garland.
- [47:10]
Carol Leonnig
I'm not a prosecutor. I only play a lawyer on tv. But I'll tell you that a very senior former DOJ official, when he read that passage in the book, called me yesterday. I was like walking in Hell's Kitchen trying to look for a piece of pizza that didn't cost $10. And he said, I cannot believe that happened. Mayor Carlin, again, Caesar's wife just wants to be so above board, doesn't want to play any games and errs on the side of caution every time and errs on the side of giving Trump the benefit. Essentially. I want to say the benefit of the doubt, but like the benefit of the Justice Department's carefulness and Thoroughness and apoliticalness. But freezing that case for 60 days when Trump is not a candidate really makes a lot of prosecutors hair blow back when they find out about it.
- [48:11]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And then we go through to the January 6th committee, and obviously, we have a lot of friends of the pot who are involved there with Jean Cheney and Kinzinger and others. And they had said at the time and Schiff and Raskin that essentially that their investigation had spurred on the DOJ and that they had a lot of stuff that DOJ didn't have. You know, being an outsider, it was hard for me to tell whether that was just, like, bravado or, you know, whether maybe there were things DOJ had that they didn't know. And then I'm reading your book, and it's like, DOJ literally didn't know about Cassidy Hutchinson until they saw her on tv. So I guess it was not bravado. They were correct, though, the, you know, Kinzinger in that crowd talking about that was correct, that it was their work.
- [48:55]
Carol Leonnig
That you and I, Tim, you and I were in the same boat. I was watching this in, you know, real time, watching, you know, various sources say to me, especially in the House, like, you know, we're the first footprints in the snow, and we're. We're doing this work, and DOJ isn't. And I was like, huh? It's hard to prove a negative, right? But when we really got down into it for the book, it was so clear that key moments of the House investigation, either through embarrassment or through how public it all was, there were two or three really key moments when the House investigation spurred DOJ to do things that exact same freaking day. So it's, like, hard to say that it didn't impact them. Here's an example. The week of January 10, 2022, there's a story that comes out in Politico that is about a very good story, by the way, about how the House investigation has put together the fake elector scheme and the information they're getting back from swing states because they had actually subpoenaed information and records, and they're getting back this pretty damning evidence about the way it was coordinated. Rachel Maddow, now my colleague at Ms. Now, did, like, a week of programming that was about just this. Like, these electors look coordinated. Where is Merrick Garland? She literally said, where is the doj? And a day later, Thomas Windom, we now know from records and interviews, reached out to that investigator from December 2020 and said, Hey, I think we're going to investigate this. Would you like to be on board? I'm paraphrasing obviously.
- [50:41]
Matt Rogers
Tis the season for identity theft. This time of year most of us are checking off our holiday gift lists. But guess what? Identity thieves have lists too. And your personal information might be on them. Protect your identity with LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss by yourself. Even if you keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements. If your identity is stolen, your own US based restoration special specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. And all plans are backed by the million dollar protection package. The last thing you want to do this holiday season is face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or other financial losses from identity theft all alone. Make this season about joy, not identity theft. With Lifelock, save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOK and use promo code iheart or go to lifelock.com iheart for 40% off. Terms apply.
- [51:41]
Tim Miller
There's a whole section on Jack Smith and I want to get up to kind of looking forward stuff at a couple other news things. But so I encourage you to actually read the book. Is there anything about the Jack Smith investigation in particular that really stood out to you or that section that made you that you hadn't expected when you're doing the reporting on it?
- [51:57]
Carol Leonnig
I mean, first off, watching it from the outside. And Bionic man, no prosecutor has brought a case that fast and certainly not one involving a former president. And he brought two of them. And you know, the guy was to say rigorous is really understating how fast the guy moved and how fast he was whipping everybody on his team to move too. Not because he was trying to indict Donald Trump, but he would say to his team, we can't leave these questions unanswered for Donald Trump or for the public. If they're bogus, we need to answer them. If they're real and there's evidence, we need to bring them before there is a decision about whether or not to return him to the White House. So he had a very different way of approaching this than Merrick Garland, which was, yeah, there's a political calendar, but yeah, we gotta answer the question. So bionic is a word I would use to describe Jack. The other huge surprise to me was that he tried to get Judge Cannon removed from the case and the Solicitor General turned him down. And he did not appeal that to Merrick Garland. He accepted that rejection. The truth is that if the Solicitor General turned down a motion to remove Eileen Cannon from the case. It was probably likely that Attorney General Merrick Garland would also reject that. She, a former clerk, incredibly trusted by Merrick Garland.
- [53:24]
Tim Miller
So I don't know, maybe if the president was awake, we would have had a different attorney general by then, but I guess that's a different problem. No need to comment on that, Carol. That's what we call editorializing. I want to go forward. The long term fixing of this is hard for me to figure and you've talked about all the people who have left. But now even if you imagine a situation where a Democrat or a reform minded Republican, that seems unlikely, but who the hell knows wins in 2029, it's kind of hard to imagine them not. And who the hell knows what crimes will be done by this administration during that time? So the question is, do you go the Merrick Garland route? Do you try to investigate any corruption related to the crypto schemes or anything else of this administration? What do you do with people who've come into this administration who have acted improperly or not acted into the code of the Department of Justice? It feels like a pickle. And I think one of the people in your book basically said it's not going to get fixed in our lifetimes. And that's sad, but it's kind of what it seems like to me.
- [54:28]
Carol Leonnig
Yeah, the hit the department has taken, as we learned in the book, is it's just not recoverable in the near term because two things you brought up at the beginning, you've lost centuries worth of experience and you can't replace them with a lot of Lindsey Halligan's and expect speaking of the former personal assistant and insurance lawyer that Donald Trump installed in the US Attorney's office in Virginia in order to indict James Comey and Letitia James, career prosecutors wouldn't do it. It's impossible to recover and expect that those folks are going to get replaced appropriately. If you're inserting these lieutenants who salute to the commander and say, sure, we'll charge whoever you want us to charge. The second thing that's hard to recover from is the credibility gap. If you go the Merrick Garland route, you can see some dangers ahead of not holding people to account for their actions. The Department of Justice's mantra is without fear or favor, like who cares who it is? Who cares how important they are? Who cares what their party is? We charge based on the evidence and the public interest. But if you go the hardcore route, I can see some dangers too, because where's the credibility for the doj. Is everybody going to assume that criminal prosecutions have been directed or manipulated by the party in power?
- [56:02]
Tim Miller
Two other news items that have happened since the book. It's the problem of book, timing, scheduling. Is this one a news item? I don't know. I guess this is what I'm asking you. Is this real news or is this fake news? It's hard to know these days. Mike Davis, who's a very unhinged gentleman, he was the one that during the campaign was tweeting about. How about how he's going to put me in the women's gulag? It was kind of like a, kind of a homophobe little gay joke, little funny gay joke between pals if Trump had won. So funny. Yeah, so hilarious. So anyway, he's friends with Bondi and he's been out there doing a lot of MAGA podcasts recently. And in one of them he said, or several of them, I think he said. A federal grand jury has been empaneled in Florida and they'll begin meeting in January to investigate a decade long conspiracy against Trump. The grand jury will consider whether to bring criminal charges against top Democratic figures that Davis claims have colluded to hurt Trump, blah, blah, blah. Is that true? Do we know, do you know anything about this?
- [57:01]
Carol Leonnig
Can I just take a beat and say, yes, that's true and stay tuned. There's more. You know, I'd rather break news at my actual news organization.
- [57:12]
Tim Miller
That's okay, well, you got me. The Bulwark. We're kind of all pals. We're all family here. I'm just like, okay, so you're telling me I have to have a, I have to have a little alarm bell from the Carol Lennig tweet, Twitter or X or MSM Twitter.
- [57:24]
Carol Leonnig
I'm not grinning like sillily. I'm just like, you and I are friends. So I can say you should tune into Ms. Now at some point soon because there is more there and I just think we should wait.
- [57:34]
Tim Miller
It's pretty alarming. I guess I'll just say, what can I say on this? That Davis lists the things that they'll go into Russia investigation, the 2020, et cetera. It's kind of this broad effort to claim there's some conspiracy against Trump. So there are a lot of people that are caught into that dragnet. And I've heard from some of them who are like, we've heard from people who are in the know who are like, you should talk to lawyers, et cetera. So that that's Pretty alarming.
- [58:01]
Carol Leonnig
It is alarming, because if you think about it, it's part of the overall rainbow pattern, which is let's charge everybody with a crime for doing their jobs. They were doing their jobs when they looked fraudulent. Conspiracy to overturn the election by claiming that swing states actually voted for Trump when they obviously did not. Let's charge people who opened an obstruction investigation into me when I fired Jim Comey. Let's criminally charge the former director of the FBI, Jim Comey, for lying to Congress. But really, because he would not absolve Donald Trump publicly of any impropriety in his campaign, having repeated contacts with Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign. Next, let's charge Letitia James, the first person, the New York Attorney General, the first person to actually get a civil fraud case against him.
- [59:01]
Tim Miller
To your point of the book, though, tying it in and not having to speak specifically to the case Davis is talking about, where are they finding all the prosecutors to do these things? And obviously, we've seen in Virginia that a bunch of people have been pushed out and that Halligan comes in and presuming this is actually happening in Florida and in some of the. And that there's other things happening that's alarm and that speaks to the future. It's like, what do you do with the folks who signed up to go along with, like, sham prosecutions?
- [59:27]
Carol Leonnig
It's really a bloodbath. Right. If you're a Prosecutor in any U.S. attorney's office that happens to own one of these grand juries. Virginia, Philadelphia, New York, Maryland, D.C. now the Southern District of Florida. There's another one I'm forgetting. If you're a prosecutor in one of these offices, we are learning you are going to resign if you're forced to do something. Remember, in our book, we have all this cinematic detail of how Danielle Sassoon and her team deal with being ordered to dismiss the bribery charge against Adams. And then every single supervisor of an elite unit in DOJ called the Public Integrity Section, created after Nixon to protect us from corrupt public officials. Every single one of those leaders, in the course of 48 hours, resigns rather than dismiss a case they know is righteous. Dismiss a case where they know the evidence is extremely powerful. Dismiss a case that Donald Trump wants gone so he has some. Some hand over Adams to make him help him with his deportation policies in New York.
- [60:39]
Tim Miller
All right, so last thing the other news you broke since you've been over at Ms. Was the Tom Homan kava bag story. I guess at this point, there's not. It's sort of like there isn't much to advance in that story because the Trump administration isn't going to look into it. But, you know, I'm just wondering if there's any sort of follow up or any sense of what you think the situation is, I guess Homan, it's interesting. Homan is also sort of in this internal political fight in the administration where he's the moderating force, apparently, according to some reporting on the deportations. But I'm just wondering if your reporting is tied in at all, if there's any people are looking at them different.
- [61:19]
Carol Leonnig
I would just say that there's some prosecutors who remind me that there's a five year statute of limitations on bribery. And the meeting that we revealed in September of 2024 where Homan accepted and was taped accepting a bribe kava bag full of $50,000 in cash, that tape still exists, that evidence still exists. And the five year statute of limitations for 2024 is September 2029.
- [61:51]
Tim Miller
Well, hopefully we won't redo the Egypt investigation. People will use the nine months to look into potential, who knows, alleged bribery. And if you're listening from Cairo and have any information you can just, you have me and Carol can find us on signal.
- [62:06]
Carol Leonnig
Tim, did you just say Cairo? If you're listening.
- [62:09]
Tim Miller
Yeah, Cairo. Cairo. If you're listening, call me or Carol. Carol Lanning, the book's Injustice How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department. Appreciate it and we'll be talking to you soon.
- [62:22]
Carol Leonnig
All right, Tim, this was great. Thanks for focusing on our book Injustice.
- [62:26]
Tim Miller
Happy to do it. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then. Peace. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
- [63:57]
Matt Rogers
This time of year, most of us are checking off our holiday gift lists. But identity thieves have lists, too, and your personal information might be on them. Protect your identity with Lifelock. Lifelock monitors millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss. If your identity is stolen, Lifelock will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Make this season about joy, not identity theft. With Lifelock, save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com iheart terms apply.