Morning Shots: Justice Department Drops FOUR Additional Reflecting Pool Cases - The Bulwark

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[00:02]
A
Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Eggert with the Bulwark. Welcome to Morning Shots. I am here as always with my colleague Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We come live every Tuesday morning to talk about what we've been writing about in our newsletter and what else is going on in the news. Kind of a big day in Washington. We have a lot of stories, but we're going to start with something that's happening right now, which is the committee vote to confirm Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General, Todd Blanche. There have been a lot of holdups to this vote, a lot of behind the scenes jockeying with Trump and his Republican senators over whether or not Blanche is going to be allowed through. They've worked all that out. So it looks like Blanche is going to get out of this hearing with a positive vote and then go to the Senate for a full confirmation vote. Let's listen in on Senator John Cornyn, who was one of the last holdouts for Blanche, talking about that vote in committee this morning.
[01:00]
B
Assertion on behalf of the United States of America that weaponization fund is dead. And of course, I expect them to live up to that in any future litigation. Given this agreement with Mr. Blanch, I expect the department to live up to to this in future litigation and I will vote to advance him out of the committee today.
[01:28]
A
So Cornyn, as he said twice, expects the Justice Department to live up to its commitment to keep this anti weaponization fund dead. And for that reason, he's going to be a yes on Blanche and so will Senator Thom Tillis. Bill, what do you think about where this has all landed? We've talked about this story a lot in the past. It does seem like they did manage to squeeze a couple of small concessions out of the White House here. And yet what we're left with is Attorney General Todd Blanch, of all people.
[01:56]
C
Yeah, and pretty fake concessions when you look at the details. But for some reason, coroner focused on this one aspect of what Blanche has done at Justice. He's also done the political prosecutions that we all know about. He's done a million other things honestly, that have turned the Department of Justice into Trump's personal law firm. They chose not to take a cast, put a black cast, a blind eye to all those, to say nothing of his really central role in the Epstein cover up. One just forgets how much that was his thing, including flying down to see Maxwell, obviously. And then she, a week later ends up at a, at a much nicer facility, which somehow Blanche now claims he didn't know about, even though the Bureau of Prisons reports to the deputy attorney general, which was his, his job at the time. So they want to confirm blanche. They're going to confirm blanche. We've seen this movie before with Hexath and Patel and all the other controversial nominees who made it through this Republican Senate. The Senate will go out at the end of this week. And I do think Democrats can say, if you want any check on Trump, you need to vote for a Democratic Senate, because this Republican Senate, after a little bit of squawking and squealing, ends up bending the knee.
[03:05]
A
Yeah. It is really remarkable when you just kind of stack up all the factors. Right. When you look at how, on the one hand, Donald Trump's popularity is lower than it has ever been before, he's at, as our fearless leader Sarah Longwell likes to say, he's at the Bush line. He's at the point of the point where past presidents, even when they have seen strong loyalty from their parties up until that point, as the political pressures mount and as actual midterm accountability grows nearer, a lot of times you have seen Congress find it useful, find it auspicious to create more distance even with an unpopular president in their own party, to be seen as pushing back strongly. Obviously, it's a little bit of a different case with Cornyn and Tillis. They are not fighting for their own political lives anymore. Their careers are already over, but they're over because Donald Trump, Trump brought an end to them. Donald Trump has, has decreed them insufficiently MAGA and has endorsed other people and kicked them out of the party. And so you would think there would be even more freedom, even more incentive for these guys to actually draw some lines in the sand and say, you know, we would actually prefer to hold out for an attorney general pick who is not a former defense lawyer of yours who continues to act like a current defense lawyer of yours in all of his official duties. But it just seems like these guys have so internalized and imbibed the, I don't know, the rules of the road of Trump America as they have allowed them to develop up around them over all of these years that even just getting these tiny little concessions like the anti weaponization fund being canceled are really all that they can muster in terms of showing an independent streak here.
[04:47]
C
Yeah, I mean, most of the Republican conference likes what Trump is doing. I gather there are a few people who have qualms, but they seem to suppress those qualms pretty easily.
[04:58]
A
Yeah, I don't know. It's really amazing. I mean, do you foresee now that they have gotten this vote through, or they are in the process of getting this vote through the committee? I guess it's possible that we could still see this fall apart on the Senate floor. Obviously, there are a number of more centrist senators, Republican senators who are up for reelection, Susan Collins, for instance, who aren't on this committee, but who in theory could put a wrench in the gears when it comes to the whole Senate voting. What's your read on that? Do you think there's any reason to think that Blanche could run into trouble later, or was this the primary roadblock he needed to get through?
[05:37]
C
Yeah, not much reason to think so. Murkowski has already signaled that she's probably going to go along if Cornyn does. Collins, I think, too, and I don't the others. I mean, I will say one thing. It's easy to sit here and say, oh, gee, they should distance themselves from Trump. It's not clear that would work politically. At the end of the day, there's so much they've already gotten along with that. If you're John Husted in Ohio or Dan Sullivan in Alaska. Sullivan's on armed services. He's voted to confirm Hegseth. He's not said a word about criticism, to my knowledge, maybe a word, but certainly has done nothing to check the unbelievable misconduct of the Iran war, something he knows quite a lot about as a former former Marine, senior Marine officer. So these guys are. So are. They're in so deep, they figure, what's the point now? And I. I'm not sure they're wrong politically. I mean, the best thing for them is for Trump to rise a little bit from 35% to 38 or 40%, not for them to try to persuade a few swing voters that they're really independent of Trump. It's awfully late in the day of that. So I've always thought the electoral appeal that for Republican, quote, moderates. And how many are there, incidentally? We're talking about four or five. I mean, you know, to break was always a little oversold. Their own pollsters are telling them that won't work, and so they should break on grounds of actual good government or conscience or something. But I think we're beyond that, too.
[06:51]
A
Yeah. Yeah. That's such an interesting point. I don't think I've thought about it in quite those terms before. I mean, obviously it is like a decade old now to talk about Trumpism as a political force being a kind of cult. Right. And usually People mean that in sort of the psychological sense that people have this deep, sort of inexplicable parasocial affinity for the guy and they behave toward him the way that people do when they are really deeply hoodwinked and brought in on something like this. But what you just gestured at is another way in which the cult thing really applies, which is just, you burned all your bridges. You have deprived yourself if you're a Republican office holder, except in a vanishingly small number of cases. And in fact, I really can't think of any in terms of people who are left today. You've deprived yourself of off ramps, you've missed all of the possible exits, and now even if you'd like one, it doesn't really appear that there are a lot. And so your options are to just sort of self immolate and sacrifice yourself by going out and telling the truth and putting up roadblocks to this guy's agenda, or to just keep riding or dying and just hoping it's riding and not dying. And even as the odds of that get worse and worse because he gets less and less popular, that doesn't, that doesn't create new, attractive options for you politically, just because the president you've attached yourself to is so unpopular. I had not thought of it like that before.
[08:16]
C
Right. And to be fair, I mean, just even if they hadn't attached themselves that much to Trump, which God knows they have, the history of 1994, 2010, the big two big off year wave elections for Republicans that I was pretty closely involved in in the case of 94 and followed closely in 2010, it didn't help those Democrats who hadn't voted, didn't help them much. In rare cases, it helped them at all. Actually, if they didn't vote for the most controversial Democratic bills under Clinton or under, under Obama. I mean, it just, if it's a midterm election, if the president's party has control both houses of Congress, it's a referendum on the president and his governance. And breaking on one or two things just doesn't do you that much good. And I remember in 94, there was all this talk about, oh, smart Southern, and they were smart Southern Democrats who didn't agree with Clinton on some of the stuff. And they were, they had voted not with him or made clear their problem, their reservations, much, much, much more so than anyone has with Trump. You know, they got swept away, too. So if it's a wave, it's a wave. And they probably just, you know, to mix the metaphor to adapt Yours, I mean, you're better off just buckling yourself into the boat and hoping it makes it through the tsunami. You know, at this point, I don't defend this judgment, but I think people are a little too quick to assume they're being foolish. They're not being foolish. They just, they are where they are, you know.
[09:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, that's a good point. I think that's psychologically useful when it comes to assessing why these people are doing the things they're doing. Still wish they wouldn't though. Still wish they help planche to go pound sand. Right. Wouldn't that be nice? But it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. So we're gonna see. Let's play one more clip from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here just because I think this does really underscore that this is a vulnerability that Democrats are going to push on and should push on going into the midterms. So let's hear from White House.
[10:01]
B
Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party line vote we are going to advance out of this committee probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of Attorney General of the United States. The reasons to vote against him number in the hundreds. But let's just focus on a few where my Republican colleagues purport to have great concern. Let's start with the Epstein files where Todd Blanche participated in the COVID up, continues to participate in the COVID up and is responsible for a massive screw
[10:56]
A
up
[10:58]
B
of the release of the documents.
[11:02]
A
Yeah, and he goes on from there. But yeah, that did happen. That's true. That's factual. I guess I have to quibble a little bit with White House most discreditable person ever to be advanced for the nomination. I'm sorry, that's still Matt Gaetz. In my particular opinion. Gates never actually got the opportunity to do the work that would have shown him to be just as discreditable as Blanche has shown himself to be. But I will die on that particular Hill. But yeah, I mean, anything to add on Blanch before we move on to other stuff? Bill?
[11:29]
C
No, I will see if the Democrats put up a fight and do echo what White House has said in committee and others are saying today in committee, this morning in committee and try to make the issue just keep it alive. I mean it does make some difference how much talk there is about it over the next four or five days. Democrats can make the vote put off, can, you know, use their time on the floor and make the Vote, make the thing stretch out through the week, rather than be good colleagues and look forward to their five week recess or six weeks. I can't keep track and desperately get out of town Thursday night or something. So we're just gonna see if the Democrats, Democratic senators at least, are in a fighting mode, even if they are very likely to lose.
[12:05]
A
Yeah, put the screws on them. Come on. Okay, that's enough about Blanche, who is the acting Attorney General and is likely to lose that acting bit here. Pretty soon he is gonna be President Trump's Attorney general, barring some crazy unforeseen eventuality. So we'll keep covering that, of course, but we got actually like a million more stories today. So let's move on from this to the story that I am personally obsessed with. And I have started to feel like I need to apologize for this one in advance. But it's the reflecting pool people. We're still crazy about the reflecting pool over here.
[12:37]
C
No apologies. No apologies necessary.
[12:39]
A
You see people out here, the Nate Silvers of the world. I hope I'm not misattributing that. Cause I didn't look it up. But you see these things from people where they're like, ah, you know, the resistance media is so obsessed with these little, these frivolities, these stories that don't matter at all. Like the reflecting pool. And look, the reflecting pool does not matter at all. This is true, this is factual. Doesn't really matter what state this little strip of water is in on the grand scale, factually speaking. But that fact just makes it all the more crazy that Donald Trump and his Justice Department tried to put a bunch of people in prison for years just to cover up how, how badly they had done a little resurfacing project, which also didn't matter. Like, none of this stuff mattered at all, except that it was important to the President's ego and so he tried to ruin people's lives over it. We have new headlines on this. We have new news of this overnight. A couple more people. There are a number of additional cases, additional criminal charges that were filed against the supposed reflecting pool vandals. That Olympian, the Olympian canoeist who had his case dropped a couple of days ago has now led. Some of these other people are like, well, you dropped the charges against him. How about you drop the charges against us? Jeanine Pirro has now done this. So the whole thing is falling apart. They have less than a leg to stand on. Everybody's known this all along. But the crazy thing has been how Donald Trump has responded throughout all of this, he has been extremely unhappy with his prosecutors for admitting in court the true fact that none of these people committed any crimes that they should be sent to prison. Prison for. So let's just hear the president talking about Jeanine Pirro and and these cases yesterday. Have you spoken to Jeanine Pirro about her decision to drop criminal.
[14:23]
B
Made a mistake. There was vandalism. I just told you we did, I think 78. One of the things was the reflecting pool hasn't worked since 1922 because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it's the largest, longest pool ever. All that.
[14:41]
A
Let's go on to that next clip, too. Real quick here. Just with Pirro.
[14:44]
B
Then it got carried away because the judge was extremely unfriendly to Jeanine. And frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department.
[15:03]
A
It has to be so interesting psychologically to be Donald Trump right now because you have this totally insane view of the world in your mind and you really do get high on your own supply and convince yourselves of these things like vandals destroyed my beautiful reflecting pool. And unlike in your first term where you had normal lawyers around who were running these things down for you, when these things fall apart, you can no longer just say deep state. You can no longer say, you know, oh, you know, my, even my own people are trying to subvert my agenda. Because now it's not normal people in there, it's Fox News personalities like Jeanine Pirro who you put in there for no other reason other than that you knew they would be enthusiastic to prosecute your enemies for you. But they're not doing it. They're not going and getting your enemies the way you want them to. And like, the way that that must just boggle the guy's mind is amazing to me, unless you just think he's lying, which is also possible. But I really do think that this is one where he's high on his own supply. What do you think, Bill? Are we going to keep Jeanine? Is she going to stick around? Those comments, by the way, were before she dropped these additional charges overnight.
[16:07]
C
Yeah, I don't know whether he'll keep her or not, but I do want to just say it's not just like she gave a press conference and slandered David Hearn or the others who were indicted for mismatch. She went to a grand jury. I mean, I watch these British crime histories And I don't know anything actually about British law, but there's something they're always telling these witnesses who were not cooperating or telling lies that we could get you for perverting the course of justice. That seems to be a phrase that they use over there. And they are perverting the course of justice in a pretty serious way. Going to a grand jury and misrepresenting facts to a grand jury is something that gets people, has gotten other prosecutors and other jurisdictions and disparate, I gather, and is certainly frowned upon to say the least. And again, the degree to which this is not just one person. Right. She has subordinates doing work there. The Department of Interior was very much involved and now they're blaming each other. But again, that's a whole other federal department. The Park Service test. They with FBI were out there and some of them may have testified to the grand jury. The degree to which the perversion of justice is running through the breadth and depth of the Trump administration is the ominous thing. And what's mostly, I agree, a ridiculous instance it turned out. Also, the final point, just this 67 year old former Olympian canoeist had good representation. I know I'm a little involved in it. I know a little bit about the group. A couple of the groups that helped represent him, they do pro bono work. They raise money to do that. So again, someone else in some other city who's arrested equally bogus charges for getting in the way of an ICE agent or God knows what. Right. And the million things they could do, they don't necessarily have quite the same publicity. They may not have the same access. The money isn't infinite. The Justice Department has, as it were, infinite amounts of money to go after these people. The world of the pro boater defense bar has to go out and raise money for these to help. Other people will get intimidated. Maybe they take a plea deal. Maybe they decide not worth risking getting too close to this particular situation. So I do think that there is an ominous side to it as well as a ridiculous side.
[18:12]
A
Yeah, and the ominous side is heightened by the ridiculous side. I mean, just the lengths to which these guys have been willing to pervert the justice system in order to just again, do nothing except win some silly little PR fight in the eyes of their base. Only because nobody else finds this stuff compelling at all about whose fault it is that the liner they put down is peeling up off the bottom of the reflecting pool. That is the cause of all of this. I mean, there's no fight too petty as long as it matters to the president personally. And as soon as it matters to the president personally, it doesn't matter how petty it was, it's his word. And the whole apparatus of the government lurches into motion and pushes as far as it can possibly push before it becomes like, personally intolerable for any of the small people who are doing the work in a selfish capacity before they start to be like, wow, I could actually lose my livelihood if I pursue this one step further. And maybe, as you say, some of them even took a few steps down that path before they got cold feet and chickened out. So that's that. We're not going to spend the whole rest of our lives talking about the Reflecting Pool, one assumes. But who knows? I guess they're going to resurface it again. And there could be more funny stuff down the line. But it's just, I mean, what a little vignette and what an amazing thing to have been sort of like the fifth most significant story of Donald Trump's second term in office for good reasons. As we, as we have laid out here. Let's talk about Max Miller. Can we talk about Max Miller? This, this, this has been a ludicrous scandal. We've been talking about it a lot since this weekend. We've had some developments, if you have not been following along with the sordid, sad saga of this Ohio Congressman in Ohio 7th district, Max Miller has been going through a very acrimonious divorce proceeding. He has been accused by his ex wife and by other women of domestic abuse. There are allegations that have swirled around his behavior toward his, his own kids. And, and we have seen a lot of shocking developments in this story over the last couple of days, especially since Miller went live online on Sunday morning to dispute a lot of these allegations. He released a bunch of stuff that just made people more confused by the whole thing because he doesn't look very good. And a lot of the stuff that, that he himself released.

Summary7 min read

Episode Overview

Theme:
This edition of Morning Shots with Andrew Eggert and Bill Kristol covers two main political dramas in Washington: the Republican-led committee’s confirmation vote forwarding Donald Trump’s controversial pick for Attorney General, Todd Blanche, to the full Senate; and the Justice Department dropping additional cases in the ongoing “Reflecting Pool” criminal prosecutions—a bizarre saga involving petty government misuse and legal overreach. The episode offers sharp commentary on Republican Senate behavior, Trump’s grip on the party, the weaponization of government for personal vendettas, and the implications for American democracy heading into the midterms.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Senate Committee Advances Trump’s AG Nominee Todd Blanche

Timestamps: 00:02–12:05

Committee Drama:
- After weeks of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, is set to clear committee—thanks to last-minute concessions over an “anti-weaponization fund.”
- Sen. John Cornyn becomes a yes vote after assurances the Justice Department will keep this controversial fund dead (00:59).
The Hollow Concessions:
- Bill Kristol calls the concessions “pretty fake” and underscores Blanche’s central role in converting Justice into “Trump’s personal law firm,” referencing, among other scandals, Blanche's connection to the Epstein cover-up (01:56).
  
  “They chose not to take a cast, put a black cast, a blind eye to all those, to say nothing of his really central role in the Epstein cover up ... including flying down to see Maxwell, obviously. And then she, a week later ends up at a much nicer facility, which somehow Blanche now claims he didn’t know about, even though the Bureau of Prisons reports to the deputy attorney general, which was his job at the time.”
  — Bill Kristol (01:56)
Party Loyalty Over Principle:
- Andrew expresses disbelief that even politically “safe” Republicans like Cornyn and Tillis—no longer in Trump’s favor and with careers effectively over—still refuse to oppose Trump’s picks, demonstrating the total absorption of Trump’s rules by the GOP (03:05).
  
  “They have internalized and imbibed the, I don’t know, the rules of the road of Trump America as they have allowed them to develop up around them...”
  — Andrew Eggert (03:05)
Structural Analysis:
- Kristol explains how, both practically and psychologically, Republicans see no upside in distancing themselves from Trump—even moderate senators—citing past American electoral history where partial breaks from an unpopular president do little to save members of his party (05:36, 08:15).
  
  “Their own pollsters are telling them [breaking from Trump] won’t work, and so they should break on grounds of actual good government or conscience or something. But I think we’re beyond that, too.”
  — Bill Kristol (05:36)
  
  “You’ve deprived yourself of off ramps, you’ve missed all of the possible exits, and now even if you’d like one, it doesn’t really appear that there are a lot.”
  — Andrew Eggert (06:51)
Democratic Reaction:
- Sheldon Whitehouse delivers a scathing committee speech, labeling Blanche “probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office.” (10:01)
  
  “Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party line vote we are going to advance out of this committee probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of Attorney General of the United States.”
  — Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (10:01)
Will Democrats Fight?
- Kristol wonders if Senate Democrats will use procedural tools to hold up the vote or will “look forward to their five week recess,” hinting at their likely loss but the value of making noise (11:28).

2. The “Reflecting Pool” Case Meltdown

Timestamps: 12:05–18:40

Why It’s Ridiculous... yet Ominous:
- Andrew frames the saga—Trump’s Justice Department zealously pursuing criminal charges against minor “reflecting pool vandals” in a high-profile renovation project gone wrong—as farcical and illustrative of Trumpian pettiness in government (12:39).
  
  “The reflecting pool does not matter at all… but that fact just makes it all the more crazy that Donald Trump and his Justice Department tried to put a bunch of people in prison for years just to cover up how, how badly they had done a little resurfacing project, which also didn’t matter.”
  — Andrew Eggert (12:39)
Case Unraveling:
- Several cases—including that of Jeanine Pirro—are being dropped, leaving the legal justifications in tatters.
- Trump is highly agitated, frustrated that loyalists aren’t willing (or able) to get real convictions out of a “nothing” story (14:23, 14:44).
  
  “It has to be so interesting psychologically to be Donald Trump right now because you have this totally insane view of the world in your mind and you really do get high on your own supply and convince yourselves of these things like vandals destroyed my beautiful reflecting pool.”
  — Andrew Eggert (15:03)
Depth of Government Weaponization:
- Kristol notes the seriousness of prosecutors misleading grand juries, and the breadth of government departments involved in the flimsy prosecutions. He emphasizes how the DOJ’s “infinite” resources can be intimidatory, compared to the finite defense resources available, quietly deterring many from fighting back (16:07).
  
  “Going to a grand jury and misrepresenting facts to a grand jury is something that gets people, has gotten other prosecutors and other jurisdictions disbarred… The Justice Department has, as it were, infinite amounts of money to go after these people. The world of the pro boater defense bar has to go out and raise money for these to help. Other people will get intimidated. Maybe they take a plea deal. Maybe they decide not worth risking getting too close to this particular situation.”
  — Bill Kristol (16:07)
Petty but Dangerous:
- Andrew highlights the pattern: no matter how trivial the offense or the issue, if it matters to Trump’s ego, the machinery of government will pursue it until stopped by resistance or procedural collapse (18:11).
  
  “There’s no fight too petty as long as it matters to the president personally. And as soon as it matters to the president personally, it doesn’t matter how petty it was, it’s his word. And the whole apparatus of the government lurches into motion and pushes as far as it can possibly push...”
  — Andrew Eggert (18:11)

3. Brief: The Max Miller Scandal

Timestamps: 18:40–close

Transition to New Scandal:
- Andrew segues to the ongoing saga of Ohio Congressman Max Miller, recently embroiled in a messy divorce and abuse allegations, after going live on social media to dispute claims in a manner that only increased confusion and suspicion.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“...the Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm.”
— Bill Kristol (01:56)
“They have internalized... the rules of the road of Trump America as they have allowed them to develop up around them over all of these years...”
— Andrew Eggert (03:05)
“You’ve deprived yourself of off ramps, you’ve missed all of the possible exits, and now even if you’d like one, it doesn’t really appear that there are a lot.”
— Andrew Eggert (06:51)
“Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party line vote we are going to advance ... probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of Attorney General of the United States.”
— Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (10:01)
“Going to a grand jury and misrepresenting facts... gets people... disbarred... The Justice Department has infinite amounts of money to go after these people. Other people will get intimidated. Maybe they take a plea deal...”
— Bill Kristol (16:07)

Important Timestamps

00:02–03:05: Breakdown of committee dynamics behind confirming AG nominee Todd Blanche
10:01: Sen. Whitehouse’s fiery remarks on Blanche
12:05–18:11: Explainer and commentary on the reflecting pool prosecutions and the Justice Department’s collapse of cases
14:23–15:03: Trump’s psychological fixation and frustration with the case fallout
16:07: The dangers of government legal overreach and intimidation
18:40: Introduction to Max Miller’s scandal

Tone & Language

Candid, sharp, and occasionally darkly humorous.
Deep skepticism toward Republican leadership’s logic and motivation.
Uses political history to explain current dysfunctions.

Summary Takeaways

This Morning Shots episode dives deep into both the astonishing normalization of ethical lapses within Trump’s GOP and the intertwining of the trivial and the dangerous in modern government weaponization. The hosts succeed in laying bare the chilling implications of party discipline, the erosion of institutional guardrails, and the risk of normalizing abuses of power, even—perhaps especially—in stories as seemingly absurd as those involving the fate of the reflecting pool. A must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the nuts and bolts, and the emotional toll, of contemporary American political life.

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Transcript25 lines

[00:02]
A
Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Eggert with the Bulwark. Welcome to Morning Shots. I am here as always with my colleague Bill Kristol, editor at large of the Bulwark. We come live every Tuesday morning to talk about what we've been writing about in our newsletter and what else is going on in the news. Kind of a big day in Washington. We have a lot of stories, but we're going to start with something that's happening right now, which is the committee vote to confirm Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General, Todd Blanche. There have been a lot of holdups to this vote, a lot of behind the scenes jockeying with Trump and his Republican senators over whether or not Blanche is going to be allowed through. They've worked all that out. So it looks like Blanche is going to get out of this hearing with a positive vote and then go to the Senate for a full confirmation vote. Let's listen in on Senator John Cornyn, who was one of the last holdouts for Blanche, talking about that vote in committee this morning.
[01:00]
B
Assertion on behalf of the United States of America that weaponization fund is dead. And of course, I expect them to live up to that in any future litigation. Given this agreement with Mr. Blanch, I expect the department to live up to to this in future litigation and I will vote to advance him out of the committee today.
[01:28]
A
So Cornyn, as he said twice, expects the Justice Department to live up to its commitment to keep this anti weaponization fund dead. And for that reason, he's going to be a yes on Blanche and so will Senator Thom Tillis. Bill, what do you think about where this has all landed? We've talked about this story a lot in the past. It does seem like they did manage to squeeze a couple of small concessions out of the White House here. And yet what we're left with is Attorney General Todd Blanch, of all people.
[01:56]
C
Yeah, and pretty fake concessions when you look at the details. But for some reason, coroner focused on this one aspect of what Blanche has done at Justice. He's also done the political prosecutions that we all know about. He's done a million other things honestly, that have turned the Department of Justice into Trump's personal law firm. They chose not to take a cast, put a black cast, a blind eye to all those, to say nothing of his really central role in the Epstein cover up. One just forgets how much that was his thing, including flying down to see Maxwell, obviously. And then she, a week later ends up at a, at a much nicer facility, which somehow Blanche now claims he didn't know about, even though the Bureau of Prisons reports to the deputy attorney general, which was his, his job at the time. So they want to confirm blanche. They're going to confirm blanche. We've seen this movie before with Hexath and Patel and all the other controversial nominees who made it through this Republican Senate. The Senate will go out at the end of this week. And I do think Democrats can say, if you want any check on Trump, you need to vote for a Democratic Senate, because this Republican Senate, after a little bit of squawking and squealing, ends up bending the knee.
[03:05]
A
Yeah. It is really remarkable when you just kind of stack up all the factors. Right. When you look at how, on the one hand, Donald Trump's popularity is lower than it has ever been before, he's at, as our fearless leader Sarah Longwell likes to say, he's at the Bush line. He's at the point of the point where past presidents, even when they have seen strong loyalty from their parties up until that point, as the political pressures mount and as actual midterm accountability grows nearer, a lot of times you have seen Congress find it useful, find it auspicious to create more distance even with an unpopular president in their own party, to be seen as pushing back strongly. Obviously, it's a little bit of a different case with Cornyn and Tillis. They are not fighting for their own political lives anymore. Their careers are already over, but they're over because Donald Trump, Trump brought an end to them. Donald Trump has, has decreed them insufficiently MAGA and has endorsed other people and kicked them out of the party. And so you would think there would be even more freedom, even more incentive for these guys to actually draw some lines in the sand and say, you know, we would actually prefer to hold out for an attorney general pick who is not a former defense lawyer of yours who continues to act like a current defense lawyer of yours in all of his official duties. But it just seems like these guys have so internalized and imbibed the, I don't know, the rules of the road of Trump America as they have allowed them to develop up around them over all of these years that even just getting these tiny little concessions like the anti weaponization fund being canceled are really all that they can muster in terms of showing an independent streak here.
[04:47]
C
Yeah, I mean, most of the Republican conference likes what Trump is doing. I gather there are a few people who have qualms, but they seem to suppress those qualms pretty easily.
[04:58]
A
Yeah, I don't know. It's really amazing. I mean, do you foresee now that they have gotten this vote through, or they are in the process of getting this vote through the committee? I guess it's possible that we could still see this fall apart on the Senate floor. Obviously, there are a number of more centrist senators, Republican senators who are up for reelection, Susan Collins, for instance, who aren't on this committee, but who in theory could put a wrench in the gears when it comes to the whole Senate voting. What's your read on that? Do you think there's any reason to think that Blanche could run into trouble later, or was this the primary roadblock he needed to get through?
[05:37]
C
Yeah, not much reason to think so. Murkowski has already signaled that she's probably going to go along if Cornyn does. Collins, I think, too, and I don't the others. I mean, I will say one thing. It's easy to sit here and say, oh, gee, they should distance themselves from Trump. It's not clear that would work politically. At the end of the day, there's so much they've already gotten along with that. If you're John Husted in Ohio or Dan Sullivan in Alaska. Sullivan's on armed services. He's voted to confirm Hegseth. He's not said a word about criticism, to my knowledge, maybe a word, but certainly has done nothing to check the unbelievable misconduct of the Iran war, something he knows quite a lot about as a former former Marine, senior Marine officer. So these guys are. So are. They're in so deep, they figure, what's the point now? And I. I'm not sure they're wrong politically. I mean, the best thing for them is for Trump to rise a little bit from 35% to 38 or 40%, not for them to try to persuade a few swing voters that they're really independent of Trump. It's awfully late in the day of that. So I've always thought the electoral appeal that for Republican, quote, moderates. And how many are there, incidentally? We're talking about four or five. I mean, you know, to break was always a little oversold. Their own pollsters are telling them that won't work, and so they should break on grounds of actual good government or conscience or something. But I think we're beyond that, too.
[06:51]
A
Yeah. Yeah. That's such an interesting point. I don't think I've thought about it in quite those terms before. I mean, obviously it is like a decade old now to talk about Trumpism as a political force being a kind of cult. Right. And usually People mean that in sort of the psychological sense that people have this deep, sort of inexplicable parasocial affinity for the guy and they behave toward him the way that people do when they are really deeply hoodwinked and brought in on something like this. But what you just gestured at is another way in which the cult thing really applies, which is just, you burned all your bridges. You have deprived yourself if you're a Republican office holder, except in a vanishingly small number of cases. And in fact, I really can't think of any in terms of people who are left today. You've deprived yourself of off ramps, you've missed all of the possible exits, and now even if you'd like one, it doesn't really appear that there are a lot. And so your options are to just sort of self immolate and sacrifice yourself by going out and telling the truth and putting up roadblocks to this guy's agenda, or to just keep riding or dying and just hoping it's riding and not dying. And even as the odds of that get worse and worse because he gets less and less popular, that doesn't, that doesn't create new, attractive options for you politically, just because the president you've attached yourself to is so unpopular. I had not thought of it like that before.
[08:16]
C
Right. And to be fair, I mean, just even if they hadn't attached themselves that much to Trump, which God knows they have, the history of 1994, 2010, the big two big off year wave elections for Republicans that I was pretty closely involved in in the case of 94 and followed closely in 2010, it didn't help those Democrats who hadn't voted, didn't help them much. In rare cases, it helped them at all. Actually, if they didn't vote for the most controversial Democratic bills under Clinton or under, under Obama. I mean, it just, if it's a midterm election, if the president's party has control both houses of Congress, it's a referendum on the president and his governance. And breaking on one or two things just doesn't do you that much good. And I remember in 94, there was all this talk about, oh, smart Southern, and they were smart Southern Democrats who didn't agree with Clinton on some of the stuff. And they were, they had voted not with him or made clear their problem, their reservations, much, much, much more so than anyone has with Trump. You know, they got swept away, too. So if it's a wave, it's a wave. And they probably just, you know, to mix the metaphor to adapt Yours, I mean, you're better off just buckling yourself into the boat and hoping it makes it through the tsunami. You know, at this point, I don't defend this judgment, but I think people are a little too quick to assume they're being foolish. They're not being foolish. They just, they are where they are, you know.
[09:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, that's a good point. I think that's psychologically useful when it comes to assessing why these people are doing the things they're doing. Still wish they wouldn't though. Still wish they help planche to go pound sand. Right. Wouldn't that be nice? But it doesn't look like that's gonna happen. So we're gonna see. Let's play one more clip from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here just because I think this does really underscore that this is a vulnerability that Democrats are going to push on and should push on going into the midterms. So let's hear from White House.
[10:01]
B
Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party line vote we are going to advance out of this committee probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of Attorney General of the United States. The reasons to vote against him number in the hundreds. But let's just focus on a few where my Republican colleagues purport to have great concern. Let's start with the Epstein files where Todd Blanche participated in the COVID up, continues to participate in the COVID up and is responsible for a massive screw
[10:56]
A
up
[10:58]
B
of the release of the documents.
[11:02]
A
Yeah, and he goes on from there. But yeah, that did happen. That's true. That's factual. I guess I have to quibble a little bit with White House most discreditable person ever to be advanced for the nomination. I'm sorry, that's still Matt Gaetz. In my particular opinion. Gates never actually got the opportunity to do the work that would have shown him to be just as discreditable as Blanche has shown himself to be. But I will die on that particular Hill. But yeah, I mean, anything to add on Blanch before we move on to other stuff? Bill?
[11:29]
C
No, I will see if the Democrats put up a fight and do echo what White House has said in committee and others are saying today in committee, this morning in committee and try to make the issue just keep it alive. I mean it does make some difference how much talk there is about it over the next four or five days. Democrats can make the vote put off, can, you know, use their time on the floor and make the Vote, make the thing stretch out through the week, rather than be good colleagues and look forward to their five week recess or six weeks. I can't keep track and desperately get out of town Thursday night or something. So we're just gonna see if the Democrats, Democratic senators at least, are in a fighting mode, even if they are very likely to lose.
[12:05]
A
Yeah, put the screws on them. Come on. Okay, that's enough about Blanche, who is the acting Attorney General and is likely to lose that acting bit here. Pretty soon he is gonna be President Trump's Attorney general, barring some crazy unforeseen eventuality. So we'll keep covering that, of course, but we got actually like a million more stories today. So let's move on from this to the story that I am personally obsessed with. And I have started to feel like I need to apologize for this one in advance. But it's the reflecting pool people. We're still crazy about the reflecting pool over here.
[12:37]
C
No apologies. No apologies necessary.
[12:39]
A
You see people out here, the Nate Silvers of the world. I hope I'm not misattributing that. Cause I didn't look it up. But you see these things from people where they're like, ah, you know, the resistance media is so obsessed with these little, these frivolities, these stories that don't matter at all. Like the reflecting pool. And look, the reflecting pool does not matter at all. This is true, this is factual. Doesn't really matter what state this little strip of water is in on the grand scale, factually speaking. But that fact just makes it all the more crazy that Donald Trump and his Justice Department tried to put a bunch of people in prison for years just to cover up how, how badly they had done a little resurfacing project, which also didn't matter. Like, none of this stuff mattered at all, except that it was important to the President's ego and so he tried to ruin people's lives over it. We have new headlines on this. We have new news of this overnight. A couple more people. There are a number of additional cases, additional criminal charges that were filed against the supposed reflecting pool vandals. That Olympian, the Olympian canoeist who had his case dropped a couple of days ago has now led. Some of these other people are like, well, you dropped the charges against him. How about you drop the charges against us? Jeanine Pirro has now done this. So the whole thing is falling apart. They have less than a leg to stand on. Everybody's known this all along. But the crazy thing has been how Donald Trump has responded throughout all of this, he has been extremely unhappy with his prosecutors for admitting in court the true fact that none of these people committed any crimes that they should be sent to prison. Prison for. So let's just hear the president talking about Jeanine Pirro and and these cases yesterday. Have you spoken to Jeanine Pirro about her decision to drop criminal.
[14:23]
B
Made a mistake. There was vandalism. I just told you we did, I think 78. One of the things was the reflecting pool hasn't worked since 1922 because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it's the largest, longest pool ever. All that.
[14:41]
A
Let's go on to that next clip, too. Real quick here. Just with Pirro.
[14:44]
B
Then it got carried away because the judge was extremely unfriendly to Jeanine. And frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department.
[15:03]
A
It has to be so interesting psychologically to be Donald Trump right now because you have this totally insane view of the world in your mind and you really do get high on your own supply and convince yourselves of these things like vandals destroyed my beautiful reflecting pool. And unlike in your first term where you had normal lawyers around who were running these things down for you, when these things fall apart, you can no longer just say deep state. You can no longer say, you know, oh, you know, my, even my own people are trying to subvert my agenda. Because now it's not normal people in there, it's Fox News personalities like Jeanine Pirro who you put in there for no other reason other than that you knew they would be enthusiastic to prosecute your enemies for you. But they're not doing it. They're not going and getting your enemies the way you want them to. And like, the way that that must just boggle the guy's mind is amazing to me, unless you just think he's lying, which is also possible. But I really do think that this is one where he's high on his own supply. What do you think, Bill? Are we going to keep Jeanine? Is she going to stick around? Those comments, by the way, were before she dropped these additional charges overnight.
[16:07]
C
Yeah, I don't know whether he'll keep her or not, but I do want to just say it's not just like she gave a press conference and slandered David Hearn or the others who were indicted for mismatch. She went to a grand jury. I mean, I watch these British crime histories And I don't know anything actually about British law, but there's something they're always telling these witnesses who were not cooperating or telling lies that we could get you for perverting the course of justice. That seems to be a phrase that they use over there. And they are perverting the course of justice in a pretty serious way. Going to a grand jury and misrepresenting facts to a grand jury is something that gets people, has gotten other prosecutors and other jurisdictions and disparate, I gather, and is certainly frowned upon to say the least. And again, the degree to which this is not just one person. Right. She has subordinates doing work there. The Department of Interior was very much involved and now they're blaming each other. But again, that's a whole other federal department. The Park Service test. They with FBI were out there and some of them may have testified to the grand jury. The degree to which the perversion of justice is running through the breadth and depth of the Trump administration is the ominous thing. And what's mostly, I agree, a ridiculous instance it turned out. Also, the final point, just this 67 year old former Olympian canoeist had good representation. I know I'm a little involved in it. I know a little bit about the group. A couple of the groups that helped represent him, they do pro bono work. They raise money to do that. So again, someone else in some other city who's arrested equally bogus charges for getting in the way of an ICE agent or God knows what. Right. And the million things they could do, they don't necessarily have quite the same publicity. They may not have the same access. The money isn't infinite. The Justice Department has, as it were, infinite amounts of money to go after these people. The world of the pro boater defense bar has to go out and raise money for these to help. Other people will get intimidated. Maybe they take a plea deal. Maybe they decide not worth risking getting too close to this particular situation. So I do think that there is an ominous side to it as well as a ridiculous side.
[18:12]
A
Yeah, and the ominous side is heightened by the ridiculous side. I mean, just the lengths to which these guys have been willing to pervert the justice system in order to just again, do nothing except win some silly little PR fight in the eyes of their base. Only because nobody else finds this stuff compelling at all about whose fault it is that the liner they put down is peeling up off the bottom of the reflecting pool. That is the cause of all of this. I mean, there's no fight too petty as long as it matters to the president personally. And as soon as it matters to the president personally, it doesn't matter how petty it was, it's his word. And the whole apparatus of the government lurches into motion and pushes as far as it can possibly push before it becomes like, personally intolerable for any of the small people who are doing the work in a selfish capacity before they start to be like, wow, I could actually lose my livelihood if I pursue this one step further. And maybe, as you say, some of them even took a few steps down that path before they got cold feet and chickened out. So that's that. We're not going to spend the whole rest of our lives talking about the Reflecting Pool, one assumes. But who knows? I guess they're going to resurface it again. And there could be more funny stuff down the line. But it's just, I mean, what a little vignette and what an amazing thing to have been sort of like the fifth most significant story of Donald Trump's second term in office for good reasons. As we, as we have laid out here. Let's talk about Max Miller. Can we talk about Max Miller? This, this, this has been a ludicrous scandal. We've been talking about it a lot since this weekend. We've had some developments, if you have not been following along with the sordid, sad saga of this Ohio Congressman in Ohio 7th district, Max Miller has been going through a very acrimonious divorce proceeding. He has been accused by his ex wife and by other women of domestic abuse. There are allegations that have swirled around his behavior toward his, his own kids. And, and we have seen a lot of shocking developments in this story over the last couple of days, especially since Miller went live online on Sunday morning to dispute a lot of these allegations. He released a bunch of stuff that just made people more confused by the whole thing because he doesn't look very good. And a lot of the stuff that, that he himself released.