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- [00:01]
Alison Gill
Diamond Dames, mount up.
- [00:06]
Charlotte Clymer
I'm Charlotte Clymer.
- [00:08]
Alison Gill
And I'm Alison Gill. Hey, Charlotte, what if you and I joined forces to create a weekly podcast amid all the chaos of the news to chat about the most recent episode of season four of Ted Lasso?
- [00:18]
Charlotte Clymer
Well, Allison, we'd be taking delight amid the spite to sit and write and bring some light on Wednesday nights. I mean, look, everything right now is ridiculous. I know we're all stressed out with the state of the country and we all deserve some joy. Ted Lasso was there for us in the middle of the pandemic, and he's back to offer us a respite from Trump 2.0 right before the midterms.
- [00:41]
Alison Gill
That's right. We believe in Rom communism. I mean, if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan can go through some heartfelt struggles and still end up happy, then so can we. So subscribe to Diamond Dames for free right now to get notifications, and then you can join us every week and after each episode of ted Lasso Season 4, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:58]
Charlotte Clymer
And remember, be a goldfish. Diamond Names Dismount,
- [01:07]
Alison Gill
barbecue sauce. Hey, Everybody, it's Friday, July 24th, 2026. I'm Alison Gill and this is Beans Talk. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Beans Talk. I want to let you know I'm going to be traveling to D.C. next week, and since Dana's still out, we're going to go dark here on the Beans Talk for a week from Monday through Friday of next week. And then we'll be back in the first week of August. I think it would be the first week of August. Yeah, I'm totally losing track of time. So, yeah, I'm going to go to D.C. because there's going to be this amazing Epstein Trump bookmobile. Kind of like those little pop up stores and libraries. They had reading rooms where they printed out all of the Epstein files. You could just see the massive amount, you know, of, of Epstein files. They're doing a mobile version of this. We're going to kick it off on Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill. There's going to be some members of Congress speaking, some Epstein survivors speaking. And so I want to go be part of that. It's all part of defiance.org and they're, you know, the, their efforts to come up with actions that we can do to fight back against this regime. And if you want to join, by the way, and see what they're all about, I can get you three months free by going to defiance.org beans and I'm going to be talking to my friend Miles Taylor on the Daily Beans audio podcast, which we will be doing all next week. And that's going to be on Tuesday's episode of the Daily Beans. So I just wanted to kind of give everybody the the skinny on that as to why we're going dark for a week. Got a lot of traveling, a lot of work with defiance.org so I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about this criminal referral that Jim Jordan, who, by the way, still hasn't responded to his subpoena from the January 6 committee, a criminal referral he made about Jack Smith to the Justice Department. And we're going to cover this in a lot of depth and get pretty wonky on Unjustified. That's a podcast that comes out on Sundays. It's a podcast I do with former deputy director of the FBI Andy McCabe. It's free wherever you get your podcast. But I wanted to talk a little bit about this criminal referral here. Listen to what Rep. Jamie Raskin had to say on the referral.
- [03:27]
Jamie Raskin
The criminal referral against Jack Smith is utterly absurd. Jack Smith correctly and honestly answered every question that they asked him. Now they're wishing that they had asked him other questions. And so they're referring him for perjury because he didn't answer questions that he had never been posed. You know, he's a telegenic guy, but he's not telepathic. I mean, he can't pluck out of their minds the questions that they're going to wish they had asked at a later moment. So obviously this is all to placate and soothe the wounded ego of somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it's got nothing to do with the law and they're going to be laughed out of court.
- [04:07]
Alison Gill
So what he's referring to there is legally the principle that he's talking about is called the Bronston literal truth defense. Now, this came to, you know, my knowledge, like I learned about the Bronston literal truth defense while reading filings in the Comey case. And I looked it up. It comes from the 1973 case, Bronston v. United States. Samuel Bronston was a movie press company president. He was like a owned a movie studio and it was in bankruptcy proceedings. And he was asked if he had any Swiss bank accounts. Now, he answered that his company had an account in Zurich, but he didn't say the he kind of left out the fact that he personally had a separate Swiss bank account. But again, he was asked if he had Any accounts? Swiss bank accounts. He said his company had one in Zurich. Now that's literally true. He left some, some stuff out, though. And the Supreme Court unanimously reversed his perjury conviction. It held that the federal perjury statute does not reach a statement that is technically true on its face, even if it's meant to deceive. Chief Justice Warren Berger wrote for a unanimous court that responses to questions made under oath that relayed truthful information in and of themselves but were intended to mislead or evade the examiner could not be prosecuted even if they were intended to mislead or evade the examiner. Instead, the criminal justice system has to rely on more carefully worded follow up questions. Now, the court stated that the burden is on the lawyer or the examiner to ask precise follow up questions to pin down evasive witnesses, rather than relying on perjury charges to fix ambiguous testimony or to fix the fact that the questioner didn't ask the proper questions. In fact, as I said, I learned about this, the Bronston literal truth defense during the Comey case, the first one, not the seashells one, but the perjury one. Jim Comey filed a motion to dismiss that first indictment against him, which was a 1001 charge. They call it perjury. And he cited Bronston v. United States. This was back in October. Here's what they wrote. Section 1001A2 authorizes the government to prosecute witnesses who misled government investigators by giving materially false answers to clear questions. But it does not authorize the government to create confusion by posing an imprecise question and then seek to exploit that confusion by placing an after the fact, nefarious interpretation on the ensuing benign answer. Indeed, basic due process principles in criminal law require that the questioner frame his questions with clarity so that a witness does not have to guess. The burden is on the questioner to pin the witness down on the specific object of the questioner's inquiry. Cited Bronston v. United States, 1973. Accordingly, quote, precise questioning is imperative as a predicate for the offense of perjury, and a perjury statute cannot be invoked so long as the witness speaks the literal truth. That's when I first learned about it. And as far as when a court should dismiss a faulty 1001 perjury charge, meaning is it proper to dismiss it during pretrial motions practice? Or is it more proper to dismiss it during trial when it comes up, or after a conviction on appeal? This is what Comey's lawyers wrote about that question. A False statement charge that rests on a particular interpretation of a fundamentally ambiguous question must be dismissed. Whether a predicate question is fundamentally ambiguous is a, quote, question of law for the court to, quote, resolve before trial. Now, we didn't get to see how the judge ruled on Comey's Bronston literal truth defense motion because the whole U.S. attorney was disqualified and the U.S. attorney was the one who, the only one who signed that indictment. So that indictment was thrown out for that reason. So we didn't get to see whether or not it was a vindictive, selective prosecution which he filed. We didn't get to see if Bronston's literal truth defense mattered. But we might get to in Jack Smith's case, because in Jack Smith's case, he testified that he did not receive any content of phone calls or text messages pursuant to the toll records subpoena of members of Congress that he sought. And, you know, when they questioned Jack Smith both times, that seemed to be the thing they were most upset about. Not the coup, not the classified documents that Donald spirited away to his shitter in Mar a Lago. Not upset about any of that. They were mad that their phone records, called toll records, were subpoenaed from their providers by Jack Smith. And those toll records don't contain any content. You only get the number of who called who and when they called or who messaged who and when they messaged. You don't get the context or the, you know, the, the what, the, you know, the actual text messages, or you don't get to hear the phone calls. But last week, the Department of Justice told lawmakers, members of Congress, that in a separate subpoena for records from the National Archives, Jack Smith's team did get text message content between Trump and multiple members of Congress and other aides. But the lawmakers didn't ask, did you get any text message content? Nor did they ask, did you subpoena the National Archives for text messages. And what's interesting is way back in the day, when Andy McCabe and I were covering the Jack Smith prosecutions on the Jack podcast, we covered the fact that these text messages were handed over to Donald Trump and his defense lawyers, including Todd Blanch, during discovery. They knew, way back then, Trump and his lawyers knew Jack Smith had gotten those text messages from the National Archives. So they knew, and they didn't raise any issues then. And they raised a lot of issues saying, you can't have that. You can't have this. This should be excluded. We should get that back. Didn't happen with These text messages. And we also know from public reporting that Jack smith received Trump's DMs from his Twitter account, despite Elon Musk resisting handing them over for four months. But Twitter lost that court battle, and they were told they were slapped with a gag order, saying they couldn't tell Trump, they couldn't alert Trump to the subpoena. We learned about all this after the fact. So he had all sorts of content that he gave over in discovery to Trump and his lawyers. Everybody knew. Yet here they are saying, well, we asked Jack Smith about the. The toll records, and he said there were no text message content, but he got some from the National Archives. So he lied. No, he didn't. You didn't ask him about that. And if you apply the Bronson literal truth defense, which you might not even have to do in this case, because it's not like Jack Smith was being evasive or even trying to deceive Congress. He just, he was asked whether the toll records had content and he said no, literally. True. And it's incumbent on the questioners, as I have said, to ask the precise questions. You can't bring a 1001 charge unless you have a false statement material. False statement. And he didn't make one here. Now, if Smith is somehow indicted by a grand jury, and I wonder if they're going to forego a federal grand jury and go to the superior court in D.C. because it's way easier to get a true bill in the Superior Court of D.C. it's more of a rubber stamp because they see so many more cases. Even if he does get indicted, there is no way this makes it to trial, let alone leads to a conviction of any kind. Though that's not really the goal here, is it? As with most of the Justice Department's weapon is weaponized cases. The goal is to get the indictment and get the news cycle. Maybe get a perp walk or a mugshot to try to take a swipe at Smith's reputation. All part of their scheme to rewrite the history of January 6th by discrediting Jack Smith, one of the most unimpeachable people on the planet, and maybe even use it to justify their weaponization, slush fund or tort claims, payouts or whatever to insurrectionists. So just something to keep in mind as this criminal referral from Jim Jordan himself, who still, as I said, has not responded to his January 6th select committee subpoena. I'm just still not sure why that wasn't referred and why it wasn't charged. But I'M hoping we have a, I don't know, a more ballsy Attorney general next time out of the gate. All right, everybody, before we get out of here today, your moxie moment comes from SportsCenter in their bigger than sports series. Watch. Absolutely love that. Absolutely wonderful. All right, thank you, everyone. I'll see you in a week. We're going to be dark for a week. I'm still going to be doing the Daily Beans audio podcast. You can get that here on YouTube, on this channel, the MSW Media Channel, or wherever you get your podcast. It's free. And if you want to get these episodes early along with the Daily Beans ad, free and unjustified ad, free and early. And if you want to join our monthly Zoom happy hour calls where the hosts take your questions, the next of which is next week, July 30th. Or if you want to join us for any of our in person events like our gala that we had in Chicago with Tig Notaro and Dana Goldberg. Or we're coming up on election night. We're going to have an election night watch party here in San Diego. I'm buying out a whole bar. I'm paying for the food and the drinks and we're going to put all the election results up on the TV screens. And if you just want to support independent media, you can sign up to support us by visiting patreon.com thedailybeans so thank you very much for your support. Again, all our content is free, but if you can kick in, it really does help us out. So enjoy your week. I'll see you on the audio podcast, the Daily Beans. I'm Alison Gill and that was Beans talking foreign.
- [16:02]
Brian Caram
I'm Brian Caram and I've spent decades covering politics. Now I'm taking you behind the scenes, one interview at a time. Join us as each week Brian confronts the issues that matter, posing the questions you wish you could ask. No filter, no agenda, just the truth. We're not here for sound bites. We're here for substance. Join me, Brian Caram Every week as we cut through the noise and get straight to it. This is just Ask the Question for curiosity will lead us to the facts. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and remember, when you want answers, all you have to do is just ask the question.