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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
So I do the gist and you listen to the gist. I could prove it. But I also do these conversations on Substack where you can subscribe and get the Gist list I produce every day, that is Mike pasco.substack.com but we also do these conversations called Substack Live. And if you want to join live, the next one is Thursday, 1:30pm Eastern with Kat Rosenfield. We're going to discuss a little Harvey Weinstein retrial. She talked about and wrote about the journalist Wesley Lowery. So come join me talking to Kat Rosenfield. You could also lob a question or two. And in upcoming weeks we have a Substack Live with Nate Silver. Next week we're doing John McWhorter either the week or after that. It's an exciting place if you like hearing me and most importantly, other people who I know talk in your ears and sometimes in front of your eyes. It's Wednesday, June 11, 2020 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and Harvey Weinstein has been convicted again. He's also been acquitted anew and there's a third charge the jury is just fighting each other about. But I always supported this trial based on the principle that no one should be convicted based on the testimony of people who claim that they were assaulted or otherwise aggressed upon in a non criminal context. And those accusers weren't part of a trial. So what happened the first time was Harvey Weinstein was convicted, but they also put on the stand many women who weren't part of that case saying Harvey Weinstein did the same thing to me. And the testimony of those women who weren't scrutinized and held to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt was used to sort of used by proxy to convict him in the actual way. Reasonable doubt cases. The New York Court of Appeals thought that was wrong and I did too. I just logically worked it out in my head. And I didn't say let us not consider the situation of America's most notorious and one of its richest film producers. Let's just take a poor guy from Harlem who's accused of an assault, accused of a mugging and let's say you get three other shopkeepers or other people who say yeah, that guy mugged me, but it's not part of a criminal case this way to open the door to all sorts of injustices. So applying the principle in the abstract to Harvey Weinstein, I said it was good that there is a new trial. I followed the trial a bit. It does seem that at least in one of the cases, the jury credited the testimony of an accuser, Miriam Haley, also Jessica Mann, and said that they were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. And they also said the evidence didn't get there with another accuser. That charge, that charge alone, that will land Harvey Weinstein in an extended prison sentence which he has been serving. He actually goes to the hospital every day and then goes to court. He also has criminal charges pending and on top of him in California. But in a way, even though there is a conviction and acquittal and we didn't pay as much attention, this was the right thing to happen. This is just the right thing in terms of justice. And I can't use the word glad. And there is more to come, but sometimes the criminal justice system needs to do the right thing, not just the popular or expedient thing. On the show today, it is a full show interview with a guy named Jonah E. Bromwich. Joni Bromwich, by the way, is the guy credited with the byline on the New York Times story about Harvey Weinstein. Because Jonah E. Bromwich covers the courts. And what I'm going to talk to Jonah about is a trial he covered of another notorious New Yorker, that guy. Well, it's all in the subtitle. The name of the book is Dragon on Center Street, New York versus Donald J. Trump. Jonah Ibrahim, which up next, Father's Day gifts. I don't know, maybe there's a sameness to it. Socks, grills, tools, repeat. This year I wanted to do better, so I quinced it up. Quince makes buying a thoughtful gift easy. They have all the pieces. Dads, I'm one wanna wear organic cotton silk polos. I have to say, did I know I wanted that? I didn't. And then it touched my skin and my skin thanked myself. It was a little, you know, self dealing, as they say. But they also have European linen beach shorts and awesome pants. And Quince's, priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find with similar brands. It is the whole cutting out the middleman, but it really works. They work with top artisans. They don't hit you with the crazy markups. They hit you with the delightful fabrics and these factories that are safe and ethical and responsible and for Father's Day, I gotta say, I got it for me and then I gave it to my dad. The shirts that I'm talking about, the polo shirts, they were amazing. I didn't want to give them up. I had two. One for me One for Dad. I chose the color that I wanted and they're amazing shirts. And I made my dad love me more. I made him. For the dad who deserves better than basic, Quint has you covered. Go to quint.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N c e.com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the gist hi guys. Is Ed getting you down? Do you not? If literally here imagine the crude crescendo of the slide whistle. You know the one. Let's get other things like your confidence back up with Hims. HIMS provides you access to treatments that could help you last longer. So you can be ready whenever the mood strikes. If you're feeling stalled out in the bedroom, HIMS is the solution. It's changing men's health. By providing you access with affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch. HIMS provides an access to a range of doctor trusted ED treatments like here are some you may have heard of Viagra Cialis so this isn't some weird off brand version of Cialis. This is the Cialis, the one with the tubs on tv. And you get it from hims. You fill out a form, a medical provider determines the right treatment for you. Your medication ships directly, shipping's free. No insurance is needed. That's really important. HIMS has been doing this for a long long time. They're very trusted. This is very important area for men from what I understand. And HIMS is the one who can help. Start your free online Visit today@hisss.com the Gist that's H I M S.com the Gist for your personalized ED treatment options. Hiss.com the Gist now here's the part I speak fast. The trial of Donald Trump. Wait, which trial? The one that actually happened. The one that happened in a Manhattan courtroom. The one that Alvin Bragg brought is the subject of Jonah Bromwich his new book Dragon on Center Street New York v. Donald J. Trump. Jonah, welcome to the Gist.
- [07:45]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Of course, thanks so much for having me.
- [07:47]
Mike Pesca
This was a very interesting book and I am going to guess that it was when you when got commissioned to write the book and maybe even when you start first started putting pen to paper for the book and not your newspaper reporting with the New York Times. I'm going to guess it became interesting in ways that you actually didn't foresee because I'll say that's how I received it as the reader. But was that your experience too?
- [08:12]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I think to an extent, yes. Because when I was covering the trial, I was covering it as this as a legal reporter, really like as an adversarial contest between a prosecution and a defense with serious repercussions given that the defendant was Donald Trump. But still I was thinking, okay, how's the prosecution's argument coming in? How's the defense doing? What's going to happen at the end of this? What are the kind of legal complications? And so stepping back a few paces, let me think of this more as a media story. Let me think of this as more of a social media and Internet story. And let me think of this in the context of kind of the recent history of prosecution, of media, of politics. And that was kind of a fun way to think about this one particular event.
- [08:56]
Mike Pesca
Yes, I was thinking that stepping back and also even stepping back from that. And I'll get to that in a second. So it's not as if the book is totally eschews politics. Politics. Well, that's what got Alvin Bragg elected. That's why Donald Trump is on trial, because of politics. So there's all these considerations of politics and also how would the trial play? But most of that, what the actual effects of this conviction were, that gets glanced at at the end of the book. And I think that that was necessary because if you open the door to that, you have a book that's three times as long. Right?
- [09:37]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Sure, yeah, I think that's right. I also, there was some thinking when we were just kind of first conceiving of the book. Oh, what will the framework be? Are we going to go 10 years back in New York history? Are you going to go 20 years back in New York history? And we did a little bit, I mean, I did do some exploring of how prosecutors go after big targets and what the history of that is. But mostly I knew I really wanted to tell the story of this trial in this kind of coherent form so that people could actually understand in a way that I felt like they never had.
- [10:04]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. So there is references to, you know, Rudy Giuliani and trying to decapitate the capos of the Mafia and you know, other things that directly inform the decision making here. But you're right, it's not sprawling, multi tentacled, decades long review, but you do have to get into the considerations to bring the case at all and set up. Oh, let's, let's just talk about the election of Alvin Bragg. He is elected at a Time when being a, a progressive prosecutor is kind of the trendy thing. But then his election runs into a period when crime is on the rise and some of his rivals have to do a little tacking, but not brag. He consistently was, and you make this point several times, he was running on two planks. Be lenient to the people who do low level crimes who are the, the have nots in society and be pretty harsh on the real crimes. Am I getting that right?
- [11:03]
Jonah E. Bromwich
That's exactly right.
- [11:04]
Mike Pesca
And so when Bragg is elected and he it's a close election, there are rivals who probably would have, were positing themselves as certainly guaranteed to prosecute Donald Trump. What's your assessment of how he handled the question which was asked often, are you going to prosecute Donald Trump? Because to this day, almost every acolyte of Trump or even just regular conservatives do think that Bragg was elected with the promise to prosecute Trump. How true was that?
- [11:40]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Right? That is not true. To be clear, and I think it's a very easy thing to say, is not true. Now, what I will say is that this election, the District Attorney Democratic primary in 2021 in Manhattan was completely defined by Donald Trump. It was all that the media would ask about. The media, including myself. We really were interested in what was going to happen with that case because it seemed as if the District Attorney who was leaving office, Cy Vance, was going to have to hand it to whoever his successor would be. And so there was immense pressure for the candidates to figure out, okay, how am I going to answer this Donald Trump question? What am I going to say about prosecuting Donald Trump? And what Alvin Bragg did do is he had been at the New York Attorney General's office and the New York Attorney General in Trump's first term had sued the administration time and time again. And so Alvin Bragg, in part with, with the kind of help of his campaign folks who understood campaigning better and understood the Manhattan electorate, said, okay, here's what you're going to do. You're going to talk about how many times you sued Donald Trump. And so even though you won't be saying, I'm going to go after Donald Trump, you will be saying, I have experience doing something like this and I have the will to go up against this guy. And so what he said was, you know, I've sued Donald Trump 100 times, it wasn't entirely true. It was the Attorney General's office. First of all, 100 times is a bit of an exaggeration. They took like 100 legal actions, which is very different than 100 lawsuits. But it kind of gave a political sense of where he stood. Without him promising, I'm going to go after Donald Trump. And I do think that's an important distinction. But there were politics involved in that.
- [13:13]
Mike Pesca
Right. So it was a requirement of the job. If he just refused to engage in the question at all, he would be unelectable. Do you think those answers. So given that that's reality, but do you think those answers or how he dealt with the question would be cited by, I don't know, some American Bar association ideal of how a prosecutor seeking election would handle such a question?
- [13:38]
Jonah E. Bromwich
No, but I'm also surprised that the American Bar association even lets prosecutors run for office. I mean, the two concepts are so antithetical to one another. You're supposed to be this kind of impartial overseer of justice once you're in office, but you somehow have to convince a bunch of people to vote for you. I mean, those two ideas just don't work together. But to answer your question, Mike, no, I think that would have been a problem for people who are thinking, what is the most ethical way to handle a consideration like this.
- [14:04]
Mike Pesca
Right. So he had to, and certainly gave the impression that he would prosecute Donald Trump because he would always talk about, I have not prosecuted, but brought cases while working for Letitia James against Donald Trump. Were there one or two answers? And I do remember some candidate for where he got a little bit beyond that. And those are sometimes the ones that are most frequently cited by people trying to say that this guy was a biased prosecutor from the jump.
- [14:33]
Jonah E. Bromwich
No, I don't think so. And I'd be curious. I mean, if you have any in mind, let me know. But I actually disagree with what you just said, too. I think that he did something tricky and not as best as he could do, but I also don't think he gave the definitive impression that he was going to prosecute Donald Trump, which is all the more interesting. And maybe you're getting there, because he got into office, there was a case that certainly his predecessor believed was almost fully developed, almost ready to bring, and he did not bring that case against Donald Trump. So I don't think that Bragg pledged that he would go after Donald Trump. I do think that Bragg pledged that he would take any case against Donald Trump seriously and, and conveyed that he had the experience to do so.
- [15:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So that's interesting. So there's a prosecutor in the office, Pomerantz, Mark Pomerantz. Yeah. And he was on the. He was assigned with the task of bringing a prosecution against Trump. And this is during the tenure of Cy Vance, Bragg's predecessor. Give me, and I have read Pomerantz's book and it's interesting. I want to ask you a question or two about that. But, but give me the thumbnail sketch of what his, what Pomerantz's theory of the case was while he was working for Bragg's predecessor.
- [15:45]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I will. So, so Pomeranz is brought in to help lead this case. Mark Pomerantz, he's a former federal prosecutor. He's what people call a lion of the bar. He's like really well known, well respected, former criminal division head in the Southern District, that's a federal prosecutor. And they have in the legal community, depending on who you're asking, but often more status, right? It's more well healed, it's more, a lot more Ivy League graduates go there, so on and so forth. He comes into the office, he's assigned to the investigation, and after looking at various different options, the thing he settles on is that he's convinced that Trump is criminally exaggerating how much he's worth. This guy has a lot less money than he's often said and said in official business documents. And Pomerantz and Kerry Dunn, the other leader in the investigation, girl convinced that they are going to be able to indict Donald Trump for that, for these kind of criminally fraudulent exaggerations of his net worth. And they're kind of gung ho. They're ready to go. Cy Vance, their boss, gives them the green light to start presenting evidence to a grand jury for a possible indictment. And then Alvin Bragg comes into office and says, wait, I don't like this case and I don't think we should bring it. And it comes to a screeching halt in a way that neither Pomerantz nor Dunn expects. They resign with a huge bang. It's just like a total catastrophe for the office in the sense that suddenly they're the epicenter of this furor that Bragg himself, who had never really dealt with media attention like this, certainly didn't expect and kind of had to deal with it away.
- [17:12]
Mike Pesca
Right? So remind us what Bragg was going through during that period when he declined to prosecute Trump. And the main vectors of prosecution, the main voices for prosecution, resigned in a huff. What was Alvin Bragg's world like?
- [17:26]
Jonah E. Bromwich
This is an extraordinary story because Alvin Bragg wins the election. A close fought Democratic primary, but not too contentious overall, breezes to a November victory and he comes into office and he's made this pledge that he's going to stop prosecuting low level crimes. He made it in April 2021, and it, you know, was barely noticed. We wrote a story about it about the time, but people didn't really care all that much. And then he comes in the office and crime has risen. And this plan immediately gets into the New York Post, and suddenly people think Alvin Bragg is going to be letting murderers free in New York. It causes a huge, huge public relations catastrophe. So that's January. He's already kind of going through it. Then these Trump prosecutors resigned because he won't bring this case. That's February. So the first two months of Alvin Bragg's tenure in this office are just kind of beset by catastrophe because people on the right don't like him. People on the left who hate Donald Trump don't like him. He just, he really can't find that many people who are approving of the job he's doing.
- [18:28]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [18:28]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Yeah.
- [18:29]
Mike Pesca
And so how does he then. What is his process for. He can't bring crime down himself, but he certainly can bring a prosecution about against Trump. How does he resurrect that case? That idea?
- [18:42]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Yeah. So what's really interesting about this is that Cy Vance, his predecessor, had been working on this case since 2018, really since 2019, and has accumulated just a massive amount of evidence. So one of the big differences between Alvin Bragg coming in and Cy Vance coming in is that Alvin Bragg has all this evidence. Right. There's so much stuff. And one of the things that Bragg and his senior aides find really, really interesting, which people were interested in when it first came out, is this idea that Michael Cohen had paid hush money to Stormy Daniels right before the 2016 election. It seemed to them like there might be a crime there. And this is where you kind of get into the psychology of Alan Bragg, which I think is really, really interesting because. Because to some extent, I think he's a progressive prosecutor because of the way he sees the law used in other places and because he thinks it's very important to hold powerful and wealthy people accountable. I think he is comfortable bringing a novel legal theory in a place that maybe other prosecutors might not. So what he and the other prosecutors in the office come up with is this fascinating legal theory in which the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels is grouped with two other hush money payments that were made during the 2016 campaign, as well as a meeting between Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker, who was the head of the company that Ran the National Enquirer. And what the prosecutors argue in what eventually becomes the trial is that those three men entered a conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 election by burying information and, and then falsified business records to cover up one of those hush money payments, namely the one to Stormy Daniels. So this is this really complicated theory. It's something that a lot of people don't understand. I mean, even during the trial would.
- [20:18]
Mike Pesca
Have reporters come three. You have three different diagrams in the book about this theory. One arranged vertically, one arranged horizontally. And I believe you say it's sort of like when a friend describes the block chain or quantum physics to me. I get it for a day, but then forget it. First of all, congratulations on the quantum physics part for even getting that for a day. I'm with you in the blockchain, not the quantum physics, but that's how hard it is. And Manhattan juries are smart or can be smart, but man, is it hard to try to give that responsibility to a jury.
- [20:52]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I think that's right. And, and a jury has to sit in a courtroom all day and pay attention very, very closely the public, which doesn't have to do anything like that to try to understand a case this complicated and really understand what prosecutors were trying to do. I think it was an incredibly tough sell from a public relations standpoint. And I don't think the DA's office really did sell it from a public relations standpoint.
- [21:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And add to that, when you're getting the blockchain or quantum physics explained to you, there's not a whole bunch of well paid legal team trying to not let you understand that or get in the way of your understanding or complicate it.
- [21:27]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Yeah, that's right. But. But at the same time, because the point you're making, I think, is that this case is so complicated that maybe a jury can't find fully understand it. But what's amazing about this case is that the legal theory is not something you have to explain to them. All you have to do is persuade them that what you're saying happened, happens. And if you're trying to do that, you couldn't find a better jury case. I mean, you were telling these people a story of political intrigue, porn stars, and the 2016 election like they'd never heard before. All the characters are in the room. Donald Trump, Storby Daniels, Michael Cohen, David Pecker. They're all there. This is kind of the greatest show on earth, but it's just limited to the courtroom. So I didn't think it was A real problem for the jury to be persuaded by the narrative that the prosecutors were putting forth. I think the public had a much harder time with it.
- [22:10]
Mike Pesca
Well, the public knew more than the jury did, in a way, because there had to be. What is the phrase, There had to be the underlying crime. What is the legal phrase for that?
- [22:21]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Sure. So the predicate. It's Right.
- [22:24]
Mike Pesca
Right. And so this wasn't explicitly. This was. This all occurred in the background. Right. For there to be a predicate, the judge. And I guess if it goes up on appeal, the Appellate Division has to agree with that. But you never have to get into it with the jury that this is the predicate crime and this is what allows us to bring the prosecution. It's like the jury is the theater audience and then the judge is the people who understands what is the mechanisms making Peter Pan fly.
- [22:53]
Jonah E. Bromwich
That's almost exactly right. There's one caveat, which is, and it barely changes the scenario you just laid out, which is at the very end of the trial, after they've heard all the actual arguments and been persuaded of all the actual events, there's this very brief moment where they hear the jury instructions. So the judge tells them what the law is, but they can't bring it back into the deliberation room with them. So they hear it briefly. It sounds very tedious. It's very dry. It's just read aloud by the judge. And it sounds very little like this kind of incredible testimony and stories they've been hearing for weeks. And so for the most part, you're just right. Like the story is what matters once you get in front of the jury, rather than the kind of intricacies of the law that we're talking about here.
- [23:32]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So it's really interesting. I said, I read the Pomerantz book, and there was a time when he and Carrie Dunn were taking sort of a victory lap, or at least people were saying they were right. They're vindicated. It must be pointed out that they. Every legal theory or every idea for prosecution they bought, brought was rejected. And they never lit upon this theory. Right. Am I getting that right?
- [23:57]
Jonah E. Bromwich
They flirted with this theory, but they. There's this very specific part of this theory which is the. The predicate you mentioned, the underlying statute is a state election law, and the state election law makes it illegal to conspire to promote or prevent someone's election. And they never found that. And you know who found that? Actually, this is in the book because first time it's been reported, Alvin Bragg himself and I always thought that was really interesting because Bragg is both state and federal. I think he's very open minded, as I've said, in the terms of the way he would construct a legal theory. And so just to use the state election law and bank on it being this thing that could bring down a president or at least allow you to convict one, is an incredibly daring move in some ways. And so it's fascinating that that's actually what happened.
- [24:40]
Mike Pesca
So explain that. Explain why it would have been missed by Pomerant, or explain the, let us call it, insight of Bragg and what made that so remarkable that the state law related to federal elections.
- [24:52]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Okay, so usually what you have when you bring a crime is just the kind of criminal code book, right? These criminal statutes. And then there's a separate. There's a separate book of. Of election crimes, basically, like state election crimes. And it's just not somewhere you might look. And one of the things they did in Bragg's office, I believe, is that they understood that it was illegal to do this on a federal level to kind of conspire to promote the election. And they were almost thinking, oh, we can use a federal predicate with the state law falsifying business records and maybe a judgment question, and maybe it's not, but it's the right thing to do. It shouldn't be legal to kind of fool Americans and bury stories this way. Maybe we'll use this federal predicate. And the prosecutors were talking to each other and they thought, well, maybe there is actually kind of a state level equivalent to this federal predicate, so we don't have to do this very risky thing of using federal law in a state court. And they found this, this state election law, 17, 152, and that's what eventually made it into the case.
- [25:48]
Mike Pesca
Do you have any way of knowing if the people who were looking at this or. Yeah, the prosecutors within the office during Cy Vance's time regarded that use of the state law as clever, something they missed, something that was legitimate, something that was questionable. That's my question.
- [26:07]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Something I know in a more general sense is that the Vance team always really believed in its case. And they thought that the case that they had put together about Trump exaggerating his net worth was a winner. It should have been brought, and specifically it should have been brought because it could have been indicted early. Trump would have been indicted early. And then I think the thinking goes, maybe he wouldn't have been a threat in the 2024 election. And you see this thinking all the time. And I comment on this in the book. I kind of want readers to draw their own conclusions, so I don't try and make a lecture series out of it. But one of the things that happened with the prosecutions of Donald Trump is that I think his political enemies thought, oh, this is the way a legal solution to a political problem, the way to deal with Donald Trump is not to beat him.
- [26:51]
Mike Pesca
Kind of, well, never really realistic that it would work. Or you're saying that's not actually what was going on within the minds of the prosecutor's offices.
- [27:01]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I don't think that's what was going on in the minds of the prosecutor's office. Certainly it was, it was going on in the commentariat. But I also think it wouldn't have worked. And we saw that in this case. I mean, don't forget Donald Trump was in fact convicted. He was scheduled to be sentenced. And his lawyers, I think very cleverly, and it's to their credit, given that they accomplished what they were trying to accomplish, put off that sentencing and made it completely politically impossible to do so, it's hard to imagine that he ever would have been sentenced given the political pressure that would have come to bear on authorities trying to do that.
- [27:30]
Mike Pesca
I want, yeah, I want to get to sentencing in a sentence in a second. But I think that there is more to the Trump defenders argument, the this is all lawfare and illegitimate argument argument. There are, this isn't a prosecutor's case, but there were efforts to get him off the ballot and the Supreme Court ruled nine nothing. Did Katanji Brown, Jackson disagree? Yeah, I think they ruled nine nothing that those were illegitimate. So that's not legal. But it could be seen as in the effort of lawfare. Then there was the RICO case in Georgia where you, you understand, I think my listeners understand that these RICO statutes, statutes are extremely capacious. And also what was going on in the specifics of the Georgia case raised a lot of, a lot of red flags. I'm going to cabin off the prosecution, the federal prosecution with storage of documents. I don't know that that would be huge criminal risk or anything other than a fine. Then you have this novel legal theory that may be legit, maybe isn't, but you know, is it's not a slam dunk. There is some legal phrase, colorable argument that there could have been something going on with the motivation besides, hey, we do this with anyone because you've never done it with anyone before for. So you add it all up and if this one case is like a 7030 case, and this one case is a 60. 30 case. 60, 40 case. There does seem to be a little more than nothing that this was a lawfare effort to get this guy who is and has been called the biggest threat to our republic and who they have been trying to, quote, unquote, get for years and years. I don't know, I think it's like, I think there are worse arguments that the Trump administration or Trump fans have made than that one.
- [29:21]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Yeah. So I have so many thoughts on this, and let me, let me see if I can get them out in a systematic way. So first, let's start with just prosecutors generally in journalism, I think there's been a lot of, of talking and hand wringing and occasionally navel gazing about the subject of objectivity. Right. And so journalists think about, about, oh, can I even be objective? What's going on with me subconsciously? What are these biases that I don't even know about that doesn't solve those problems, but at least journalists have talked about them and thought about them and in some cases, put in measures to really try and kind of step away from unconscious bias. As far as I know, those conversations don't happen as much for prosecutors. So what I do know, in terms of the folks that I've talked to and the folks who have talked to folks that I've talked to, I don't think, and I've never seen any evidence that this prosecution, the one that I wrote about, was brought in bad faith. But what we don't know is what happens subconsciously to someone who doesn't bring a Trump case and then maybe feels a lot of ambient pressure to do so. What are the motivations there? And I think that one of the things that Trump has been really, really good at and has been really, really successful about is that he speaks his mind. He talks to the public constantly. He is constantly airing out how he thinks. And one thing that prosecutors never do or almost never do, they do it kind of after an indictment, maybe after a conviction, is they don't spell those things out. They don't talk to the public. They don't talk about what's going through in their minds. And so, Mike, I think one of the reasons that so many people would agree with what you just said and so many people think of this as kind of a vast conspiracy to get Donald Trump, is because there's so little information given to us about decision making in these individual cases, the personalities in these individual cases, why this effort happened there and this effort happened there that doesn't mean necessarily that there isn't kind of deep political opposition to Donald Trump that results in kind of various efforts to bring him down in various different ways. But I think what we need to know is actually know more about these institutions, the way they work, so we can actually parse those things better rather than just reverting to, oh, this is definitely the explanation, a coordinated law firm.
- [31:24]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back in a minute with more with Jonah Abrom Witch. I don't know, all these meetings, trying to remember. Wait, what did we just say? Here's a solution that we've been using at Gist World Headquarters that it seems like it's making us smarter, but it's a tool that itself is smart. Fireflies let's say you're in a meeting and you're getting interrupted all the time and you're trying to look up information but you can't incorporate it into the meeting. Just say hey Fireflies. And get real time, reliable answers directly inside your video call. It's time to upgrade your AI note taker to be part of your team so your meetings can drive momentum rather than pull you down in the drudgery of it all. Fireflies. It's a little like magic and it's very practical. The number one AI teammate. It transcribes, it summarizes, it analyzes conversation. You get the most out of meetings it can be and it is designed to be tailored for you, summaries that fit exactly what you're doing. Look, I don't want to give you too many ideas here or birth control competitors, but Fireflies can actually make a podcast from your meeting or anything else they do podcast production. You'll get powerful collaboration tools like real time and up to date web search directly in your meetings, shareable sound bites, timestamp notes that allow you to pinpoint key moments, very important bookmarks as well. And it's designed with security in mind. Right now, when you sign up for a yearly Fireflies subscription, you get your first two months free. Just go to fireflies.AI/the gist. That is right. Two months free. Check it out. I think you will be very impressed. Slash blown away. Two months free when you go to fireflies.AI/the gist. That's fireflies AI/the gist. We're back with Jonah Bromwich, author of Dragon on Center Street New York versus Donald J. Trump. I don't even know if Fannie Willis or Alvin Bragg were sat down for a three hour interview and were given a sodium pentothal cocktail Beforehand. I don't think that that would clear up all the questions that a fair minded person would have. Just the very fact that Fannie Willis is an elected official. Alvin Bragg is an elected official. If Alvin Bragg. You talked about all the pressures Alvin Bragg was feeling if he didn't bring the prosecution. I'm not talking about anything nefarious. I'm not talking about anything where he says, damn it, I'm violating my principles to do this. I'm talking about the pressures that we feel as human beings working in a certain social milieu. Alvin Bragg, every day he didn't bring this prosecution, just felt an enormous amount of pressure. And he could have felt something like fealty to the law or the idea of doing the right thing. But if you do this, your circle becomes more and more closed. The people who you go to benefits with, that you depend on for fundraising, that just give you your approval, start to disapprove of you more. You probably don't get elected the next time. I just think that you add it all up. There is a ton of weight to bring this novel prosecution. And if you want to call it an unfair prosecution, the courts don't think that it's unfair.
- [35:02]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Right.
- [35:03]
Mike Pesca
I think that there is a really decent enough case for it. This is my point.
- [35:08]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I think that's a totally fair argument and I think it would be silly to say otherwise. I will say it's an incredibly cynical argument. Right. And I want to just say something about the jury system, which is, I think, related to this. So one of the big arguments that Donald Trump's lawyers made, and I think a lot of people commenting on this trial made, was that this guy was not going to be able to get a fair trial in New York. Like New Yorkers hate the guy. The jury pool was going to be a deep, deep blue. And these were folks who just hated Donald Trump, who are just going to kind of shut their eyes and, you know, cover their ears. And no matter what the prosecution did or the defense did, they were going to convict the guy. And I think that's fine. It makes sense to me to be cynical about that kind of thing. But I also think the world works better and certainly these institutions work better when you take people at their word. Not to be credulous, but to just kind of start from an assumption of good faith. When someone says, I'm going to be fair minded and I will be impartial and I will listen to this case disregarding what I know, I think our society actually works better when we trust Those people. And so the only thing I'll say about the argument that you just made, which I think would be ridiculous to dismiss entirely, is that it's so cynical that if we were to start thinking like that all the time, I think these institutions that are already not necessarily working very well and are already not kind of keeping up with the 21st century and its various means would function even worse. But that's why I also think it's incumbent upon institutional actors to explain what they do to try to address that cynicism head on.
- [36:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I mean, different circumstances demand different considerations. And I'm not blaming. Beyond not blaming the jury. You have a lot in the book. Personality profiles of different jurors. Fascinating. I love that stuff. And just as when a dirty prosecutor withholds evidence, you don't blame the jury for that. The jury did its job. The jury definitely did its job, given that they didn't even have to really consider the predicate crime considerations. And I'm also not saying that that argument holds for all the Trump prosecutions. I'll come back to the documents case, which never got adjudicated, but that is in the category. And not every case has the benefit of being this clear. But there was something going on where the prosecutions of Trump had this counter argument saying it's not about the person, it's not about the man, it's simply about the crime. We would bring this prosecution for anyone. And I think that is true with the documents case. And I think they. You can show all the times that Trump, as a former president, was given deference in the prosecutor in the case. Right. With this one. Novel legal theory doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it's wrong, that it's novel. But there never was anyone else who was prosecuted along these lines. Is that. Is it the case that there was never anyone with an analogous circumstance? I mean, I don't know. Do you know about that? That there was never anyone who could have been prosecuted along. I don't mean this exact crime, but not reporting something akin to an electoral benefit that if you reported it would be insane, like reporting hush money to the irs. I mean, I would guess that there were, or maybe you actually know if there were other people who had engaged in that sort of thing and there was no prosecution.
- [38:36]
Jonah E. Bromwich
There's. There was never a case brought like this. That's exactly.
- [38:38]
Mike Pesca
I know. There was never a case brought like this.
- [38:40]
Jonah E. Bromwich
No, but there were not. It's such a. It's a great question. It's like A fascinating question. I actually wish that I had done a story on this, because it's such a good question. What we did was that we looked at the way this chart had been used, the way that the falsifying business records charge had been paired with other things, and we never found anything that looked like this that had been charged. But one of the things that I think is really interesting there, and this is why, I mean, I'm just promoting my own book, which is what it's so fascinating to me because the Manhattan District Attorney's office was, for about a half century, run by these two guys with deep connections to basically the American aristocracy. Both their fathers had been in presidential cabinets. And so one of them, Morgenthau, who was in office for almost 40 years.
- [39:23]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, like the most important member of the FDR cabinet and the architect of the American economy for years and years. Yeah.
- [39:31]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Robert Morgenthau invented the idea of white collar crime. He popularized the phrase. He is the law and order prosecutor. I mean, the person you see in Law and Order is based on the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, and he has power. And so when you think about criminality, and I talk about this a little bit in the book, there are crimes that I think everyone agrees are crimes. Right. There's murder, there's shooting someone, there's rape, and then there are white collar crimes, which are societies and particularly authorities, ways to define deviancy. Right. Like what you do when you look at white collar statute is you have these kind of broadly worded, vague statutes, and you fit specific acts in them, and those are acts that you believe are acts of deviancy. And so, of course, when there's room for that kind of interpretation, I think politics, I think subconscious bias, all kinds of stuff can slip in. And so what happened in this Manhattan case where what the prosecutors defined as deviant was the hiding of the three specific series of information and then the falsifying of business records to cover up one of them. They define that as deviant. They decided that was a crime. It fit with the statutes. A state judge blessed it, a federal judge blessed it. Donald Trump was convicted of it. But if you think about what's happening socially there, particularly with the political backdrop, you're talking about, you're talking about incredibly interesting philosophical questions of what counts as a crime. Do people deserve to be punished a bit? How do we watch out to make sure that a biased administration or a prosecutor who is genuinely acting in bad faith does not do these things to people, does not construe statutes in such a way as to go after who they want to go after. These are, like, really profound and interesting questions that I think came to a head while Trump was out of office during this interregnum period.
- [41:16]
Mike Pesca
Yes. And most prosecutions don't potentially flirt with the idea of disenfranchisement, right?
- [41:23]
Jonah E. Bromwich
No, 100%. I think that's a really important point. And it's a point that Donald Trump's lawyers made all the time, and particularly after he was convicted and getting to the sentence.
- [41:33]
Mike Pesca
All right, I want to talk about Donald Trump's lawyers. Tell me all you can. So that about Todd Blanche, just in terms of how we understand you. Give me a little bit about who he was. Very respected guy. And I know many people in the New York bar who are surprised. And you probably wrote the story like, really, Todd Blanche is doing this. So really respected guy. But what he showed us during the Trump trial and what that might mean for his ongoing employment with the administration.
- [42:01]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Sure. And if you don't mind, I'll actually pair him with Amel Boba because they work together on the trial.
- [42:05]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [42:05]
Jonah E. Bromwich
And they're foils in a way. So Todd Blanche and Amel Boba are two of Trump's defense lawyers who work together on the Manhattan trial that I wrote about and also his two federal cases. And they are a study in opposites, as the cliche goes. Todd, both of them were Southern District prosecutors, kind of the premier federal prosecuting office in the United States. But Todd Blanche is like, beloved in the office. He was a friends with everyone, incredibly charming guy, someone who's really, really well liked.
- [42:32]
Mike Pesca
And isn't from the manner born.
- [42:36]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Is not from the manner born. And it's actually important about both these guys that they are not from the manner born. And in fact, if you were to look at their backgrounds and be told nothing else about them but just where they grew up, what their parents did for a living, et cetera, et cetera. You wouldn't be totally surprised to find out that they were Trump voters, but they went to this premier institution, the Southern District. Todd Blanche was this extremely kind of popular, well loved guy. Amel Boba had friends, it's silly to say, like, oh, he was a total, like, social isolate, but he was less popular, more intense, kind of more head down and driven. And then Todd Blanche was retained by Donald Trump right before he was indicted in Manhattan in February 2023. And what he found was that already, even in the process of representing Donald Trump, he was beginning to lose these social connections that he had gained. People were starting to look askance at him. And I think he said this in many, many interviews, that it was alarming to him because people had defended all kinds of monsters. But somehow Donald Trump was this line that you weren't supposed to cross. And so he defended Trump. He was proud to defend Trump. And one of the things that both Blanche and Bove did really well, I think my colleague Glenn Thresh referred to this in a story recently as stall and brawl. In the federal cases and in the Manhattan case, what they would do is kind of push the cases forward with, you know, try and delay any kind of trial date, try and delay any kind of serious event, push things back. And the federal cases, they were so successful that those cases never got to trial. Not only that, but in one of them, they actually got this presidential immunity ruling, which has really protected Donald Trump from any consequences that he might face for official acts that could be considered crimes. In the Manhattan case, they tried to do the same thing. They tried to delay it. They worked really, really hard. They went up to an appeals court three days in a row, which is just something that I've never seen done before, to try and delay the trial, but to no avail. They got to the trial, and once they were at the trial, I believe that these instincts to kind of delay and fight and delay and fight come from Trump himself. And those instincts served them really well outside of the courtroom. Once they were in the courtroom to try, they were arguing as the prosecution about this idea that there had been a conspiracy to get rid of these stories, get them out of the public eye, and that documents were falsified to cover that up. And they did the same thing in the courtroom. They fought and they denied everything. They denied that Trump had ever had sex with Stormy Daniels. They denied that Michael Cohen had coordinated with Trump about these hush money payments, particularly the last hush money payment. And to be clear, and this is fascinating, they didn't have to do that. None of that stuff would have been illegal. The only thing they had to do was to convince the jury that Trump had nothing to do with a scheme to falsify business records. Had they been able to do that, all this other stuff would have fallen away.
- [45:26]
Mike Pesca
Well, of course, you want to say they didn't have to do that to win this case that they probably thought was all but unwinnable. But why they. The impetus to do that was because the case wasn't just for 12 jurors.
- [45:38]
Jonah E. Bromwich
That's right. That it was a political case. And always Trump kind of puts Political and legal considerations on the same par, kind of fights them with the exact same weapon. And so that worked really poorly for them in the trial. Right. The Stormy Daniels for the. In the ways that she's not credible. One of the places that it's hard to not credit her is in the fact that she had sex with Donald Trump. I think her testimony on that score was fairly convincing. And there, Michael Cohen also, same thing, credibility problems in all kinds of different ways. But given the massive amount of evidence, paper evidence of his calls back and forth, not only with Donald Trump, but with all the main players, it was really hard not to credit the fundamental truth of the idea that, oh, he clearly was talking to Trump about these hush money payments. And so in denying those things, even as to your point, it might have worked for them politically, they really kind of, I think, bungled the criminal case. But again, to your point, and especially given that these guys are now at the Department of Justice, they really kept those political considerations front and center. And because of that, Trump never had to explain to the public anything that he had not previously explained. Right. His lawyers never put him in a situation where he had to change his story or tell something, you know, talk about something he never talked about before. And I think ultimately that was really good for him.
- [46:55]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I would say their tactics occasionally stalled and there were a couple days where Mershon, I probably know this from your reporting, just tore into them and they seem to have done a blanche, especially during one cross examination, a terrible job. So their tactics didn't always get there, but the strategy was borne out because even though they could install the trial, Trump gets elected and then sentencing is pretty much taken away from the discretion of the judge. But if it had come to pass that there would have been a sentence, what do you think the sentence would have been?
- [47:32]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I had always thought that Trump would receive a custodial sentence. And we did an article.
- [47:37]
Mike Pesca
Okay.
- [47:38]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Interesting, interesting meaning. Oh, sorry. And that means that he would have gone to jail or prison. I don't think he would have gone to MDC or a prison kind of with other prisoners.
- [47:45]
Mike Pesca
That's not the conventional wisdom, by the way.
- [47:47]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Jonah, is that right?
- [47:49]
Mike Pesca
Oh, yes, definitely. The idea was beforehand it will probably not be resulting in jail time. And the argument for jail time was how he behaved at the trial, but the actual crime itself for a force first time convictee would not have resulted in jail time. That was, I think, yeah, I think that was the convention.
- [48:10]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I think you're right. It's hard for me to remember down the haze of all that's happened since. But we did an analysis of folks who had been convicted of the same Level E felony. First time offender, maybe in trouble with the judge. And what we found with Marshawn in particular is that there often were custodial sentences given. I also think that this judge, even though I think in many ways was deferential to Trump, really had a lot of patience for his lawyers because they did things that many lawyers would not do. And they kind of worked in this kind of gray zone that we're now very familiar with, where they weren't outright disrespectful toward the judge, but they would make repetitive arguments or they would try his patience, or they would ask him to recuse himself multiple times. I think that despite his patience with them, for the most part, in those moments, my sense is that he took this really seriously and he thought it was a serious crime and he probably thought that it deserved a kind of serious punishment, but we'll never know.
- [49:04]
Mike Pesca
So this is going to ask you to step outside your area of expertise massively, but take the idea that he got a custodial sentence, move it ahead of time so that he could have served his sentence and still run for president.
- [49:20]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Right.
- [49:21]
Mike Pesca
Would it have helped or hurt him?
- [49:24]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Tough to know. Really tough to know.
- [49:26]
Mike Pesca
You could, you could do the journalistic thing of making the best case for each side of the argument.
- [49:32]
Jonah E. Bromwich
I'm trying to think how I want to answer that question. One of, one of the things that I think we were shown from this trial and from the other cases is that not that these things didn't hurt Donald Trump. In fact, polling showed that independents were not particularly happy with the fact that he was convicted, but that they didn't change people's picture of him. Republicans were either didn't care at all or were more willing to support him, and Democrats didn't care at all because for them, they believed criminality was already baked into their idea of who this guy was. I don't see prison changing that equation. And in fact, it results in kind of, I think, images that Trump could promote extremely well to further a narrative of persecution and lawfare. And so it's hard for me to see how a prison sentence might have changed things. I have one counterpoint to myself, though, which I guess I'll air, which is that I do think one of the lessons of what happened with President Biden is that Americans and people generally want to see strong, vigorous leaders. And maybe Trump could have posed and looked very cool inside of cell, or maybe Not. I mean, prison is a terrible place to be. Being confined in any way is a hard place to be. And so if there was some way that that image might have kind of disrupted the narrative, right. Of the. Of a very strong, vigorous man, then maybe it could have changed his political fortunes. But it's hard to imagine these days, right? He's just a remarkable political figure.
- [51:02]
Mike Pesca
And there are a hundred data points where someone predicted, you know, this will show that Donald Trump isn't inevitable. This will show that Donald Trump has weaknesses. And in 2016, when he ran and whenever he didn't win a primary, the narrative on MSNBC was, once he loses this one primary, it will show he's not inevitable. And it never did, Right. Or maybe it did to the. Some. To the people who weren't going to vote for him anyway. He's a sui. Generous character, and he is.
- [51:29]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Well, and he's a sweet, generous character. But one of the things I try and show in this book is that he. He fits our era so precisely. His talents, his celebrity, his shamelessness, his combativeness, his ability to command the spotlight, his humor, I think are all things that fit with his individualism. This is an era that perfectly flatters those qualities. And I think the reason he is powerful is not because he is some magical figure, but I think is because who he is locks into our political and media and cultural environment so perfectly that he can't help but just be successful. And you see kind of comparisons with Donald Trump a lot, right? Like, Eric Adams would get compared to Donald Trump or Elon Musk, before he was so close to Donald Trump, would often compare to Donald Trump. Kanye west, before he went completely off the deep end, would get compared to Donald Trump. And I don't think that's. I used to think those are facile comparisons. Why don't people have any imagination? And then I realized, no, it's actually that this era flatters people with this set of qualities. And so it's no surprise that there are so many people who seem like Donald Trump in the. In the public spotlight. It's because our era loves those people and we want them.
- [52:36]
Mike Pesca
We want. And because Donald Trump trained these people to be like him and showed. And as a proof of concept like, this is a successful way to operate as a person in America in 2025.
- [52:49]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Yeah, it's really fascinating. One of the things that's really fascinating about it to me, I'm very interested in not quite institutions, but in the people that make up institutions. Like, there are real people in there, but they're often shy and self effacing and they don't like to talk. And so what happens when institutions and their figureheads, in my book, it's Alvin Braggin and Juan Merchand, the judge, go up against someone like Donald Trump who understands these powers that these institutionalists really haven't grappled with or haven't figured out how to use their advantage. And I think it was a defining conflict of the trial. I think it may be a defining conflict of our time. But for now, people like Donald Trump, individualists who understand camera, who understand these dynamics, are, I think, winning in terms of just kind of the raw power they've amassed.
- [53:34]
Mike Pesca
All right, it gives me an idea for some bonus questions, but for this part of the interview I will thank you. Jonah E. Bromwich, author of Dragon on Center Street New York vs Donald J. Trump I don't want to tell you who won, but it's you, the reader. Thank you, Jonah, of course.
- [53:51]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Thanks so much for having me.
- [53:53]
Mike Pesca
And there was a few bonus questions that I want to give for you. The subscribers to Pesca plus go to subscribe.mike pesca.com to get bonus segments or an ad free show or a little of both. That's subscribe.mike pesca dot com it is the best way to support the show and enhance your understanding of dragons and Center Street. And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes is the editor in chief and also chief investigative journalist of the GIST List. Ashley Khan is our production Coordinator. Michelle Pesk is our cbso. Astro Green runs our social. We got a lot of people here, plus the intern, Leo Baum. Improve. And thanks for listening.
- [54:46]
Jonah E. Bromwich
Foreign.
- [54:59]
Mike Pesca
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