Lawfare Daily: Grand Conspiracy with Molly Roberts

Summary

The Lawfare Podcast — Lawfare Daily: Grand Conspiracy with Molly Roberts

Date: January 20, 2026
Host: Benjamin Wittes (Editor in Chief, Lawfare)
Guest: Molly Roberts (Senior Editor, Lawfare)

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the so-called “grand conspiracy” theory currently facing scrutiny by a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida, presided over by Judge Eileen Cannon. Host Ben Wittes and guest Molly Roberts parse the origins, substance (or lack thereof), and legal mechanics of a sprawling conspiracy narrative, allegedly connecting Donald Trump’s political and legal troubles across years and government agencies. The conversation is at once sober and incredulous, exposing the legal incoherence of the grand conspiracy claims while taking seriously the fact that they are under active federal investigation.

---

Main Discussion Points & Insights

What Is the “Grand Conspiracy”?

• Definition and Origins

  • Roberts jokingly describes it as “really, really, really super extra big” (02:20) and explains it's an unprecedentedly broad, time-spanning alleged plot.
  • The claim encompasses multiple elections, top officials (including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, FBI Director Jim Comey), and various investigations from Russian collusion to Mar-a-Lago and January 6th.
  • “The grand conspiracy in this case is a plot so large scale that it spans multiple elections, it ties together officials you'd never think would be tied together.” — Molly Roberts, (02:45)

• Allegations

  • At its core, it alleges a unified “deep state” plot, starting with Clinton’s 2016 campaign, to sabotage Trump through manipulated intelligence and subsequent prosecutions.
  • Central to the narrative are “document dumps” including the discredited “Durham Annex,” said to be forged and potentially Russian sourced, purporting to show Obama and officials framing Trump. (06:20–07:20)

• Mar-a-Lago’s Role

  • The Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is used as a device to bring the sprawling theory into the jurisdiction of Florida, specifically under a Trump-friendly judge.
  • “Mar A Lago kind of gets you to Florida, right?” — Ben Wittes, (13:29)

How Did This Turn into a Criminal Investigation?

• Grand Jury Mechanics

  • Despite the theory’s incoherence, a grand jury has been convened in Fort Pierce, FL, with a pattern of forum-shopping to get a receptive Judge (Eileen Cannon).
  • Subpoenas—mostly for classified documents these officials can’t access—have been issued to various former intelligence officials. (12:12; 41:32)

• Protagonists Behind the Scenes

  • Mike Davis, head of the Article 3 Project and close ally of U.S. Attorney Jason Redding Quinones in Florida, is identified as a “shadow prosecutor,” consistently privy to otherwise secret proceedings.
  • Davis is cited as “the animating spirit” behind the investigation, pressing for it publicly and leveraging connections to inject loyalists into key positions. (20:42–22:09)

• Jurisdictional Engineering

  • The podcast explores how Mar-a-Lago was tenuously used to justify venue in Florida. Even that stretch is further strained by moving proceedings from West Palm to Fort Pierce, aiming for Judge Cannon. (13:33–15:23)
  • “Eileen Cannon is the only sitting judge in Fort Pierce. As it turns out, this does not 100% guarantee that she would ultimately be presiding over the case... but she will be doing so every alternating month.” — Molly Roberts, (14:29)

Legal and Factual Incoherence

• Lack of Clear Statutory Offense

  • The only hinted statute is “conspiracy against rights” (paralleling a January 6th charge), but this doesn't logically bind all the implicated acts or people.
  • “They'll have to identify the statute which Mike Davis has hinted is this conspiracy against rights statute... but they have not, to the targets of any of the subpoenas, articulated any particular crime.” — Molly Roberts, (34:05)

• No Evidence of an Actual Agreement

  • Both Wittes and Roberts return to the legal requirements for conspiracy: an actual agreement to break the law. Here, there is no plausible evidence of such.
  • “Is there any... suggestion about when who formed such an agreement?” — Wittes (18:00)
  • “Only in kind of the earliest stages... a lot of this is in the discredited Durham annex.” — Roberts (18:37)

• Practical Obstacles

  • Any real investigation would quickly falter: witnesses can't testify to what never happened, subpoenaed evidence doesn’t exist, and documents cited are discredited or unauthenticated.
  • “I don't know who your witness would be, right?... None of them is going to testify that this was a corrupt process.” — Ben Wittes, (47:01)

The Role of Trump and Loyalists

• Trump’s Perspective

  • Trump’s own role is less tactical than narrative—he tends to collapse all investigations into a single persecutory “hoax,” while lower-tier loyalists tie it into actionable legal theory.
  • “I think Trump is content as long as everyone gets prosecuted... for whatever is most convenient.” — Molly Roberts, (26:18)

• The MAGA Legal Tactic

  • The strategy seems less about actual prosecution than performative grievance; moving cases to friendlier jurisdictions, targeting perceived enemies, and perpetuating the “witch hunt” narrative.
  • Wittes: “One way to expect is like February 1st, you get a slew of motions to quash... another possibility is that it's easier to talk about a grand conspiracy and tweet about it than it is to investigate it.” (40:16)

Courtroom Realities and Prognosis

• Obstacles for Prosecutors

  • Successfully sustaining such a case, even with favorable judicial conditions, remains extremely unlikely: the facts, legal standards, and evidentiary requirements are insurmountable obstacles.
  • “You shouldn't want, if you're these prosecutors, to have to end up in a courtroom explaining this case... I can't really identify an agreement, and I can't really show intent...” — Molly Roberts, (42:54)

• Potential Outcomes

  • Despite the jaw-dropping implausibility, Wittes and Roberts admit that—given recent political-legal history—it’s possible some litigation and noise emerges.
  • “Every time I have predicted that something is gonna peter out cause it's too dumb, somebody ends up getting indicted.” — Ben Wittes, (50:49)
  • Roberts bets some subpoenas will spark procedural litigation, “if only because then it will make me sound slightly less crazy for having explained this whole grand conspiracy.” (50:28)

---

Notable Quotes and Moments

• On the Circular Nature of the Claims:

  • Wittes: “You sound like a kind of parody of Jim Jordan.” (08:48)
  • Roberts: “Yeah, I feel crazy.” (08:50)

• On the Legal Flimsy-ness:

  • Wittes: “In a conspiracy, there has to be an agreement... is there any suggestion about when, who formed such an agreement?” (18:00)
  • Roberts: “Only in kind of the earliest stages... a lot of this is in the discredited Durham annex.” (18:37)

• On the Reality of Grand Jury Tactics:

  • Wittes: “If a prosecutor just doesn't give a shit... you can, actually... get anybody to indict anybody for anything.” (44:28)
  • Roberts: “If, again, you're nihilistic enough about it, if you're willing to lie, if you're willing to yolo it, I can imagine getting somewhere on some sort of conspiracy related to the interference and collusion investigations, even though, again, there's no there there.” (46:11)

---

Key Timestamps

• 01:19–03:16 – Introduction and scope of the “grand conspiracy”
• 05:08–08:43 – Allegations and how the theory is constructed from document dumps
• 10:36–14:13 – Mar-a-Lago as jurisdictional bridge; targeting Eileen Cannon's court
• 20:42–22:35 – Mike Davis and the placement of Jason Redding Quinones as U.S. Attorney
• 34:05–36:10 – Likely statutes to be cited and potential judicial responses
• 39:56–41:48 – Subpoenas, obstacles, and possible next steps for the grand jury
• 44:28–47:01 – Conspiracy law as a tool, limits of the evidence, and legal realities
• 50:28–51:32 – Predictions about litigation and lasting impact of the grand conspiracy story

---

Tone & Style

Wittes and Roberts blend legal expertise and measured incredulity, anchoring every jarring detail in careful skepticism, often with dry or sardonic humor to underscore the implausibility of the whole affair.

---

Summary for Non-Listeners

• The episode investigates a sprawling, evidence-thin conspiracy theory tying Trump’s adversaries from 2016 onward into a single “grand conspiracy,” now under grand jury review in Florida.
• The narrative is buoyed by a few determined ideologues and legal activists eager to place it before a favorable judge—despite deep skepticism about its legal and factual basis.
• Host and guest are candid about the ludicrousness of the underlying claims, but serious about the legal process and the possibility that such cases, no matter how wild, can produce real-world headaches and consequences.
• The core takeaway: Even the most fantastical theories can acquire legal legs with the right mix of political incentive, judicial engineering, and “YOLO” prosecutorial culture—but their time in court, if it comes, will likely be short and chaotic.

Transcript

[A]

Close your eyes. Focus. Listen to work getting done with Monday.com relax as AI does the manual work while your teams are aligned on a single source of truth? Feel the sensation of an AI work platform so flexible and intuitive it feels like it was built just for you. Notice you're limitless, limitless, limitless. Now open your eyes. Go to Monday.com, start for free, and finally, breathe.

[B]

It's the New year and Instacart is here for whatever your new routine looks like. Maybe it's committing to the after work workout or trying plant based recipes or just having fresh ingredients in the fridge. Because with Instacart you get time back. You can filter shopping by dietary preferences and never run out of what you need. So whatever your new year plan is, Instacart is here to make it just a little more possible. Do download the Instacart app today. Actual dietary information may vary. Always check product packaging. Our understanding is that there is a sitting grand jury investigating this, and we have to take it seriously because that means that the people it's investigating are possibly going to end up in a courtroom defending themselves against these charges if that grand jury issues an indictment.

[A]

Ben it's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor in Chief of lawfare, with lawfare Senior Editor Molly Roberts.

[B]

We know, and we have reports already on the interference, collusion investigations from multiple sources that haven't found that there was any of this sort of malfeasance that the prosecutors will ostensibly be describing. So why do they think they'll be able to show facts contrary to that?

[A]

Today we're talking grand conspiracies. Not little conspiracies, not ones that only take a short period of time, but really big ones that go on forever and ever and ever. We wouldn't be talking about it, folks, except that a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida is hearing evidence on this matter and by the way, is being supervised by Judge Eileen Cannon. So, Molly, what is a grand conspiracy?

[B]

I believe it's a conspiracy that's really, really, really super extra big. You want to know what the grand conspiracy is or what a grand.

[A]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think this is the first time we've ever done a podcast on a grand conspiracy as opposed to merely a conspiracy. And I want the listenership to understand what the difference is.

[B]

Well, of course this one involves Donald Trump, so it has to be grand. The grand conspiracy in this case is a plot so large scale that it spans multiple elections, it ties together officials you'd never think would be tied together. Basically, it's a conspiracy that's outside the bounds of a usual conspiracy case because the people involved in it really plausibly seem to have been able to enter into an agreement at all.

[A]

All right, it sounds like you're making fun of the grand conspiracy and that I'm also making fun of the grand conspiracy. So let's start with the question of why we're taking this seriously enough to have a podcast about it rather than doing snarky tweeting. Why are we talking about the grand conspiracy?

[B]

So we're talking about the grand conspiracy not only because Donald Trump himself and various officials in his administration have been talking about it over the course of particularly the past few months, but because there is specific action now in Southern Florida that suggests that the Department of Justice is actually beginning to investigate this theory that they have that's become to be known as the grand conspiracy.

[A]

So in other words, we're taking it seriously because there's a sitting grand jury in Florida. Whether or not it's taking it seriously, it was convened in order to investigate it and therefore we have to take it seriously, right?

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Our understanding from the evidence available is that there is a sitting grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, investigating this grand conspiracy. We're not supposed to supposed to know that because grand juries are supposed to be conducting their proceedings in secret. But various MAGA allies and even Attorney General Pam Bondi herself have been pretty loose lipped about what's going on. So our understanding is that there is a sitting grand jury investigating this and we have to take it seriously because that means that the people it's investigating are possibly going to end up in a courtroom defending themselves against these charges if that grand jury issues an indictment.

[A]

Or even just dragged through the process of a grand jury indictment, whether or not there are any indictments. All right, not to be coy, but what is, to the extent that we understand it, and I will admit that in my case, the understanding is limited. What is the allegation that is being investigated by this grand jury in Florida?

[B]

Yeah, I think that any reasonable person's understanding has to be limited here because this theory is not particularly coherent. But I will do my best with that caveat to explain it. The grand conspiracy essentially, is that Hillary Clinton, and by the way, Hillary Clinton in the grand conspiracy is diabetic. She has heart and lung disease, and she's on heavy tranquilizers to control her fits of anger, aggression and cheerfulness.

[A]

According to whom, like who has articulated this vision of the grand conspiracy as starting with a diabetic Hillary Clinton.

[B]

Yeah. So there are a series of document dumps in which the grand conspiracy has sort of been spun out. And a lot of these occurred over the summer. So first in June, CIE Director John Ratcliffe released what was basically what was just a reassessment of the 2017 intelligence community assessment. And the only conclusion he came to was that the high confidence conclusion that Russia aspired to help Trump win then was too confident, and that intelligence officials nonetheless had made that determination. And he said that amounted to a manipulation of intelligence. So the officials that he was complaining about there were CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey. And then Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence, also did three dumps of documents. So one of those was a declassified Republican staff report from the Devin Nunes led House Intelligence Committee. One of them was a whistleblower account. And one of them, the most kind of explosive one, was the so called Durham Annex. And that's in reference to U.S. attorney John Durham's report from when he was Special counsel charged with ascertaining whether the Crossfire hurricane collusion investigation was improperly motivated. And the Durham Annex supposedly was discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel inside burn bags in a secret room. And it's a bunch of communications that show that Obama was trying to protect Hillary Clinton by framing Putin and Trump. And. And it turns out that the Durham Annex didn't show up in the Durham report because Durham himself said the documents were likely forged. These are likely Russian source documents. And it's in those that you get kind of the most insane stuff here that you get allegations of Hillary Clinton telling these officials, or these officials finding out that Hillary Clinton needs to be protected from the investigation into a private email server, and then those officials saying, okay, to do that, we're just going to get Trump in trouble instead and we are going to make it look like Putin was trying to help him win the election. And we're going to rely on bad intelligence, including the Steele dossier, to do that.

[A]

All right, so listening to you talk.

[B]

About this, I sound crazy.

[A]

You sound crazy.

[B]

Yeah, I feel crazy.

[A]

Well, you sound like a kind of parody of Jim Jordan. But I am trying to figure out the grand conspiracy. As I understand, it kind of starts with Hillary Clinton and the intelligence community assessment and dwells excessively on the Steele dossier. And then it kind of migrates to the Mar A Lago raid, which involved a completely different set of characters. Years later. And then it has to do with the indictment of Trump, Both for the January 6th case and the classified documents case. And there seems to be this idea that there is a single unified conspiracy that transverses time and involves a whole bunch of people who didn't even know each other or don't know each other, never work together, and just involves all of the allegations against Trump being false. And I'm trying to figure out how you get from that kind of melange of nonsense to a grand jury investigation. As in what? Is there some narrative thread that involves an actual crime that binds all this together? And if not, what is it doing in front of a grand jury?

[B]

Yeah, where to start. And even harder, where to start that doesn't make me sound even crazier. So I guess one place to start would be the Mar A Lago question. This ties a lot of the allegations against Trump together, and it doesn't totally tie all of them together. It doesn't really bring in Ukraine, it doesn't bring in. Doesn't really bring in January 6th, except to the extent that it brings in Jack Smith via Mar A Lago. So the basic allegation there is that. And this goes back to those burn bags that in the burn bags there were records that tied together Russia, Durham's investigation, Mar A Lago investigation, therefore they are connected. And ah, again, I'm sorry, I sound crazy. Perhaps the connection was that the Mar A Lago search for classified documents was actually an attempt to get back documents that would have revealed all the malfeasance in the Russian interference collusion investigations that were happening earlier. So that's how they tie those two things together. But I think the other reason Mar A Lago is really important here is it's getting to your question of how does this get in front of a grand jury. And more specifically, how does it get in front of this grand jury in Florida? Because Mar A Lago is in Florida and we're talking about a case that sounds like it's pretty much based in the Beltway. So it's Mar a Lago that gets them to Florida. And Florida's really convenient for a few reasons, the first of which is that it has a super friendly U.S. attorney. So this case cropped up in other U.S. attorney's offices over the months, some version of it, mostly focusing on John Brennan, but it stalled out in multiple places in the Western.

[A]

Because it's insane.

[B]

Because it's insane. Because it's insane. Yeah, like a U.S. attorney. And I mean this happens all the time now. But a U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia was even forced to resign related to some version of the grand conspiracy because he didn't want to sideline a high ranking career prosecutor who was skeptical of it. And then in other districts, they just gave up. Nobody got fired or was forced to resign, but they gave up. But this guy, Jason Redding Quinones, who is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, has, it seems, been way more receptive. And so he has already issued subpoenas out of the Miami office for several of these officials we've been talking about. And there have been indications, mostly coming from this kind of MAGA activist, Article 3 Project founder Mike Davis.

[A]

We're going to get to Mr. Davis in a moment.

[B]

All right, all right, all right. Yeah, all right. Indications from Mike Davis that Quinones, who Davis describes as his very good buddy, is standing up this grand jury in Fort Pierce, specifically which Mike Davis had been calling for for years to investigate the grand conspiracy. So Mar A Lago kind of gets you to Florida, right?

[A]

And it gets you to a particular judge in Florida.

[B]

Right. Mar A Lago gets you to Florida. Fort Pierce gets you to a particular judge. And that judge is Eileen Cannon. And of course, we're familiar with Eileen Cannon from the classified documents case in which she eventually dismissed it for Jack Smith having been improperly appointed, but was just very, very, very friendly to the President throughout. So you said Mar A Lago gets you to that judge. And I would quibble with that a little bit. I think that's part of the problem here. Mar A Lago is not in the same division as Fort Pierce. Mar A Lago is in West Palm. So really, this should be going to a grand jury in West Palm if they're going to be using Mar A Lago as the reason that it's in Florida at all.

[A]

I mean, it should be in the District of Columbia.

[B]

It should not be here. It should not. Sorry. It should be here. Yes, yes. Yes. No, no, no. Well, yes, in the bur. It was in. Again, it popped up in all these.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that was in the Western. That was in Virginia. Right.

[B]

We're going all over the. I was going to say all over the country, but we're at least going all over the coast with this one. But. But yes. So Mar A Lago gets you to Florida. Already a little strained. And then for whatever reason, we've also gone to Fort Pierce, which is even more strained because that's not where Mar A Lago is. But never mind, that's fine. You can choose your district, even if it seems a little suspicious that you want it 130 miles away from the Miami office. But you can choose your district. And Eileen Cannon is the only sitting judge in Fort Pierce. As it turns out, this does not 100% guarantee that she would ultimately be presiding over the case if it makes it to that point. And it doesn't guarantee that she'll be presiding over the grand jury all the time, but she will be doing so every alternating month.

[A]

All right, I'm still hung up on this question. And we're going to keep coming back to this. What the heck is this about? Is the grand conspiracy the idea that there was a deep state plot to prevent Donald Trump from being elected in 2016 or that there was a deep state plot to get him charged in 2022? Or as I think, both. And what on earth do they have to do? Like, what's the connection by which John Brennan and the creation of the intelligence community assessment in 2016, 2017, and Jim Comey and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are out of office and gone, you know, not running for, you know, not part of the political system can be part of a conspiracy to get Trump Mar A Lago searched in 2021, 2022. And similarly, who are the conspirators? How is Jack Smith connected to any conspiracy that happened in 2016? These seem like what is the notion that there is a conspiracy here at all?

[B]

I mean, it's so strained, it's really difficult to answer the question. But I believe that the conspiracy is to prevent Trump from getting elected in any election ever. So that ultimately means to prevent him from being on the ballot by charging him with crimes and hoping he'll be convicted of them. And originally, it just means don't get him elected by smearing him. So you're not going to stop him from being on the ballot, although. Well, you're not going to stop him from being on the ballot. There's no way they could have moved fast enough to stop him from being on the ballot if he were, you know, even if it hadn't proven that he'd colluded. But it's not to get him elected. So that's the conspiracy. They all wanted to do this. They were all working in concert across time to make sure that Trump didn't get elected. And that kind of ends with the final effort, which is this prosecution. And also, it's a cover up. Sorry. Also, the Mar A Lago search is a cover up of them trying to not let him get elected the first time.

[A]

Okay, so normally in a conspiracy, there has to be an agreement. Yes, a conspiracy is an agreement to commit an illegal act with some overt step taken in furtherance of that agreement. So is there any, in any of the voluminous, high quality literature about the grand conspiracy, is there any suggestion about when who formed such an agreement?

[B]

Only in kind of the earliest stages. There's the suggestion. And again, a lot of this is in the discredited Durham annex. But in the early stages, there's the suggestion that there were conversations between Obama and his intelligence officials about framing Trump to protect Hillary. But there's nothing that they have to suggest that's supposed to show that the Mar A Lago classified documents search involved an agreement with any of those people or had anything to do with the COVID up. They don't have that. All they have are these recently released documents showing that FBI agents were concerned that there wasn't probable cause. But they don't have emails from FBI agents saying, we're going to do it anyway because we want to frame Donald Trump more. We want to cover up what Obama did in 2020, 2017, 2016.

[A]

All right, I'm still struggling with the coherence of this thing.

[B]

I mean, me too.

[A]

You know, coherent enough to create the basis for a grand jury investigation. But let's leave that aside and return to a name that you mentioned of somebody who really appears to be one of the animating spirits behind this, which is Mike Davis. And as I've looked at this material, I've been surprised. He's not a government official, and yet he seems to be remarkably knowledgeable about the conduct and foundations of this investigation. And he keeps making statements that, you know, purport to reflect what the Southern District of Florida is doing, purport to reflect things about this grand jury that, you know, are supposed to be secret. So who is Mike Davis and why does he seem to be the shadow prosecutor behind the grand conspiracy case?

[B]

Yeah, so Mike Davis is a Federalist Society lawyer who has gone on to found the Article 3 project, which is basically trying to be a more MAGA version of the Federalist Society. He and Jason Redding Quinones are, my understanding, is friends from way back. And in fact, it's.

[A]

Quinones is the U.S. attorney in Florida.

[B]

The U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Exactly. And in fact, part of the reason Quinones has been installed in the Southern District is that Mike Davis, who is very active in sort of the MAGA influencer podcast world, who's very well connected, was pulling for him. So Quinones, who doesn't have a great past, he. I'm going to try to find exactly what he. I believe it was in the same district that he left the office because he had basically not impressed his supervisors. He was not doing well at the job, he had a bad performance evaluation. I just wanna make sure that I. Yep, same office, Southern District, Miami, U.S. attorney's office. He had left that office previously and now he's back in there leading it. And this is partly because Mike Davis was pulling for him. He said, this would be a great guy to have in there and sent kind of the message, this would be a loyal guy to have in there.

[A]

And is your impression that he was put there in order to run this investigation in a kind of Lindsay Halligan, or was he put there for general reasons of loyalty? And then Mike Davis or somebody came to him later and said, hey, bud, you want to do a grand conspiracy investigation? What's the order of operations here? To the extent we know, yeah, I.

[B]

Think that it's sort of some combination of the two. Mike Davis has been for a long time advocating for this grand jury to be stood up in Fort Pierce. So it's clearly something that has been on his mind. But we saw versions of the grand conspiracy or matters that have now been pulled into the grand conspiracy, as I said, appearing in other U.S. attorney's offices. And then eventually in the fall, they seem to have been sort of consolidated in Florida, where Redding Quinones issued upwards of two dozen subpoenas to a bunch of those officials we were talking about. So I think it's a bit of a mix. I think that he was put there generally to be useful, but also this is a particular effort with which he can be useful. And as those inquiries were stalling out elsewhere, it seemed like the right time to kick this off down in the Southern District.

[A]

And do you have the sense that this is Trump driven or is this Mike Davis driven? So I look at this and I say at some level, this is the sort of paranoid fantasies of a whole bunch of MAGA people who are, you know, convinced that the Russia investigation was a corrupt effort to get Trump and convinced sort of, that subsequent investigations flowed from this fruit of the poisonous tree, which is the Steele dossier, a proposition for which there is actually zero evidence of any kind, but people really do believe it. But there's another side of it, which is Trump's own very deep belief that the Russia investigation turned into the Ukraine investigation turned into. He talks about the hoax, this hoax turned into that hoax turned into this hoax, turned into January 6th hoax, turned into the classified documents hoax. And he has this sort of unified field theory of all the investigations against him, that it was just sort of one. One giant hoax that was directed against him that had ever morphing forms. And the grand conspiracy kind of reminds me a little bit of a set of Trump tweets. What's his role in this?

[B]

Yeah, I think it's a hard question. I think that you see Trump saying what you said. You see Trump sending out tweets that say, they impeached me twice, they indicted me five times over nothing. Justice must be served. These tweets, where he's not distinguishing between the types of things people did to him and where he's essentially saying, this is all one enemy from within that wants to destroy the country by destroying me. So he has it all put together like that. But also he doesn't mind whether you get Letitia James for mortgage fraud. He doesn't need her necessarily to be part of some grand conspiracy with a legal theory underpinning it. I think Trump is content as long as everyone gets prosecuted, to have them prosecuted for whatever is most convenient. Right.

[A]

In fact, he kind of likes, you know, Letitia James charged him or sued him for mortgage fraud. He brings a mortgage fraud case against her. You know, Jim Comey says he's a liar. Says he's a liar. He accuses Jim Comey of lying. Right. There's the. He likes the kind of parallelisms of these things.

[B]

And there is a parallelism here with a Jack Smith count that we can get to in a bit. But. But my guess is that Trump is not thinking on the level of. And we could actually legally allege a grand conspiracy. I think he likely wanted the prosecutions about the Russia hoax specifically, which is what was the quote, unquote, Russia hoax specifically, which is what was happening initially with scrutiny of Brennan and other officials related to that intelligence assessment. I think it is way more the machinations of people far lower down the food chain who have brought this, appear to have brought this to Florida and appear to be spinning it into this narrative and legal theory that is the grand conspiracy. And again, to even get it to Florida, you need to allege something grand. To get those issues with John Brennan from the Beltway to Florida, you need to tie them to something totally actually unrelated, like Mar a Lago. So that, I think, is kind of instrumental. It's just to get it down there. And I don't think that that was necessarily on Trump's Mind. Oh, we need to get this to Florida where we have a friendly judge and a friendly prosecutor. I think that's people kind of trying to do this work for him. And it's certainly convenient that it's something that narratively he's very much on board with something that he has described too this big hoax.

[A]

Hey, lawfare listeners, I got a secret for you that no one else will tell you about. Dinner every night. It's the thing that never goes away. It's always there. Every single day. There it is again. You have to do it or you're going to order out or go to a restaurant. Hellofresh doesn't make you a better cook, but it does give you your evenings back. So let me tell you what actually happens here. There are a hundred recipes every week. You pick what sounds good. You don't do what you can figure out how to make yourself. There are bigger portions so no one's going to go hungry. And you get this big menu with stuff that sounds like you couldn't do it yourself. But then you do. And on a hard night, that's right. Really cool that you actually feel like you're eating what you probably couldn't have cooked yourself on that night. It's sustainably sourced seafood, antibiotic free chicken, seasonal produce that actually tastes like something. There's steak and seafood at no extra cost. 3 times more seafood options than before. 35 or more high protein recipes weekly, plus Mediterranean and GLP1 friendly options. It's not just dinner. It's time. It's energy. It's the ability to actually sit down instead of standing at the counter. Stress eating while you cook. And when dinner tastes this good and takes this little effort, you finally get your nights back. That's what it's really about. I have used hellofresh. I ate a hellofresh dinner just the other night. And I think you should try it too. So go to hellofresh.com lawfare10fm to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife. A $144.99 value on your third box offer valid while supplies last. Free meals applied at discount on first box. New subscribers only. Berries by plan.

[B]

Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on ebay where I go for all kinds of things I love. And there it was. That hologram trading card.

[A]

One of the rarest.

[B]

The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. Ebay had it and now everyone's asking.

[A]

Ooh, Where'd you get your windshield wipers?

[B]

Ebay has all the parts that fit my car.

[A]

No more annoying, just beautiful.

[B]

Millions of finds, each with a story. EBay Things people love par le to.

[A]

Francais, Hablas espanol par Liano.

[B]

If you've used Babbel, you would.

[A]

Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted, crafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com acast spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com acast rules and restrictions may apply.

[B]

Hi, I'm Darina, co founder of Quo. You might know us as OpenPhone. My dad is a business owner, and growing up, he always kept his ringtone super loud so he'd never miss a customer call. That stuck with me. When we started Quo, our mission was to help businesses not just stay in touch, but make every customer feel valued, no matter when they might call. Quo gives your team business phone numbers to call and text on your phone or computer. Your calls, messages and contacts live in one workspace so your team can stay fully aligned and reply faster. And with our AI agent answering 24. Seven, you'll really never miss a customer. Over 90,000 businesses use Quo. Get 20% [e-mail] tech that's qU-U-O.com tech and we can port your existing numbers over for free. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers.

[A]

All right, so let's talk about how a grand conspiracy investigation proceeds. You start by issuing a whole bunch of subpoenas. They've done that. And then presumably you start hauling people in to give testimony before a grand jury. At some point when you do that, somebody is going to move to quash the grand jury subpoena, saying, wait a minute, what are you even investigating? And I am waiting. Like a lot of that litigation would take place under seal. But this is where the identity of the judge becomes very important. Because if you have a normal judge, and a normal judge can be a Democratic appointee, a Republican appointee, a normal judge who is not known to have taken wild liberties with the law in support of Donald Trump, it is fairly easy to see how eventually a prosecutor who cannot articulate a coherent legal theory of what they're investigating without sounding like a crazy person runs into some trouble. Right. You actually do need a theory of a law that you're looking at and conduct that would, if true, violate the law. What are the mechanisms that you see by which the judges of the Southern District of Florida and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals might actually end up looking at some of this stuff?

[B]

Yeah. So, and I think you're right. I think it's going to be difficult for them to explain what they're actually trying to prosecute here. And they'll have to identify the statute which Mike Davis has hinted is this conspiracy against rights statute. And that's the parallelism I was pointing to, which is that conspiracy against rights was actually count four in Jack Smith's January 6 indictment of Donald Trump that was interfering with voting rights. And I think that they would attempt to make a similar case here. The kind of other weirdness of this is that they have not, to the targets of any of the subpoenas, articulated any particular crime. Except to Brennan's lawyer. They've articulated a lying to Congress charge, but that would not be involved in this conspiracy. That would have to be a separate charge. So you can see them saying, oh, we're investigating lying to Congress, but it wouldn't even work with their conspiracy against rights theory, which is the only way that you get it to Florida. So, again, I see them having trouble explaining this theory to a judge. How does it get to a judge? Well, like you said, the defendants, their attorneys could move to quash a subpoena. If Judge Cannon refuses a request to quash it, they could resist the subpoena. Or if Judge Cannon rules that their testimony can be compelled, they could resist that. And that could conceivably bring it into a courtroom, and it could eventually bring it to the 11th Circuit. If it gets to the point that a grand jury hands down an indictment, then of course, they can motion to dismiss the case. And that's another way that you get it to move up the chain of the courts.

[A]

But you also, you have a weird situation here in which they do seem to have successfully engineered the fact that the grand jury is being supervised at least some of the time by Eileen Cannon. And any indictment, presumably would be in her court where she is the only judge. And there is some. I mean, that is a bit of a feat of engineering.

[B]

It is a bit of a feat of engineering. And Brennan's lawyer has written a letter to the chief judge requesting that she intervene to prevent the case from being steered toward Fort Pierce. But he wrote that over the holidays, this grand ju was Scheduled to start sitting this week, January 12th. We haven't heard anything. So that doesn't mean that if an indictment were eventually handed down, she couldn't make sure that the case didn't end up in Judge Cannon's courtroom. Judge Cannon is the only judge sitting in Fort Pierce, but that doesn't mean necessarily in the Southern District that she's the only judge who would hear it. They have kind of a complicated wheel system that involves neighboring divisions, but has exceptions, but also has exceptions for unanticipated emergencies. And one point also, that if the Mar a Lago classified documents case is brought in, that the defense for any of these people could bring up is that it was in Eileen Cannon's courtroom. She was involved in that case. Should she be overseeing this conspiracy case that could involve a prosecution that she presided over? So anyway, the. The answer to your question is yes. It's a remarkable feat of engineering. I do wonder, and may not be connected at all. I don't wanna be being a conspiracy theorist myself, whether the fact that Eileen Cannon is now duty judge in Fort Pierce only every other month, when she was initially supposed to be duty judge in Fort Pierce for the entire year. I wonder if that's the chief judge who I believe has interfered with Cannon previously in a way that was favorable to the prosecution in the Trump cases. But you can tell me if I'm wrong.

[A]

I believe that the. I'm not sure it's the same chief judge, but I would have to look that up. There was definitely a moment where some of her colleagues, including the chief judge, came to her and said, are you sure you're up to this? Because she was sort of brand new. And they, I think, urged her to step aside, given the way she had handled the pretrial litigation or the. The pre indictment litigation, and she refused. That's what I. I'm not sure I remember the details of it. But yes, there were prior interventions, and of course, there were aggressive interventions by the 11th Circuit on more than one occasion. So, you know, this is. This is a problem judge in a conservative circuit who has a bad relationship with a court of appeals that has had to step in to correct her with respect to this set of issues a number of times.

[B]

Right. So I wondered whether it was at all possible that that change in scheduling for the duty judge was a move by the same chief judge to at least mitigate against what was going on here. Because this grand jury has been stood up in Fort Pierce. But the subpoenas were initially issued out of Miami. So you Know you wouldn't. It was a kind of gearing up for the case to be steered toward Fort Pierce, but hadn't happened yet. So was this a way to. Because the grand jury would sit for longer than these remaining three weeks of January. Was this a way to make it at least. So it wasn't going to be a case that purely Judge Cannon would be looking over. But it could also be a coincidence. You know, it's an order by the chief judge that amended the schedule, but it doesn't have any reasoning in it. So it could just totally be a coincidence.

[A]

Right. And so as it is now, depending on when one filed a motion to quash, and you would know, as a defense lawyer, you know, January's a bad month, February's a good month, March is a bad month. So which do we know which months Eileen Cannon is supervising the grand jury and which month somebody else is?

[B]

Yeah, you just said the bad months and good months. Oh, I got that. Yeah. Well, the coin flip. Yeah. So Eileen Cannon is there now in January, and then next month it'll be this judge who is a Miami based judge, David Leibowitz, I believe his name is, and then back to Cannon and so on.

[A]

So one way to expect is like February 1st, you get a slew of motions to quash. Another possibility, though, is that it's easier to talk about a grand conspiracy and tweet about it than it is to investigate it. And if you're, you know, okay, so you're Mr. Quinones and you've got a. You've got to actually investigate and create a prosecutable case out of a combination of nonsense and, you know, a time warp. Right. And people who don't know each other. And so what will actually happen is it will focus in on a few discrete questions that are not grand conspiracy questions like, did John Brennan lie to Congress? Answer no, but. Okay, but you can investigate that question. Right. Do you have a sense of what other than issuing 24 subpoenas to a group of former officials who this investigation has actually consisted of at this point?

[B]

No, I don't. Just issuing the subpoenas, which by the way, is itself somewhat performative because my understanding is they were largely for highly classified information that these people don't have, presumably don't have. If they did have it, we'd have a whole other problem on our end of the reason.

[A]

People who Trump has already stripped of their security clearances.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so they don't have access to this material. But it does, I suppose, force them to go Search their records to make sure they don't have. It's a, you know, it is a pain in the neck. All right, so now the grand jury is sitting. We haven't had any indication of anybody being called to testify to it, right?

[B]

Not that I know of.

[A]

So one possibility here is that this is an. It's kind of a ghost investigation of a grand conspiracy. Right, like that. There's that you act, when you actually sit down to do it, you can whisper in Mike Davis's ear, oh, we've convened a grand jury. But, like, when it actually comes down to doing anything, that's a tricky, much trickier business. And one possibility we should keep in mind is that nothing happens.

[B]

I think that is 100% correct. The case, as you have pointed out, doesn't make any sense. You shouldn't want, if you're these prosecutors, to have to end up in a courtroom explaining this case and explaining, yeah, it's a conspiracy case where I need to prove that these people entered into an agreement with the specific intent to violate someone's statutory or constitutional right. But I can't really identify an agreement, and I can't really show intent, and certainly I can't show that that intent and that agreement had anything to do with the specific right to vote or to appear on the ballot of Trump or his supporters.

[A]

Now, on any witness you bring in there and you ask that question, John Brennan, you know, were you trying to. Did you have an agreement with Hillary Clinton and Jim Comey to prevent people from voting for Donna? He would look at you like you were insane, right?

[B]

Yes. Like you've been looking at me when I was trying to describe this throughout the entirety of the podcast. He would. Absolutely, he would. And what they would have to show was that these people did all these things entirely in bad faith, that that was what they were trying to do, that they didn't have any other reasonable basis to be doing this investigation. And how can you show that? We have. We know, and we have reports already on the interference collusion investigations from multiple sources that haven't found that there was any of this sort of malfeasance that the prosecutors will ostensibly be describing. So why do they think they'll be able to show facts contrary to that?

[A]

All right, so there's another possibility, though, and that is what you might call the Lindsay Halligan YOLO possibility. You know, everything that we're saying, I would have said the month before Jim Comey was indicted for lying to Congress, which he did not do. And then if you have a Prosecutor who just doesn't give a shit and says, you know, I'm gonna, on my third day in office, indict him anyway. You can, actually. And one thing about conspiracy law is that it is, it really is quite malleable, right? And it gets rid of all kinds of statutes of limitations problems. Because if a conspiracy that never had a beginning date and has never ended and continues until now, if it's grand enough, you get rid of all your statute of limitation problems. And so another possibility is that you have a friendly judge, you have a compliant grand jury, and that's a hypothesis. I've been pretty impressed with grand juries this past year. But a compliant grand jury and you're willing to lie, you can kind of get anybody to indict anybody for anything. So I'm curious whether you think the grand conspiracy might have legs because of the combination of forum shopping and a kind of nihilism on the part of the prosecutorial team.

[B]

Maybe like you said, one likes to think better of the average grand juror than that. To me, I can imagine, again, grand juries, ham sandwiches, I can imagine managing. If, again, you're nihilistic enough about it, if you're willing to lie, if you're willing to yolo it, I can imagine getting somewhere on some sort of conspiracy related to the interference and collusion investigations, even though, again, there's no there there. I get hung up on the connecting it to Mar a Lago. That's where it seems to me like it is just so much of a leap that it should be difficult for any even semi reasonable person to be convinced of it. But of course, Mar a Lago, again, is what gets you to Florida. So that seems like a big problem for them.

[A]

So I have a different problem which goes back to 2016 and the IAC, which I, you know, for my sins in life, is a record I know really well, which is I don't know who your witness would be, be, right? Somehow you've got to put on a witness that show who would testify to somebody with firsthand information using admissible evidence, not stuff that John Durham wrote eight years later or six years later, seven years later. But you know something, somebody who actually can testify to firsthand facts as to the intention of a group of people that they formulated an agreement to throw the election to. Hillary Clinton, diabetic Hillary Clinton, because I know a lot of people who were involved in that process. None of them is going to testify that, that this was a corrupt process designed to deprive voters of the right to Elect of their constitutional right to elect who was clearly the person of their choice and by the way, who won anyway. Right.

[B]

So, like, I know, we forget about that part, don't we?

[A]

Right. I just. I'm hung up on the first part of the conspiracy. I don't understand what evidence you would ever think you could put on in court that even hints in that direction.

[B]

Yeah, no, I mean, all you have, evidence wise, is these document dumps. Right? I can't think of a person either, who is going. Who would have firsthand knowledge.

[A]

Right, but documents don't testify, right?

[B]

No, exactly. I can't think of a person who would testify to them. One of them is a disgruntled whistleblower, but his only story is that he didn't think that the Steele dossier was included in the ica. And then he found out that it was, and then he was. He was mad about it. There's. That's nothing there.

[A]

Right? All right, so let me sketch out a hypothesis for you, which is the moment that this investigation shows signs of actual life, as opposed to being the kind of investigation that you announce a grand jury and then it kind of vanishes. You will have motions to quash filed in even numbered months, but that there is a reasonable possibility that what will happen is that this is the last time we will ever talk about the grand conspiracy. Because it's 30 to 40% too dumb to have to have enough legs to actually do anything with. Which would you bet on if you were a betting woman? Too dumb for legs or we're actually going to spend some time this year litigating in even numbered months only over the grand conspiracy. Grand jury subpoenas.

[B]

I'm going to bet on some subpoenas being issued through this grand jury and some litigation emerging related to that, if only because then it will make me sound slightly less crazy for having explained this whole grand conspiracy that supposedly is being heard in Fort Pierce right now and being pursued by the administration.

[A]

Folks, on that bold prediction, which I think unfortunately is probably right, every time I have predicted that something is gonna peter out cause it's too dumb, somebody ends up getting indicted. And that's why I am taking the Letitia James hairdresser story very seriously. But by the way, if sandwich guy does not get folded into the grand conspiracy, Mike Davis will not have done his job. The culmination of the conspiracy was the moment that that sandwich guy threw that sandwich at the CPB agent.

[B]

That's good. That extends the statute of limitations even longer.

[A]

It does. Folks, we're going to leave it there. Molly Roberts, thank you for joining us today. Molly's you can find Molly's excellently insane story about the grand conspiracy on Lawfare. And you know, look folks, we're sorry. Sometimes we have to bring you content like this. The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material supporter of Lawfare and at our website, lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. The podcast is edited by Jen Patia and our theme music is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening.

[B]

Foreign hey, this is Paige from Giggly Squad. We all have way too many subscriptions and bills and no good way to manage or track all of them. But now we have Experian. It's the best place to manage your finances because you can connect all of your accounts in one place, track all your spending, and you can let Experian do the work of finding ways to save you money. January is the perfect time to get your finances in order. It's the perfect New Year resolution. Let your big financial friend Experian do the work for you. So get started today with the Experian app. Now.