Trump’s TV Strategy

Donald Trump’s legal troubles didn’t get any better this week because he essentially confessed on national television. We also heard from the great Anti Mueller hope John Durham would testify in front of congress, some major developments in the January six case, this sentencing of one of the most violent of the rioters and the protesters. And we get a report from the Washington Post that the Department of Justice and the FBI may have slowed off the investigation. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes.

And this is the latest episode of our new companion podcast, the Trump trials that we feature every Thursday in partnership with our friends from Law Fair. And, of course, joining me again this morning. Offares editor in chief Ben Whitis, the author of the invaluable dog shirt daily newsletter. Good morning, Ben. How are you?

Good morning, Charlie. Is your world rocked this morning by John Durham’s testimony yesterday? Have you repented all your sins now that you realized that the entire sequence of Trump investigations was indeed a hoax perpetrated by secret deep state actors against a presidential candidacy.

Put this in the context of all of the hopes that were invested in John Durham by by Maga World. I mean, he was going to blow the lid off something something something. Right? I mean, So he investigated for years to expose I think Donald Trump referred to it as the crime of the century. And it hasn’t gone well for John Durham.

He’s been humiliated in the courtroom. His report was kind of a damn squib, and things didn’t go that much better. When he testified him before the house, because he did it.

I think his best moment yesterday was just the shot of his beard before he said a word. It’s all downhill. Because, you know, the beard does look kind of menacing and you know, like, justice glued to a face. But then he started talking and it just didn’t go so well.

One thing that I think needs to be underlined here is that, again, you know, when when Donald Trump is promising, the Jonathan Last the guy who was going to expose the crime of the century. John Durham comes out and makes it very clear that he’s not criticizing the Mueller report in any way whatsoever. In his opening statement, the one part that he actually had prepared for, His said his report should not be read to suggest in any way that Russian election interference was not a threat. It was And then he’s talking about Mueller himself. He didn’t hold back anything.

He said, our object, our aim was not to dispute director Mueller. I have the greatest regard, the highest regard for director Mueller. He is a patriot. This is not the way most, you know, Trump folks, and We’ll get to this a little bit later. One of the guys who was really, really mad at John Durham yesterday was Matt Gates.

But so let’s walk through. Did you catch the back and forth with Adam Schiff

I did. There were several back and forths over the course of the testimony, including that one, including with representative Cohen that revealed that Durham does not appear especially converse in the findings of the Mueller report.

Okay. That was to me the most shocking part how little he knew and understood and Adam Schiff. This seems very timely because, of course, Kevin McCarthy’s majority voted to censure Adam Schiff last night, of course, this led to, you know, chaos on the house floor with Democrats saying shame, shame, shame, shame. And my guess is, and this is just some ranked punditry, is that it probably makes it far more likely that next year we will see a senator Schiff since he’s running for senate in California, and there is nothing that would, I would think, support his campaign who give rocket fuel to his campaign more than being censured by Kevin McCarthy’s majority. But in any case, let’s play a little bit of this because it was interesting.

And and just keep in mind, again, how overhyped, how hyped up this Durham report was, and the way in which in, say, Fox News World, it’s still considered to be, you know, this debunks the Willow report. So, I mean, John Durham comes out and basically says, yeah. We’re not debunking anything. We think he was really good. And then, you know, Adam Schiff asked Durham about, you know, details about the Russia collusion including, you know, the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was actually sharing polling data with a Russian operative.

Let’s play cut number one.

Both Mueller and congressional investigations found that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was secretly meeting with an operative link to Russian intelligence named Konstantin Clement. Correct?

That’s my understanding. Yes.

And at Manafort, while chairman of the Trump campaign gave that Russian intelligence operative, the campaign’s internal polling data. Correct?

That’s what I’ve read in the news. Yes. What?

And that Manafort provided this information to Russian intelligence while Russian intelligence was engaged in that social media campaign and the release is stolen documents to help the Trump campaign. Correct?

You may be heading beyond depth of my knowledge, but it

Well, let me let me say very simply, while Manafort, the campaign chairman for Donald Trump was giving this Russian intelligence officer internal campaign polling data, Russian intelligence was helping the Trump campaign, weren’t they?

I I don’t I don’t know that.

You really don’t know those very basic facts of the investigation?

I know the general facts. Yes. Do I know that particular fact? Myself? No.

I mean, I know that I’ve read that in the media.

Oh, so bad. Yeah. I have to say that I thought I was kinda beyond shocked. I figured it was gonna be routine in the in the that exchange. Yeah.

I didn’t really know much about that thing.

I mean, at one level, it just a humiliating moment for Durham, but at another level, it goes to something very profound about the Durham project. Right? So John Durham is appointed by Bill Barr initially not as a special counsel, but to conduct a review of how the Russia investigation started. And he pursues weird set of conspiracy theories that we still don’t really know how Barr cooked up, but that he seemed interest in and committed to early in the period right after Mueller’s report came out. And if you read the Durham report, he is fixated on this idea that when the George Papadopoulos information first came in.

That is when you’ll recall that George Papadopoulos gets a little too drunk and talks to the former Australian foreign minister and then ambassador to Britain Alexander Downer and sort of boasts that the Russians have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Mhmm. And at the point at which the Australians turn this material over to the FBI, the FBI, in my view quite rightly immediately predicates an investigation. And

—

Mhmm.

—

Durham is in his report is very sated on this idea that when they opened this investigation, they didn’t have any other evidence of collusion, that the evidence of collusion that predicated the investigation was really the only thing they had on collusion. To which some of us respond wait a minute. That’s when you open an investigation is when you get your first significant piece of information and you wanna find out if it’s true if You

investigate things.

That’s why you investigate things. But but leave aside that sort of, I don’t know, almost definitional point about an investigation. Durham seems remarkably uncurious throughout his investigation about the degree to which Mueller established all kinds of other evidence of contacts and cooperation and offers of help between the Trump campaign and the Russians. He’s uninterested in things like, you know, the Trump Tower meeting.

Okay. Let let’s play that because that was another one of those moments where Schiff is asking about Trump family members meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in June two thousand sixteen. This was after they had promised they would dish dirt on Hillary Clinton, and Don junior agreed to that meeting. Okay. Let’s play that.

Anywhere, mister Durham, Mueller, and congressional investigations also revealed that Don Junior was informed that a Russian official was offering the Trump campaign, quote, very high level and sensitive information, unquote, that would be incriminating of Hillary Clinton was part of, quote, Russia and its government support of mister Trump. You’re aware of that?

Sure. People get phone calls all the time from individuals who claim to have information like that.

Really, the son of a president shall get candidate gets calls all the time. From before and government offering dirt on their important opponent. Is that what you’re saying?

I don’t think this is a unique in your experience.

Okay. So a little bit of a dig there, don’t think this is unique in your experience. So, you know, this causes a little bit of laughter, but without missing a beach shift then keeps going. I asked Durham, if he knows of many other sons of a presidential candidate getting calls from the Russian government.

You said that it’s not uncommon to get offers of help from a hostile foreign government and presidential campaign directed at the president’s son. Do you really stand by that, mister Durham?

Saying that it that people can make phone calls making claims all the time that you may have experienced?

Are you

really trying to diminish the significance of what happened here and the secret meeting that the president’s son set up in Trump Tower to receive that incriminating information trying to diminish the significance significance of that, mister Turor?

I’m not

trying to diminish it at all, but I think the more complete story is that they met and it was a recent they didn’t talk about, missus Clinton.

And and you think it’s insignificant that he had a secret meeting with the Russian delegation for the purpose of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton And the only disappointment expressed that meeting was that the dirt they got wasn’t better. You don’t think that’s significant?

I don’t think that that was a well advised thing to do.

Oh, oh, not not well advised. Alright. Well, that’s that’s the understatement of the year.

No kidding.

I mean, I think when you look at his obsessive interest in the lack of corroboration in the FBI’s holdings at the time the Papadopoulos came in, and his total uninterest in later acquisition of you know, information about, in fact, direct contacts between the campaign and the Russians. And these include, you know, exchanges of poll data with a Russian intelligence officer, the Trump Tower meetings, a whole negotiation over building Trump Tower, Moscow, all of which Trump was actively lying about It almost seems quaint to me

to focus on the

fact that none of this was known at the outset of the investigation. I was trying to think of a good analogy for it, and it’s like if I get a tip that you’re robbing banks. And it’s completely uncorroborated, and maybe it comes from a a source that I trust a lot and, you know, maybe from the Australian government. But the information itself is not that corroborated and I open an investigation on you, and then I get criticized a lot for opening the investigation on a flimsy basis. But then it later turns out that you’ve robbed hundreds of banks.

It seems a little weird to say, yeah, but you know, the whole investigation shouldn’t have taken place because you know, the Australian government didn’t really we didn’t really have any corroboration of the Charlie Sykes crime spree at the time that I opened the investigation. And for you know, political operatives for like the federalist people for Matt Gates to be saying all this. I totally get it. They’re hacked. Their propagandists, but for a federal prosecutor who’s written a four hundred page report or three hundred page report to not really have an answer to the yeah.

But look at all the bank robberies we found problem, strikes me as weird. Yeah.

I read about those in the media. And by the way, that his account of that Trump Tower meeting is just not true when he says they didn’t talk about missus Clinton. The Mueller report, you know, notes that in fact they did discuss this, you know. In fact, I think it was in the senate report. They also said that they did this.

I mean, his characterization of the meeting, and David Corn has a great piece, goes through all the false statements that he made. You know, Durham’s characterization of that meeting that they didn’t talk about Clinton does line up with what the Trump camp first claimed when the media happened. They lied about it. Later, Trump actually conceded the point of the meeting was to gather negative information on Clinton from a foreign adversary. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent Trump said.

So what’s weird is that it’s years later after they basically admitted it, the Durham is still peddling the original disinformation about the meeting that was propagated by Trump and his allies. I mean, it’s just kind of amazing.

Yeah. I mean, I think Durham’s psychology and motives are genuinely opaque to me. You know, he’s somebody whose career previous to this. I had some awareness of because you know, he investigated some of the CIA secret prisons issues associated with the destruction of tapes of interrogation. And I’ve always had a mixed view of him, to be honest.

But I never saw him as a raging partisan or propagandist or a kind of bilbar type. And so I was very much taken by surprise, by his conduct through this whole episode. And I think his performance yesterday and the report itself is a kind of mystifying Coda to the whole episode.

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Okay. Also yesterday, Donald Trump supporter who drove a stun gun into the neck of Washington police officer Michael Fannon, was sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. This would be, I think, the third longest prison term. This is Daniel DJ Rodriguez. Just to remind people what happened, Michael Fonone has told this story, multiple times now, you know, how he was basically, you know, grabbed by the rioters.

You know, they were going for his gun. People were saying killing with his own gun. He was, you know, shocked by tasers over and over again until he had a heart attack. This is a short sound bite from Michael Finone telling this story to Congress last year.

That initial period of time where I was pulled you know all set lines kind of a blur. I just remember getting violently assaulted from every direction and eventually found myself out probably about two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred feet away from the mouth of the tunnel where the other officers were at. And I knew that was in I was up shit creek without paddle. I was trying to push guys off of me, create some space all the while I recognized the fact that there were individuals that were trying to grab ahold of my gun. I remember one of them distinctly lunging at me time and time again trying to grab my gun.

And I heard people in the crowd yelling, get his gun, kill him with his own gun. And words to that effect.

Good brie. DJ Rodriguez, as he’s leaving court, apparently, shouts Trump won. Wonder where he got this idea. It is kind of interesting a little bit of the backstory that DJ Rodriguez was arrested as a result of Basically, amateur sleuths, a guy living in Germany who was doing a frame by frame analysis of what happened on January six and was able to pick out the guy that was attacking officer Finone. And then, of course, they found all of the the social media tech.

Where he’d actually bragged about what he did on on telegram. He said o m g, I did such f ing shit and got away. He wrote to fellow members of the Patriots forty five Maga gang, tase the f out of the blue. So he confesses it but appears to have no remorse whatsoever despite his conviction in getting twelve and a half years in prison. What do you think?

Well, he’ll have a long time to think about it.

Unless Trump pardons him, of course.

Yes. Yeah. Look, there are really three possible bases in which people can get long sentences. And most people are getting relatively small amounts of time on I think on the theory that this is a huge event, but responsibility for it is dispersed among large numbers of people. And while they’re all somewhat responsible, you have assign criminal penalties based on what the individual did, which is usually not all that much.

Rather than what on the collective mob did together. And there are a few things that separate individuals and create really long sentences. One is sedition. There are these groups of people who’ve been convicted of seditious conspiracy. And those sentences, some of which have been enhanced by the terrorism enhancement, get pretty long.

You know, getting up near twenty years in some cases. The second is and we haven’t seen this yet, but I do think it’s gonna happen. Is think about things like the Trump Mar a Lago indictment, where you have these highly bespoke. This isn’t in the January sixth context, but these highly bespoke indictments that are really about very individualized, bad conduct. And I think as you see some of the political level indictments happening in the January sixth, cases, if they ever happen, those will be on a very different scale, I I suspect.

But the third issue is violence. And you can be pretty low down the totem pole. But if you repeatedly tase a police officer if you cause somebody to have a heart attack, if you beat somebody, you know, you’re gonna rack up a lot of time, and that’s what you see in these cases, which is, you know, the people who wander in and didn’t have a plan to go in but kinda wander in are getting probation, getting suspended time, sometimes due in a few days, you know, because basically they’re guilty of trust passing. The people who destroyed things who plotted, who did

violence are getting a number of

years, And the people who really did heavy duty violence who attacked people, not just breaking windows or putting your feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk or something, but who actually caused injury You know, the justice system takes that pretty seriously. And

As it ought to?

As it ought to. And by the way, I know you talked about this with Andrew Weisman yesterday, this Washington Post story about the slowness with which the Justice Department began looking at the political echelon stuff. One of the reasons for that is the sense of exigency about getting as many of these people off the streets as quickly as possible because the Biden inauguration was coming up because you wanted to deter future violence. And we have now had two Trump indictments and arraignments without significant violence. And I do think we have to think about that as a likely result of a strategic decision by the justice department.

Two, get as many of the DJ Rodriguezes off the street as possible and send a really loud message to others. And so you know, without getting into whether the focus on street level violence was the right call or the wrong call, it’s certainly a call with negative consequences, like the Trump remains unindicted for January six. It also has some positive consequences, and one of them is I think that Miami went off largely without a hitch.

I do want to come back to this a little bit later and I want to talk about Trump’s TV confession, but I have to do something you first, Ben. My wife wanted me to tell you that she is a huge fan of your series, your lawfare series called the aftermath. And wanted me to pass on the apologies that she hadn’t listened to the first couple of seasons until now and now she is binged listening. To all of these podcasts. So what are there now?

Five seasons of the aftermath?

Yeah. So the aftermath is the fourth season of a series that we started at the time of the Mueller report. This was some of your listeners may remember we did this series called The Report, which was actually telling

—

Mhmm.

—

the story of the Mueller report as though we were you know, this American life or something. And that series, which I did with Susan Hennessy and some other people its law fair is probably biggest smash hit in popular media. I think it was briefly number one on the Apple podcast charts. So we followed that up with during the Trump impeachment, a series that was essentially just found sound from the impeachment trials. Every day, we did a a kind of compilation of the sound and testimony of the day.

So eight hours of sound, we would reduce it down to forty five minutes or an hour that would kind of tell story of what happened in the impeachment that day. And then the third season, which it was a real departure for us, was a story about Afghan translators who worked with US forces over the course of twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan who got left behind and who were trying to get out and the problem of the special immigrant visas that we issued. That’s a series called allies And then we started the aftermath, which was a effort to tell the story. This is all on the same feed. It’s called Law Fair presents the aftermath, which is an effort to tell the story of the effort at accountability for January six.

And it looks at diverse government efforts from things like the impeachment itself, to things like the criminal process to things like the January sixth committee and it’s again an effort to do this in narrative form. We’ve now finished the first season of it. It’s six episodes that take you right up to the point of the summer of last year when the January sixth committee was starting to do its hearings in public. You know, we got interviews with a remarkable array of people from, you know, members of congress who were hiding in their offices during the riots to journalists who have covered various aspects of the thing to Trump’s defense counsel in the impeachment and to Doug Letter who litigated all the house cases for the January sixth committee. So it’s I think it’s a genuinely different piece Bulwark, and I’m delighted that your wife is enjoying it.

She loves it. She absolutely loves it. I think it’s helped her get through the past couple of weeks. Okay. So let’s talk about Trump’s television confession.

He sits down with Fox News’ Brett Bear and explicitly admitted the, yeah, held on the boxes of subpoenaed documents, and claiming that he couldn’t tune the material over because he needed to go through them because his pants or something were were in there. And his explanation as others have pointed out is inconsistent with prior claims that everything in the box is his. And as has been pointed out, Bulwark letter law violation of the espionage act to have unauthorized possession of a national defense document to willfully retain that document and fail to turn it over.

There’s also a spec little known provision of the espionage act that specifically prohibits storing national defense information with your pants. I mean, come on. That’s just disgusting.

So breaking news in the context of this, this is a story out of a I think it’s out of Kansas City. Ex FBI analyst who kept classified information in bathroom like Trump is going to prison. See. Former FBI Intelligence analyst from Dodge City, Kansas who kept hundreds of classified documents at her home, including in her bathroom, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison by a federal judge in Kansas City on Wednesday for violating the same part of the espionage act that former president Donald Trump is accused of breaking.

And there were no pants in that case. So it’s gonna get worse for Trump.

It is gonna get worse. So what did you make of his confession to Brett Bear?

So, you know, this is not the first time he has shouted a confession across the ether. And you know, he has said everything from I had every right to do it under the Presidential Records Act. These are mine, which is course, false. So he’s said this stuff before, and I think every one of these statements is you know, potentially usable against him. The thing about Trump though is that his stories are so inconsistent with one another it’s not clear to me what weight a confession like that would have before a jury because, you know, everybody knows he’ll say, absolutely.

Anything. That said, it’s the kind of statement, exactly the kind of statement that any lawyer for Trump would have an aneurysm upon seeing. It’s exactly the sort of thing he shouldn’t be saying. And, you know, when you finally get to present this case in front of a jury, the fact that he is completely unabashed about it makes it very hard for his lawyers to claim anything like it didn’t happen, which is always your goal as a defense lawyer.

We talked about this with Andrew Weisman yesterday. It does seem as if he’s bypassing the legal process altogether. Because as you point out, this is not helping him in court. No lawyer in America would, you know, tell their client to do what Donald Trump did. But Donald Trump is playing to the court of a public opinion, isn’t he?

I mean, he he’s apparently not that worried about undermining his defense and His strategy seems to be you delay the proceedings or you, you know, tamper with the jury pool, or you just wait until you get back into the White House so he could pardon himself.

Right. And all of that may be strategically wise if you are a super confident that you can beat Joe Biden, and b, super confident that you can delay things indefinitely. The problem with delaying things indefinitely is that ultimately you can’t. And, you know, this trial will not happen before the election. That’s actually not because of Trump’s delaying tactics It’s just because of the volume of classified information involved and the difficulty of managing that kind of volume of classified material.

So he’s not wrong that if he can win, he can make this case go away. But that’s a big if and I am never gonna be the one to say there is no way Trump can win because God knows nobody who said that in two thousand sixteen looked good after the election. The major party candidate of either side can always win. And so we have to take the possibility of a Trump victory as seriously as a heart attack That said, if I were Donald Trump, I would not want to stake everything on beating Joe Biden because Joe Biden has already beaten me once and the power of incumbency is real. And Joe Biden has whatever Trump may think about it, a real record to run against.

And by the way, Donald Trump is not the most popular man in America. And so I do think he’s staking everything on an electoral win. And if I were responsible for his defense, which thank God, I am not, I would be very troubled by that because I do think eventually you have to walk into court and defend this case. And that is gonna be a very hard thing to do under any circumstances, but having him shout from the rooftops You damn right. I ordered the code red.

Doesn’t make it any easier.

You know, I it’d be remiss not to point out though that, yeah, Donna Trump is extremely unpopular. But so is Joe Biden right now? A new Pew survey out showing the Biden’s job approval rate remains under forty percent actually. It’s It’s about thirty five percent, sixty two percent, disapproved, thirty five percent approved. This is all those moments where you go.

This is this is not a slam dunk. In terms of the election, particularly even though it is a rerun. You know, and I I remember saying back in twenty sixteen that both parties had nominated a candidate that was absolutely unelectable except that they were running against the other person. So speaking of the world of whataboutism, Just briefly, your thoughts on the Hunter Biden plea bargain? Because, of course, you know, Moggle World, and virtually every Republican is saying this was a slap on the wrist.

Is another indication of the two tiered justice system. You know, if Merrick Garland thought that he could offload the criticism by having a Trump appointed US attorney to the investigation, giving him total authority. No. We don’t live in a world in which you can cover yourself in any way. So your thoughts about the Hunter Biden case?

Was it a slap on the wrist?

Obviously, we don’t know what Hunter Biden could have been charged with had mister Weiss decided to be as aggressive as possible. Normally, nonpayment tax cases are generally prosecuted kind of mildly. And so I don’t detect any reason to think this was handled with special kid gloves because the potential defendant was the son of Joe Biden as opposed to some other rich guy capable of nonpayment of, you know, one point two million dollars in taxes, which you know, by the way, that tends to be, you know, relatively under prosecuted. I have no reason to believe that this was not handled responsibly. And I also since it was honestly, not involving the conduct of Joe Biden.

It strikes me as sort of the kind of Billy Carter kind of thing. And I I’ve always had an attitude toward the Hunter Biden stuff that the urge to get Hunter Biden who is after all a somebody who’s struggled with addiction and who’s you know lost his brother and had a, you know, kind of rough time of things I’ve always found that a little bit ghoulish. And, you know, it seems to me if he’s broken the law, he deserves appropriate prosecution, and I have no reason to think this isn’t that. So I haven’t delved into it all that much. And I don’t see any reason to doubt the integrity of the disposition of the case.

Yeah. And and and I think just going back to the point that I think, you know, can’t be emphasized enough. This was a Trump appointed special prosecutor in effect. I mean, it was a Trump appointed the US attorney Joe Biden or Merrick Arlene could have removed him at any time. They gave him complete authority over all of this.

One other point on that tying it to the Durham matter there are actually two prosecutors who were investigating politically sensitive things holdovers from the Trump administration and Merrick Garland handled them both exactly the same way, which is just say John Durham and this US attorney from Delaware who had Hunter Biden case. And Garland came in and in both cases said, we’re gonna leave them alone. I’m not gonna interfere. I’m gonna their independence and they’re going to do their jobs, and they’re gonna, you know, come to whatever dispositions they came to. John Durham has publicly thanked Merrick Garland for a making that pledge and b honoring it.

So we know that in Durham’s case, that was entirely respected. We have no reason to think in Weiss’s case it was not. And in one case, Republicans are, you know, shouting from the rooftops, look at the results, you know, John Durham is blown the lid off of blah blah. And in another case, they’re crying foul. Well, what’s the difference?

In one case, they have a report that for some reason they like, And in another case, they have a plea deal that they think is too lenient, though they don’t know what the facts would support. And so I would just say that the criticism is entirely political. It has no basis in any sense of the conduct of the investigation in either case. And in both cases, we have exactly the same behavior on the part of Merrick Garland, which is to leave in place Trump era prosecutors who were handling stuff close to Democrats’ heart and to Republicans’ hearts.

Okay. Let’s talk about the John Eastman hearings. This is rather extraordinary. Eastman, of course, one of the architects of the coup and the fake collector plot. Is fighting to keep his law license in California.

There may be criminal charges looming for his efforts, you know, to help Trump nullify the the election yesterday. Greg Jacob, who was a lawyer for Mike Pence, testified over Zoom about how he was in the middle of a pointed email changed with Eastman on January six. When he heard the ear splitting sound of breaking glass, his rioters using a police shield shattered a window. Jacob was about thirty five feet away. He he then sprints back to the senate chamber along with the aid who carries Pence’s nuclear football.

And as they caught their breath, Jacob typed out to Eastman. Thanks to your Bulwark. We are now under siege. So give me Give me your sense of what’s going on with John Eisman. I mean Eisman and his supporters are saying, look, I was just I’m an advocate.

I’m, you know, testing, you know, some various legal theories. You know, that’s not grounds for disbarment. But on the other hand, eastman went far and beyond simply throwing out legal theories. So what do you think about that particular case? What do you think might happen?

So it takes a lot to get you disbarred in California. But I would think that coming up with a garbage legal theory to support the overthrow of the constitutional order that are backed by facts that you’ve and your side has made up should certainly be enough to warrant professional discipline. I think in the long run, these professional discipline cases are very important because they are the way that the legal profession shows that there are quite apart from if you get indicted, quite apart from what liability you may have if you defame dominion

voting systems or, you know, make

up really crazy stuff that causes civil liability that there are just limits to what you can do as a lawyer.

And that there are professional

limits to what the organized bar will tolerate. Eastmen it seems to me has crossed several really important lines. One is lying. The other is advancing arguments that he no’s or should have known to be not merely wrong, but kind of wildly wrong. And, you know, the most prominent example of this which judge Carter called him out about in the January sixth committee litigation was when he described what he was arguing as only requiring a minor violation of the electoral count act.

And like most lawyers don’t urge conduct that they acknowledge to be a minor violation of the law. Leaving aside whether the word minor is a correct understanding of the magnitude of the violation he was urging. So I think these cases are very important. My colleague, Quentin Jurassic, is following all of the professional responsibility cases very closely and knows them better than I do. But I do think the way a profession polices itself, particularly a profession that is supposed to be No pun intended, the bulwark of the law.

Right? These are after all lawyers. And if they cannot be relied upon not to make the

most democratically toxic arguments based on flat out lies

like what does the concept of law mean as a bedrock and kind of tectonic plate language for a democratic society. So I take them pretty seriously, these cases.

Eloquently put, Ben Whitis’ editor in chief of law fair senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings institution and my co host for our new series the Trump trials. Ben, we’ll talk again next week.

I’m excited about it.

Thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow we’ll do this all over again. The Bullworth podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.