The Bulwark Podcast - Flipping Is in the Air

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Jenna Ellis will not be the last flip in Georgia, former Trump water carrier Michael Cohen testifies about the fudged books, and the confusing case of Mark Meadows. Plus, Republicans are backing "Jim Jordan in drag" for speaker. Ben Wittes joins Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials.

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Don Valley North, Don Valley North for Lexus. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. Welcome to the latest episode of the Trump Trials. I am Charlie Sykes. Look, let's just start with this day in history. I wrote about this in my Morning Shots newsletter. You know, this should be something to bookmark for historians of the future and maybe psychologists of the future as well. On October 24th, 2023, the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, who is facing 91 felony indictments, spent the entire day in court listening to testimony from his former personal lawyer about all of his systemic, systematic financial frauds. In the morning, he also learned that one of his other former lawyers,

Jenna Ellis, had cut a plea deal in the racketeering case against him. And in the afternoon, sometime in the afternoon, he found out that his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, may have been given immunity to testify before a federal grand jury about Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. So on Earth 2.0, this would have been a particularly bad day for Donald Trump. But in the actual world we live in, Donald Trump had a fabulous day because with one tweet, one bleat, he reestablished his position as the apex predator of the Republican Party. He shivved the speaker ambitions of Tom Emmer, who had been nominated to be speaker. Look, I mean, there are slices of avocado that lasted longer in the sun than Tom Emmer's speaker candidacy. Donald Trump put out one statement saying he was a globalist rhino, and that was it.

It was done. Now, why did this happen? Tom Emmer's cardinal sin, the unforgivable sin, was that he voted to certify Joe Biden's election. He voted to recognize the reality of the 2020 election, and that was completely disqualifying. So I do think that we need to put this in perspective, what's going on right now. And when we're taping this, we don't know what the result's going to be. We may have a new speaker by the time you hear this. But what Donald Trump did was not just assert his dominance over the Republican Party. He made it very clear that belief in the big lie and support for the coup is the litmus test for leadership in the

GOP, in case you hadn't realized that that was what was happening here. If you do not have a coup in your resume, don't even bother, don't even bother to apply for the job. Of course, because it is Wednesday, we're doing a special edition of the Trump trial. Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, joins us from beautiful New Orleans. How are you, Ben? I'm great. Not a single one of my former lawyers is testifying against me. This is a good time. None of my former chiefs of staff have been given immunity to give evidence against me in a grand jury. You know, so I'm just fine.

And by the way, for people watching this on YouTube, that is a dog t-shirt you're wearing. Those are dog's eyes. I could just tilt it down to clarify the dog eye thing. I don't want people to misinterpret that shirt. Look, Virginia Heffernan once described the dog shirts as nipply and weird. I do want to emphasize that they're only nipply if you only see the top half of them. Right.

So I just want to clarify that for people. I want to get into the flipping, the plea by Jenna Ellis, the fourth of the defendants down in Georgia to plead guilty. And then, of course, the story about Mark Meadows, which I will confess to you right now, I find a little bit confusing and hopefully you can clarify this. Before we get into all of this, could we talk about the new speaker designate? Because it's very, very clear that this now is that Donald Trump has successfully imposed his will on the Republican conference, that if you voted to recognize the results of the 2020 election, you are disqualified. You are going to be in Liz Cheney's company. But this guy, Mark Johnson,

I'm sorry, is that his name? I'm sorry, Mike Johnson. Yeah, whoever even heard of this guy. It's hard to keep track of them. You go through them so quickly. I mean, one day it's McCarthy and then Emmer and then Jordan and then Scalise and then Johnson. And there's like 10 Johnsons in the House. What are you supposed to do with this? Okay, so before you dump on me, folks, you had to Google him too, right? Actually, there's a very funny anecdote. Somebody asked Susan Collins in the Senate, so what will it be like to negotiate with Speaker Mike Johnson on the CR?

And she said, I've never heard of him before, but I will Google him. But for people who have Googled him, realize that he was not just your run-of-the-mill Trumpist election denialist. I mean, CNN reported back in December, Trump ally lobbying fellow House Republicans to support Texas lawsuits seeking to overturn the election. OK, so let's just remind people about this Texas lawsuit, which was completely bogus. But he apparently was enthusiastic. He was all behind this theory. members of the House to sign on to this amicus brief to the lawsuit, which sought to invalidate the electoral college votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Now, take a deep breath here. We're talking about tens of millions of votes that would have been thrown out if this lawsuit, which was never going to go anywhere, but if it had won, he signed on to something that I think is way more extreme than just voting against certifying the Electoral College. So Ben, your take on that lawsuit and the fact that Mike Johnson is like all in on this, not just denying, but I mean, he does have the coup on his resume, which is why he is where he is today. So, look, there are many levels of election denialism, right? There's the level where you express doubt as to the integrity of the election. There's the level as a member of Congress in which

you vote to object to certification of individual states or of groups of states. And then there's this third level where you organize frivolous litigation to try to get courts to stop the certification. And what Texas did in this case was not merely, by the way, to try to not certify its own vote. It has the ability to count its vote to certify its electors like any other state, but it tried to get federal courts to invalidate the electoral votes of other states. That's a little bit like Lithuania objecting to the vote count in Latvia. If you think of them as their separate sovereigns, they're both part of the EU. Georgia is its own state. Texas is its own state. Generally speaking, one state doesn't- Wisconsin, we are our own state.

Wisconsin, it's its own state, right? Generally speaking, in a federalist system, Texas doesn't get to tell Wisconsin how to count its votes, much less, by the way, to tell Wisconsin how to count its votes wrongly, since Wisconsin had counted its votes accurately and Texas was trying to get federal courts, trying to get the Supreme Court to step in and invalidate the correct counting of votes in several states. And so then as a member of Congress, you have do nothing. You can denounce it and say, hey, we live in a federalist system and states are responsible for counting their own votes. And by the way, what you're asking for, Texas, here is an adjudication based on a lie about a different state. Or you can get enthusiastically on board with that in support of, you know, an authoritarian effort to invalidate an election that Donald Trump had lost. And he

appears to have done the latter. And I will point out that, you know, some Republicans who had, I'm thinking particularly of you, Mr. Ken Buck of Colorado, who had taken an honorable position with respect to Jim Jordan and some others that, hey, I don't want to vote for a speaker who doesn't acknowledge the reality of the election, seems to be caving now and seems to be willing to support Mr. Johnson. He's as new to me as he is to anybody else. I'm not pretending to have a deep familiarity with his record, but it does seem like what's happening or what may be happening here is that a bunch of people who drew the line at Jim Jordan

are just fine with somebody who represents all the same things, believes all the same things, who is just as involved in objecting to the election, but just isn't quite as much of an asshole about it. Yeah, I think that's what it comes down to. Just remind me, this was, I think, objectively, legally ridiculous, this thing that Mike Johnson was pushing. I mean, the Supreme Court didn't even take it up, did it? Like, just basically say, never mind, with like one sentence? So I believe they just dismissed it on all but summary grounds, if memory serves. Not even Clarence Thomas said, hey, this is really brilliant. We ought to take this up, did he? I mean, it was...

I don't think so, no. I believe this was a theatrical exercise that had no prospect of going anywhere and didn't. Theatrical, but also had consequences because, of course, this fed the fire that led up to January 6th. So, again, Mike Johnson being one of the most aggressive election deniers. The resolution of this speaker thing does not solve the problem because dysfunction is now the new normal. I think the chaos has become a habit. They're going to have to negotiate keeping the government open, somewhat problematic when you still have the crazed, slavering jackal caucus, as you have so memorably described them, who don't actually want to engage in governance. And then, of course, you have the question of aid to Ukraine. This is another thing. Mike Johnson, on his resume, he is an opponent of aiding Ukraine's

defense. Talk to me about that a little bit, what that means. There's a lot of stuff I will joke about. I will never joke about aid to Ukraine. Look, this is a life and death situation for a lot of people. And the Ukrainians need US military assistance in an ongoing fashion. This is an active war. And the idea that we would have a Speaker of the House, I mean, Kevin McCarthy was not great on this issue. But at the end of the day, he often sort of said the wrong thing, but did the right thing. Having a person who actually represents the sort of Matt Gaetz position on aid to Ukraine is very dangerous and quite different, by the way. There's a sense in the Republican world that the urgent matter is aid to Israel. The IDF has a lot of depth. It's an organization that

has years of planning is very well. It is not about to be wiped away. It is not about to be wiped from the face of the earth. Yeah. And they definitely need assistance, but it is not an urgent matter, nor is Israel dependent on the United States for general budget support right now. You know, when you play with Ukrainian aid, you're actually really playing with the ability of that country to continue to exist and to continue to fight in a fashion that's effective. And that's, you know, I just remind listeners that the people they're fighting have stolen 20,000 children. The stakes in the Ukraine fight are extreme and very pointed and very now. I have made a lot of jokes about the Speaker fight, and I will make more,

but this is a deadly, serious matter. And for a lot of people, I mean deadly not in a metaphoric sense, but in a very real sense. This is the balancing act. On the one hand it is a clown car. It's like an episode of South Park and yet there are real real world consequences and they are deadly. Your analogy that it's a clowns with flamethrowers situation is a very good one. They're clowns but they are flamethrowers. They are flamethrowers and you know you can be very clownish and be very dangerous anyway. I will say that the administration, which is caught in a very difficult situation here, needs to handle this with a lot of delicacy because the thing that would be a real disaster, and I'm sure if this Johnson character becomes speaker, I'm sure the part of the proposed deal is let's pair Israel aid with border stuff with keeping the government open and freeze out the Ukrainians. That's going to be one of the Republican House deals. And I think the combination of the administration and Mitch McConnell,

and for all the Mitch McConnell haters out there, I feel you, I see you. On this matter, he is an adult and he has been excellent, need to be very firm that continued Ukraine aid is part of the package and is an essential part of the package without which there is not a deal. Yeah, life and death matter. Okay, one final word on Mike Johnson. Get a text message here from Adam Kinzinger, who wants us to know that Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan in drag. Same views. Your point. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy.

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a lot of folks have been digging up this old quote from an interview with, I think, with Fox and Friends on Fox News. Donald Trump has some strong feelings about people who flip. You know, all mafia dons have this thing about, you know, the people who break Omerta, who rat you out. Donald Trump has articulated this over and over again. So here is from a few years back, Donald Trump talking about people who turn state's evidence. Listen to this. People make up stories, this whole thing about flipping, they call it. I know all about flipping for 30, 40 years. I've been watching flippers. Everything's wonderful. And then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is or as high as you can go.

It almost ought to be outlawed. It's not fair. It almost ought to be outlawed. It almost ought to be outlawed. Do you want to address that, Ben? Because, you know, I don't know if we have a debate about that. I do think there are a few really interesting points about that comment. There's a lot packed into there.

So, first of all, I've been watching it for 30 or 40 years. What have you been doing for 30 or 40 years that you've had occasion to be watching people flip? Flipping. Yeah. I feel like we should have the theme for The Godfather playing underneath this conversation now. Exactly.

So I've been around for a while, too. You know, I've not had occasion to watch any of my people flip and go cooperate with law enforcement against me. When is Ben Wittis going to rat me out? What really goes on in this podcast, right? Exactly, right. Nobody talks about that sort of thing because, you know, I'm not a criminal. If you start the sentence by saying I've been watching people flip for 30 or 40 years, it's kind of a way of saying I've been engaged in criminal activity for 30, 40 years, and occasionally my people talk about it. I love the fact that he thinks it's so terrible that it ought to be

outlawed, that you should definitely not be able to testify. Wow, that would change the criminal justice system a bit, wouldn't it? And yeah, that brings me to the second interesting point about this quote, which is that, you know, of course, what flipping is, is deciding to take responsibility for your criminal activity and telling the truth about the people that you did it with. He says people just make up stories. But the truth of the matter is that the government has a lot of ways to check the veracity of people's stories. And so when somebody like Mark Meadows or Jenna Ellis decides to, Meadows' case, testify, and in Ellis' case, plead guilty to a felony and cooperate, the government has all kinds of ways of assessing and verifying the veracity of the story that they're telling. And when they're doing their job properly, what flipping means is cooperating by telling the truth about the people that you work with. And that is, of course, that is exactly what Trump says

really should be illegal. Yes, absolutely. Telling the truth should be illegal. So we're going to come back to Mark Meadows because I think it's a little bit more complex and we need to know more about it. But very clearly, we have had some flips. Jenna Ellis. By the way, Charlie, we need to have a conversation. One more thing just about flip. Yesterday with John Martin, you played the flipper theme to discuss flips. I think when we talk about flips, that should be like a recurring motif on the Trump trials. I think it kind of dated us. I don't think that Jonathan actually watched that show. I mean, I remember the show.

I remember the show Flipper. I don't remember Flipper, but I remember the tune. And I do just think that there should be like a little... It plays in my head. Okay. Just so you know, it plays, it plays. Can we just listen to it? All right.

Okay. You know what? Let's give people a little bit man that just takes me back i just have to say it takes me back i think whenever we discuss flipping because there's going to be like 10 more of these. You think so? Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll get to that. But yeah, there's going to be a lot more of these. And we just need a theme for flipping. Okay. We have a theme for flipper. Okay. So Jenna Ellis is number four, right? Jenna Ellis is number four. Kenneth Cheeseborough pled guilty. Sidney Powell pled

guilty. That bail bondsman pled guilty. Jenna Ellis is interesting in the sense that she was so, she was so militant in her defenses. She was the public face of the big lie. She was the one who said, this is, what was the phrase she used? This is like an elite strike force, you know, and I'm never going to back off. We have a little short YouTube video with a clip where she's on with Brian Stelter from CNN, who's actually saying, you know, at some point, Jenna, you're going to look back on this and you're really going to regret this. I mean, 20 years from now, you think maybe, you know, you're going to think this was a mistake. No, absolutely not. Well, that was then. Then yesterday, Jenna Ellis. And again, you almost, you have to juxtapose the images of how fiery and adamant and how there was no doubt in her mind.

And then there was her appearance in court yesterday. Let's listen to a little bit of Jenna Ellis, a tearful Jenna Ellis. What I did not do, but should have done, Your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence. I believe in and I value election integrity. If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, Your Honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado Bar who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize

to the people of Georgia. Thank you. Wow, Ben, very different Jenna Ellis, okay? If only she had known. If only she had known. If only she had known. And if only, you know, she had had relevant information. I also think there's another important if only, which is if only Trump had paid her legal bills. I suspect this plea may have been averted. I do not want to question the sincerity of Jenna Ellis's remorse or her tears. But I do note that she was loyal up until the point that she could not afford, and I mean, in a financial sense, to be loyal anymore. And so if I sound a little bit cynical about it, I am. I am more than a little cynical about it. I mean, she was talking about the weaponization of the criminal justice system, like up to like five minutes ago, declaring her innocence, like up to

five minutes ago, you know, going online, raising money, you know, for her defense with various right wing groups until about five minutes ago. The other thing, though, is that this is a grown woman. She's 38 years old. She had access to tremendous resources and information. This notion that she was just too naive, that she just didn't know, she didn't check her facts, as if this was some sort of a lapse in judgment, as opposed to, you saw your main opportunity. You saw your path to riches and fame and influence and celebrity by pushing a big lie,

and it was too good to be true. I mean, I just don't buy her argument that, you know, if only I had done my due diligence. I mean, no shit. No, that's exactly right. And look, I think it's important to separate at least three different thought streams here, right? One is how do we assess Jenna Ellis? And I think the answer to that question is we should assess her as a rational actor in the criminal justice system, which is to say most people plead out because it's in their interest to plead out. At the point at which they plead out, most people say something taking responsibility for it. She did that. The relevant question is

whether she provides useful assistance to the prosecutors at this point. The second question is, how do we assess her as a potential cooperator? And the answer here, this is completely independent of how we assess her remorse or whatever. The answer is, this is not a huge player, but it is somebody who is present for a great deal and specifically who can provide important testimony about the effort to pressure state legislators. And we are seeing this pattern though. I mean, we now have four of the 18 people that were charged by Fannie Willis under the racketeering statute who have pled guilty. Now, again, there were a lot of folks who were skeptical about whether or not Fannie Willis might have been overreaching by charging that many people. But obviously, her plan, her theory was to use the

racketeering strategy to put pressure on a lot of folks to do what these four have done. So, you know, I'm not that surprised by Jen Ellis, because I think she's been signaling it. But I was quite surprised. I wanted to get your take on this because you've watched this much more closely. I was surprised both by Sidney Powell, but especially by Kenneth Chesbrough, because I thought Chesbrough was probably the guy who was the least likely who might have actually had a plausible case. I mean, didn't you think so? I mean, were you surprised by Chesbrough? Both yes and no. I interviewed Ken Chesbrough's lawyers on the Lawfare podcast with Anna Bauer at significant length. They insisted they were not pleading.

There would be no plea. They were going to trial. We got off the line. And the first thing I said to Anna Bauer when we got off the line is, he's going to plead the night before trial. Oh, really? And so at one level, I called it extremely exactly. And yet I was still surprised. So one thing that Ken Chesbrough's,

he has excellent lawyers. It was actually nice to watch people deal with this like professionals. And they were fun to watch in action. I think they did an excellent job by their client, and game likes game, they did a very, very good job. And so even as I could watch them and say, okay, they're setting up a good plea here, I know exactly what they're doing, I still, at some level, bought the act. I was surprised, even though I was not surprised. You know, the third level of this analysis is about Fannie Willis, and it's not about Jenna Ellis at all. And it's exactly what you said, that she is methodically shrinking down the defendant pool, getting pleas, and using the big stick of, do you really want to go to trial on a racketeering matter when she's offering pleas

on relatively generous terms? And so it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of people are going to take that, and there will be more people who take that. Was Sidney Powell surprising? No, I don't think so. Sidney Powell is a little bit crazy, but you go to trial on that and you get convicted, you're a 68-year-old woman, you're going to be in prison for a good long time. And I think the same calculation is true for Kenneth Chesborough. Jenna Ellis does not have the money to go through. She put, as you said, she was fundraising on right-wing sites. She wasn't raising any money because she endorsed DeSantis and she's, you know, disgraced in the eyes of the Orange God King. How is she going to pay for a defense at trial? And so at some point, you know, a lot of these people have rational actor questions and they may say crazy things. This is true of, by the way,

all criminals. Criminals are rational actors in the justice system. They are gain maximizers and loss minimizers. And you can say, well, they did all this crazy shit and they tried to overturn an election. And by the way, knocking over a bank isn't the smartest move either. But once you're in the justice system, most people behave pretty rationally. And if you apply that to this case, that means a lot of these people are going to plead out. I think at the end of the day, Fannie Willis thinks she's going to trial against three or four people, not 14 or 15 people. And I suspect she's probably right. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees?

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so Jenna Ellis pleads guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, which is a felony. And the count she pled to stemmed from her testimony before a Georgia State Senate subcommittee in late 2020, alongside Rudy Giuliani and another Trump attorney named Ray Smith, who I don't know anything about. So the three people testified that there had been 96,000 fraudulent absentee ballots cast in the election, that 2,500 felons had voted, that 66,000 underage voters cast ballots, and that 10,315 dead people voted. And Ellis is now acknowledging that she knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully made those false statements about election fraud in Georgia. And of course, you know, this is the entire myth. So she is pleading guilty to a felony for lying about it on the same day that an election denier

who wanted to have the U.S. Supreme Court hear a lawsuit that would have thrown out Georgia's entire electoral vote count is elected, possibly elected, nominated for Speaker of the House of Representatives. Proving that it's not, you can't lie to the Georgia State Subcommittee, Legislative Subcommittee, but to the whole House of Representatives, it's fine. Right, exactly. Yeah, so on the one hand, the people at the heart of the big lie are acknowledging, yes, it was a big lie and it was a crime. On the other hand, the politicians who continue to push the big lie and took the most extreme steps are now rising to positions of incredible

power, maybe second in line to the presidency. Okay. So let's continue the theme of flipping the Mark Meadows story. The Mark Meadows story. The Mark Meadows story is slightly more complicated because we don't know all the details of it. ABC had this extraordinary story that Meadows has testified before the federal grand jury with some kind of immunity, maybe limited immunity, we don't know. Meadows, one of the closest aides to Donald Trump, according to the ABC report, Meadows has told prosecutors that Trump was being dishonest when he said hours after the polls closed the election was a fraud.

Obviously, he said, we didn't win. Meadows told the prosecutors, he told them he agrees with the Department of Homeland Security's assessment that the 2020 election was the most secure election in American history. Of course, when Chris Krebs said that, he was fired by tweet. Meadows, of course, has a mixed record. In public, he has said repeatedly that he believes Donald Trump. He was the person who set up that Georgia call with Brad Raffensperger when Trump asked him to find the 11,780 votes. He was backstage on January 6th. He wrote a book that apparently he is throwing under the bus, making all kinds of claims. Yeah, I want to retract, by the way, all the

factual statements I've ever made in any books that I've written. I assume you don't stand by any of the facts and how the right lost its mind or anything. Just because I wrote them doesn't mean that, yeah. So first of all, what do you think is going on here? I tweeted last night, okay, Meadows has flipped, and a reporter, I'm not going to name him, said, no, no, this is not the same as flipping. It's not accurate to use the word flipping, because he's been given maybe limited use immunity to testify. So give me your sense, what do you think is happening? Because I'm a little confused. What's happening with Mark Meadows? So the short answer is you're confused because the story is confusing and we don't know precisely what happened. But here is, I think,

no, it's not just you. Here is the range of reasonable possibilities. So when somebody testifies under a grant of immunity, that can mean a few different things. Often what it means is they say, okay, we want you to testify before the grand jury. And you say, I can't testify before the grand jury because of my Fifth Amendment rights. I would incriminate myself. So I'll assert the Fifth Amendment. And so the government says, we're going to immunize the testimony, which means we can't use anything you say against you. We can't use the fruits of it against you. But then you have to testify. And sometimes they can do this by agreement.

They protect your Fifth Amendment rights essentially through the immunity instead of by your keeping silent. But sometimes they do it by court order. There's actually a statute that allows them to get a court order that says, A, Charlie Sykes, you must testify, and B, you're subject to an immunity order for the use of the testimony and the derivative fruits of that immunity. So that's one thing it could mean. The second thing it could mean is that they have an agreement with Mark Meadows that he is cooperating and that they are immunizing him. That is, he is now a cooperating witness and he's helping the government in their

investigation. This would be more of a flipping situation. My guess is that it's the first situation. And the reason I think it's the first situation is that none of the stories have used phrases like, you know, cooperating witness or is in a cooperation arrangement with the government. On the other hand, Meadows is conspicuously absent from the federal indictment. And he is, like, as Georgia shows, which includes a lot of information about him, he's got some exposure. And so my best guess here is that we're in a situation where, and by the way, Meadows is represented by very good counsel at McGuire Woods. Again, this is-

We're pushing back on this ABC report. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm quite sure the source of this story is somebody in the Meadows camp. But if you were them, what you would want is you get immunity for your client in testifying, and then you have an understanding with the government, hey, when you are ready to have a cooperation agreement, we will work with you. We'll plead him out on something. Or maybe he gets some degree of cooperative arrangement or understanding between them and the government, but it's not he's a cooperating witness at this stage. So that's my best guess, but I think the facts are still pretty murky, and I don't think we know the answer. If he were in a real adversarial posture with respect to Jack Smith, he would have been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment. He would have been treated a little bit more Georgia-like. Well, the fact is, though, he apparently has, according to this report, he has already testified twice. So he has told whatever the arrangement is, he's telling them stuff.

Now, Jonathan Karl from ABC, the author as well, reported on this. He called this an extraordinarily significant development because between the election and January 6th, no other individual was closer to Donald Trump than Mark Meadows. But as a witness, given the fact that he has made all of these other public statements, that he's basically now saying that everything I have said and written is false. During trial, Trump's attorneys are going to try to impeach that, right? I mean, as you say, look, I mean, you're saying this now, but this is what you wrote. This is what you said. How does that play out in a courtroom? Well, so it can play out in one of a few ways. One is that you put him on the stand

and you acknowledge upfront that he's been lying about it and now he's coming to tell the truth. This is one reason, by the way, that when you do that, it's very important that the person have pleaded to a felony, right? That they have to have some skin in the game or else you say, oh, I'm putting Charlie Sykes on. He's contradicting everything he's ever said. And by the way, he's not going to spend a day in jail, right? This is why it's very important for cooperators in prosecutors' eyes to take pleas. And so one thing to look for is whether there is a plea with Meadows over the next few weeks. That's a very important point. But the second way it plays out is that you never put him on the stand.

You use him as a whisper in your ear guidance. You know, hey, Cassidy Hutchinson said you went into the meeting with Trump and then came out and said, blank, tell us what about that meeting. But you don't actually use him as a witness for exactly this reason. So I think either of those is possible. The government has a huge amount of material. And so what they need him for and what they don't need him for, I don't think we know. The other big Trump trial case and flipper, Michael Cohen, being one of the most prominent. We had the rather extraordinary reunion of Michael Cohen with Donald Trump. I have to admit that among the long-term things that have surprised me, Michael Cohen was

such a thuggish water carrier for Donald Trump. I remember the first time somebody suggested that he might turn against Donald Trump. I was extremely skeptical. Well, obviously he has. So he was in this Manhattan courtroom in the civil fraud case. And by the way, Donald Trump, everything he's doing about the speaker's race, he's apparently doing during breaks in the New York trial, which is interesting. The guy's sitting there. That's what the breaks are for. It's so that he has a chance to tweet about who should be speaker. Doing this trial for his fraud. There are bathroom breaks and there are lunch breaks and there are speaker tweet breaks or speaker bleep breaks. I'm going to blow up the House of Representatives during the next bathroom break. So Trump's present. He's sitting there.

There's a lot of pictures of him looking very, very unhappy. Cohen describes Trump as a criminal and a cheat from the witness stand. The loyal fixer was called to testify about Trump's annual financial statements, which are at the heart of this case. And he testified that Trump directed him to reverse engineer the financial statements to reach Trump's desired net worth. And of course, Trump's lawyers, you know, challenge his credibility. Let's talk about this case. I mean, this case is one that I think it's pretty safe to say that Donald Trump is going to lose this case. But I mean, how important is Michael Cohen? And how, I guess, how problematic is his testimony given his own track record, including his criminal convictions in the past?

Right. So this is a very good example in the past tense of exactly the issue we were talking about Mark Meadows in, in the present tense, right? So this is a thuggish criminal who was a, as you describe, water carrier for Trump on a whole bunch of things, who turns against him and, you know, appears to have told the truth about a bunch of things. His history, including his criminal history, including his history of lying on some of the same issues that he's now testifying, is ripe for cross-examination, is fair game, and he has to answer for that. And the trier of fact, which in this case is a judge and in the criminal case is a jury, gets to decide how much weight to

give it and which version of Michael Cohen they believe. Now, the wrinkle, of course, is that, and this is where I think a parallel with Meadows makes a lot of sense, actually, that Michael Cohen is testifying as to things that are also painfully obvious from record evidence. So that these books were fudged to make properties worth what they wanted to make. We know that from other things. And so you're actually having him testify not to establish the cheating, because you know that because we know that these valuations were garbage from a hundred other means. But to add some texture to it, to give another validation of it and to talk about it from the inside, you're not relying only on him. And I think

that's a good indication probably of the way that people are likely to use Mark Meadows on these points. Okay, so the other big development over the last couple of weeks that I'm fascinated by are the gag orders, the restrictions on Donald Trump. Now, my understanding is that Judge Chutkin's limited gag order has been lifted temporarily. So there's actually not a gag order in place at the moment. Is that correct? Yeah. So get your bleats in quickly because, you know, if you have something to say about witnesses, do you see jury pool? Get it in really fast before the judge enters her final order. That was what I was going to ask you about. Donald Trump put out a bleed attacking Mark Meadows this morning. And Kyle Cheney writes, this Trump post about Mark

Meadows is like a checklist of things barred by the now suspended gag order. It includes a direct attack on Jack Smith. It calls cooperators weaklings and cowards and comments on the substance of Meadows testimony, Meadows, a known witness. So if that gag order was in place, this statement, this attack on Meadows would obviously be something that Jack Smith would bring to the judge's attention. I'm guessing that Jack Smith will anyway bring it to the judge's attention. I'm sure he will. And I'm sure the Chutkin placed an administrative stay on the order by way of allowing adjudication, of allowing its appeal and whatnot. And I suspect also of improving the text of it herself. There were some questions about her use of the word target,

about the sort of vagueness of the order. And I wouldn't be surprised if she perfected it a little bit, amended it a little bit herself by way of making it a little bit more bulletproof. This will remind her to do it quickly. And it will also, I think, remind her of the importance of the order. Not that she needs a reminder of it, but Trump will, you know, there's nothing like issuing an order, freezing it by way of making sure your workmanship is proper, and then immediately having it flagrantly violated

and not being able to do anything about it because you suspended your own order. I suspect she will want the order in place and binding in light of this as quickly as possible. Yeah, I think we will learn that very, very quickly. Ben Wittes, thank you so much for another edition of Trump Trials. I appreciate it. Hey, we will be back next week and we will do this all over again. Probably on Thursday next week. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Thank you.