The Bulwark Podcast - Jonathan V. Last and Carol Leonnig: The Danger of a Weakened Bully

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Trump took it on the chin in Tuesday's elections, SCOTUS sounds skeptical about his tariffs, and his plan to 'gerry-rig' the midterms looks like it is slipping away—but he is still the most powerful president since FDR. And murmurs about a lame duck may prompt him to take even more extreme actions. Plus, the still infuriating inability to hold Trump accountable for trying to steal the 2020 election, and the long-term damage he has done to the DOJ. Carol Leonnig and JVL join Tim Miller. show notes Carol's new book, "Injustice" on the DOJ, Merrick Garland, and the Jack Smith investigations JVL's Wednesday Triad on Hispanic voters and 2028  Tim's 'Bulwark Take' with Rep. Pat Ryan on sports blackouts Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/BULWARK and use promo code BULWARK at checkout.

Hello, welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got a double header up today. It could not be more excited about the second block with Carol Lenig, one of my favorite reporters who's moved over to MS now from the Washington Post. She's got a new book out about the Justice Department that I've been devouring. But first, my buddy, my co-hosts on the Next Level podcast, author of the Triad Newsletter, your favorite, Jonathan Victor Las, JVL. What's up, JVL?

Hey, man, it's nice to be here when things aren't like totally terrible. That's the first in a while. Yeah, though we're going to do some feelings at the end. I'm having some mixed feelings. I'm going to save that for people. We're going to do happy talk at the beginning. Then we'll go over my mixed feelings about everything. JVL, I wanted to grab you because it was just such a big win.

for the Democrats on Tuesday night and such a big wave and we were all we were talking on the next level kind of live as it was coming in kind of processing everything so I want to just have a little bit of a deeper both analytical and emotional kind of recap of where things stand right now

and you did a newsletter yesterday on the Hispanic vote that was a banger as they all are so I want to start talking about the Hispanic vote and then we'll get into some more big picture stuff pretty stunning just the degree to which the rebate Republicans tanked all of their gains and then some with Hispanic voters.

You know, again, admittedly, these are in blue states. Maybe things are a little bit different in the border states. But why don't you talk about what you found? Yeah. So here's what we found. I was looking at Union City, which is the most heavily Hispanic township in New Jersey. It's like 81, 82 percent Hispanic. So overwhelmingly Hispanic.

And it's a pretty big place. They're up in Hudson County. And here is how Trump's vote share grew. He went in 2016, 19%. Okay. 2020, 208%. 2024, 41%. So this is like the big Hispanic realignment.

The Hispanics in Union City were like, man, the more I see of this guy, the I like to cut a his job. Yeah, we're into that. That sounds like a great idea. So, I mean, you've read the things. I won't, like, pretend, like, can you guess, Tim, what it was? But the answer is 15.1%. The Republican Jack Chitterelli dropped from the Trump share of 41 to 15.1%.

So, like, he lost 25% off of Trump's 2016 total. Mikey Sherrill was plus 50 in this county. And Steve Kornikai over at L.S. I guess not. Yeah. That's so you that you're not a TV. watcher, which I love about you. Jayville does not consume cable TV, so he only is consuming it on MS.

No, he's not anymore, actually. We've lost him off of MS now. He's on NBC. But it's pronounced Kornacki. Oh, okay. Steve Kornacki, the gay man with the khakis. Kaki, Kornacki, it rhymes. I always knew him as a guy who wrote for salon back in the days.

I know. It's been a minute. Anyway, so he went through and pulled the municipalities in Jersey with more than 60% Hispanic demographics, and there were one, two, three, four, like nine of them. And on average, they swung about 50 points against where they had been. It's truly crazy. I'm just going to read a couple of them. You mentioned Union City already, but Passaic County, which is what a lot of folks focused on. That had been a long time Democratic stronghold. Trump actually won it by seven. Cheryl won it by 26. It's only a 33 point swing there only. Perth and boy. Harris,

plus nine, Cheryl plus 56. Yeah, I mean, it's just an unbelievable turn. West New York, Harris plus 13, Cheryl plus 57. Patterson, Harris plus 28, Cheryl, plus 71. It's hard to win a place by 71 points. It's really hard. I mean, when you just do the math on what that means. I mean, Zoron did it in Bushwick.

Sure. Most of the time, most of the time, it is tough. Trump does it out in, you know, West Texas. Again, that is a 12-month swing. Yeah. That is not a, like, four years to now. That is a 12 months ago to right now. There's some caveats to this.

It's just important to say because I know that people will push back. So, like, we should just go through them. Like, for starters, it's an off-off year. So there's kind of a self-selecting group of every voter, including Hispanic voters. Like, it probably is such that it's a higher college-educated percentage, right? It's probably such that it's a higher percentage of people who are, like, really engaged what's going on in the news, like the types of people that tend to be more Democrat are going to vote in a off off year than a presidential year. So, you know, there's some elements to that.

You know, and Union City in particular is a big article. This guy, Brian Stack. Jersey is one of the few places where they still have machine politics stuff. And, like, he is a friend to share all day when in big. Right. Like, so there are some caveats. But, like, 50 points is not, you know what I mean? Like, okay, let's say he's down 20 points instead. If you, if you put it up against a general a presidential electorate and you put it into a different state where there isn't as much a kind of union machine politics happening. Even still, you know, the swing is rocked. When you saw in Virginia, for example, in the NASA City, which is a highly concentrated Hispanic precinct out by Dallas Airport. And, you know, you saw a similar story there. Well, and this also matches up

with the polling, right? And so this is one of the big questions we had going into Tuesday was, wow, the polling on two particular groups, 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters, has looked post-apocalyptic. So we've seen almost like zombie apocalypse level collapses for Trump within both voters 18 to 35 and Hispanic voters over the last 10 months. And some of the Hispanic polling suggested he had lost like 45 points with Hispanic voters, which seemed crazy, right, except that it shows up. been a lot of surveys.

And this was the first test of, well, is it, can you see it in the wild as well? And it turns out you can. And so that, I think, is a little bit of confirmation. It's going to make polling 2026 really hard, right? Because polls are always modeled on the things that have happened reasonably close before them, when there are big shifts happening, especially big shifts happening very quickly. It's hard for models to catch up with them. Yeah.

It was one of the reasons why Chitarelli, like, really his polls were way. out of whack with where he actually performed in Jersey, and it was because of Hispanic voters. The other thing you point out in the article, which is, I mean, just, I think everybody who listens to this show knows it's kind of obvious, but it's just worse kind of sitting on the implications is that, like, the thing that is driving this is obviously the deportation campaign in addition to the costs, you know, staying high. You don't have to do deep analysis to figure this out. Neither of those things are going to get better. And Trump has pot committed to his deportation campaign, was the phrase you used in the, in the column. I think that is obviously the case, and it's not like he's going to replace Stephen Miller with Javanka next year because they decide to do a softer, kinder version of the Trump administration.

Like, this is, they're in on this on the deportation effort. Trump said it himself. If we have deflation, he's going to have other problems on his hands. So I think that just this kind of projecting out, it's hard to see what would reverse the trend for him, at least with this demo. The best he could hope for is that the Supreme Court. court overrules tariffs. He'll just declare victory at which we'll say, see, it worked.

The tariffs worked. I got all the best deals. And then he sends everybody a check for $600 or something that he says, here is your big beautiful tariff check. Right. Like none of that will actually do anything to costs, really, because costs ain't coming down. Right. And the ICE thing, I mean, just think that they're in the process of hiring 10,000 people.

Once you have committed those budgetary dollars to this, and you're in the process of staffing up like that, will you have to keep doing the enforcement? Because otherwise, what do you do with these bodies, right? And so I just don't see how they stop that. All right. That takes us to one of the other topics going to kind of mull over with you, which is, what is Trump's next move to this?

I mean, you look at it and lame duck talk is going to start. His ability to bully is going to weaken somewhat. Like not entirely, right? And he still has a lot of levers that he can use with the Department of Justice and tariffs for as long as those go or other, you know, ways to, you know, threaten companies. But some of his levers to bully, I think, are going to be weakened here if you're looking at, you know, imagine the Jimmy Kimmel situation happening next week. You kind of think that Disney probably would have would have not folded, right? And it wouldn't have taken them the time to come around. I'd have like, okay, buddy, you know, how does he combat that, right?

Like, do you have anything in your crystal ball on how Trump is going to deal with this stuff? On the Hill, I guess I should just say one more thing. You know, there's these conversations we talked about with Wigley yesterday about killing the filibuster when we were talking. And this is very fast moving. So, like, who knows by the time this publishes, but, like, initially it was kind of like John Thinner's like, no way. Then all of a sudden some cracks were starting to leak, Ron Johnson, John Cornyn, some pretty traditional Republicans are like, yeah, maybe we can figure out something. So maybe they do something with that. What else do you think it might be in his set of reactions to such a big rebuke?

I mean, I assume something will involve New York City. Yeah. Right. He's got Mundani there. He would like to pick Mundani to be a foil. So you wait till he's sworn in. Then maybe you send the National Guard or, you know, send ICE. You give New York City the Chicago treatment and see what happens.

This is what Trump is really good at. Vince McMahon used to say, just get it in the ring. You know, whatever the problem. was that you're having with the company or with the law or with anything else. Just get in the ring. Make it part of the show. And once you are in there doing it, you can make moves. You can maneuver. You can find an angle. And I think that's basically how Trump has always viewed politics. And I imagine he'll keep doing that. Don't you? Like, you know, like, okay, let's push some buttons on ice. Let's blow up some more people in Venezuela. See if we can, you know,

say if that, it'll make threats against Nigeria. I guess that was my point is I think that the alarmist side of me thinks, well, the more he starts to kind of feel like he's not riding high, like that he can see the end game, the more maybe there's some lashing out on his, on his behalf. And so I don't want to overstate what yesterday is, but it's like, you know, you see though, he sees those losses, maybe he takes this Supreme Court defeat, as you mentioned, tariffs, you know, he feels like the midterms, like the plan to rig the midterms of the gerrymandering doesn't seem like that's going that well.

What are other things you can do? You know, and he floated the Insurrection Act to Nora O'Donnell and she didn't ask him about it, for example. Oh, yeah. That's something that stands out to me as something that obviously is on his mind. I think that for Trump, like obviously we're all great on the curve, like for Trump, it was kind of a quiet two weeks, kind of like he went to Asia and he does the China deal and just there hasn't I suspect that you know he will feel like he needs to do something else

to shake up the snow globe in the coming in the coming weeks yeah and I don't know that we can know what that is but we don't forget we also have like the birthright citizenship yeah decision coming down right we've got a whole raft of Supreme court decisions just on the Supreme court thing for example just he wanted to buck them on snap yeah and and it's kind of it's still kind of unclear. It's like to be the, for the functionaries working for the administration or getting snap out while Trump's bleeding that he, that he's not going to follow the Supreme Court. And so maybe he likes it that way, actually. So it feels like he's fighting them. I don't know. It's hard to understand exactly what's happening. But if he does get rebuked on birthright citizenship

on tariffs, you know, a Supreme Court showdown also seems like something. Yeah. Why wouldn't me? And the undergrating, I know you're not going to like this and you're going to make fun of me. But the bedrock beneath all of this is 2028. No, I don't. And how long he can maintain the position that actually I might run. They need me, actually. Look at how bad it is and I'm not on the ballot. You have to have it.

And, you know, well, maybe the constitution says one thing, but I don't know. What if we have an emergency? Maybe you can't have a, you know, or maybe we need to push it to the Supreme Court and see if maybe it's really just two consecutive terms is what it's all about. I don't make fun of you I make fun of the notion of like it's inevitable nothing is inevitable in life and I think that this is probabilistic

nothing is inevitable I've never said it was inevitable element to all of this and you know sometimes everybody has a different judgment on what the level of probability is but I think we can all agree it's not zero

that he's going to flirt with that and it's not a hundred so it's a question of where it is in between there I heard from my old friend Steve Bannon the other day you ready for this I was unhappy that I was making fun of him

over the 2028 stuff that he does to get attention and he's like we have five different ways we could do it. So again, I don't know, it's worth noting, I guess. It's on a private message channel that he floated that. So that's not for attention per se. I mean, he's not wrong. He probably does have five different ways that they could try it. Right. Yeah. I mean, I can think of four of them. I'll stop my head. But what this is really bad is about freezing the Republicans, though, right?

I mean, really is it's about what can be said publicly. And can he prevent? Because this is the other thing to realize, for Donald Trump, being president is less important than owning the Republican Party. But the thing is, you can't own the Republican Party if you or your child aren't president, right? If some other Republican is president, then you are no longer the main character, just by definition. Yeah. And, like, that's his business. You saw the tracker that Cap has out where, you know, he put, like, $2 billion just in liquid assets and probably, another seven, I think, billion in unrealized gains so far.

That's just in the first 10 months. Yeah. Like, this is, you know, we're going to be talking about tens of billions of dollars that are dependent upon him being the owner of the Republican Party. You think he's just going to say, well, going to be great to see a primary. Good luck to J.D. and Marco and Marjorie Taylor Green. And I'm just going to go back to my ballroom. And, you know, we'll see who the future is.

Yeah, the other thing about that is Trump might have avoided jail for himself. thanks to his friends with the Supreme Court. But as kids and great kids haven't. We can pardon them all right. He can preemptively pardon them for all of the, well, that will those hold? A preemptive pardoning for unlimited crimes. With this Supreme Court, you better believe it will. Yeah, that's a good point.

Anyway, I just think it's something to monitor, especially if you have a series of things where he doesn't get his way. He's gotten his way on basically everything for about 10 months now. If he doesn't get his way on this election, he doesn't get his way from the Supreme Court, John Thune doesn't give him his way on the shutdown. I think that's something to monitor. Delete me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete me does the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. They know your privacy is worth protecting and they send you personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it, and what they removed.

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I mentioned I interviewed Pat Ryan, Congressman, over, about the insidification of sports TV right now and how, like, you can't watch ESPN on YouTube TV and you have to turn on the peacock, you know, to get a certain game, like how stupid it all is and kind of how he's using that as an antitrust fight. Anyway, folks are going to check that if they want to put a link in here. But as part of that conversation, I was telling them, I have a little bit, this is PTSD from recent elections, I have a little bit of nerves. seeing some of the chatter from the Democrats chatter for some of my friends on MSNBC

about that sounds a lot like after 2022 when when the Democrats won't you know the red wave didn't come into fruition and they were kind of like oh look at this look at this things are going good jobs and et cetera and you know they won blue states in uh they won a couple states common one and they won't new york city and then they want some down ballot places and and it's good it was good It was good. Good night. Really good night. But I don't know. Do you feel I just, is this just me being a rain cloud? I have a little bit of concern. It's like all of the structural issues that were besides maybe Hispanic men, all of the other structural structural issues that existed for the party, the Democratic Party going after 2024, it still exists today with with maybe the exception of they're standing with Hispanic men and the fact that the party at least understands. to talk a little bit more about affordability. Donald Trump has an enormous amount of power right now, right? He probably has as much or more power than any American president since FDR,

just in terms of his totally unified control of the country and of the federal government. And like, even if all of the stuff that you and I hope happens comes to fruition, his capacity to do damage is still like almost unimaginable. And he does still have room to maneuver. Like, it's not written anywhere that he can't turn this around, that God knows. It's not written anywhere even that you can't have a bunch of shenanigans in 2026 that result in things which are quasi legal, right? You know, a close election where the House has been decided by like two or three seats and maybe, you know, some, the Missouri Senate, the Ohio Board of Elections is like, huh, we think that in this district where Democrat won,

we're not sure we can certify those results because reasons. Right. And all of that, God knows, is independent of the possibility that Trump could legitimately keep winning, right? Maybe we wind up with maybe the AI bubble bursts. We go into a recession and people blame Democrats. Like, I think that's the less likely of the two possibilities, right? normally they blame the incumbent president's party.

But that's not like a rule of physics. You know, that's not inevitable. Yeah. Lots of things could happen. Here's what I say. Yesterday turned out as well as you could have asked for it to turn out. Yeah. If you and I had sat down and say, what are the results that would be the best possible

case scenario, it would have looked basically like what we got. Like, that's necessary, but not sufficient for rolling back all this stuff. Yeah. And that takes one of the final thing on this. Sarah, when we're on with Sarah Live and TNL, isn't Sarah the best, cut lover. And Sarah is just in the fight, you know, and it's like, next man up. She's exactly who you want on your field hockey team. That is a lesbian joke or whatever, any sports team, you know, focused.

That's not me. I'm an emotional wreck, which you can relate to. Sure. And I don't know. I felt myself the last 24 hours like trying to convince myself, I should be. happier. It was objectively good. Objectively good. And yet, he's still in there. And I'm talking to Carolina next. And it's just like, how is the Department of Justice ever fixed? And he is going to get away with this no matter what. And I don't know. There's something about maybe just hearing the

election music on MSNBC and whatever, looking at my numbers. And I just, I don't know. I got a little, I felt like I needed an SSRI a little bit. Despite the fact, I felt like I should want to do shots instead. I felt like I needed an SSRI. Does that land with you at all? No, but I would say that. Good. We are never going to be able to go back to where we came from, which is bad. Like, you know, Sarah's like, oh, we'll just build something that's new, but even better that fixes all the faults of the old systems. And I'm like, that's not how these things work. Like, we might to get the chance to build something new, but it'll still be a slightly crappier version of what we used to have.

That's just how it always is. Enshittification. It's in shittification, the inshittification of America. And that's the best case scenario, right? The best case scenarios. But I have given up the hope that we could ever go back to American political life as it existed for my entire lifetime, from essentially like 1980 as a kid,

a little kid in 1980 to 2015. And I think that world is gone This is Noah Smith I wrote a long essay about this I know like this is we have spent down the inheritance that the World War II generation created for us And that's just all gone now And we live in a different world

Which is going to have like moral and political austerity to it And that is not going to be fun And it kind of sucks I wish that that it didn't happen, but that's just where it is. And I, so I don't feel the way you feel. I feel sort of more hopeful in that, like, I have made my peace with never getting back there.

But if there's a chance that we could just get in shittification instead of authoritarianism, I will take in shittification over Victor Orban's Hungary every day of the week. You know how when there's a crisis? Does that work for you? Yeah, because this is why. You know, I don't know if this is how it works in your marriage. But if there's a crisis of some kind, I do better if Tyler is panicking as dark, you know, because then I'm like, okay, he's carrying the darkness for me.

And so that'll balance me. So your answer right there really kind of made me feel lighter, you know, because it's just like, yeah. Yeah. So I've always wanted to be. Yeah, she feels carrying the burden of this, right? Like things are inevitably horrible. And so I shouldn't have to worry about that. I said, what about can I get you on me just a little mad at the,

the voters on Tuesday? Can I also get you on that one? I had one more feeling I had to get off my chest. A little mad at them. Kind of like, fuck you. Fuck you. You fucking people in Passaic County. What do you think? What were you thinking? A little bit of that. So this is a, I mean, it's not a productive thought, but yes. It is one thing if somebody says, I don't believe that driving my car into a wall will hurt my car and they do it. And then you're like, you fucking idiot. Look what you did. You wrecked your car. This is more like they took our car and drove it into a wall. Yeah, drove into our house.

Right. And so that makes me pretty mad because it isn't the case of, and again, this isn't in 2016, it isn't the case. They all saw a million people die while the guy, I just, I happen to go back and reread some of the stuff that we wrote in the after action report of COVID. And it was the greatest failure of the federal government in any of our lifetimes. I mean, just top to bottom, somebody should have gone. to jail for the way the federal government handled the response to COVID.

Everybody saw this. Everybody knows somebody who died from COVID. And these people in Passaic County, these very nice people in Passaic County, who watched people die, who all had pretty good jobs, and I am sorry that, like, prices went up a few percent, but your wages caught up with them. Your real wages outstripped the increase in inflation. I'm sorry, but that's real. that's the reality.

And these people saw COVID. They saw all that happen. They saw the insurrection. They heard him talk about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation and how he wanted to deport 20 million, 25 million people, criminals and thugs. And these people in Passaic County thought, yeah, you know what? Let's fucking roll the dice. I like him.

I like him. Let's give that a whirl. I'm glad they've come home. and realized that the stove was hot and they would like to not touch the stove. It would have been nice if they couldn't have wrecked the car for America

and wrecked the rest of the country in the midst of their idiocy. I really needed this. I hope Sarah doesn't listen to this podcast. Don't worry. She never does. It's like it's a roll of the dice. Yeah, it's like 20% chance. One a week.

All right. That's Jonathan V. Last. Sign up for his newsletter if you had it. It's just gold like that. It's just gems every day you're getting from him. And up next, we have Carol Enig. Stick around. All right. All right, we are back with one of my fave senior investigative reporter at MS Now.

We're about to be MS now. A four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book out this week is Injustice, how politics and fear vanquished America's Justice Department, which he co-authored with Aaron Davis. It's Carol Lenig. What's going on, Carol? Tim, I'm so glad to be with you.

I love it when you say one of my favorites because all of my friends just think I'm so cool that I know you. Okay, well, great. Now I'm blushing, and it's true. You know, I have a lot of, you know, I can argue and I can spin, but I can't really bullshit. People know, if I tell you you're one of my favorites and I'm faking it, You can see it on my face, as anybody knows who watches, like, a Pierce Morgan performance that I do.

Anyway, I want to get into the book. When did you write this book, by the way? You're breaking news stories. Did Aaron do most of the work? Yeah, he did it all. He wrote the whole thing. I just do the TV. You know, we started this book in 2023.

I mean, the reporting for it, obviously, a subject we were really interested in generally as reporters. But we decided to like step back from the dizzying headlines and try to figure out, why is DOJ acting so differently than we have expected? Why are we, it kind of started with a tip I got that there was no investigation of Donald Trump's potential effort to overturn the election in 2021. Like there was people were saying to me, you know, you think there's an investigation, there's not. And when we got going on that road, we realized DOJ was really. acting oddly and then we thought we need to we need to go deeper and a book a book lets you i thought it was kind of an interesting way to start the book with the uh attorney general's honors program kind of explaining what that was i didn't i didn't know anything about that and then kind of

go into a couple of examples of some regular just line prosecutors who were doing their job camille shields and david kent and so i want to get into kind of the big stories that you cover during this this decade but but just talk about why you wanted to focus on that element of it, like the types of people that go in, the talent, like what it is that is driving them. I'm so tickled that you zone in on those two people and the honors program because we wanted to introduce the Department of Justice to people who don't cover it, don't know its norms, don't know it's how venerable an institution it is, don't know the kind of calling that

prosecutors and investigators have that people this place. So it's a living, breathing institution of these people with this shared mission, you know, no matter their ideological views, no matter which party they vote for, which most of them don't know among each other, who their party affiliation is, what their party affiliation is. These people kind of have a shared notion of what's right and why we bring prosecutions, why we bring cases. And it's not because we don't like people. it's not because we have some evidence. We can do it. It's very thoughtful. So when we open with Camille Shields and David Kent, they are being browbeaten by Donald Trump indirectly. I mean, he's not coming at them specifically, but he is pushing, pushing, pushing the Department of Justice to criminally charge former acting FBI director Andy McCabe, who opened an investigation of Donald Trump, right? That's his crime. But Donald Trump wanted him charged for other things. Is it a righteous case?

Like, is it in the public interest to charge this guy with misleading or lying to some federal investigators when he was asked a question about a leak in a newspaper story? But we also wanted to explain how do people get this shared vision and how do they get these values? And the honors program is the way so many of them, the people who led the Department of Justice under Joe Biden. And even in the first Trump administration, so many of them came up through that program. It's like the youngest, best, brightest lawyers that came out of law school. We're grabbing them. We're training them young. And we're going to teach them what it means to represent the United States of America.

Obviously, just huge changes in the reputation of the Justice Department and the more isn't how it's worked. But like the actual people, since you've been covering this, how many of them are still there? How much of this has cycled through? Who are the new people that are coming in in those types of roles? Huge, fast forward and wow, I mean, there's an estimate out there that 4,000 FBI agents and federal prosecutors have left the Department of Justice since January 20th. You know, the afternoon of January 20th, I saw a century worth of DOJ leadership be reassigned and essentially pressured to resign. People who were in charge of counterterror, George Toskis,

had led most of the counterterror investigations of the last two decades for the Department of Justice, and poof, he's out. The people that are still there, and I do talk to quite a few of them, are holding on to something, and that is that this department needs them, that there are bread and butter cases, not the sexy, you know, grab the headlines, politically tinged cases like Eric Adams and New York mayor charged with taking bribes or Donald Trump charged with hoarding and concealing and obstructing justice with classified records. There are bread and butter cases, and these people are saying somebody with integrity and with our shared values has to do this work. Some of them also want to bear witness to the corruption and manipulative.

of the department and make sure there's someone there to see it. Wow. So you think there are people staying like really that have that like three year horizon in mind, four year horizon in mind of like we need to be here for this because eventually this thing will have to be rebuilt? Yes. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day who said I'm just holding on. I'm just holding on because this can't stand. I want to get back into some of the specific case you're going in the book and you know and folks should obviously get it and uh on some of this stuff i just i have to admit um i was reading it yesterday at uh at the local uh cafe and uh you know some of it's triggering so i had to fast forward through a couple of the cases um so everybody can

choose which ones they can revisit the one that i was digging in the deepest on though because i've been obsessed with this i'm so happy you wrote about it was the egypt bribe case something a lot of folks have forgotten about but this was just a small part of the muller investigation was that There's been a kind of mysterious $10 million in U.S. cash. They've been taken out of an Egyptian bank that we don't know what happened to it. Maybe coincidentally, maybe not. Donald Trump put in $10 million into his campaign around a similar time. So for folks who aren't familiar with that, just give us, like, the Reader's Digest on that investigation.

You did a good summary. You know, we were kind of gobsmacked, Aaron and I, my co-author, Aaron Davis, when we learned that there was, this investigation that got shut down. And the investigation began actually because of a really unusual referral from the CIA. There was a informant who reported to his intelligence handlers, if you can imagine this, Tim, that he had information that LCC had ordered his folks to get $10 million to Donald Trump in the form of. a illegal campaign contribution, a friendly campaign contribution in 2016. Now, you'll remember, LCC met, the Egyptian president, met with Trump in an interesting

sidebar during Trump's campaign and the United Nations General Assembly, private meeting, initially public, but then private. It was during this time that everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Duh, that didn't work out. Everyone in Donald Trump's campaign was like, this guy will not put any more. of his money into the campaign because he thinks he's going to lose, and this was all marketing brouhaha anyway, and we don't have enough money to get to the end with TV advertising. So, anyway, the investigators got this information from the CIA that LCC was going to try to

give Trump $10 million. And interestingly, at that same time, in the late, late, late, late 2016, right before the election, Trump writes a check for $10 million to his campaign. But Bill Barr, when he got wind of this as the new attorney general, he questioned, do you really have the basis, the predicate for doing this investigation? And he scolded FBI director Chris Ray and said, you better have some serious adult supervision of this investigation because I've got my doubts. And within a matter of a few weeks, the U.S.

attorney in D.C., Jesse Liu, told the FBI agents she was not going to authorize them to pull Donald Trump's financial bank records to help establish, did he get the $10 million? So I was, you know, eating my biscuits and like frantically pushing through the book, doing the D.C. read of the book, going to the index to see like when Egypt comes back in and it doesn't. It was within the statute when Biden wins again. So I know we're about to get into the Merrick Garland. of it all. But did they not open back up the Egypt investigation when they took back over the DOJ? Hey, by the way, your quick read is quite good. You're getting all the juicy bits with your biscuits. Yeah, you nailed it. The statute of limitations had not run and the Biden DOJ did not open that

investigation. There were people who told us that Merrick Garland was never briefed on it, but like it's kind of a big deal. And it was in the news. And, you know, It's not like it should have been a surprise to anyone that there was this scuttle butt about LCC writing this huge check, allegedly writing this huge check that ended up being, you know, 200-pound bags taken out of an Egyptian bank. That's part of the evidence that the investigators had. And they were trying to trace when it left that bank in Egypt in duffel bags, did it eventually go to Trump. But no, the Biden DOJ did not look.

And I guess Jesse Lou was not in the DOJ then? She had left. She had been essentially shoved out of her U.S. attorney position by Bill Barr when she got nominated for a higher job. He was like, okay, you got a nomination. Get out. I want to put my person in. And that was at the end of 2020. Okay.

This is going to be my Candice Owens. This is my, the Egyptian $10 million bag is going to become my Brigitte McCrone. I'm going to be doing this podcast from Kai. after reading the book again. Speaking of things that Merrick-Garland didn't look into that quickly, so the Biden-D-O-J takes over in 2021 after, you know, we all saw the attempted coup in front of our eyes on the television. So it didn't like really take subpoenas to figure out what was,

what had happened on January 6th. We already knew that the DOJ decided to focus on, you know, the folks that had entered the building and that actually the rioters themselves rather than the organizers of the effort. Your reporting includes that were specific agents that pressed multiple times to investigate the Trump part and were rebuffed by senior DOJ leaders, basically until after the select committee with Liz Cheney and that crew. Talk to us a little bit about that. So I want to start by saying there is no comparison between Merrick Garland and Pam Bondi in terms of the way they ran the Department of Justice. I mean...

I have separate complaints. I have different complaints about... both. Yes, yes. But it's important to note, one guy was an institutionalist trying to protect its independence from the White House and its credibility. And the other says basically Donald Trump gives me my orders in the morning and I follow them. So what we learned in injustice in our reporting for the book was kind of made my hair stand up, which was that starting in December of 2020. A little known team of investigators at the National Archives were noticing that these fake elector certificates had been sent into the archives and to the Senate, and that they all looked

boilerplate, phony, bogus, and they also looked the same, coordinated, right? And they came from swing states where a bunch of Republicans from those states, party officials said that they were the sworn electors, which was false, and they said that Trump had won the election, which was also false. So these investigators at the National Archives went to the Department of Justice and said, hey, not sure, but this looks like a conspiracy. This looks like a potential crime at the base, like mail fraud, wire fraud. They submitted things that were bogus. What was their intent? DOJ is in the middle of investigating the riots. And, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. eventually gets back to the National Archives

investigators and says, yeah, we don't see a case here. So that was the first missed opportunity because they could have started looking there. It's not like you're looking at a violent riot and you're going to get to eventually building the brick one by one as Merrick Garland wanted to do. You're not going to get from the rioters to the fake electors coordinated in swing states. A lot of people who were inside the Justice Department told us, sources told us, like we should have been walking and chewing gum, right? We should have been doing both things. That's the first missed boat. The next missed ball is Thomas Windham, who is plucked out of a U.S. Attorney's Office in Maryland by the Deputy Attorney General's office in November 2021 and basically instructed, you're the lone prosecutor on this, go into D.C. and try to figure out, start looking around to see are there ties between Trump's orbit? and this riot. And as he begins to do that, he asks the FBI chief in the Washington Field Office to start a grand jury investigation with him. He wants to pull the financial records for the Willard,

where Rudy Giuliani and the campaign were all based in the days before January 6th. And, you know, oathkeepers were there with Roger Stone. Like, there was all this smoke that had never been looked into. And the head of the FBI's DC office, Tells Wyndham, I'm not subpoenaing the friggin' willard. His exact words, it's weird. He thinks it's inappropriate to start looking at a political campaign and also to pull the records of a hotel where a lot of swanky people probably have affairs.

So he concludes, no, and he blocks that grand jury. It is not, for 15 more months, Tim, after Biden takes office that the Department of Justice finally, I saw your hand on your face, finally investigates these fake electors. Here's the other one with the hands on my face. We've got it in all caps on my notes here. And then I guess it's September of 22 when I forget which element of the case it is. They go to Garland and want to move forward and he says,

we're going to wait until after the midterms. He doesn't want to politicize it. Now, I should just state the investigation was against Donald Trump, wasn't running in the midterms. as a private citizen in Marlago, but he was planning on running in the 2024 election. So the idea that for, that they didn't want to have any appearance of political impropriety, they decided to not do the investigation before the midterms, but save it until 2023 when Donald Trump is obviously going to be a candidate for office,

that seems like a pretty big judgment error to me by Merrick Garland. I'm not a prosecutor. I only play a lawyer on TV, but I'll tell you that a very senior former, DOJ official when he read that passage in the book called me yesterday. I was like walking in hell's kitchen trying to look for a piece of pizza that didn't cost $10. And he said, I cannot believe that happened. You know, Merrick Garland, again, like Caesar's wife, like just wants to be so above board, doesn't want to play any games and airs on the side of caution every time and heirs on the side of giving Trump the benefit, essentially. I want to say the benefit

of the doubt, but like the benefit of the Justice Department's carefulness and thoroughness and apoliticalness. But freezing that case for 60 days when Trump is not a candidate really makes a lot of prosecutors' hair blowback when they find out about it. Yeah, and then we go through to the January 6th committee. And, you know, obviously we have a lot of friends of the pot who are involved there between Cheney and Kinsinger and others. And they had said at the time and Schiff and we're asking that essentially that their investigation had spurred on the DOJ and that they had a lot of stuff that DOJ didn't have. And, you know, being an outsider, it was hard for me to tell whether that was just like bravado or what, you know, whether maybe there were things DOJ had that

they didn't know. And then I'm reading your book. And it's like, DOJ literally didn't know about Cassidy Hutchinson until they saw her on TV. So I guess it was not bravado. They were correct, though the, you know, Kinsiger and that crowd talking about that was correct, that it was their work that you and I, Tim, you and I were in the same boat. I was watching this in, you know, real time, watching, you know, various sources say to me, especially in the house, like, you know, we're the first footprints in the snow and we're doing this work and DOJ isn't. And, I was like, huh, it's hard to prove a negative, right? But when we really got down into it for the book, it was so clear that key moments of the House investigation, either through embarrassment or

through how public it all was, there were two or three really key moments when the House investigations spurred DOJ to do things that exact same freaking day. So it's like hard to say that it didn't impact them. Here's an example. The week of January 10th, 2022, there's a story that comes out in Politico that is about a very good story, by the way, about how the House investigation has put together the fake electors scheme and the information they're getting back from swing states because they had actually subpoenaed information

and records and they're getting back this pretty damning evidence about the way it was coordinated. Rachel Maddow, now my colleague at MS Now, did like a week of programming that was about just this. Like, these electors look coordinated. Where is Merrick Garland? She literally said, where is the DOJ? And a day later, Thomas Windham, we now know from records and interviews, reached out to that investigator from December 2020 and said, hey, I think we're going to investigate this. Would you like to be on board? I'm paraphrasing, obviously. There's a whole section on Jack Smith, and I want to get up to kind of looking forward stuff and a couple other news things.

But so I encourage you to actually read the book. Is there anything about the Jack Smith's investigation in particular that really stood out to you or that section that made you kind of that you hadn't expected when you were doing the reporting on it? I mean, first off, watching it from the outside and Bionic Man, no prosecutor has brought a case that fast and certainly not one involving a former president. And he brought two of them. And, you know, the guy was, to say rigorous is really understating how fast the guy moved

and how fast he was whipping everybody on his team to move to. Not because he was trying to indict Donald Trump, but he would say to his team, we can't leave these questions unanswered for Donald Trump or for the public. If they're bogus, we need to answer them. If they're real and there's evidence, we need to bring them before there is a decision about whether or not to return him to the White House. So he had a very different way of approaching this than Merrick Garland, which was, yeah, there's a political calendar, but yeah, we got to answer the question. So Bionic is a word I would use to describe Jack. The other huge surprise

to me was that he tried to get Judge Cannon removed from the case, and the Solicitor General turned him down, and he did not appeal that to Merrick Garland. He accepted that rejection. The truth is that if the Solicitor General turned down a motion to remove Eileen Cannon from the case, it was probably likely that Attorney General Merrick Garland would also reject that. She, a former clerk, incredibly trusted by Merrick Garland. I don't know. Maybe if the president was awake, we would have had a different attorney general by then, but I guess that's a different problem.

You know, no need to comment on that. Carol, that's what we call editorializing. I want to go forward. The long-term fixing of this is. is hard for me to figure. You know, and you've talked about all the people who have left. But now,

like, even if you imagine a situation where a Democrat or a reform-minded Republican, that seems unlikely, but who the hell knows? Like, wins in 2029. It's kind of hard to imagine them, like,

not, you know, and who the hell knows, like what crimes will be done by this administration during that time. You know, so the question is, do you go to the Merrick Garland route? Do you try to investigate

any corruption related to the crypto schemes? Is there anything else of this administration? What do you do with people who have come into this administration who have acted improperly or not acted into the code of the Department of Justice? It feels like a pickle. And I think one of the people in your book basically said it's not going to get fixed in our lifetimes. And that's sad, but it's kind of what it seems like to me. Yeah.

The hit the department has taken, as we learned in the book, is it's just not recoverable in the near term. Because two things. You brought up at the beginning. You've lost centuries worth of experience, and you can't replace them with, you know, a lot of Lindsay Halligans and expect, speaking of the former personal assistant and insurance lawyer that Donald Trump installed in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Virginia in order to indict James Comey and Leticia James, career prosecutors wouldn't do it. it's impossible to recover and expect that those folks are going to get replaced appropriately if you're inserting these lieutenants who, you know, salute to the commander and say, sure, we'll charge whoever you want us to charge. The second thing that's hard to recover from is the credibility gap.

Like, if you go the Merrick Garland route, you can see some dangers ahead of not holding people to account for their actions. The Department of Justice's mantra is without fear or favor. Like, who cares who it is, who cares how important they are, who cares what their party is. We charge based on the evidence and the public interest. But if you go the hardcore route, I can see some dangers too, because where's the credibility for the DOJ? Is everybody going to assume that criminal prosecutions have been directed or manipulated by the party in power. Two other news items that have happened since the book. It's a problem of a book timing, scheduling.

Is this one a news item? I don't know. I guess this is what I'm asking you. Is this real news or is this fake news? It's hard to know these days. Mike Davis, who's a very unhinged gentleman. He was the one that during the campaign was tweeting about how he's going to put me in the women's gulag. It was kind of like a, yeah, kind of a homophobic little gay.

gay joke, a little funny gay joke between pals, if Trump had won. So funny. Yeah, so hilarious. So anyway, he's friends with Bondi. And he's been out there doing a lot of MAGA podcasts recently. And in one of them, he said, or several of them, I think, he said a federal grand jury has been impaneled in Florida. And they'll begin meeting in January to investigate a decade long conspiracy against

Trump. The grand jury will consider whether to bring criminal charges against top Democratic figures that Davis claims have colluded to hurt Trump, blah, blah, blah. Is that true? Do we know? Do you know anything about this? Can I just take a beat and say, yes, that's true. And stay tuned. There's more. You know, I'd rather break news at my actual news organization. That's okay. Well, you got me the bulwark. We're kind of all pals. We're all family here. I'm just like, okay. So you're telling me I have to have a little, I have to have a little alarm bell from the Carolenig tweet, Twitter, or X or MSNBC. MSNN?

I'm not, I'm not grinning like sillyly. I'm just like, you and I'm, you and I, friend so I can say, you should tune into MS now at some point soon because there is more there. And I just think we should wait. It's pretty alarming. I guess I'll just say, what can I say in this? That Davis lists the things that they'll go into, Russia investigation, you know, 2020, et cetera. It's kind of this broad effort to claim there's some conspiracy against Trump. So there are a lot of people that are caught into that drag net. And I've heard from some of them who are like, we've heard from people who are in the know who are like, you should talk to lawyers, et cetera. So that's pretty alarming.

It is alarming because if you think about it, it's part of the overall rainbow pattern, which is let's charge everybody with a crime for doing their jobs. They were doing their jobs when they looked into a fraudulent conspiracy to overturn the election by claiming that swing states actually voted for Trump when they obviously did not. Let's charge people who opened an obstruction investigation into me when I fired Jim Comey. Let's criminally charge the former director of the FBI Jim Comey for lying to Congress, but really because he would not absolve Donald Trump publicly of any impropriety in his campaign, having repeated contacts with Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign. Next, let's charge Letitia James, the first person, the New York Attorney General,

the first person to actually get a civil fraud case against him. To your point of the book, though, tying it and not having to speak specifically to the case Davis is talking about, like, where are they finding all the prosecutors to do these things? And obviously we've seen in Virginia that a bunch of people have been pushed out and that Halligan comes in and presuming this is actually happening in Florida and that there's other things happening. That's a lot. And that speaks to the future. It's like, what do you do? do with the folks who signed up to go along with, like, sham prosecutions? It's really a bloodbath, right? If you're a prosecutor in any U.S. Attorney's Office that

happens to own one of these grand juries, Virginia, Philadelphia, New York, Maryland, D.C., now the Southern District of Florida, there's another one I'm forgetting. If you're a prosecutor in one of these offices, we are learning. You are going to resign if you're forced to do something. Remember, in our book, we have all this cinematic detail of how Danielle Sassoon and her team deal with being ordered to dismiss the bribery charge against Adams. And then every single supervisor of an elite unit in DOJ called the Public Integrity section created after Nixon to protect us from corrupt public officials, every single one of those leaders in the course of 48 hours resigns rather than dismiss a case they know is righteous. Dismiss a case

where they know the evidence is extremely powerful. Dismiss a case that Donald Trump wants gone. So he has some hand over Adams to make him help him with his deportation policies in New York. All right. So last thing. The other news you broke since you've been over at MS was the Tom Homan Kava bag story. I guess at this point there's not, it's sort of like there isn't much to advance in that story because the Trump administration isn't going to look into it. But, you know, I'm just wondering if there's any, any sort of follow-up or any sense of what you think the situation is. Like, Homan, it's interesting. Homan is also sort of in this internal political fight in the administration where he's the moderating force,

apparently, according to some reporting, on the deportations. But I'm just wondering if your reporting is tied in at all if there's any people are looking at them different. I would just say that there's some prosecutors who remind me that there's a five-year statute of limitations on bribery and the meeting that we revealed in September of 2024 where Holman accepted and was taped accepting a cover bag full of $50,000 in cash, that tape still exists, that evidence still exists. And the five-year statute of limitations for 2024 is September, 2009. Well, hopefully we won't redo the Egypt investigation.

People will use the nine months to look into potential, who knows, alleged bribery. And if you're listening from Cairo and have any information, you can use because you have me and Carol can find us on Signal. Tim, did you just say Cairo if you're listening? Yeah, Cairo. I should, Cairo if you're listening. Call me or Carol. Carol Lennon, the book's Injustice.

How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department, appreciate it. And we'll be talking to you soon, all right? Tim, this was great. Thanks for focusing on our book, Injustice. Happy to do it. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then. Peace.

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