The Bulwark Podcast - Just What Putin Wanted

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Moscow Mitch capitulated to Trump's electoral interests, Justice Scalia speaks from beyond, Lindsey may have flipped on Trump in Georgia, and reading the tea leaves on why the presidential immunity ruling is taking so long. Ben Wittes joins Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials. show notes: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-justice-scalia-thought-about-whether-presidents-are-officers-of-the-united-states 

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flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Trump trials. In 2024, Donald Trump faces criminal trials in New York, in Washington, D.C., in Fulton County, and in Florida. And meanwhile, he faces fraud charges in New York. And today he will be in a courtroom where he faces charges of defamation involving a woman

that the court has already found he sexually assaulted. He prepped for that by putting out more than 30 attacks on social media because, I don't know, political reptilian genius or something. So because it is Thursday, we are joined by our good friend Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare to break it all down. Happy Thursday, Ben. Happy Thursday. I forgot to even mention that Peter Navarro is being sentenced today. So there's that story as well. For those who have forgotten the Peter Navarro case, this is actually a really interesting moment because Peter Navarro stiffed the January 6th committee, refused to cooperate along with a number of other people, including Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino. And some of them

were charged criminally for contempt of Congress, including Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. Some were not. But this is a good reminder to those of you who are considering simply ignoring a congressional subpoena that, you know, sometimes that act will catch up with you. And it is a, if memory serves, contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor offense that can get up to a year. I believe Peter Navarro faced two counts of it, but I could be wrong about that. So, you know, a day of reckoning, he may actually serve some time in jail. Imagine, who knew? So just catching up, there's so many other things that are going on. The U.S. Supreme Court is getting ready to hear Donald Trump's arguments about the Colorado decision that would disqualify him. We're still waiting on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals

decision on Donald Trump's claim for total immunity. The full court refused to lift a gag order last week. And then, of course, we had the U.S. Supreme Court hand down a 5-4 ruling that rather, in some ways, surprisingly gave the Biden administration a win over the state of Texas about the border. But I want to get to this a little bit later. We're getting all kinds of very interesting vibes from both Texas and Florida's Ron DeSantis saying basically, yeah, we might not pay that much attention to this Supreme Court because we think the federal government does not have the power to tell us how we protect the state from foreign invasion. So with all of that, Ben, we have to start with something completely different. I want to tell you a story about a

lost puppy in Mequon, Wisconsin. All right. Okay. This is complete news to me. I just want to say, sometimes we do a little prep for this. So, You know, we talk about what we're going to talk about. The lost puppy in Mequon, Wisconsin never came up in our discussion. So we're, I'm here with the listener here completely at a loss. This is the real America. I want to remind people that while people, we are obsessed with all of the insanity and the primaries and everything, the real America out here in flyover country is still going on. So, and this is one of these community-wide efforts. So here's the story. And by the way, just so you know that it's an important thing, it's actually on the front page of the local newspaper. I'm holding it up here for YouTube viewers. Basically here, and then the headline is Community Breathes Collective Sigh After Missing Puppy is Found. And it is the story of

this little puppy named Lucy, who was at the Ozaukee County Humane Society. And a loving couple from Mequon adopted her. She's very, very nervous. Have you ever adopted a rescue puppy? I mean, they can be very, very jumpy. It takes them a long time. Yeah. It takes them a long time to get acclimated.

So they come home, you know, again, a couple of weeks ago. And she's, you know, obviously a little bit nervous. They put her in her cage, but for some reason the cage doesn't get latched. This is the first night this puppy is in this house. Okay. The puppy, nervous, scared, bolts from the cage, runs out the door and into the night. Now, when I say runs into the night, this is right about the time that polar vortex was hitting the Midwest. So, you know, we know that Wisconsin is cold, but this was really cold. So this puppy is out there and the temperature is dropping. It's dropping from 10 degrees to six degrees to four degrees, and then drops into the negative zone. And negative four

in Wisconsin can actually be colder than that even sounds because you have the wind chill that may drop at another 10 degrees or so. So the word went out on social media, you know, the police, you know, Facebook, various community organizations, neighborhood watches. Where is Lucy? Where is this puppy? Because the little puppy is not going to last long in this kind of incredible cold. I mean, I have big German shepherds. I have a German shepherd who's 140 pounds. And yet we worry about him being outside too long in this kind of weather because you have the ears, their paws might freeze. So the couple are frantically searching much of the community. And again, this was a community effort. They spent from sunrise

till sunset searching every street, yard, and park. And it was really amazing, Lucy Holler told the news graphic. Even when I was driving, I was over by the Mequon Golf Course, and I saw a guy in a pickup truck. And I was like, hey, I lost my dog. Did you see her? And he was like, oh, yeah, Lucy, yeah. I'm looking for Lucy too. And again, people are giving up hope. So after a couple of days, she said, I kind of gave up. I'll be honest, she admitted, about halfway through the week, especially after there were like four days of no sightings. And with this kind of weather, I just thought there was no way that she survived. That probably she got frostbite, maybe succumbed to a coyote or froze to death or something happened. By the way, I have a coyote out in my backyard here. It was really emotionally devastating to tell you the truth. So last Friday, 630 in the morning, she gets a phone call from a neighbor that she didn't really know very well saying, hi, is this Lisa? I have Lucy.

And I'm like, I'm sorry, what? And she says, is he alive? Does he have frostbite? What apparently happened was that another neighbor who lives like two doors down had seen this little black thing huddled in the bushes up against the house. And she called me and it was pitch black out. And she said, Abby, I think it's that puppy that you've been talking about that everybody's been looking for. And I was like, are you sure about that? And so they said, you know, I'm going to have to figure it out.

I mean, it might be a coyote or something. So they, they, they rush over with a towel, hoping to lure Lucien and Lucy at, at apparently this little tiny puppy. Okay. Who had been like days out in this cold had dug herself a little Heidi hole in the wall against a brick house. And he didn't, she didn't move. She didn't move. They came up and they were able to coax her out, put the towel around her. And you know what, Ben? She's okay. And that's a metaphor for all of us. We're out there in the cold, the wind chill is dropping, and we're going to be okay. Well, it's because the community still exists. We think of ourselves as being so atomized, you know, but in this newspaper article, you know, it talks about

all the people who are out there, you know, the police department, the Humane Society, Lost Dogs of Wisconsin, social media posts, church groups, all out there looking for that one little puppy. And none of them turn into rhinoceroses. You know, they don't. And so I wanted to start this because we're going into what is going to be a very, very long year, a very, very long slog that will often have on display the worst of human nature, you know, the worst of American culture. So 37 bleats attacking the woman you attacked kind of stuff. Yeah. So I figured that a guy who has a newsletter called Dog Shirt Daily,

that you were the only person that would actually understand this moment and what it means for us here in the frozen tundra. I think that's right. Not that I'm the only one, but that that was, I think it's a great thing. And maybe we should have a Lucy shirt. We could have a Lucy shirt, the little puppy. All right. So Donald Trump, and you can't make this stuff up.

He's already lost the Eugene Carroll case. I mean, the judges found that he actually raped her. And yet Donald Trump appears obsessed about it. I go back and forth on all this. People think there is this genius you do not appreciate, that here is somebody who knows how to manipulate the criminal justice system. And then on the other hand, there's this ranty rapist who cannot control himself. I struggle to come up with the upside of going into court, a court that is going to decide whether you not only have defamed, but you have re-defamed your sexual assault victim, and then putting out 30 tweets attacking her. Your thoughts about that weird moment?

Well, so there's no advantage to that in the justice system, right? So you're going to infuriate the judge. You're going to, whatever incremental decisions he has to make are likely to go against you just based on your conduct, right? If he has judgments to make, if he has jury instructions to give. So within the four corners of the case, there is no advantage to behaving this way. One question is whether there's a reptile brain strategy here or whether it is just flailing anger. hey, this was a $5 million judgment against me the first time. Maybe it'll be a $30 million judgment against me this time. But however much extra it is for my behaving this way, it is important for me to show my constituency that I'm the 800-pound gorilla who pounds his chest and admits nothing and doesn't care the implications legally for me. I'm just telling it like it is. I think the show

is for voters. I think that's clear. And it's also clear how important it is going to be for this to become now a litmus test for the Republican Party. The old news is the Republican Party capitulates to supporting Donald Trump. The new twist is they not only have to capitulate, they have to mirror and they have to mimic everything he says, including about a woman that he raped. So, for example, Elise Stefanik this week, as part of her audition to VP, is asked about this. And she, of course, knows that she has to also attack E. Jean Carroll. It's all fake. It's all a witch hunt. So they all now have to have an opinion on it, and it must align exactly with what Donald Trump says about it. So he has made this a centerpiece

of his loyalty test in the Republican Party. Even Nikki Haley, who is actively running against him, can't bring herself to say there is no reason to disbelieve this woman. A court has found her account credible, his behavior to be sexual abuse and defamation. I mean, even she can't bring herself to speak the obvious facts of what the court has found and what the judicial process has determined. You know, she keeps saying things like, I don't follow the specifics of the case in a fashion that, you know, you would think this would be, you know, something that a person running against him in a primary would, if not necessarily want to talk about, at least not run away from. I want to get back to the Trump trials in a moment, but I also wanted to get your take on

the Supreme Court decision on the border. This is not a specifically Trump-centric decision, but it was awfully interesting. The court ruled 5-4 on behalf of the federal government, which has basically been pushing back against Texas, putting the barbed wire on the fence. And it has a lot to do with the relationship between the federal government and the states and the supremacy clause. The Biden administration won. A lot of people's eyebrows were raised that he only won 5-4. But what I also think is equally interesting now is listening to Governor Abbott in Texas

and just this morning, Governor DeSantis in Florida, suggesting that their interpretation of the Constitution is the federal government does not have the ability to tell states how to defend themselves against a foreign invasion, which strikes me as kind of a throwback to debates that we had many, many, many years ago that I naively thought had been resolved in the U.S. Civil War. So give me your sense of the state of play here, Ben. So it has vague overtones of the nullification crisis in the 1820s and 30s. But the Supreme Court has allowed the Biden administration to remove this razor wire that Governor Abbott has put in place. What DeSantis has anything to do with any of this, I don't know. Florida isn't, at the end of the day,

a state with a border with Mexico that migrants are coming across. But he loves to sort of inject himself into, like, sort of pretend that Florida has border with Mexico. The order technically doesn't prevent Florida or prevent Texas from putting up more wire. But, you know, the rhetoric is definitely getting into this land of, is this Texas's border or is this the United States's border? And, you know, we have an answer to that as a country, which is that it is, yes, it is the border of Texas, but it is also the border of the country. And the border of the country is the responsibility of the federal government. Now, I do have some sympathy for border state governors who are in an impossible position right now. And, you know, the federal government and Congress in particular

is not addressing the rather exigent situation that they're facing. But the answer to that, it cannot be to put migrants in serious danger by putting up a razor wire in the water where there are children. And I don't pretend to know what the right answer to this problem is. And by the way, you know, there's a lot of discussion of that in the Senate in the context of a compromise over the emergency supplemental funding. So, like, I don't want to oversimplify it, but the answer cannot be state defiance of federal authority at the expense of cutting migrants. That's the wrong answer. Okay, so this is going to be a digression from the legal cases, because you did just mention on the negotiations going on about the border. Up until the last 24 hours, there was a lot of hope

that they were going to come up with a compromise on all of this. And it looks like Mitch McConnell is now bowing to Donald Trump. So Republicans who have been saying that there is a crisis at the border, urgent crisis at the border, were this close to basically getting one of the most conservative bills ever and have decided they would rather have it as an issue. And as a result, they are not only not going to fix the border, you're holding up the Ukrainian flag there. It does appear that America's abandonment of Ukraine

feels like it's imminent now, Ben. I mean, I don't want to be too dark here, but they have decided that they don't want to fix the problem. And if it means that feeding Ukraine to Russia is the price for that, then it's just collateral damage to their 2024 election agenda. This is a shameful, shameful moment for Mitch McConnell and for the Republican caucus more generally. And I want to focus on McConnell because he so clearly knows better. He knows, right. He has been a stalwart supporter of Ukraine. Look, he and I, we have our differences. I'm not a fan of Mitch McConnell. But until today, I would have always said, but he's been an important rock on Ukraine,

and he's really restrained his caucus in important electoral interests. And he said it pretty baldly. And so if you translate McConnell's, we don't want to undermine Trump on the border language into English, what he means is we're going to give up on reaching a compromise on the border at the expense of the Ukrainians for Trump to have this as an electoral issue. I really hope, beyond hope maybe, that at least kept him up a little bit last night, that he tossed and turned in bed thinking, you know, how many Ukrainians have to die so that Trump has this electoral issue. It will not be a small number. The Ukrainians are short on ammunition, and we are out of money to continue resupplying them. The administration was not lying or bluffing when it

said around the turn of the year the money was going to run out. It has run out. And there are a variety of European countries that are stepping up in relatively small ways to address that. But nobody has the materiel that we do. Nobody has the size of a defense budget that we do. And, you know, this is what Putin has been waiting for. And Mitch McConnell kind of earned his Moscow Mitch nickname yesterday. We could devote the entire program to this and to the implications for the world, for Europe. It's one of those things where the politics can feel very, very small and petty, but the historic ramifications could be so great, including the message it sends to China about Taiwan. And again, Donald Trump has sent very, very clear messages

about that as well. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask at work and social settings around your family? Better help online therapy is convenient flexible and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding because masks should be for halloween fun not for your emotions take off the mask with better help visit betterhelp.com today to get 10 off your first month that's dot com. Okay, so deep breath and legal wonk alert here. We're waiting on what's going to be this really, you know, major argument and decision of the U.S. Supreme Court about whether or not the 14th Amendment Section 3 disqualifies Donald Trump as an insurrectionist. You know that I am a skeptic what the court is going to do. But one of the arguments that the court might seize upon, I don't know, but we're getting a lot

of attention, is this one argument, that Section 3, which says that if you're an insurrectionist, you are barred from any office of trust in the United States, does not apply to Donald Trump because he was not an officer of the United States within the meaning of the Constitution. If the Supreme Court wants to sort of dodge this or not apply Section 3, it could just rule that Trump is not an officer of the United States. I mean, this is kind of the weeniest out, but it is there. And it's what the trial court judge in Colorado used. Now, Roger Parloff has written this very, very detailed piece. And by the way, Judge Michael Luda was so impressed about it that he showcased Roger's work on Twitter. And he calls it basically Parloff's amicus brief to the Supreme Court. So one of the

things that Roger does is he cites a 2014 concurrence by the late Justice Anson Scalia in a private letter he wrote shortly after explaining the concurrence, believing that, of course, the president was an officer of the United States for constitutional purposes. So can you give me the thumbnail version of this? Because I think it's a ludicrous argument, but it's going to be made seriously. And if the court wants to dodge this, this might be the thing that it hinges on, right? Okay, so first of all, I don't think it's a ludicrous argument. I think it's the best argument that the Trumpist forces have.

It is the argument that prevailed at the trial court level in Colorado, where the judge ruled, yes, there was an insurrection, yes, Trump engaged in it, and yes, it's ridiculous that the Section 3 disqualification provision doesn't apply to the presidency. The presidency isn't an office of the United States, or the president isn't an officer of the United States, but that's actually how I read the Constitution. And this argument has been advanced most fulsomely and over the longest period of time by two scholars, Seth Barrett Tillman and Josh Blackman, by the way, who have been advancing this argument for longer than the current dispute over Section 3 has been going on. I don't want to sound like I'm accusing them of having adopted it for political reasons. They've been arguing this for years. And back in 2014, Justice Scalia had

occasion to write a concurrence in this famous Appointments Clause case, NLRB v. Canning, and he wrote in the concurrence that an analysis of the president as officer of the United States and the presidency as an office of the United States that seemed to adopt the opposite view that Professor Tillman had, that is that the president is an officer of the United States. And so Professor Tillman, being a inquisitive sort, wrote Scalia a letter and said, hey, what did you mean by this? And Scalia writes back, I don't have the letter in front of me, I meant exactly what I said. And so, Roger points out that, and by the way, several current justices were on that

concurrence, including, I believe, the chief. And so, Roger's point is, and I think it's a compelling one, that several justices, including the great originalist himself, our textualist Antonin Scalia, did not read the appointments clause in the fashion that Professors Tillman and Blackmun now urge for purposes of Section 3 disqualification. That is, they saw the president as an officer of the United States. Look, I mean, the fact that Justice Scalia thought that Tillman and Barrett were wrong doesn't mean they're wrong, but it is an interesting piece of authority, and it is an interesting piece of authority that, like, to his credit, Professor Tillman wrote him a letter and inquired after, and Scalia, faced with that, stood by his understanding of it. I actually have the letter here. Dear Mr. Tillman, I meant exactly what I wrote, the manner by which the president and vice president hold their offices is provided

otherwise by the Constitution, as is the manner by which the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate hold theirs sincerely, Antonin Scalia. Pretty just, you know, flat out there. It is not dispositive as to the who's right question, but it is a really interesting data point. And it shows, I think, in Professor Tillman's, to his credit, that this is a position he's held for a long time. And it's a sincere position, but it also shows that Justice Scalia and maybe three of his colleagues rejected it. Will that sway the justices in the coming? Probably not. But is it a really interesting data point? Yeah. And is it one of those moments where you are very proud to be the editor of Lawfare, where

you have reporters and analysts who notice these things and the ability to write them in the kind of wonky length and detail that Roger did here? Yeah, it's one of the reasons we have Lawfare and that it exists and that we're all very proud of it. And for which we are all grateful. And by the way, those three justices that you mentioned, that we're all very proud of it. And for which we are all grateful. And by the way, those three justices that you mentioned, so we have Scalia regarding the president and officer of the United States. And the suggestion here is that Roberts, Thomas, and Alito, who joined in

that concurrence, agreed with him. Now, again, that was then, this is now. We can't do one of these podcasts without also discussing Alexander Hamilton, or at least citing Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton also seemed to think that the president was an officer under the Constitution, correct? Yes. And Roger provides some interesting evidence of that from Federalist 67. That evidence is more technical because it actually involves an inference from a sentence that is actually about senators. But the argument that Tillman and Barrett are advancing is a serious one. I think it is probably the most likely basis on which if the court wants an off-ramp, it is probably the best off-ramp. But the point of Roger's piece is that it is not without significant

flaw, and there are serious problems with it. And the argument on the other side, which has been advanced by Will Bode and Michael Stokes Paulson, is actually very strong as well. So I think it's a genuinely interesting issue, and I want to be respectful of the seriousness of the argument. But yeah, this is one of the places that this Supreme Court case will turn on. Let's shift down to the Georgia case. A couple of developments there. There's a new book coming out by pretty well-known investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman that reveals that Lindsey Graham threw Donald Trump under the bus before the grand jury investigating election subversion in the Georgia case.

This is from Politico. The authors also report in the book, which is coming out next week, that Lindsey Graham, after fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block that subpoena and then losing, that Graham turned on a dime. That Graham reportedly told the grand jury that if, quote, you told Trump that Martians came and stole the election, he'd probably believe you, unquote. He also suggested that Trump cheats at golf. So, you know, just when you kind of feel you've plumbed the depths of the depths of Lindsey Graham, he comes up with something new, you know? Yeah. So this is more a question ultimately for Will Salatan and his role as Lindsey Graham psychiatrist than it is for me. I will say Lindsey Graham is one of the most remarkably

unprincipled human beings in American politics. And everything you think you understand about there being some core to which he's true turns out to be bullshit. But then you put him in a room where he's protected by grand jury secrecy, at least until somebody, probably him, violates that secrecy. And he knows that he's a corrupt actor and he spills his guts. And I do think somewhere in there, he knows that he is aiding a very, very evil person and that he's doing it for reasons that the closer you get to, you know, a confessional and a grand jury room is, you know, there's 12 people there or 23 people there, not just one priest, but it's kind of like a confessional in other ways, including the silence, right? And all of a sudden, you know, the awareness that he has sinned very greatly comes to the surface. Well, there's a couple of dazzling details in this book that, of course, as we know, the Fulton County DA, Fonny Willis, did not charge Graham. But the authors write about this little episode where Lindsey Graham thanks Fonny Willis in the hall for the opportunity to tell his story. According to the book, he tells Willis, that was so cathartic. I feel so much better. And then he hugged her. And Willis's reaction, she was like, whatever, dude, according to one witness of the strange encounter. So, wow, that's, you know,

big if true, but again, maybe it won't impact on the case. But another little, you know, episode in the psychology of Lindsey Graham. Okay, so since we brought this up, we did not really address the allegations against Fannie Willis last week. We may not this week, but the judge has now ordered a hearing. Your thoughts, people are wondering, is this going to be the end of the Fannie Willis case? These allegations, other media are stepping forward. New York Times stepping forward that this special counsel she appointed, Nathan Wade, bought airfare tickets for trips with her to San Francisco.

And the allegations that she may have benefited financially from a relationship with Wade, of course, don't change the underlying allegations in the case against Trump and the 18 others. But where are we at on all this? All right. So first of all, Fannie Willis's brief in response to these allegations is due on, I believe, the first or the second, I can't remember which. The hearing is a week or so after that. And so we still don't have a formal response. That said, we do have some material that was unsealed from Mr. Wade's divorce proceedings, which include these credit card records appearing to show that he

took Fannie Willis on vacation. This is most unlikely to derail the case. It is not unlikely, in my view, to derail Nathan Wade's participation in the case, that you could imagine easily him stepping aside, as some people have urged him to do. You could imagine him also being disqualified, particularly if it looks like he has been in any way kicking back money to her that he earned on the case. The less likely possibility is that it could disqualify her and with her the entire office, in which case the case would have to be reassigned to some other office to handle. I think that's unlikely. I have not seen any evidence that she is involved in any kind of a kickback scheme. The most that we've seen evidence of is that she's having a relationship with somebody she hired who has, among other things, taken her

on vacation. And that is a terrible look and absolutely not best practices. But I don't think that's going to derail the case or cause her to be disqualified. The thing that could change that is if the financial arrangements look more corrupt than him paying for her to go on vacation with him with money he legitimately earned. And I think we will have a better sense of that after the hearing in early February. I don't think based on what we know now that we should expect either of them to be disqualified, although I do think it would be wise for him to not be involved in this case going forward. I think that would be the intelligent, wise, and prudent thing to do. So, Ben, what else should we be watching for? We're still waiting on the D.C. Court of Appeals ruling on the immunity motion. I think

a lot of us thought this might have come down by now. Do we read anything into the fact that we haven't seen it yet? I think we do, actually. I think we read into it that it either is not unanimous or that the judges think that there's some negotiation that had to happen to keep it unanimous. I'm surprised it has taken this long. The judges, you know, had a lightning fast briefing and argument schedule, and they were... Very cognizant of the need for speed here, too. So that's, yeah. Exactly. A lot of people, including me, were expecting it to happen significantly faster than this. So I assume it's reached some kind of a hiccup. And whether that's

a small hiccup of the kind that requires graceful writing, or whether it means that somebody is writing a protracted dissent or concurrence, which in this context would be a kind of memo to the Supreme Court, I really don't know. But I do think it's a surprising development. It is also a development, importantly, that affects the timing of everything else that happens this year. And the reason is this trial was scheduled for March 4th. It is clearly not going to happen on March 4th. And the New York trial is scheduled for the end of March, for March 25th, I believe. So if you push this back, you probably interfere with the New York trial. You're talking about the Hush Money case?

Exactly. Yeah. Which then has implications for when Judge Cannon, if she ever decides to have a trial in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, what dates are available for her. And that in turn has implications for what dates are available for Fulton County. And so if you are hoping for as many trials to take place as I am before the election as possible, it is really important, you know, that we free up the D.C. case, which is, other than New York, the most advanced and, including New York, by far the most important of the cases to proceed in a timely fashion. And so, you know, all eyes on the D.C. Circuit and a lot of things are held up pending their adjudication of this matter.

Okay, so this, I'd completely forgotten about this until I saw a tweet, whatever they're called now, from Andrew Weissman last night, looks like it's like 16 hours ago saying once again, where is the special counsel? Her report on Biden classified docs. You remember there was a special counsel appointed to look at Biden, which, of course, is nothing like the Mar-a-Lago case. But it's we don't have it yet. And then Andrew Weissman says, will he pull a Comey and delay the release to a time that will hurt the most and make extraneous statements outside of his mandate? The delay is pretty unconscionable.

Again, that is not even on my radar screen, or I don't think it's on the most radar screens, but. I disagree with Andrew about this pretty completely, actually. We got some news stories a number of weeks ago that he was wrapping up. And, you know, I don't think anybody serious ever expected charges to arise from Mr. Herr's investigation. There was no evidence that Biden was even aware of classified material that was retained following his vice presidency. And so there is guidance in the special counsel regs about what the nature of Mr. Herr's report is supposed to be. Who is a Trump appointee, right? He's a Republican. I mean, I want people...

He's a Republican. He's a former, a very good reputation. And that report, by the way, goes to the attorney general, you know, not to the public. And I assume that Merrick Garland will make it public at some point. So, the inference that this is long overdue strikes me as wrong. It's only been a few weeks since we got the news story that he was wrapping up. And, by the way, the inference that he is writing something judgmental and inappropriate in this report just seems to me made up. I have a lot of respect for Andrew Weissman, but I don't think of this report as either late or inappropriate. It seems to me we should be expecting it at some point not too long from now, And I assume it will be done

professionally. All right. Well, we have a lot to go over the next couple of weeks. The next couple of weeks, the pattern is really going to be full. So I am feeling very fortunate, Ben, that you will be here as our co-pilot here. So thank you so much. We will be back next week and we will do this all over again. And there are going to be, you know, there are going to be Supreme Court briefs. We're maybe going to have a DC Circuit opinion, might set some trial dates. And by the way, I should mention this every week. For those of you who dig the Thursday Bulwark podcast with Lawfare, please check out, you know, Lawfare's own Trump Trials and Tribulations, which runs on YouTube live every Thursday at 4 p.m. 4 p.m. Eastern time. Yep. And runs as our

Saturday podcast every week. We really nerd out on stuff like Roger's article and the events of the week. So please check us out. We do it every week. And no digressions about lost puppies in Mequon, Wisconsin. We sometimes have digressions on other stuff, but never lost puppies. You have to do that. Thank you all for listening to today's podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Bye.