The Bulwark Podcast - Justice for Ruby and Shaye

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Giuliani is going to pay $$$$ for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss—and Trump may too, for his financial statements in New York. Meanwhile, ex-POTUS faces a criminal trial before the RNC, and Mark Meadows sounded wishy-washy in Georgia. Ben Wittes and Anna Bower join Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials. show notes: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/mark-meadows-takes-the-stand https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-has-jan.-6-trial-date-and-it-s-the-eve-of-super-tuesday

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. 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 dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees?

Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. In courtrooms across the country, the march toward legal accountability continues. In Washington, D.C., a federal judge finds Rudy Giuliani liable for defamation. In Georgia, Donald Trump faces arraignment next week.

Mark Meadows testified for the first time. In New York, the attorney general accuses Donald Trump of inflating his network by more than $2 billion. All the while, prosecutors push ahead for early trials on many of the 91 felony counts the former president faces. Welcome to the latest episode of The Trump Trials, a bulwark podcast that we are doing in conjunction with our partners from Lawfare. And we are joined today by Ben Wittes, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Anna Bauer, Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent at Lawfare. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it very much. Hey, Charlie.

Thanks for having me. We have to start with, Rudy, a rather extraordinary moment. A federal judge ruled yesterday that America's former mayor is legally liable for defaming two Georgia election workers who are the subject of all these conspiracy theories about how they handled ballots while working for the Fulton County Board of Elections during the 2020 election. Let's play a little montage of this that we put together. This is Rudy Giuliani, then the former president of the United States also defaming them, and then Ruby Freeman describing the impact this defamation had on her life.

Ruby Freeman and Shea Freeman Morris, and one other gentleman, quite obviously, surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine. We had 18,000 voters having to do with Ruby Freeman. She's a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler. Ruby Freeman, that was the tape that's been shown all over the world that makes everybody look bad. I've lost my name and I've lost my reputation. I've lost my sense of security. All because a group of people starting with number 45 and his ally, Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shay, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.

So, Federal Judge Beryl Howell in Washington wrote this really lengthy smackdown of Rudy Giuliani, and she issued basically a default judgment against him and awarded the election workers punitive damages. So, the case now goes to a trial. And the only question for the jury is the amount of damages that should be paid. So let's start with this. This is rather extraordinary. Rudy just basically rolled over on this case, but this will have real consequences for him, won't it? It will, especially because he appears to be running out of money anyway. There will be a trial on the amount of damages, but liability is now established, as it should be. One of the real human victimizations of this period was his and Trump's treatment of Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss, the two Fulton County

election workers whose lives were really torn upside down as a result of this. Beryl Howell is a very serious judge in Washington. She was until recently the chief judge of the District of Columbia District Court. And she, you know, responds to this, I think, the way any reasonable person would respond to this kind of, you know, malicious lying about two, these were not public people, you know, these were kind of random election workers caught on film passing a breath mint between them. It wasn't crack. It wasn't heroin. It wasn't a USB port. It was a mint. It's a mint. And let's be frank, Giuliani would not have said like crack or heroin had they been white. There was a very racist component to this. These are, you know, this is a predominantly Black county,

and these are two Black election workers. And he accused them, they use language like hustler and, you know, vote rigor. And so there was this sort of persistent insinuation of crime, and the underlying accusation was false and malicious. And so he has essentially acknowledged that these were false allegations. And so the only question left really is how much damages they are entitled to. And I think the answer to that, if you listen to their testimony before the January 6th committee, the answer to that question is going to be a lot. They suffered a great deal. They had to move out of their house, out of the area. And so I think in the list of Giuliani's troubles, this one is just money, unlike some of the others, but it's going to be a lot of money. And he's already having to put his apartment up for sale to fund his various legal

bills. So I think, you know, it's in the spiritual accountability department for January 6th, that's an important moment. And I think also in the financial sense for Rudy Giuliani, it's an important moment. Well, it also feels like just an alignment of planets because Giuliani's attack on these women claimed that this video showed them passing around this USB port, which turns out to be the Mint, and that it was used to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines. Well, of course, you know, this links back to the great Dominion lawsuit against Fox News that they settled for $787 billion. By the way, just a little footnote here, you know, Rudy Giuliani running out of money. He, you know,

had been begging Donald Trump to pay his legal bills. He wanted to be paid $20,000 a month. And Donald Trump, as is his pattern in practice, stiffed Rudy Giuliani and had not paid him. But now that Rudy Giuliani is facing criminal charges in that conspiracy in Georgia, suddenly he's doing something. He's not writing out his own check, but I don't know if you saw this. He's actually scheduled a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani. Donald J. Trump invites you to come to this fundraiser. Are youiani. Donald J. Trump invites you to come to this fundraiser. Are you going to attend, Charlie? Well, wait, here's the punchline. The seats are selling for $100,000 a plate.

Now, here's the question. Seems a little steep. It seems a bit steep. So the question will be, who's going to do that? Who's going to show up for Rudy Giuliani and pay $100,000 for your chicken dinner so you can listen to the election? I don't know. There's a kind of just sort of outrageous unseriousness about it. I'll go only if Mike Flynn is speaking. Are there free tickets? Are there comps to all of it? How big is this event going to be? I mean, honestly. Also, Mike Lindell, Mike Flynn, and those are the people. If they're not

headlining it, I'm not going. Carrie Lake might show up. Carrie Lake, Mary J. Taylor Greene, I don't know. But speaking of sort of the alignment of the stars. So this does link to the Dominion defamation suits. And Dominion is also suing him. But this harassment, this campaign of vilification against Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss is also a big part of the Fulton County racketeering case that's brought by Fonny Willis. So it is going to be interesting to see how that all plays out. I have a sort of an, just sort of an off the wall question. Clearly, they have won this defamation suit based on these comments. Could they sue Donald Trump himself for defamation? What do you think? Why not? I mean, if Rudy Giuliani is liable, I just played a tape of Donald Trump saying, making the same completely false bullshit

accusation. Right. So it's not off the wall. So Ruby Freeman, and shout out to the folks at Protect Democracy here who are representing Freeman and Moss, but Donald Trump has a defense that Giuliani does not have, which is the case of Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which makes the president immune from civil liability. Remember, he was president at the time. He's civilly immune for anything within the outer reaches of his role as president. And so you would have a question, and I think there's a reason why they brought this case against Giuliani and not in the first instance against Trump. There would be a question whether speaking out on this matter, including in a malicious false way, would be covered by Nixon v. Fitzgerald.

And I think nobody really knows the answer to that question. Giuliani is more obviously exposed. Okay. Well, speaking of duties that are performed as part of your official capacity. Yeah, it connects kind of well, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. So let's talk about former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who wants to remove the criminal case from Fulton County Court to federal court where he could hopefully get the charges dismissed. Now, Anna, you have been covering this. You laid out what Meadows really wants. He has to establish three things, that he was a federal officer at the time of the alleged offense,

not in dispute, that the conduct alleged against him has a causal connection to his federal office, that he has a colorable federal defense against the charges. So I think to pretty much everybody's surprise, he showed up and testified for several hours in federal court. You were there, Anna. So tell me about that. Tell me how that went. Yeah, it was a really stunning moment when his defense attorney called him to the stand ahead of the hearing. Many of us reporters did not think he would even show up. We didn't think he was required to appear. And then sure enough, we walk into the courtroom and there is Mark Meadows wearing a blue suit and a baby blue tie, looking very relaxed. And then the judge instructed counsel, you know, we're here for an evidentiary hearing. I will give each side an opportunity to

present evidence. And Meadows' defense attorney stands up, and I expected that he might have some documents to admit into evidence and then at the end might make some argument. But instead, he said, Your Honor, we call Mark Randall Meadows to the stand. And Meadows proceeded to testify for four hours. And it's rare enough to see a criminal defendant take the stand and testify because often defense attorneys don't want their client to be locked into one telling of events. They don't want to open their client up to cross-examination. There's just all kinds of concerns that are raised whenever a criminal defendant testifies. But Meadows went on for four hours and he's the former White House chief of staff. And it was a really remarkable scene. And we were there, ended up being there for about eight hours to hear everything go down. So did we learn anything new? Was there any, you know, revelation from that testimony? Because I don't get the sense that there was.

Not necessarily from Meadows' testimony. One thing that we did learn that is new information, at least as I understand it, is Kurt Hilbert, who was a campaign attorney who worked on some of the Trump campaign's litigation here in Georgia. He was called to the stand by the prosecution. And Kurt Hilbert is someone who was on that famous Raffensperger call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find votes. And Hilbert testified that before that call was made to Raffensperger, there was actually another call that occurred about 10 minutes beforehand, and that involved Meadows and Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman and Cleta Mitchell, who were all of these campaign attorneys. And Hilbert would not testify to the substance of that call. But as I understand it, I think what the prosecution was trying to show is that when Meadows says that he wasn't really clear on whether the call was about a campaign happening or campaign litigation

or some other litigation, that he's not being fully truthful about that. So I think that that was the point maybe there. So that was new. We also learned that Mark Meadows denies or disputes some of the conduct that is alleged in the indictment. It's alleged, for example, that he met with some delegation of Pennsylvania legislators to discuss calling a special session to potentially appoint electors in favor of Trump. And Meadows says that he did not take part in that meeting. He says he was there in the beginning. He introduced himself as chief of staff, and then he exited before the substantive discussion about the election occurred. And then he also said that he did not instruct John McEntee to write a memo about how to

potentially overturn the results of the election. So that was new. But otherwise, you know, there wasn't a whole lot that was new. Do you get a sense? I mean, do we have any signal which way the judge might go on all of this? I mean, obviously, Meadows really wanted this ruling to come down to remove this to federal court before he had to be arrested. He was trying to avoid being arrested. He didn't want that mugshot. The judge pointed out that under the law and under precedent that you generally didn't stop state-level prosecutions while a case like this was pending. Now, the judge has asked some questions. Do we know when a ruling will come down and do you get a sense of how it went? Do you think the judge is going to be inclined to remove the case? We don't know when a ruling will come down. I did get the sense that

Judge Jones might take some time, and I will point out that he's ordered some additional briefing on the matter. So I think it may be a little while. This is an area of law that's really unsettled, and he pointed out that there's not a whole lot of precedent and that this will probably set precedent for future cases. But in terms of what I gathered from how it went, I got the sense that Judge Jones seemed to think that at least some conduct was maybe not in the scope of Meadows' duties as chief of staff. He asked a lot of pointed questions about the president's and the federal government's power under the Constitution to get involved in state elections. He seemed at

times to maybe want Meadows to be a little bit more direct about some of the answers that he was giving that were, seemed I think, to me to not be entirely credible. Meadows would give some answers that sounded a little bit wishy-washy and that were... You would have surprised. Yeah. He would say things like, there was this email that Meadows says, we just need to get electors coordinated in the states. And Meadows came up with this response of saying, oh, well, I overused the term we. It's a leftover from my congressional days. I didn't want to take too much credit for myself. And there were responses that I think

my impression of the judge's facial expressions and demeanor, I think there were times when the judge did not find Meadows to be entirely credible. And so I think at least to some extent, there's a chance that it is not removed to federal court. But at the same time, like you said, Charlie, the judge pointed out that very often these things are removed and it's a very, very low bar. So I'm really not sure what to expect here. Okay. Well, the other major development, of course, were the speedy trial requests from Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheeseborough. Under the law, they have the right to ask for an expedited trial. This creates, of course, a dilemma for Fannie Willis, or you can use whatever words you want to use on all of this. She clearly does not want to sever these cases.

She wants all 19 to be on trial at the same time, because it's certainly easier to be able to paint the picture of the vast conspiracy, the interconnectedness, if they are all on trial. If they go singly, they kind of have the ability to say, to point to the empty chair and say, well, that other person was responsible. Why should I be held responsible? So you have two of the defendants who've asked for a speedy trial. Fannie Willis then filed this rather extraordinary motion to say, okay, let's try everybody early. So how is that going to play out? I mean, it seems extremely unlikely that we are going to have a vast conspiracy RICO case against 19 defendants, including the former president of the United States, in October. So tell me what's going on, this back and forth maneuvering gamesmanship.

Like you said, you know, Fannie Willis wants to try all of them together. I think that to some extent, Cheesebro and Powell filing these speedy trial motions, it's a way for them to remove themselves from the larger group because I think it's very unlikely that even though it's the defense who has the burden to show that they should be severed or separated from other defendants in a case like this. I think it's very unlikely that the judge is going to effectively force these defendants who don't want a speedy trial and who want more time to prepare to go ahead and go to trial in October, right? Because there's going to be all kinds of evidence. They might have a lot of motions that they want to file that maybe Powell and Cheesebro's team doesn't. So there's just a lot of complicating factors with putting defendants who don't want this speedy trial to effectively say to them, okay, you got to prepare

for this 19 defendant Rico case in two months. I just don't think that Judge McAfee is going to do that. The big question is going to be whether or not we see Powell and Cheesebro and anyone else who does want a speedy trial put together. Powell and Cheesebro yesterday filed motions to sever from each other and from every other defendant. And of course, someone like Cheesebro, who has not been implicated in things like the Coffey County breach, he's not going to want to have anything to do with Powell's trial. So I think that the question that remains for me is who else is going to file speedy trial demands? And then to what extent will Judge McAfee say that they should be tried together? And I think that, you know, whether or not these actually go in October,

it's really unclear to me. There's a lot of things that could happen that would delay that October date and that would effectively mean that Powell and Cheesebro have waived their speedy trial demand. So, you know, like I said, this might be some gamesmanship on their part to just try to get severed from as many defendants as possible. But we'll see. Okay. Now, because it's 2023, there's always a political aspect to this. And one of the extraordinary developments we're seeing both in Washington and in Georgia is the zeal with which Republican legislators want to use their power to obstruct the investigation. In Washington, they're pushing ahead with proposals to defund the special counsel. And there's this effort to either oust or impeach Fannie Willis in the Georgia legislature. Now, Greg Blustein of

the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls this a fantasy that far-right Republicans think they can stop her from prosecuting Trump. And yesterday, I thought this was rather significant, another conservative Republican, the Speaker of the Georgia House, John Burns, joined others, including the governor, in saying that, I'm not really bothered about antagonizing Trump. And he wrote a letter to his caucus, Speaker Burns, saying that targeting 1DA would undermine the idea of separation of powers if not violate it. So right now, does that appear to be dead on arrival in Georgia? Because I mean, there was this buzz that the Georgia legislature could step in and just yank Fannie

Willis out of the case. Not going to happen. Well, I understand certainly the concern over the talk about removing Fannie Willis. I think that what people need to know is that Georgia has very complex Republican leadership politics. It's maybe not as simple as a bunch of MAGA Republicans who want to oust Fannie Willis. You've got to remember that Brad Raffensperger at the Mark Meadows hearing on Monday testified about that phone call. These are folks who have taken a stand against Trump and what occurred during the 2020 election. And survived.

Yeah, and survived. And, you know, Kemp is pretty broadly popular. You know, he's certainly conservative. You know, Georgia's just very different from other conservative states. It's hard to explain. And I'm not entirely sure what the reason for that is as to why Georgia's Republican... It is interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. This is a really interesting question. Why the Georgia Republican

Party is so different, say, the Arizona Republican Party or the Michigan Republican Party, all of which have set themselves on fire with crazy. And then there's the Georgia Republican Party, which seems to have this threat of sanity. And in fact, the fact that Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp, you know, won their primaries rather easily. It really is one of the extraordinary sort of contrarian political developments of the year. It is pretty extraordinary. So back to the point of what's happening with Fannie Willis, I think that even though there is a strand of the party in Georgia, there are the Colton Moores, those far right folks who are going to just make outrageous claims and try to get some movement and get some attention in MAGA world. I just don't see it happening in the long term. You know, I'm hopeful that it doesn't. But in the meantime, it really is causing some infighting amongst the legislatures who are Republican in the Georgia General Assembly. Anna Bauer, thank you so much for

your reporting and joining us on the podcast. We really, really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. 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. TreadExperts.ca Okay, so Ben, picking up with something I was just discussing with Anna, this congressional push to defund the special counsel, it's so bizarre. It's not going anywhere. At least I don't think it's going anywhere. But the willingness of congressional Republicans to basically say, yes, obstructing justice, defunding the criminal justice system is really one of our top priorities, is really one of the more remarkable developments of the year. I mean,

if you want to be a little bit snarky about it, I mean, the Democrats had their defund of the police and that didn't work out well for them. And the Republicans seem to be saying, hey, hold our beer. We're not going to defund the police. We're going to defund the whole freaking thing. So this is a new development. I'm trying to think of other precedents where members of Congress, members of the Appropriations Committee would formally introduce resolutions that would cut the Department of Justice off at the knees. So talk to me about that. I can't think of any. No. I wouldn't be

surprised if there had been some noises about that among individual members during the Mueller investigation or some past special counsel investigations, but I'm certainly not recalling it. It won't, as you say, it won't go anywhere because, you know, there is a Senate and the president has a veto and realistically defunding individual investigations is something that Congress is ill-positioned to do. That said, it does, as you say, show a lot about where the caucus is and, you know, what it's willing to contemplate in defense of Donald Trump. And notice that it's not, you know, it's not done with any protestation that he's innocent, right? It's just, you know, let's defund the investigation slash prosecution because, well, it's all about power and we can. All right. The other major, well, there's a lot of major developments this week. Let's go to the

federal case in D.C. The district court judge, Tanya Chutkin, set a trial date of March 4th, 2024, which is the eve of Super Tuesday. And she did this after a hearing, but apparently a rather contentious hearing. She had to, you know, several times tell Trump's lawyer, you know, let's take the temperature down. They were asking for a trial date set in the spring of 2026, which was laughable. She tried to get them to be reasonable. Can we come up with a compromise? They wouldn't budge. And it's kind of interesting because the attorney, Laura was considered to be, you know, a credible attorney, right? But clearly he is doing what Donald Trump is demanding he do. And as a result, the judge just basically rolled over him. Is that what happened? I think so. So we have a very detailed account of this hearing

on lawfare from Saraf Indanani. I think in Mr. Laro's defense, he has an impossible job here. The client is only interested in a trial date that is after the election. There is no basis for that kind of a request. And so you don't actually get to say, and Judge Chutkin was clear about this, you don't get to say if you're a professional athlete, hey, can we wait till after the NBA season because I really don't want to miss my games, right? And you don't get to say if you're a concert pianist, hey, I've got a tour coming up. Can we wait until after that. Trials don't yield to professional convenience. And, you know, she was pretty frank and pretty clear about that. And that's true if you're a political candidate, too. So you can't say if you're John Loro, hey, we've got an election coming up. And if we win it, we can make this case go away. So can you please schedule the trial for after the election so that preferably with a little time for us to get sworn in so that

we can have an attorney general drop this case or we can, you know, pardon ourselves if need be. Like you don't actually get to make that argument. So what do you have left? Well, you have to make the argument that this is some outrageous amount of discovery that is so vast that you couldn't possibly get this done until several years from now. And the problem with that is that it's not true. This is a significant volume of discovery, but as the prosecution points out, a lot of it is duplicative of itself. A lot of it is duplicative of material that was already in the public record because the January 6th committee released it. And a lot of it is also material that was obtained from Trump's own campaign and super PAC. And so he already

has access to, we're not providing him anything new when we give him this discovery. So yeah, it's millions of pages, but it's not millions of new pages. And by the way, we've organized the stuff in a sort of roadmap kind of binder for him, the stuff that's really new. And so if you think about it that way, it's much less material than is in a lot of major white-collar investigations. And so, Lauro ends up in this position where he can't make the argument that he really means. He has to make an argument that's not really true. And Judge Chetkin, you know, she's been around the block a few times. She's not, you know, especially patient with this sort of nonsense. And so she, you know, gives him two more months. The government was asking for

January. She gave them a trial date of March, but she didn't give an extra two years, which was what he wanted. I have a transcript of what she said. She said, let's not overlook the fact that Mr. Trump has considerable resources that every other defendant does not. Translation, hire some more lawyers if you need to. Well, exactly. And then, yeah, given how much discovery has been produced in electronic searchable form, and given the substantial portion that has been reviewed by Trump and his team, why won't the manner in which discovery has been turned over speed up your review, which is the point you just made there? So do you think it's going to take place in March? I mean, that does seem a little bit aspirational. Will it

actually take place in March? I think it's likely to take place at or near March. So, you know, as with all of these things, somebody can get the flu and you can have a brief continuance or something. March 4th may mean March 20th, but it won't mean June. I think we're likely to have a trial, you know, in the first half of next year. Yeah. But of course, you know, as the New York Times pointed out, you know, it's unlikely that you're going to get a conviction before Donald Trump has wrapped up the Republican nomination. I think they put it like before Republicans know whether he's going to be found guilty. I think that's almost beside the point because there's no

evidence suggesting that even if he was found guilty, that Republicans would not re-nominate him. I think that's pretty clear. By the way, this whole argument that it just will take too long to be able to mount a defense. And Laura went out afterwards and said, you know, this will deprive Donald Trump of adequate counsel and all of that, that sort of thing. He had another one of his lawyers, that young woman whose name I forget right now because I haven't bothered to memorize it, goes on one of the talk shows and says, no, this will be easy for Donald Trump. He doesn't need to prepare. He's got this great brain. He's got the best memory in the world. And, you know, he doesn't need any prep. He knows what he did. He knows what he said. So you have lawyers arguing exactly the opposite point about how hard it is to bound to defense.

I mean, I think the judge is likely to ignore the talk show defense. There's a sophistication among federal judges, at least good ones, that there's the PR thing and then there's what you say in court. I do think Loro's advanced acknowledgement that he may provide ineffective assistance of counsel because of the timeframe was a pretty shocking thing for him to say. And it will not have been lost on Judge Chutkin that he basically threatened to not do his job. And she responded pretty sharply to that. I think that was a tactical error on his part to make that threat. The other lawyer I was referring to is Alina Haba. Alina Haba. I'll remember it in the future.

You know, I wouldn't spend a lot of brain power trying to remember their names because they do come and go real fast. Remember Ty Cobb? Oh, yeah. But that was an easy one to remember. I mean, Ty Cobb. It's true, because he was Ty Cobb

and he had that mustache. I wish they would have kept him around because that was easy. How about John Dowd? Yeah, exactly. You remember him? I do absolutely remember him. There are some names that stick in your mind.

They come and go so quickly that it's hard to remember them. So I've just stopped trying. Yeah, it's like trying to remember a license plate you see on the interstate. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire.

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 you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. Okay, so this is not a strictly legal question, but I wanted to get your take on this as a student of the art and the politics. What do you make of the mugshot? We finally got the mugshot, the iconic moment. Trump world has decided to embrace this because, you know, he's a badass. Of course, you know, the anti-Trump world has also embraced it because it's a mugshot. What is your take? Does it help him? Does it hurt him? Charlie, I support anything that brings us all together like this. The Trump world supports

the mugshot, loves the mugshot. The anti-Trump world that supports the mugshot. It came as I was flying home from Europe. I read everybody's enthusiasm for the mugshot, and I just thought, this is bringing America together. And so I'm for it. I'm for it as well. Although I heard somebody say that, you know, he was trying to look like Churchill or something, which I think is overthinking it. Because I'll tell you the first thing I thought when I looked at it, Blue Steel. I thought he was trying to look like Mike Tyson. Not exactly Mike Tyson. I mean, that's not exactly it. Blue Steel is the look from Zoolander. Zoolander, by the way, continues to be edging toward idiocracy as perhaps a documentary of our times. And it's this,

shall we say, intellectually challenged male model who has this patented look, which is really, really fierce. So, of course, Blue Steel is taken. So that would be orange steel. The thing about it is he wants to look badass and menacing. And he succeeds in looking ridiculous. But again, isn't that the brand? You know, half of America is laughing at his ass and half of them is going, this is the great leader. This is the one we have been promised. Yeah. So I think in that sense, the mugshot is something deep, actually, because you think of a mugshot as, you know, not stylized, right?

Usually not, right? you're female, there's no makeup, your hair isn't done. If you're male, it's, you know, maybe you're not even looking at the camera, right? It's kind of your worst look. And then there's that institutional background rather than whatever you would want it to be. And so it kind of represents you hitting rock bottom, right? But then this is the opposite of that, right? This is a highly stylized mugshot in which he's clearly thought about and designed himself for the look that he wants in his mugshot. They've sold advanced mugshot merch. The anti-Trump world has been braying for the mugshot.

And so you have this sort of mugshot to deliver all mugshots. And so it kind of defies the notion of a mugshot. That said, it is deeply unimportant. However, it has moved a lot of people on all sides of the question, and there's a reason for that, and this time he couldn't. And so this represents the treating of him like everybody else. So when did they stop doing the mugshots where you had to turn to your right, turn to your left, you know, full size? Oh, I think it just depends where you are. And also the fact that they let himself report his height and his weight. I mean, it seems a little bit like what could go wrong there?

I mean, 6'3", 215 pounds. Oh, right. I'm also 6'3", 215 pounds, Charlie. Which is a coincidence because so am I. Yeah, we're all 6'3", 215 now. Speaking of mugshots, I thought the John Eastman mugshot looked exactly like what a mugshot should look like. That's right. I mean, that looks terrible and just awful. John Eastman is actually going on television now talking. He went

on Laura Ingram's. It didn't go well, but again, these guys are actually lawyers. They have in the past allegedly been legal scholars. Generally, when you are facing serious felony charges, you don't go on television and keep running your mouth. I mean, obviously, they all think that this court is just like one of the venues, that there's another audience that may be as important or more important. I mean, who's John Eastman talking to when he goes on Laura Ingraham's show when he should be keeping his mouth shut? What's that about? It's a very deep question, and I don't know the answer to it. So sometime before I was banned from Twitter,

I had a Twitter exchange with Jeffrey Clark that really reinforced this point to me. And I'm not sure whether I picked a fight with him on Twitter or he picked a fight with me, but we ended up in an argument back and forth that went on for some time until he blocked me. You know, I was asking myself this question, who is the audience for this? You're talking about your own criminal exposure in public, being baited by, you know, whatever I am, a think tanker or a journalist, and you're a former senior justice department official. You're the one who's supposed to know. Don't talk about your criminal case in public. You know you're likely to be indicted. You've already had a search warrant executed at your house. There are pictures of you in your underwear in front of your house. shut up right and who is the audience that is more important than the process that you are

already messed up with unless the audience is the one who can pardon you unless they're basically all throwing in it's an audience of one and they're all thinking it's a binary choice at this point i mean for donald trump except they can't pardon you in Georgia, except they can't pardon you if he doesn't get elected, right? And there are a lot of contingencies here, if you're John Eastman, that you should be thinking through as a, this is a guy who clerked on the Supreme Court. This is a guy who clerked for the estimable J. Michael Ludig on the Fourth Circuit. indignant about your treatment in the criminal justice system is less important than preserving your rights and position within the criminal justice system. It's one thing with Trump, who is a raging bull elephant who, among other things, is running for president. And so there is a competing set of concerns with respect to his criminal trial.

But with respect to Eastman, Clark, Sidney Powell, Giuliani, there is no good reason for these people to be speaking in public. And one of the things that they do when they speak in public and yap like this that surely they are aware of is that they reduce their value as cooperating witnesses because if you've been all over the place saying everything you're less valuable as a witness on the stand saying one thing because you've said all kinds of things right and uh you can be cross-examined with, but didn't you say X on Laura Ingraham? And didn't you tell Tucker Carlson Y? And didn't you say Z to Sean Hannity? And the more you speak, the less valuable your words are.

And that has implications for any plea deal you might cut. It has implications for and then took the stand in support of his own motion for removal. That was a surprise. But again, he has extremely professional lawyers and including a former deputy attorney general, and he's following their advice. One last question. This has almost gotten lost in all of the different Trump trials. I mean, before the four indictments against Donald Trump, he was already facing this suit in New York from the attorney general who was accusing him of fraudulently inflating his assets by billions of dollars. This is scheduled for civil trial in New York in October. And the Attorney General, Letitia James, is going to try to bar him and three of his children from leading their family

business, the Trump Organization. And she's looking for a fine of around $250 million. And yesterday, the Attorney General, Letitia James, fired this shot arguing that a trial isn't necessary. You don't even need to have a trial to find that Trump and the other defendants inflated the value of their assets in their financial statements, which enabled them to fraudulently obtain loans and insurance arrangements. She argued that the fraud was so pervasive that Trump had falsely boosted his net worth by around $812 million to $2.2 billion each and every year over the course of a decade. Trump is firing back, asking the judge to dismiss the suit. So in the great scheme of things, this is likely to get lost. But talk to me about where this all fits in. The practical

implication would be that he would be barred or limited from doing business in New York. He could do business elsewhere, but this certainly would not be good news for the former president. I mean, inflating your value by $2.2 billion a year. So the good news for Trump is that this is all just money. The bad news for Trump is that it's all just money, and there's a lot of it at issue. And he's gotten away with an enormous amount, both in federal and state taxes, and in all kinds of other matters over a very long period of time. and this stuff can catch up with you. And in the New York case, it is not catching up with him as a criminal matter, but it is catching up with him in terms of civil liability. And so, you know, much like Giuliani and the defamation of Shea Moss and Ruby Freeman, with which we started, you know, this isn't the thing that's going to sink

Trump. But it is a thing that is, you know, while you're being trod on by dinosaurs, you can also be eaten by mosquitoes. And the civil liability stuff is a lot of welts that are forming in the form of nasty bug bites. And, you know, I'm not by any means an expert on New York fraud law, but I think he's got a lot of exposure here. And I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up with a very big judgment against him. Now, the net result of that may be no more than he's not allowed to run his business anymore in New York, in which case, dirty little secret, it's been a long time since Trump's real business was anything other than raising money for political causes and using that money to pay his legal fees. So that might not be the worst thing in the world for him. On the other hand, it's both embarrassing and it's a limitation on his ability to use resources like to borrow against big buildings, to create institutions like the Trump

Hotel in Washington, the now former Trump Hotel in Washington, that he kind of monetizes in the political arena. Yeah, it may make it harder to borrow money going forward. And it's also another line in his growing legal resume, you know, liable for rape, fraud, tax. I mean, all of these things are sort of have a cumulative effect. Ben Wittes, Anna Bauer, thank you so much for joining me on the new episode of The Trump Trials. It does feel as if the pattern is full and we will talk again next week. I have a feeling there'll be stuff to talk about, Charlie. I think that that is a safe bet. And thank you all for listening to the latest episode of The Trump Trials, a Bulwark podcast in partnership with Lawfare.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. Bye.