The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser: An Offense against Democracy Itself

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Jack Smith has filed a case for the ages. It's not only an indictment of the Big Lie itself, but also of the charlatans who knowingly and consciously used fraud, deceit, and violence to try to impose their political will when they had failed through democratic means. Susan Glasser joins Charlie Sykes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment was issued by a grand jury of citizens here in the District of Columbia, and it sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full. The attack on our nation's capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.

As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election. The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6th are heroes. They are patriots and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people.

They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States. Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day. This case is brought consistent with that commitment, and our investigation of other individuals continues. In this case, my office will seek a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens. In the meantime, I must emphasize that the indictment is only an

allegation and that the defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. I would like to thank the members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who are working on this investigation with my office, as well as the many career prosecutors and law enforcement agents from around the country who have worked on previous January 6th investigations. These women and men are public servants of the very highest order, and it is a privilege to work alongside them. Thank you. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. The day

after indictment number three, Susan Glasser tweeted out, they will teach this case in the history books, a president of the United States charged with conspiring against democracy itself. Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, joins me now on the podcast. Good morning, first of all, Susan. Morning. How are you today? Well, when the word came down last week that Donald Trump had received the target letter, you had sort of a one-word reaction, finally. And I guess the question is, will this be different? We've seen all of the other indictments that have not moved the public opinion needle, at least among Republicans. This is obviously bigger. This is the big case. This is the historic

case. But talk to me about whether or not this will make a difference, this will be different, and whether maybe it's a little bit late. Well, first of all, it is different. It gets to the heart of the matter. It addresses in as clear and direct a way as possible the offense that Donald Trump undertook against the constitutional system itself in the aftermath of the 2020 election. It's a reminder that this is a legal process. It is not aimed at a political outcome. And in fact, it may not produce the political outcome that those who see it as an offense against the constitutional system wish. So in other words, I don't hold out many hopes. I don't know if you do, Charlie, that this is going to finally be the thing that magically changes the mind of millions of Americans.

In fact, I quite think the opposite. People who've been willing to go along with a campaign of lies and deceit in the face that the election was rigged and are nonetheless enabling his attack on this indictment, strongly suggests to me that this is not going to be a kind of political revelatory moment. But nonetheless, it is a very important moment for our legal system, for the country. Taking the long view, it's a reminder why you can't sort of game out short-term political impacts when doing something like this in the sense that it's got to stand for history. And I always felt that when you had something as serious as a president of the United States refusing to abide by the results of an election and in fact seeking to remain in power after losing an election, that unaddressed

would fester and fester in our democracy and in our country. So it's an important moment, but it's pretty late in the day. It is something late in the day, but I think we need to keep coming back to, we can kind of get numb to it because this is so unprecedented. Nobody knows what's going to happen because nothing like this has ever happened before. And of course, our default setting has to be that nothing matters. Nothing matters to Republican voters. The base will rally around him, etc. I want to take the sort of unwontedly optimistic counterpoint on all of this because it's hard to see how Jack Smith's litany of Trump's lies, frauds, conspiracies,

obstruction, and assaults on democracy is going to be a political asset to Donald Trump or his party. Jack Smith and the other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump's criminality. And you think what next year is going to be like, I mean, if there's a trial, and I don't know whether there is going to be a trial before the election, I mean, all hype aside, it is going to be the trial of the century, isn't it? I mean, kind of like, you know, the OJ trial times 10. It's hard to imagine how big the trial of Donald Trump would be in a presidential election year. Look, I don't want to harsh on your optimistic vibe here. But, you know, to me, this is the constitutional crisis, once again, that we're hurtling toward.

Because there are, as far as I can tell, very little to no prospect of any resolution of this case or trial before the Republican nomination for 2024 is meaningfully sewn up. In fact, none of these cases that Trump is currently facing, and of course there still could be more, but even the ones that he has already been indicted in, in New York State, for example, in the classified documents case, none of them are going to be resolved before millions of Republican voters have voted already in the 2024 Republican primaries. And the history of primary elections in modern times strongly suggests that, in fact, the race is going to be sewn up by the time any of these trials take place. The early voting begins in states such as New Hampshire and Iowa,

Super Tuesday in early March. The first trial right now is scheduled to begin in New York in March. That's the Stormy Daniels hush money case. As of right now, the first Jack Smith case in the classified documents in Florida is not scheduled to begin until May. And that's assuming that there are not further delays. And as we all know, delay is Donald Trump's favorite legal tactic. And so you're facing, at a minimum, the prospect of millions and millions of Republican voters having already voted for Donald Trump and doing so notwithstanding these charges and these pending court cases. And so to me, that's just setting up an inevitable confrontation between the courtroom and the political calendar in a way that suggests even further disruption, political volatility,

and potentially real crisis in our system next year. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that being a criminal and a civil defendant in so many cases is very time consuming. And so we're going to see something we've never seen before. Somebody who's trying to run a campaign while, you know, facing all of these cases. And of course, I'm guessing that Trump is likely to argue to a variety of judges. Hey, I'm too busy. I'm doing this much more important thing. I'm not sure that the judges are going to buy it.

I mean, if Eileen Cannon didn't buy the argument that the trial should be delayed after the election, I don't know. But I'm not pushing back on your harshing on my optimism here. Republicans, I think, did buy the ticket, and they're going to take this ride. I mean, they want desperately next year's election to be about Joe Biden, right? They want to talk about inflation, the borders, crime. They want to talk about drag queens. They want to talk about Hunter Biden. Instead, it's going to be about Trump and his attempts to sabotage the peaceful transfer of crime. They want to talk about drag queens. They want to talk about Hunter Biden. Instead, it's going to be about Trump and his attempts to sabotage the peaceful transfer of

power. And it's not just that. I mean, you look at the schedule, his court calendar filling up. You have the New York fraud case. You have the New York rape case. You have the hush money payments to a porn star. You have his violations of the Espionage Act, and then you have this indictment of Donald Trump's obstruction and conspiracy, his attempt to overturn the election. And it's hard to imagine that that is not going to be a massive distraction, not just on the presidential election, but for every Republican everywhere. And yet, it is more likely than not that they will double down and make him the nominee, which is, if only they'd been warned, Susan, if only they had been warned about Donald

Trump. Well, I don't know, Charlie, maybe, you know, it's our definition of what a Republican is that needs to change. It strikes me that the numbers have been fairly clear and overwhelming over the last couple years in documenting that, you know, almost the modern definition of Republican right now is somebody who subscribes to the personal ideology of Donald Trump and whatever Donald Trump wants is him. And it may well be that Republican politicians who are not named Donald Trump don't want the election to be about Donald Trump next year, but Donald Trump wants the election to be about himself next year. And in fact, has explicitly cast his campaign as a campaign of vindication and vengeance, and one

in which he will not only protect himself, but also to wreak vengeance on those who have persecuted him. That is actually what he is running on. If you listen to like his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania over last weekend, if you listen to his rhetoric and in this period, of course, of his indictments, that is precisely when the Republican party, according to the polls, has consolidated support for him, rallied around him. His lead is overwhelming. There is no history in modern Republican primaries to suggest that anyone who has had a lead like Donald Trump's right at this point in an election didn't come away with the Republican nomination. His closest contender, Ron DeSantis, is going the wrong direction. He's going down in the polls, not up.

According to the New York Times survey that was released this week, there is not a single Republican other than Trump and DeSantis who has more than 3% in the polls. So all those like hype stories about Tim Scott, you know, they're being generated by the Republican donor class, which may be eager for an alternative, but don't represent the Republican electorate. And of course, we have to just note that yesterday, the day that this indictment came down, we had that New York Times-Siena poll showing that he is tied with Joe Biden, that he's 43-43. So it is plausible. When I say this, this can't be a political asset for him. I am thinking, though, of the soft Republicans, the independents, whether or not this will motivate Democrats. It's hard for me to imagine going through this long slog of legal challenges, the testimony of Trump administration officials,

you know, playing the loop of video loop of what happened on January 6th over and over and over again during the trial. It's hard for me to imagine that that will add any votes. Any of the suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin voters who were skeptical about Trump in 2020 and get them to say, you know, I think I'm going to vote for him this next time. So you are the co-author of a book on Donald Trump with your husband, Peter Baker. So you've studied Donald Trump and written about Donald Trump and thought about Donald Trump. It occurs to me that this moment we're in right now, where the former president has been indicted for a conspiracy to overturn the government, it's an amazing moment. I'm sort of struggling to not become numb to all of the Trump stories. But in many ways, it's a culmination of everything we have known about Donald Trump, about his character and about his style.

And you look back on the warnings about Donald Trump and the pattern of his presidency, and there is kind of a feeling of inevitability about all of this. This is who Donald Trump was. And unless he was restrained, unless he was checked, it was always going to end up in some sort of a catastrophe like this. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, there is a sort of inevitability. If Greek tragedy is made of hubris, well, Donald Trump is certainly endowed with more than his share of hubris. And, you know, it seemed in particular in the 2020 election, there was this sort of almost march of inevitability toward it. disasters and bad luck, the year that begins with impeachment and a once in a century global pandemic so mishandled by Donald Trump. He's behind in the polls. He's desperate to save himself. And he begins speaking about the rigged election. I think this is very important to notice. We're reconsidering that. His first tweet about that was in the end of May in 2020. He said that

this is going to be a rigged election. It seemed to have been a plan that he was preparing to carry out regardless. And once it became clear that he really was losing the election, of course, it was set in motion. Many of those around him surprised and shocked Trump, I think, by refusing to go along with it. The outcome of the election was really not even that close in many respects. When you look at something like the 2000 election with Bush v. Gore, well, that really came down to one state and to just a little bit more than 500 votes separating the candidates and determining the outcome of a national election. The electoral college results in 2020 were essentially identical to what Donald Trump called a landslide victory of his own in 2016. And so I think there was this

inevitability. And again, Donald Trump, his whole foundation of his presidency, of his business, was built on lies and lack of accountability. So he expected, in many ways, it seems to me, that somehow he would still get away with this, even this most extraordinary thing. And you do have the sense of sort of the mad king with courtiers surrounding him who just were afraid to tell him the truth. And, you know, those who did were banished. See, I think there's nothing surprising about the fact that Donald Trump wouldn't concede the election. You know, I remember saying, you know, throughout 2020, understand that Donald Trump can never be defeated. Donald Trump will never admit he's a loser. He can

only be betrayed. He can only be cheated. This is very much part of his brand. But even having said that, and I said this over and over again, even having said this, and you write about this in your column today, that it's hard now to remember the assumptions, the wrong assumptions that shaped the thinking of even the most bitter Trump critic before the early morning hours of November 4th, 2020, that, yeah, I knew that he was never going to admit that he was a loser, but I think that there was the assumption that, okay, you lose, there's a law, right? The law was the law. The electoral votes were counted. Maybe he would go through the motions. And I think you're right that none of us thought that they would carry it as far as they did or that they were that serious about overturning the election. You know, my colleague Bill Kristol kept tweeting out, you know, I am alarmed. And when you had all the former secretaries of defense issuing a letter saying, yes, by the way, the military should play no role in the election, you really got a sense that, oh my goodness, there are some serious people who are thinking that this is way more dangerous than we thought. This is not just waving your hands and putting out a couple of irresponsible tweets. So this whole story really

is shocking when you think what we thought was going to happen that morning. Well, you know, that's right, Charlie. And actually, I'm waiting to see, of course, in this process, the indictment essentially was a very strongly worded enunciation and articulation of a series of interconnected plots that we were by and large already familiar with. I'm waiting to see in the case itself, you know, what new evidence has occurred. And I'm feeling the absence today, actually, of a kind of 9-11 style commission, a definitive report for history. I thought the January 6th report was important, was adding a lot to the record, but because of its inability to access testimony from key players, such as Mike Pence, the vice president

who was pressured by Donald Trump, such as Mark Meadows, the double-dealing, wily White House chief of staff, we may yet see a role for him in this court case. But because of the incompleteness of the January 6th record that it was able to gather in that House committee, I want to know, for example, you raised this issue of the alarm being felt inside the military. When Peter and I were reporting the divider, our book on Trump in the White House, that was some of the most alarming reporting I've ever done, I think, in my career and decades in Washington to find out how concerned so many senior officials were in our national security world. The real prospect, they considered that Trump would not only seek to politicize the military, but to enlist them on his own behalf.

And then we later found out, of course, that he was entertaining people like Mike Flynn for hours in an Oval Office meeting at which they pushed Donald Trump to invoke martial law. I want to know more. I want a definitive account of that meeting. I want to know how seriously Trump considered martial law. I want to know how much he pressured not only the Pentagon, but DHS to take unprecedented and illegal steps towards securing his power. I still, you know, think absolutely a historical accounting of this requires us to know everything about what occurred in that two-month period. And of course, just a reminder that you played a rather significant role in other events because it was your reporting about General Mark Milley's concerns that Donald Trump might want to attack

Iran that led to probably the most dramatic element of the Mar-a-Lago case. It was your reporting that Mark Milley was concerned about that. It apparently triggered Donald Trump to wave around those Iran war documents and try to rewrite history. So, I mean, that's still in play. And he obviously was obsessed about that particular story, wasn't he? Oh, amazing, Charlie. I have to say, when CNN first reported that that was going to be a key piece of Jack Smith's first indictment against Donald Trump, and then the indictment came out, and in fact, that was the case. As we know, we've now heard the audio tape of Trump. You hear the rustling of the papers. And just last week in the superseding indictment, you learned that the prosecutors have now turned up the document that Trump apparently waived at

Mark Meadows' ghostwriters. And by the way, of course, Donald Trump, because that mouth of his always gets him in trouble, he went on television after the initial indictment and he said, oh no, there were no documents I was just you know essentially bsing and now of course hearing the indictment well actually we have the documents Donald Trump seeks to weaponize information that's been a key part of his playbook since he entered business another one of the unpleasant facts of life he learned, I think, from his mentor, Roy Cohn. And in this case, it sort of blew back at him and it resulted in him creating evidence against himself. So he's thin-skinned. He takes everything personally. And, you know, five days after the initial story I

wrote about Mark Milley's concerns that Trump might attack Iran in that volatile post election period, you know, Trump had it on the brain, right? He's ranting and raving about it at his club in Bedminster as he gives this taped interview. The hubris also, the expectation of lack of accountability is the other theme that leaps out to me in that particular incident. Donald Trump freely allows them to tape this as he goes on and on and on, you know, about how he's got this classified document, which somehow is going to show that Mark Milley has no right to criticize him on Iran. You know, it's just so revealing, isn't it? It is so remarkable that there's always a tape, there's always a tweet.

But you make the point that the indictment, you know, has a great aggregation of a lot of things that we had seen from January 6th. And by the way, kudos to the January 6th committee, because I don't know whether you agree, but I mean, it certainly looks to me as if, you know, had it not been for the January 6th committee, we would not be having this discussion today. You know, for all of his merits, Merrick Garland was not moving with speed and determination on this. And the January 6th committee seemed to really prod him along. Is that the way you see it? Yeah, I do. I mean, you know, one of the notable things, right, is that it does appear that the Justice Department investigation was very slow starting and had not done much of anything

in regards to looking directly at Donald Trump. The Washington Post and others have done reporting on this until the January 6th committee started to take some of this evidence, put it out there, hold public hearings. The pressure increased, the record of what was out there grew, and the results seem to have been much more pressure on Merrick Garland to do what he eventually did, which is to appoint a special counsel, Jack Smith. I would note that Peter and I were looking at this in our book yesterday, the basic contours of this, as we did interviews after Trump left office, we reported and wrote our chapters on the post-2020 election in a book that came out and was published nearly a year ago in last September. And again, there's some new details out there,

but essentially the core allegations were out there, including many of the key pieces of evidence. And so, you know, the importance of yesterday was how would Jack Smith connect these dots? What crimes would he charge? I mean, it is one thing to do a narrative about Trump's lies. The question is, you know, what are the legal consequences? But I want to go back to your point that the indictment is far from a comprehensive account of the case against Trump. And you say that millions of questions remain for starters. What evidence has Smith held back? Will he charge the so far unindicted co-conspirators? Are there cooperating witnesses not yet public, such as perhaps Mark Meadows, who was present for much of the wheeling and dealing during those hectic days, but is not named as a co-conspirator? And the biggest question

of all is how and when we might expect a resolution of the case. Give me your thoughts on the co-conspirators, why we don't have any charges of co-conspiracy, and whether or not Jack Smith has more stuff in his back pocket. I think one of the things we learn in his handling of the Mar-a-Lago case with the superseding indictment is that he's not done when he looks like he's done, right? I mean, he is prepared to say, okay, I am still investigating. I am prepared to amend and add and extend these indictments. So do you think that there's more out there? Yeah, well, a good point.

In fact, he explicitly said that. That might've been in some ways one of the key quotes from his press conference, which was, you know, the investigation is not over. And I think that there's every reasonable expectation of that. But it's also important to remember, right, that I was thinking about this overnight. His mission is to make these charges, to make the strongest case that he can, to win that case in court. His mission is not to write a report for history. So he may well have information that if public,

you know, we would find fascinating or revealing or titillating or important in kind of putting together this mosaic, right? But doesn't necessarily help him to build the strongest case or isn't necessarily directly relevant to how he's chosen to build a case toward conviction of Donald Trump. So I think it's important to keep in mind, right? What's the role that Jack Smith is playing? It's prosecutor here. It's a lawyer building a case rather than a historian documenting something for eternity.

And so that may be part of it. But I do think that we can expect to see a lot more about what the actual evidence is that he's gathered. What's the testimony he's gathered? I can't wait to see those contemporaneous notes that Mike Pence, the former vice president, took of his Oval Office meetings and phone calls with Donald Trump. As you point out, though, this is a two and a half year investigation and lots of speculation, a lot of talking heads. And what we got yesterday was this stark 45-page document,

which I thought was extraordinary for how clear and concise and how much was packed into it. As you point out, I mean, it's stark and sharply stated in plain language. And no disrespect to lawyers here, at least not for the moment, but I don't think that the lawyers are necessarily known for the clarity of their language at all times. But as you point out, the preamble is a piece of legal writing for the ages. Let me just read this. The defendant spread lies. These claims were false, and the defendant knew and widely disseminated them anyway to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election. And as you write, the words are stunning and shocking and also a restatement of what we've known all along, the case against Donald Trump.

While unprecedented, rests on the unprecedented acts that took place for all to see two and a half years ago. This indictment is striking to me for its clarity and the way in which he told the story and is willing to tell the narrative and how the narrative builds toward the legal conclusions. I have to say, I found it impressive. What did you think? Yeah, Charlie, I think, look, it doesn't beat around the bush. There are no euphemisms here. There are no kind of turgid legalisms. He's very clear. He refers to prolific lies and the attack essentially on the system itself and in a way that is laid out so that you understand the intertwining of these plots and how the calendar worked from he goes from

election night to boom you know losing the recounts and you know being declared the loser in Arizona then he kicks into essentially rigged election mode. He appoints Giuliani, unindicted co-conspirator number one in the language of the indictment, to be his kind of chief fighter, if you will. And from there, you have, you know, the marker after the marker falls, his lawsuits fail. December 14th, the electoral college deadline comes and goes. All 50 states certify the election results. Boom, another marker is passed. He grasps onto the fake elector's plan that he's been given. And they show for the first time, I really understood how that became a key part of the conspiracy. So you have a lawyer, reportedly Kenneth Chesbrough,

in Wisconsin at first, he's consulting with the Trump campaign, and he comes up, and you know this story well, the story of Wisconsin, of course, but he comes up with this idea to file a fake, essentially electoral certificate. And it seems that Trump and his band of, you know, merry constitution wreckers like this idea. And so then they expand that into a more national plan for the battleground states. And, you know, they have the fake electors plan. Then they have the conspiracy inside the Justice Department. He wants to get an acting attorney general who will help to validate the fake electors plan. He gets an obscure official, Jeffrey Clark, to write a letter that they want to go out in the name of the acting attorney general that says that the Justice Department found fraud that it didn't find. And it's only the threat of mass resignations that stops that plot. And then finally, when everything else fails, they're left with calling forth the mob on January 6th to stop the certification and also using them

to pressure Mike Pence, which they do directly and indirectly, to claim powers that he does not have to single-handedly overturn the election. And so I think they just did a great job of showing how one thing led to the next thing, led to the next thing, and how this was a multi-pronged, essentially, conspiracy to overturn the election. No, what I was struck by was the breadth of this indictment, how he included all of those things, that it's not just some technical violation of the law. We didn't go for the Al Capone, you know, didn't pay his taxes. He went big on all of this. And he did put this all into context. Look, I mean, this indictment focuses like a laser beam on Donald Trump, but it's also an indictment of

the big lie itself. He spends a lot of time going through, documenting in a factual way, how in fact Donald Trump lost the election. All of the false claims, the false claims about what happened in Michigan, the false claims about what happened in Georgia, and pointing out that Donald Trump was told repeatedly that the things he was saying was untrue. And that goes through, I think, like on page two of the indictment, lists all of the people from within Trump's own administration, his own appointees, who told him that what he was saying was untrue, who told him that he had lost the election. It is one thing to have fact checkers out there, but here we now have the Department of Justice that is prepared to litigate basically the big lie as well as Donald Trump's

crimes. One of the things that I thought was striking about this also was that he did not charge Donald Trump with actually inciting the riot. He did not talk about that he did not charge Donald Trump with actually inciting the riot. He did not talk about, he did not include Donald Trump's speech on January 6th. That obviously would have allowed Trump to use certain First Amendment defenses instead of going with incitement. The way Jack Smith describes it is Trump's willingness to exploit the violence in order to obstruct the proceedings. Your thoughts about that? Because I thought that was an interesting strategic and tactical decision on Jack Smith's

part to go that way, and seems a much stronger legal basis to say, because we have now the record of Donald Trump, even after the riot, even after all the violence, having himself and his co-conspirators still into the evening of January 6th, on the phone, trying to get members of Congress to block the certification of the presidential election. Yeah, that really was a scene, I have to say. You know, they're frantically calling, you know, these members of Congress who literally had fled for their lives. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, also mentioned in doing this, appeared to be completely heedless and disregarding this national tragedy that just unfolded. These members of Congress are literally walking over the shattered glass of the United States Capitol as they're receiving frantic phone calls begging them to keep the

conspiracy alive. There's this moment recounted in the indictment at 7.01 p.m. on January 6th. Again, this is after most of the rioters have been ejected, but the FBI and the SWAT teams and the military, they're still going door to door in the Capitol trying to secure the bastion of democracy so that the members can come back and finish the voting that had been temporarily stopped by the mob. And there's Donald Trump. What is he doing? Not trying to bring this fractured country together. He's calling senators. Rudy's calling senators. And he receives a phone call. Trump receives a phone call from Pat Cipollone, his White House counsel, who from the beginning had been against his effort to overturn the

election. Cipollone says, please, sir, in effect, you know, give it up. You know, can't you, in light of everything that's happened, you know, abandon your objections and say that you want them to certify? And in the plain language of the law in this indictment, you know, defendant refused. Defendant would not do it. Three-word sentence, the defendant refused. This is the night of January 6th. And as you point out, we are where we are because of that. There were so many points like that, that one along the way when Trump could have avoided this, could have stopped the reckless game that he had unleashed. It did not have to end this way. It did not have to end this way in federal court, in a legal clash for the history book. So just going through this indictment

and keeping in mind that a lot of it was familiar, were there any dazzling details or anything that just jumped out at you? Well, I'm sure you and I both had at least a chuckle over certainly the best quote, which is from an unidentified in the document, but appears to be Jason Miller, a campaign advisor. By the way, who identifies himself to this day as a Donald Trump campaign advisor. And yet he's quoted in the indictment as dismissing the, you know, untruthful and ever more fanciful, crazy theories that Rudy and Trump and all the others were advancing. And he calls it conspiracy shit sent down right from the mothership. Conspiracy shit sent down from the mothership. Again, what's amazing is that this is a grift, right? That quote, I think, it should stand as an important quote because it's so revealing that Donald Trump went along with the lie,

knew it was a lie. Jason Miller went along with the lie. These guys are charlatans and grifters, and they are putting over a grift on the millions and millions of Republicans who went along with Trump's big lie. They knew it wasn't true. Yeah, see, this is an interesting thing. I keep waiting for people recognizing that these people really despise their own supporters. I mean, the amount of contempt that Trump world has for their donors and the base comes through occasionally. It just sort of pops out, you know, we're going to say this, we're going to raise money, but, you know, among ourselves, we all know this is bullshit coming down from the mothership. You would think that at least the insult would at some point take its

toll. I think it was, was it Steve Dace, one of these blaze TV hosts who was crying on the air when he's reading the fact that they were admitting among themselves that all of this was false. And he says, you know, I went to the mat for you. I believed you. I pushed all of these stories. And now you're saying you never believed them in the first place. Well, yes, you're so close to figuring this out. You are so close to getting all of it. That's what makes it even more tragic. I mean, you know, this is something fragile, right? You know, you can't just assume that you can play around with American democracy and that it won't break. And that's the other thing that jumped out at me was the number of times they actually discussed violence or the threat of violence in these meetings. You know, people

talking about, you know what, if we do this, you know, we will have riots in every major city. You know, this election may be determined in the streets. If I remember correctly, it looks like the co-conspirator, who I think is Jeffrey Clark, at one point seems to be like shrugging his shoulders and saying, well, you know, there's been a lot of times in American history where violence has been necessary in order to solve these sorts of problems. And so I guess it's the acknowledgement and the understanding that what they were doing could result in violence, I thought was really extraordinary, that they talked about it, they thought about it, they knew it, and yet they behaved the way they did. They went ahead with everything that happened on January 6th. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right to pull that out of this document because it's chilling.

The implication, of course, is that these were folks who were willing to reap the whirlwind, that they knowingly and consciously confronted the threat of violence and on January 6th, actual violence as a tool to impose their political will when they had failed through democratic means. And that is almost the very definition of an anti-democratic, even authoritarian movement that seeks to impose its will on the people when they have failed through legal, democratic, and constitutional measures. And I think that's what makes this as a document something that will go down in history books. This is a case for the ages. And if we come through it okay, and even if we don't, people will study this because there's never been, I don't think, a legal document like it in the history of the United States.

One more anecdote that I thought was rather striking was the account of Trump's meeting with Mike Pence the day before. I think it was January 5th, the day before the riots, in which Pence tells Trump that he's not going to go along with the plan to steal the election. And Trump says, well, I'm going to have to criticize you. I'm going to rip you. And Pence's chief of staff was so alarmed by this that he decided to inform the head of the vice president's Secret Service detail because he understood that this was an implicit threat of violence. In many ways, that was prescient because, of course, we know what happens. And this indictment then lays out the timeline of what Donald Trump said about Mike Pence and the threats against Mike Pence, which, again, is one of those extraordinary moments. So let's focus again on the Republican blowback against

all of this. And you've written about this as well. In fact, before this indictment came down, my sense is that the more trouble that Donald Trump is in legally, the more focus there will be on Hunter Biden and what you call the manufactured outrage, deflection, and whataboutism that we see from House Republicans. So the psychological and political necessity of ramping up the Hunter Biden investigation, that will intensify now, won't it? Because they need something to counter this. Is that the way it works out? Yeah, absolutely. The false equivalence requires it. The mirroring, you know, Donald Trump's high office, and in the case of Jared and Ivanka, their own positions in the White House, then Joe Biden's children should

be accused of the same things. And these are not accidental coincidences of timing, but, you know, a very purposeful political strategy. What I'm also struck by, Charlie, and that really I do find so worrisome, is that you have people out there essentially mouthing Trump talking points, doing Trump's bidding, who were people who at the time, back in 2020, were against his rigged election rhetoric, refused to go along with the effort not to certify the election. And yet here they are with the Republican electorate being so firmly in Trump's camp. Two and a half years later, they're much more willing to make excuses for what Trump did after 2020 than they were at the time. And I think that is very worrisome because the trajectory, it seems to me, of the Republican party is going in Trump's direction, is going in the opposite direction from fealty to the truth and fealty

to the Constitution and the rule of law. And that's what's scary to me. You know, people like Tom Cotton, he was absolutely a big critic inside the Republican conference. He was mad at those Republican senators who were going along with the objections to the certification of the election on January 6th. And, you know, there I saw him, caught him on Fox this morning, you know, complaining about, you know, whatever the weaponization of the Justice Department and how this was so wrong. These were actions that Donald Trump took. This is not the criminalization of a blabbermouth. You know, when you cause people to submit under penalty of perjury, fake certificates of electoral votes. That is not just Trump blabbing. That is an action, an illegal action that was undertaken at Trump's behest to stop the election. You know, and again, and again, and again,

the underplaying of the reality of what these people used to acknowledge, you know, Kevin McCarthy is a great example of that, the House speaker. When January 6th happened, he calls up Donald Trump in a panic. He publicly castigates him. He says he's to blame. And look at him now. Look at him now. I wonder what goes on inside the Mitch McConnell household about this as well, because whether or not, I mean, Mitch McConnell's speech that he gave talking about the responsibility that Donald Trump had and that the criminal justice system, you know, can still hold him accountable. But he had the opportunity to put an end to all of this and he didn't do it. Do you think he

regrets that? Everything I know about Mitch McConnell suggests he doesn't do regrets. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. You know, he made a choice. It was a very conscious choice, right? So he chose to remain in power in the House Republican Conference. And I guess he calculated that he couldn't do that if he voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial after the events of January 6th. And that was a calculation that he made. You're right that we should stipulate the Trump era is not over. Jack Smith could lose this case. Trump could win the primary. He could actually win the presidency. And you remind us that we've experienced some odds defying bad outcomes, global health crisis, the worst military conflict in Europe since World War II, Trump winning in 2016 in the first place. Bad stuff can happen that we did not see coming. So it would be foolish to rule anything out. But that's what makes this moment so fraught because the alternatives are so, I mean, the divergent possibilities are so dramatic and consequential. Well, that's right. Fraud, I think, is the word of the moment.

One more thing in a few minutes. We have to do a shout out to your son, Theo Baker. I think the last time you were on the podcast, we talked about him. He's a student journalist whose work actually has forced the resignation of Stanford University's president. He was a freshman when he wrote this. Baker, Glasser household is powerful.

You know, I'm proud to be the third best journalist in my family. No, really, it's been remarkable to see, you know, our son take on, you know, a really brave act, I think, of investigative reporting and to report and to write about and to turn up questions about potential scientific misconduct in many of the groundbreaking papers authored by Stanford University's president earlier in his career, really a very renowned neuroscientist who denied that there was anything wrong. Now, after a many months long investigation by a special committee appointed by Stanford's Board of Trustees, the president not only has resigned, but has agreed

to retract three of his major papers and to issue significant corrections on two more to correct the scientific record. And, you know, it's hard to imagine that this would not have occurred, but it would not have occurred without Theo's reporting. Well, congratulations, because back in February, when he was just 18 years old, your son won a George Polk Award for his reporting, the youngest person ever to win that award, ever to win a Polk, which is an extraordinary accomplishment. So congratulations. Susan Glasser, thank you so much for joining me again on the Bulwark Podcast. Appreciate it very much. Oh, Charlie, it's wonderful to be with you.

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