The Bulwark Podcast - Trump Is Going Down

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

The docs case against Trump is bigger than Snowden's, the people of South Florida should be cut more slack as a jury pool, and the media is largely ignoring the case of the armed Jan 6 defendant who was outside Obama's home. Ben Wittes joins guest host Tim Miller for The Trump Trials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, in for the great Charlie Sykes for the next two days. As is tradition on Thursdays, we're here for the Trump trials. You can tell by the dramatic music switch. But before I get to Ben, a couple quick plugs. Charlie's show has been crushing it on YouTube. You podcasters might not have noticed, but YouTube is an awesome place for the Borg to build new audience. So we're putting some exclusive live interviews over there.

I did one with Alex Vindman last week. So if you haven't yet, please subscribe to our YouTube page. Help teach the algorithm overlords that the Borg is loved by the people. And while you're over there, also subscribe to the Next Level feed on Wednesdays. I'm always with Sarah and JVL. And on Sundays, we're trying to give you a lighter, more fun weekend interview. So if you're enjoying Charlie's daily interviews, which I know you all are, come on over to the Next Level on Sundays. We're getting outside of politics a little bit. We've had Bradley Whitford, Reid Hoffman, Pablo Torre, Eugenio Diaz, Jane Lynch.

And we also bring in some politicians and get to the lighter side of their life. We've had Tammy Baldwin recently. So I think you'll enjoy adding that to your weekend roster on the next level wherever you listen to podcasts or over on YouTube. So with that, let's get down to business. In lieu of fun, I'd like to welcome my good friend Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and the author of Dog Shirt Daily on Substack. He's in a dog shirt right now. I'm looking at him. Benjamin, what's up, man? You know, it's another beautiful week in Washington.

More excitement than you could possibly imagine. Is that true? No, no, it's not true. I did have a remarkable 4th of July, however. I'm happy that you did. And I hope that people can't notice, but if you catch me slightly mumbling, I had my best friend's four-year-old jumped on me in the pool and tomahawk kicked me while I was pretending to be a sea monster. I heard about that on the next level, and I was really on the side of the four-year-old. I'm sure, yeah.

Anyway, it hurts. You know, when you're in the audio business, it does hurt to have a huge gash on your lower lip. But anyway, we've got a lot to cover. Before we get to your territory, you know, I'm here on the Trump trials. I feel like an imposter over here on the Trump trials. So before I let you kind of cook and demonstrate your expertise on the legal stuff, let's do a little palate cleanser, huh? On the demise of Elon Musk. Yeah, he threw me off his platform, man. I am all about his demise. So this is what I'm wondering. Since you've been banned from Twitter, are you thrilled

that Mark Zuckerberg's new Threads app may finally be the Twitter killer once and for all? Or are you lamenting that your social media addiction might return? I've just been dying to hear. No, so I am pleased so far with Threads. I think it's a noble attempt. It's got some of the problems of Instagram. You know, my view of all of these new Twitter killer apps is that I am subscribed to all of them. I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on Post. I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Spoutable. I'm on Threads. I'm trying them all, and I will go with whichever one wins. I don't have aesthetic or moral preferences among social media sites. I only care about, you know, which ones are effective for helping me reach people. What I'm hearing is it seems like you need a cleanse. Okay, you get banned from one social

media app and you've joined five. Yes, exactly. You might need to go out into the woods a little bit. Okay. My brief take, and I have no really love for Zuck. He did kind of a disconcerting interview recently with a guy's name is Lex, who interviews all these tech titans, you know, where he was getting a little kind of COVID conspiracy curious, you know, and talking about how some of the other apps had it right on some of the COVID stuff. And he wishes they would not have been so, you know, draconian about cutting out some of the misinformation stuff and he wishes they would not have been so draconian about cutting out some of the misinformation. So that was kind of a concerning comment that he made. So I don't have any love for Zuck. But the thing about threads is I do want Elon to suffer and I do

want Twitter to die. And his endorsement of not like what he has done has gone far beyond the pale of anything Zuck has ever done of promoting and endorsing insane, racist, and conspiratorial views. And Zuck just has the best advantage to do it because when stuff happens, people still want to Twitter, right? People still want the people that they follow's instant reaction. If it's over on Mastodon and Blue Sky and you can't figure out where to go, people are just going to default back to Twitter. Here, because Instagram already has so many people and these threads accounts are based on your Instagram account.

If you haven't downloaded it yet or if you haven't seen that, I think there's this critical mass over there. And I think that's why it ends up winning. So maybe that's an argument for why Facebook is a monopoly. But I think that that's probably how it's going to shake out. I don't know how it's going to shake out. And I'm committed to being agnostic about it because I want to be wherever wins. That said, you know, they got 10 million users within their first few hours of operation. And that's a reflection of the,

you know, the integration with Instagram. And that's going to be very powerful. The question for our purposes is, can they attract the journalists? Can they attract the discussion people who were never part of Instagram because it's not a, except the people who love taking selfies, it's not a platform that's optimized for text. Yeah. Okay. So I want to get to some SCOTUS stuff. We had some listeners who were unhappy with our takes on the next level yesterday. So I want to get your takes. And I have a long newsletter today about SCOTUS and norms, but I want to save that for the end and do the traditional Trump trial stuff here to start. And my first question though, for you, before we get into the specific cases is biggest picture. I want to put myself in as like just your generic

resistance consumer who has no legal expertise, who is not a lawyer, who's been watching all this very skeptically, hoping that Trump finally gets his, but very skeptical that will ever actually happen. We have a lot more information than we had two months ago about the scope of the, you know, Jack Smith cases in particular, also a little bit about Georgia and New York. And I'm just wondering where you stand today, Ben, on the likelihood that Donald Trump actually gets what's coming to him from the legal system, and not only the likelihood, but what a timeline would be for that. So I want to clarify the question before I answer it. When you say gets what's coming to him, do you mean gets convicted of significant crimes? Or do you mean

gets prison time above a certain level? What like what what's your definition of what comes what's coming to him? You know, I think that's for you to answer, right? And so me as your average viewer of all this is going, I like to see Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit. All right, orange is the new orange, I want to see him behind bars. Okay. But that is maybe wishful thinking. And so I want you to temper my wishing or maybe stoke it. I guess that's what I'm coming to you for. You've been following this closer. You have a better sense for, you know, kind of how I think Jack Smith in particular is thinking about this, you know, based on relationships you've had in the past with special counsels. I'm curious where, where your levels of expectations are as we stand here,

4th of July, 2023. Yeah. So I fully expect Donald Trump will be indicted for more felonies and will be convicted of at least quite a few of them. I have been confident for a long time that Donald Trump is facing serious criminal liability and will be convicted of serious felonies, both at the state and federal levels. Let's start by sort of debunking a myth that has arisen partly intentionally about the current case in Mar-a-Lago and partly by accident, which is that this is kind of a minor-ish case. Presidents mishandle material and Trump's getting charged and some people don't get charged. This is a barn burner of a case. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before at the senior levels. The volume of information is huge. The sensitivity of that information is like bigger than Snowden.

I mean, this is serious stuff. And the conduct is, I think the technical term is unbelievably fucking outrageous in the sentencing guidelines, you know. And let's also put out just on the table that the evidence is overpowering and that Trump has publicly admitted to everything that matters in serial statements. So Trump is going down for this one way or another. And by the way, this case is so overpowering that under normal circumstances, it would never get past the plea phase. This is the kind of case that always pleads out because defendants can't afford, not financially, but they can't afford the possible prison time associated with going to trial. Like, don't let anyone at National Review or at, you know,

the Wall Street Journal editorial page, what about this or diminish it. It's a big deal case. And the only thing that mitigates my sense of it as quite dire for Trump is that the judge is somebody who is very favorable to him. And that can introduce all kinds of mischief. Now, the timeframe, to go back to your question. The timeframe is long. And the reason that the timeframe is long is not just that Eileen Cannon is the judge, but because there's 31 charges involving specific classified information. SEPA cases, the Classified Information Procedures Act, take a long time. I had a conversation on the Lawfare podcast with a former CIA lawyer named Brian Greer, who worked on a lot of these cases. He said flatly, there is no way this case goes to trial before the turn of the presidential administration. That had nothing to do with

Eileen Cannon. It just had to do with the complexity of the case. Well, that's balloon deflating. So I was planning a big kind of Mardi Gras style party. Mimosas thing going. No, no, much bigger than mimosas. I had costumes and it was going to be a whole deal, but that's probably a 2025 thing. I would say it is a not soon thing, but that's only one of the cases. I don't see any reason why the Alvin Bragg case in New York doesn't go to trial, if not on time, certainly in the spring sometime of next year. And then there's Fannie Willis, who is going to bring her case within the next month or so.

The docket in Fulton County is not exactly the fastest thing in the world, but that's going to pile up. And then there's the big wild card, which nobody knows the answer to, which is what is Jack Smith going to do in the January 6th case? So I would say there is likely to be some criminal accountability before the election. It's not going to be on the biggest stuff. A January 6th case, if it does happen, won't have the same classified information problems that the Mar-a-Lago case is going to have and could move faster. Also, we'll be in D.C. where we may have a more professional judge. The bench here is superb. So I think the chances that you're going to get serious criminal accountability are overwhelming. The chances

that you're going to get it on a timeframe that is what you want is less overwhelming. I like the word overwhelming. Let's then start to look at a couple of these in particular. There are news items, at least this week, on two of these fronts. One was the judge ordering the release of more information from the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. Some of the blacked out portions were released. There was one of which you texted to me. I think you found of particular interest. So, what have we learned additionally from the Mar-a-Lago search warrant case? So this was important, like little nugget of gold, so to speak, in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. Pun intended. Yes, pun intended. The door of the storage room at Mar-a-Lago in which classified materials were

stored is painted gold, just like the radiators at the Trump Hotel in Washington. You know, that's the fact that's going to make the difference to people. Now, look, there's not a whole lot of new information in the search warrant because it's, you know, a year older than the indictment. But there are interesting tidbits. For example, the search warrant confirms what we all suspected, which was that the FBI had surveillance video that they were using to track the movement of boxes and stuff. But the story is very much the same as the story in the indictment, which is not surprising because the FBI did the investigation that led to the search warrant, which is not surprising because the FBI did the investigation that led to the search warrant, which was then part of the investigation, which led to the indictment.

The big important aspect of this is that a whole lot of information is going to come out about this investigation over the course of the discovery in the case, and the Trump lawyers are going to try to use all of it to make the investigation look bad. And so I think what you're going to see is how important it is. You know, we've heard a lot of criticism of Merrick Garland. This is a Justice Department that will have been extremely careful to dot every I and cross every T and will have been thinking about this litigation a year and a half ago as it conducted this investigation. And you're going to start to see the dividends of that caution, all of which takes time that people complain about. But the caution and care really pays off when you then have to litigate things,

which is what we're going to see now. Yeah. And the other new developments, if you will, in that, and specifically in the Mar-a-Lago case related to Trump's aide, Walt Nada, he has his arraignment scheduled for this morning after it has been twice delayed. In the affidavit that came out, one of the quotes here is that Witness 5, who has been reported to be Walt Nauta by several news organizations, removed 64 boxes from the storage room between May 24, June 1, 2022, but only returned 25 to 30 boxes to the storage room June 2, 2022. And it can't be seen from the video footage where the boxes were moved when they were taken. So I think that sheds a little bit more light about why, you know, Walt is such a key part of this investigation. And now he's going to have his day in court, you know, after, I guess, he struggled trying to find local counsel, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally.

What's your take on his arraignment and, you know, the new information about the video? The new information about the video actually is only sort of new. So the fact that he removed 60 plus boxes and only returned 30 of them is, of course, an important fact in the indictment itself. It's one of the ways that the government is going to try to prove that Donald Trump went through those boxes, right? That he interfered with the ability of his own lawyer, Mr. Corcoran, to return the classified material that he owed the government. What is new in there is, again, what we suspected, which is that the way the government knew this is because of surveillance

video. Look, Walt Nauta, and I have not checked yet this morning whether the arraignment actually happened. I think it will be difficult for him if it did not. But by the time anybody listens to this, presumably Walt Nauta will have been arraigned. I think the significance of his trouble finding local counsel is one of two things, and I'm honestly not sure which it is. One is it could just simply reflect the chaos of the Trump legal team. At the end of the day, they're not reliable about paying their legal bills. In fact, they're reliable about not paying their legal bills. And they may just be having trouble finding lawyers to represent even ancillary figures like Nada, who is, you know, not the important character here. The other possibility is that it may be intentional,

as you allude, you know, they may just be playing games with the court. If that is what's happening, you know, that's the kind of thing that tries the patience of judges, even judges who are... I want to get to this on South Florida's acceptable district. So, we're taping this at 11 Eastern time here on Thursday, and Audit as arraignment was scheduled for 10. I was pushed back to 11. So he should be getting arraigned any minute. Interestingly, Mark Caputo reported the lawyer he finally found, Sasha Dadan, D-A-D-A-N, is a Florida state representative Trump supporter. So, you know, he found somebody on the team to do it. Lawfare had a column that was maybe zagging against the conventional wisdom about, you know, whether South Florida,

you know, might be a district where Trump could hear a fair trial. I think there's a lot of folks who are maybe concerned both with Cannon and with the Florida man-itude of a potential jury, that this wasn't going to be maybe the best place for Jack Smith to find accountability for Trump. What's your take on the piece from Stephanie Pell? Right. So Stephanie Pell, who is a lawfare senior editor who mostly works on cybersecurity issues, but Stephanie had a prior life as a federal prosecutor in, of all places, the Southern District of Florida, where she worked on the prosecution. People may remember this name of Jose Padilla, who was the gentleman who, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, was suspected of trying to plant a dirty bomb in

the United States. He was eventually charged for other things. Stephanie prosecuted him. Her point in the piece is that, first of all, leave aside the merits of Eileen Cannon as a judge. You know, people are making assumptions about what the Florida court is capable of in a classified, in a heavy-duty, politically sensitive classified Information Procedures Act case. And she rightly reminds readers that there have been a number of important such cases prosecuted in Southern District of Florida, including the Padilla case, but perhaps more importantly, the Noriega case, the case of the former Panamanian dictator, that was one of the biggest SIPA cases that has ever been

prosecuted, and it was handled there. And so her point is that there are, to the extent that Eileen Cannon, you know, kind of needs help, which I think a lot of young judges would probably need some help on this case like this. There are judges in that district who are quite experienced with this sort of thing. I think she would concede it's not the most experienced bench in this type of national security litigation, but it's not the least either. You know, the other thing I would say just in terms of, can you get a fair jury in South Florida? I actually think people, like, leave aside the question about Eileen Cannon. People need to cut the people of South Florida a break. I was looking at the crowd at that Miami Heat game, and I'm just

telling you, there's some folks in there that I wouldn't want on this jury. All right, that's all I'm going to say. Yeah, and that is why there are strikes for cause and peremptory strikes, so you can get rid of the Miami Heat fans. Look, every day in every jurisdiction of the country, juries get impaneled and they swear an oath to, you know, follow the evidence as presented before them and follow the instructions of judges. And every day they do it. And, you know, there are people in the MAGA world who insist that nobody can catch a break from a jury in the District of Columbia in these, not January 6th cases. And every day, these cases that have gone to trial, there aren't that many that have gone to trial, juries have made careful distinctions between what Stuart Rhodes did and what Enrique Tarrio did and what lower level Oath Keepers and Proud Boys did. Jurors take

their responsibility seriously. Defense lawyers get to help pick them. Prosecutors get to help pick them. And by the way, there's no choice. There's a constitutional requirement that you bring a case in appropriate venue. The appropriate venue for this case is South Florida. The Justice Department acknowledges that. And so that's just the cards that people are dealt. And I just remind people that the South Florida jury pool includes all the Miami Beach people that you'd want to party with. So- The Vindmans have moved down there. You know, maybe we can get Rachel on there on the jury.

Yeah, exactly. So just chill, people. We're going to get a jury. We're going to get a trial. The evidence is really, really bone crushing. It's going to be okay. Okay. I like that positivity i want to get to probably the most

alarming and maddening story of the week about the gentleman who went by the obama's home but the other kind of news since your last time on the podcast was about a call that we knew about which was trump trying to pressure arizona governor doug ducey you know maybe he didn't feel like he had the confidence to bully him that he did with Brad Raffensperger, but called with a similar intent. And it appears as if now, you know, that is another thread that Jack Smith is pursuing, in addition to the call that Trump made to Ducey and pressuring Pence to call Ducey. I'm just wondering, you know, what your thought is on that

and just the broader kind of Jack Smith, the January 6th side of the Jack Smith efforts. Yeah. So unlike the Mar-a-Lago side, even before the indictment, the Mar-a-Lago side, we always had a lot of visibility into, and we had it because there was a search warrant, you know, because Trump kept announcing things about it. It was not a leaky investigation at all, but it was, there was a lot of witnesses were talking about things and we had a lot of visibility into this. We have comparatively much less visibility into the January 6th investigation. We know it is very active. We know some things that it has been looking at because who goes in, like Mike Pence goes in to the grand jury, you know what they're

talking about, right? We've seen there's some litigation that has shed light on it. And I think one of the things that we know is being very actively looked at is Trump's efforts to pressure people of different varieties with respect to state officials, with respect to fake electors, all these different components of his activity, not necessarily with respect to the violence on January 6th, but with respect to the attempt to overturn the election. In that sense, it is altogether unsurprising that one interesting thing to the grand jury and to Jack Smith would be the Arizona affair, which you'll recall from the January 6th committee, you know, there was some serious pressure on Rusty Bowers, on local Maricopa County

election officials, pressure that, by the way, continued until they were recently announced they weren't running for re-election again, right? Like, people have been really terrorized. And the president's personal role in some of that is an obvious area for them to be looking at, and they are. And I think that's really all we can say with confidence. I do think the January 6th investigation, there is some reason to believe it is wrapping up at this point, but I'm not confident of that. You know, there's a limited window of time for them to act before you really do get into the election season and things become politically difficult. I do think this summer is crunch time in a lot of ways. That said, we really don't know very much.

Yeah, tick tock. Okay. Yeah. My one other stray observation on that, on the Arizona thing in particular is, you know, it doesn't really cover Mike Pence in glory. You know, the more you look into this situation, you know, I mean, Pence, who obviously does the right thing in the end, it seems does make a couple of calls into Ducey on Trump's behalf, since Ducey is like ghosting Donald Trump. So Ducey turns out to look OK in this situation.

But Pence does kind of nudge Ducey a few times. Dan Quayle, or at least Arizonan by move, who's a fellow Indiana originally, to get his opinion on whether, you know, Pence could actually try to overturn the election on January 6th. So it's just noteworthy how far down the field this gets, even among the team normal crowd. Look, I think Mike Pence, that is actually consistent with a huge amount of Mike Pence's oeuvre, which is, I will go very far, but there is a line, Trump ultimately found the line that he wouldn't cross. And that bravery in not crossing that line is real. And he, you know, it causes a significant constituency for his being hanged. But it is worth remembering that like that line did have to be found. He wasn't like out of the gate in November, saying, I'm really sorry, we lost this election. Let's have a transition befitting the office of the presidency. Remember, there was no transition.

The Trump administration refused to cooperate with the transition. By contrast, I just want to remind people of this, because I think it's super moving. Barack Obama was once asked by The New Yorker about his feelings about George W. Bush, with whom, of course, he had such profound political disagreements. And he said that the greatest gift that Bush ever gave him was a beautiful and seamless transition and that he instructed his people to give every information they could, every cooperation they could to the incoming Obama administration. And it's like, that is what the presidency is supposed to be. And it was moving to Obama. Yeah. And even more on the other end is what Obama did for Trump. I know Obama sat there and met with Trump, hard to stomach. But Pence did not feel the need to ever say, you know, we should be doing that. Right. Or try to do it himself. Or try to do it himself.

He could have held a meeting with Kamala and Biden, it just, Trump didn't. Also, you go into Georgia, this is my constant rant to reminder that on January 5th was the Georgia runoff. Both Republican candidates were running on an explicit pro-coup platform, who I believe are the only two major party candidates to run on a pro-coup platform since the Civil War, you know, saying that they would, if they got in there, they would overturn the election and reinstall Trump. And Pence campaigned for them. Pence didn't have anything to say about that. No, he supported them. Right. I mean, I am all for honoring Mike Pence for defending the line that he found.

On January 6th. On January 6th. But up to January 5th, from November through January 5th, he was pretty dicey. He found it a few days earlier, which is why there's this pressure campaign on him. I really do think it's important for Democrats and Pence haters to understand that it is no small thing that he found the line and defended it. Of course, sure. But I also think it's really important never to lose sight of the fact that that line had to be groped for and, you know, felt with fingertips. And before he found the line, he rode with Trump a very long way, not just on the lawlessness stuff,

but also in the less in participating with the election overturning stuff than in not actively refusing it. Agree. Speaking of things that curdle my blood, I have more of a comment than a question on this story. So I'll do that and then you can kind of respond. But people haven't seen it, Taylor Taranto. And I think actually that's an appropriate intro for people who haven't seen it. It's pretty insane that this story is not a wall to wall leading the news item.

And maybe in my shame, we should have started the podcast with this. Because in any other instance where it was any other political figure besides Donald Trump who stoked a lone wolf terrorist attack, or at least attempt on a political foe. You should slow down and tell the story because I bet there are a lot of listeners who don't know who Taylor Taranto is and don't know what happened past week that the press doesn't seem to care very much about. Okay. Donald Trump puts on Truth Social a post where he links to some article about how he's battling the shadow government. I'm not sure what the article was sourced from,

but whoever it was irresponsibly included the Obama's address. It's part of an insult in the article about Obama and his access to the deep state and how he accessed this $5 million mansion in DC, links the address in DC. Trump posted on Truth Social. Taylor Taranto, who breached the Capitol on January 6th, rebleated that, I guess that's what we're calling that, a rebleat, got them surrounded, exclamation point, with a red square around the Obama address. So, you know, not exactly hiding his intentions here. He then drove a van full of weapons to Obama's neighborhood, where he appears to be casing the neighborhood, according to prosecutors, and was live streaming from his van onto his YouTube channel about his plans to target the former president and his wife. Again, we had some of these instances with Supreme Court

justices. We had some of these instances, obviously, with Steve Scalise, and there's been a bipartisan effort of, you can't stop crazy people from trying to do crazy things. But we have here a case of somebody that was motivated by a post by former President Trump, bringing weapons to essentially the doorstep of former President Obama with an intention to act. And there is silence. I guess I started with a media criticism, but maybe more apt is there is silence from Republican leaders, from the Supreme Court justices who are getting all outraged when, right correctly, when they're getting outraged when someone went to Kavanaugh's house. The fact that this happens, I think, is a reflection of a very dangerous political culture that we're in right now that is being stoked disproportionately by a wide margin on the right. And frankly, I think that we're lucky that we haven't had more

successful efforts in the line of Taylor Taranto. So I'm curious just for your response to all that. Yeah. So I have a lot of thoughts on this, some of them very personal. And I want to start with the fact that Taylor Taranto was stopped because he tripped over Secret Service stuff. The Secret Service has a very significant presence in that neighborhood because the Obamas live there. They used to live next door to, of all people, Jared and Ivanka, who had the house next to them, who were also under Secret Service protection, then you're really playing the big leagues all of a sudden. I have a lot of interactions as part of my projections on Russian diplomatic facilities. I deal with them all the time. These are very serious people, and they're good at what they do. And I think the fact that the Obamas are okay, and that all those weapons in the van stayed

in the van, and that Mr. Taranto is in federal custody is, you know, a reflection of people rag on the Secret Service every time, you know, a deer gets on the White House lawn or something, whatever. It's a flawed organization in some ways, but on their core protective mission, they're very, very effective. And we owe them a debt of gratitude on this one. They were chasing him good and hard. So in a world of social media and political polarization, you're going to have your Steve Scalise situations where, you know, somebody who supports Bernie Sanders shoots Steve Scalise, and that's, you know, a disaster. And, you know, I don't know what you do about that. Some combination of social media radicalization and gun culture, those things

are really dangerous. And, you know, sometimes it's from the right and sometimes it's Pulse nightclub, right? It's, you know, ideologically motivated people. Sometimes you have your, you know, your left crazies like the Steve Scalise. And I'm generally against blaming politicians for the people who do crazy, horrible things in their names or who support them. I just think that's cheap. This is different. Trump doxed the Obamas. He gave out their address. And he does it knowing that he has violent followers.

He encourages his violent followers. He talks about them as, you know, Second Amendment people, right? Stand back and stand by. In the 2016 campaign, how many times he, you know, knocked the hell out of them. He has been far outside even the outer edge bounds of what was acceptable political discourse on, you know, when it comes to inciting violence. Exactly. Far before January 6th, and then obviously, you know, on January 6th, and then the fallout. And, you know, when you send out somebody's address to, I don't know how many people follow his bleats, but it's a substance, not Twitter, but it's not the trivial number. It's more than I would wish.

Right. And they are self-selected for a propensity to both do what Donald Trump says and frankly, to a certain violent type of rhetoric and behavior. And you send that out intentionally, and then somebody goes and goes to that address, you bear a certain amount of responsibility for that. It's the obvious and frankly clearly intended outcome of the original bleat, and you're dealing with an activated armed cadre of potentially violent people, some of whom are out on supervised release from their previous violent episodes on behalf of Donald Trump by the grace of the court system in Washington. This is just really quick on that, on the previous release. This is the other thing that pisses me off about this and all these Republicans. You have the J.D. Vance's of the world and the Blake Matt. It's not just the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, but, you know, it's

Ted Cruz doing the whole, oh, the January 6th people are being targeted. You know, this is happening across conservative media. You know, the false equivalence between the BLM arrests. This is very common throughout conservative media. And here we are having a case like this where somebody is out on pre-release, essentially doing a political assassination targeting a former president Obama and silence from that, you know, like there's, there is no responsibility, you know, from anyone in the MAGA world to say, Hey, this is going too far. There's nobody trying to rein Trump in or rein Trump supporters in, even in the least. It's too much maybe to ask them to

moderate on policies or to work with Democrats or to say something nice about Joe Biden, but to at least try to rein in the extreme violent rhetoric and tamp down this notion that the people that acted on January 6th are being targeted by the government. You don't see that at all, even in the face of a news story like this. And that's the thing that really pisses me off. I agree with that. Although I will say people who committed criminal activity on January 6th have been targeted. and that's absolutely right. That's called crime control, right? And we've seen real benefits. Unfairly targeted. No, no, I just want to say the goal here is to have a chilling effect, and it's a chilling effect

on insurrectionary violence. It's called in the crime world deterrence. It works. And let me give you two examples of it working. One, we had an arraignment of Donald Trump in New York. There were substantial fears of violence. There was no violence. Would that have happened if you hadn't prosecuted a thousand, a thousand people who committed violent or otherwise illegal acts on January 6th? I don't know. Second, we had a second arraignment of Donald Trump in Miami, Florida. There were protests. There was a lot of anger expressed. It wasn't violent. Nobody was hurt. I don't think anybody was arrested. Would that have happened if you hadn't had prosecutions of a thousand people for not following the law and for trying to storm the Capitol on January 6th? I doubt it.

And so, again, people criticize the way the Justice Department has privileged sequentially the violent street protesters of January 6th. But there was a reason for that originally, and it was to prevent violence at Joe Biden's inauguration. And they made a decision, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Justice Department, this is before Merrick Garland is even in office, that the priority was to take people off the streets who might engage in violence on the inauguration and thereby deter violence. We're seeing a lot of benefits of that. And so to J.D. Vance, I would say, yeah, we're targeting, the Justice Department is targeting the criminals and insurrectionists of January 6th, and that's great. Damn right. Okay. It's been a good show,

long show. We're over, but I did promise people at the top we'd get Ben's opinion. We had some listeners who thought we were a little too generous to the Supreme Court yesterday on the next level. Folks can listen to that if they want. In morning shots this morning, I wrote about my kind of conflicted view on this question of whether we need court reform. I strongly believe that Mitch McConnell, I wrote the word stole, but you can define it how you want.

Outside of fair game, procured a Supreme Court seat that otherwise would have gone to a democratically appointed judge, either Merrick Garland in the first instance, or whoever Biden would have appointed in lieu of Amy Coney Barrett in the second instance. And so I'm sympathetic to the ideas for reform. But on the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to President Biden's view. And I think that he deserves a lot of credit for being norms protecting and that this court has, in a lot of ways, zagged away from what MAGA partisans would have wanted on voting rights and democracy and other issues. So there's a ton there. We're over time. I just want to put in a quarter and get Ben Wittes' take

on Supreme Court. Do we need reforms? Where are you at? Where do you fall down on how normsy the current 6-3 Supreme Court is and what should be done about it, if anything? All right. This is a huge topic. And you have two minutes. Go. I have two minutes. So here we go. I totally understand liberal fury at the end of this term. I totally understand it. You know, between the end of this term and the end of last term, this is some significant percentage of the liberal nightmare of what happens when you put a bunch of conservatives on the court. That said, I am still normsy about the whole thing. I was giving you a chance to win over the listeners who are mad at us, Ben, but I guess we'll have to do Tommy Vitor tomorrow, you know, and maybe he'll do it.

I'm too normsy to win people over on this. Let me tell you the big thing that the court reform movement misses, and it is the actuarial tables. You know, Supreme Court justices don't last that long if you think about them in groups of nine. And if you win elections, this problem will take care of itself. And one of the great things, there's an old saying, the Supreme Court follows the election returns, which is a famous sort of saying from the legal realist movement. And the reason it follows the election returns is that justices eventually die and get replaced or retire and get replaced. So my big message on this is, I don't want to tell you it's not as bad as you think. Listeners don't need my patronizing sense of that. We need to keep the MAGA people out of power. And if you keep the MAGA people

out of power, the Supreme Court problem over the next decade will take care of itself. That's not a satisfying answer to people who feel strongly about affirmative action or who feel strongly about abortion rights, which I am certainly in the latter camp, and to some degree, I'm in the former camp. I do think that the world of putting the structure of the court on the table every time the court gets way out of line is a bad idea, and it's one that Mitch McConnell has more to gain from than I do. One exception to that, I do think term limits for Supreme Court nominees is a good idea, has always been a good idea, and could be a basis for something bipartisan on this since it is broadly supported by something like 80% of the public. Yeah, I think the Republicans feel like they're in pretty good shape right now.

And I don't know why they'd want a constitution changing bipartisan move on that. I do hear you. I agree with your sentiments entirely about the elections. I think that the pain that the left feels here is made more acute by the fact that this additional seat was garnered, or if you want to put it, by a president that didn't even win a majority of the support. And this is where you get in the tyranny of the minority stuff. Ben, we're going to have to do more of this on like an Aloua Fun remake or something at some point, because we've gone way over. It's going to happen, people.

Katie Cooper is going to kill me. I've gone way over. It's been a wonderful show. You will see me back here tomorrow with Tommy Vitor while Charlie is on holiday. And so tune in then. We'll do it all over again. Peace. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.