The Bulwark Podcast - Trump vs Law and Order

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

From promising a general amnesty to Jan 6 rioters, to re-victimizing E. Jean Carroll on CNN's town hall, and calling a police officer a thug, Trump is sure making it easy for Biden to claim the mantle of law and order. Tim Miller, Ben Wittes, and Roger Parloff join Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How much legal trouble is Donald J. Trump really in? Are the walls closing in or are we about to find out that some people are in fact above the law? Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. This is the third installment of our new companion podcast, The Trump Trial, that we will be featuring every Thursday. Look, we know the headlines, the federal and state prosecutors who may or may not be closing in on the former president, the civil suits, the discovery, the indictments. But today, we felt we needed to do something a little bit different. So in addition to my regular co-host, Ben Wittes, we have an emergency cameo appearance

by my colleague, Tim Miller, because we have to talk about the incredible shit show that America saw on CNN last night. So first of all, Ben, good morning. Tim, good morning. Good morning. Good morning, gentlemen. I have to put on my dog hair shirt today.

Since last Friday, I came on and was, you know, a little bit, I just wanted to wait and see. I was hopeful that it wouldn't be as much of a shit show as it was. And I should have listened to your pessimism, Charlie, because God, that was worse than, you know, even our worst nightmares. Yeah. I mean, you know, who could have possibly guessed, you know, the giving the indicted twice impeached coup plotting, chronically lying sexual predator, an unedited hour and a half on live television, that things might go badly. I don't know. The fact is, it went worse than I thought. And I want to make it clear, I am not blaming Caitlin Collins for this. I thought she did a, you know, as good a job as you could do. But this format, this is the format from hell. This was set

up to fail. And Trump just rolled over her. You had the invective, the jibes, the bullshit. I mean, there were fact checkers, but I mean, they're just left in the dust here. I love, you know, CNN anchor, you know, Jake Tapper says he declared war on the truth and I'm not sure that he didn't win. I mean, let me just run through some of the highlights of this before we get to any of the audio. Trump calls a black law enforcement officer a thug. He repeats baseless conspiracy theories about 2020. He lies over and over again about the 2020 election. He lied about his call to terminate the Constitution so he could be returned to power. He lied about his role on January 6th. I'm like only halfway through this list here. He suggested he would pardon many of the January 6th insurrectionists. He insisted again that Mike Pence should have overturned the election.

He endorsed letting the country default on its debt, even if it would bring on a cataclysm. He claimed the residents of Chinatown in Washington, D.C. didn't speak English. And this is part of, you know, talking about some weird conspiracy theory about Joe Biden. There'll be news to the Wizards and Capitals players who play in Chinatown. And all the people who live in the high-rise apartment, fancy condos there. I mean, that's got to be the least Chinese-populated Chinatown in the country. You would think so. Okay, he refused to back Ukraine against Russia, refused to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal, lashed out at Caitlin Collins as a nasty woman.

And the audience cheered that when he said that. And guys, this is not the worst stuff that happened. This is not even close to the worst stuff that happened. This interview took place the day after a jury found that Donald Trump had sexually abused, injured, defamed, maliciously lied about E. Jean Carroll. And Trump turns the whole thing into a joke, insulting the victim. And this crowd loved it. Let's play the Bergdorf cut. I wanted you to listen to this. And particularly, look, Trump is same old, same old. This is the moment. In my newsletter, I titled, you know, the moment that you knew. This is the moment you knew where we are, this

moment in our culture, in our politics. Listen to the crowd. Okay, let's play this. Never met this woman. I never saw this woman. This woman said, I met her at the front door of Bergdorf Goodwin, which I rarely go into other than for a couple of charities. I met her in the front door. She was about 60 years old. And this is like 22, 23 years ago. I met her in the front door of Bergdorf Goodman. I was immediately attracted to her. And she was immediately attracted to me. And we had this great chemistry. We're walking into a private department. We had this great chemistry. We're walking into a Prime outrage we had this great chemistry and a few minutes later We end up in a a room a dressing room a bird of good men right near the cash register And then she found out there are locks on the door. She said I found one that was open

She found one she learned this at trial. She found one that was open What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings him up and within minutes you're playing hanky-panky in a dressing room okay i don't know if she was married then or not john johnson i feel sorry for you john johnson mr president can i no but think of it i know you're recounting what she said all right tim you want to you want to take this one for the moment well the mr president thing really bothered. That's my one criticism of Caitlin Collins. I guess you feel like you have to do that, but you have to call him Mr. And she called him Mr. President a thousand times. Like after this, he's been twice impeached after this just despicable standup comedy act from Reno about the sexual assault that he committed.

We really need to give him honorifics anyway. The crowd is really it, right? Trump has revealed over the last seven years, eight years, just how debased not only our political culture, but our culture is. And the idea that CNN would decide to allow them to stack this crowd with apparently the types of people that go on tour for MAGA rallies or have their wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago just was an unbelievably moronic decision and set that up for, I think what you said to me in Slack last night, Charlie, was that this was unspeakably ghastly. That was the unspeakably ghastly part. We knew what we were going to get from Trump. We hoped that, you know, Caitlyn could

do her best she could. And I think she did. I think we saw with John Swan, like there are times, there are occasions where you can get Trump going in a way that you give him enough rope to hang himself. And you could imagine a situation where that was maybe a worthwhile endeavor. But to do it in front of a studio audience of fanboys laughing at his most cruel comments, you know, laughing not only at the sexual assault comments, but laughing at, you know, when he's calling the black Capitol police officer a thug, you know, laughing during his January 6th schtick, laughing during his insurrection schtick. And that was the part that was the worst. And the one thing that I think I'm the only one that noticed, just to give a context for how bad this crowd was. Sitting in the crowd was a former colleague of mine, Chris Applegate, who's a fundraiser,

who's a Republican fundraiser, saw him. And then at the end, you see Trump say, good to see you, Woody, good to see you, Woody, and imitate a football throw, which I think very clearly narrows it down to the fact that his former head fundraiser, Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, was there. So you stack this audience with paid Donald Trump supporters who cheer his most grotesque arguments. I think there's a lot to get into on the substance. But to me, that was the original sin of holding this event. And that was what made this just so awful, worse than anything we've seen really in years in this account. So Ben, what do you think of this?

I think there's another aspect of it too. I agree with that. But I also think, you know, Trump is a two-year-old emotionally, and you don't give unstructured time to two-year-olds with cameras on. You know, it's not going to end well. And there's just something about, okay, if this were a highly responsible person, let's say it was Charlie Sykes, you say, okay, we're going to give him an hour with an audience. And if he makes a mistake, we'll correct it. But that doesn't work with Trump because you're just operating in a stream of lies environment and also a stream of bullshit environment. And so you end up with this situation where you either have to have a shouting match with him. No, that's true. Not true. Yes, it is. And then you're kind

of dragged down or you kind of let him get away with it. And when you have that crowd, you're going to lose the shouting match and you're going to get exhausted and let him get away with it. And that was predictable. It was also predicted by lots and lots of people. And so I do think the original sin is letting the audience in, but it's also just forgetting even for a moment that this is not a normal candidacy. This is not a normal person and you can't treat it like one. You can't. I'm going to go to this excuse that,

well, you know, this is news and CNN has to cover him because he is the front running candidate. I get that. I get that they need to cover him. I get that he is news. But what you saw last night was not journalism. I said this several times. You know, Jonathan Swan is journalism. This was entertainment programming. This was reality TV. And what a surprise that he owned the format. Yeah, he was alpha in the format, right? And this is the same mistake that over and over again, establishment Republicans and establishment media made in 2016 was thinking that they could put Donald Trump in a situation where, you know, he would act in such a way that would repulse them, and that would repulse the broader electorate, right? Like that is the thinking, right? That, you know, about the giving him enough rope to hang himself strategy. That's not how, as we see with that audience, the Donald Trump voter is processing this. Like they are processing this as him, you know, again, being this whatever victim, who's the one man that can fight back against this nasty woman, you know, against the, all of these mean questions

and that he is the one that's fighting. They put him in this fighting stance, not into a defensive crouch. You know, that was the thing about the Swan interview. Swan was on the offensive. Trump was cowering. Trump was on the defensive, trying to defend himself. This placed him as an alpha, calling him Mr. President over and over again, letting him set the narrative about the 2020 election again for this crowd. If you put yourself in the head of a MAGA supporter, I don't know how you look at this and say, why would we go with anybody else? Everyone's going against him, and they stole it from him, and he's making the case that he's the only one that can do it. And say what you want about Trump.

He might be demented. He died out of all his marbles, but his performance skills are still really good. And it might not land for you, this listener of a board podcast, but for those listeners, it does. He has a good performance skill. And I saw Jon Favreau tweet last night, and I agreed with this, that Donald Trump talking about defaulting on the debt, not defending Ukraine, making fun of his victim for having

a cat named Vagina. Like this stuff is not going to work for all the people that voted against him last time and voted against Democrats in the midterm. Agree. But we got a lot of elections between now and then in this primary, and it does work for those folks. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy

voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around. Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise.

On the mocking of Jean Carroll, Kara Swisher had a great Twitter thread. I don't know if you guys happen to see it, know how she would have handled it, you know, and said, look, she understands, Trump-Lemme audience is going to jar anybody and it's easy to let it get to you, but it's also an opportunity to maybe, you know, win some people over. So anyway, she writes, when the crowd started snickering, laughing about E. Jean Carroll, for example, I would have stopped the interview cold, told Trump politely to sit still for a second, walked over to a man and a woman in the crowd who were laughing and said, do you have a daughter?

I do. She's just three. Then in the kindest tone possible, ask them if they said they did have a daughter or a sister or a wife. Ask them if they thought that a man forcibly touching a woman's genitals was actually funny. Because I couldn't imagine that they would think it's funny since they don't look cruel. In any case, I would have interacted with the crowd a lot more as most tend to fold when you pull individuals away from the mob. It's kind of interesting. I mean, I am sympathetic with Caitlin Collins, who was thrown into the deep end by her bosses under

these circumstances. But there were moments to push back on a number of things. You mentioned some of the highlights, lowlights of all of this. Here is the former president of the United States referring to a Capitol police officer, a cop, an African-American law enforcement officer as a thug. This is the Ashley Babbitt story. Let's play that. And a person named Ashley Babbitt was killed. Yes. You know what?

She was killed and she shouldn't have been killed. And that thug that killed her, there was no reason to shoot her. At blank range, cold blank range, they shot her. And she was a good person. She was a patriot. One person who was there. There was no reason. And he went on television to brag about the fact that he killed her.

The officer was not bragging about the fact that he killed her. Oh, he was bragging. Ben, so this is the leader of the party that he killed her. The officer was not bragging about the fact that he killed her. But one person who was... Ben, so this is the leader of the party that backs the blue. This is the leader of the party of law and order. So let's remember what Ashley Babbitt was doing at the moment that she was shot. The crowd had breached the Capitol. A number of law enforcement officers had been injured, and they were trying to get into the barred chamber of Congress. And she climbed up a sort of like a window portal and was trying to

climb in where members were as the sort of, you know, vanguard of the crowd, that officer told her to back off, gave her a lot of opportunities, and then fired to protect members of Congress from a mob that was trying to come into the chamber. This is not a situation where this is a extreme use of force. Yeah, just the other thing on the Ashley Babbitt thing is, again, he's playing to the QAnon crowd. Like, for a long time, it was not known which officer it was that killed Ashley Babbitt. And there was this, you know, kind of buzz started in conservative media world and MAGA media world, really, to be more precise, you know, that it was this black officer, Michael Byrd. And so, like, his race became very central to, you know, the justice for Ashley movement. If you kind of, in lieu of fun, you decide to suffer through, you know, the MAGA

message boards on this. And so, for Trump, you know, to call him a thug, you know, and to get a crowd reaction out of that, you know, was very much, you know, a racial, I would not call it dog whistle, a foghorn, you know, for the MAGA audience that is following the stuff. Yeah, I don't think that's particularly subtle. You know, before the town hall actually aired last night, officer Michael Fanone had a piece up over at Rolling Stone where he wrote, putting Donald Trump on stage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate and that there are no consequences in the media or in politics or anywhere else for rejecting them. And then, of course, we saw this play out. But the Ashley Babbitt story in calling the cop a thug is also part of this very aggressive attempt on Trump's part to do the revisionist history of January 6th. And then, and I don't know whether, if people have been paying attention, they know that he has been suggesting pardons for the insurrectionists

on a regular basis. I know that Amanda Carpenter has covered this extensively. But last night, on CNN Live, he was asked about what will he do? And this is what he said. Let's play the pardon clip. My question to you is, will you pardon the January 6th rioters who were convicted of federal offenses? I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can't say for every single one because a couple of them probably they got out of control. But, you know, when you look at Antifa, what they've done to Portland, and if you look at Antifa, look at what they've done to Minneapolis and so many other, so many other places. Look at what they did to Seattle and BLM. There it is.

BLM. Many people were killed. So, Ben, later on this podcast, give you a get out of jail free card to anyone involved in this, you know, with the exception of maybe, you know, a handful of people that, you know, who are on video. But what do you make of this in the middle of ongoing trials and investigations into the January 6th attack? So I'm going to surprise you here, Charlie. I think it's great. I'm actually completely serious. I'm sorry. I just blacked out for a second. Did you say great? I said great. He said great. Okay. I'm interested to hear that pitch. You know, one of the problems with Trump is that he's all vibe and he sends dog whistles

and there's plausible deniability about what he's saying. Proud boys stand by, stand back, you know, that sort of thing. And they're vague, but the people to whom they're directed know what they mean, but then he's never accountable for it. Here, he has said directly over and over and over again, and this was just the most recent time, he said this before, that he's inclined to issue what amounts to a general amnesty with maybe individual exceptions for people associated with January 6th. And I think that is clarifying and valuable. Basically, he's saying, I think this was a legitimate expression of popular rage. And this kind of thing organized by a president is no different from, you know, Black Lives Matter protests turning into riots or Antifa stuff in various cities.

And though none of those people have been pardoned, I'm inclined to issue what amounts to a general amnesty here. I think that is a clarifying thing, kind of like saying I support defaulting on the debt limit, or I don't support continuing aid to Ukraine. I think any time Trump identifies his radical deviation from general decent thought, I think it's helpful. January 6th, defendants, because I believe in law and order, my opponent has promised to pardon them all, or almost all. I put the Proud Boys in prison for seditious conspiracy, he will let them out. I put the Oath Keepers in prison for seditious conspiracy, he will set them free. I think that kind of clarity is helpful. And what Trump is basically saying is if you commit acts of violence in support of my fascist revolution, I will take care of you. And I like it that he's actually saying it rather than hiding the ball.

Okay, so Tim, I have the same emotional reaction to last night that you have. But this is a good point, isn't it? That there's so much ammunition that he laid on the table, you know, calling for a default, you know, the comments about Vladimir Putin, but also this one, you know, Joe Biden can really take that mantle of law and order, take the mantle of being opposed to this, and say, look, here he is on record. So what do you think about that? I mean, again, I'm still in the rubble of just watching this complete shit show. So, you know, I'm pulling myself up. I'm not trying to be irrationally optimistic about this at all. But there's a lot of damage that he did to Republicans and to his general election prospects there, isn't there? I do think so. And I think a few things can be true at once, right? The problem with that

assessment, though, is that, you know, we only get two tries at trying to get rid of this person. And this person revealed last night, as plainly as ever, it was just as stark a reminder as ever that we need to do everything possible to make sure that this person is never in the White House again. And that is our number one, two, and three priority as a country and as a democracy right now in order to protect ourselves. And so, you know, we only get two chances to stop him. And yeah, what he did last night, I think probably harmed himself in that second chance in a general election.

There are a lot of other factors. A lot can happen. 2020, Joe Biden won handily in the popular vote. But man, the Electoral College was a little too close for comfort from my perspective. And so I agree with that. I think he provided a lot of ammunition for the Democrats. I liked the Joe Biden tweet last night that was just, if you don't want that, donate here. I think that's a pretty clear re-election message for him, a lot better than maybe some of the specifics are for him in a re-election message. So I do concur with that. But while that is happening, he was juicing up the venom and the anger and the

racial animus of his own base, right? And to specifically name Black Lives Matter protesters and try to compare that to January 6th is again, such a racist foghorn. And then again, to show you the problem with having an event like this, Caitlin, again, she did a formidable job of trying to fact check him, but he's just he is a firehose of lies. And this is a situation where it requires somebody to interrupt and say, actually, the Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters that did violence were arrested. I don't know what you're talking about. They haven't been pardoned by Joe Biden. There was law and order accountability. There is this belief in pretty mainstream Republican circles as something I've discovered from interviews for the book and elsewhere, not just in the MAGA circles, this lie that like Antifa and BLM got away with everything because there's this

reverse racism and the feds are coming down really hard on January 6th people in a way they didn't. Like, that's just not true. People that committed violence in other protests have been arrested. But that narrative is baked in. That narrative is baked in. Yeah, that's true. But I just think having somebody like this being able to spread that false narrative without any pushback, again, I think that it positions him as an alpha in the Republican primary and it further animates the Republican base in a way that's unhealthy. And so, yeah, I agree it also helps Joe Biden. Okay. Ben? I agree with Tim. Look, I'm not saying that there's anything good about this happening, and I don't think CNN did right here. My point is simply,

as to his announcement in this setting that he would pardon these people, I think that is much healthier than a dog whistle in that direction. Whereas he used to say, you know, we'll see what happens, or I'm very upset what happened to Paul Manafort. He's a good man. Roger Stone, we'll see what happens if he's asked whether he's going to pardon him. Now he just says, yeah, I'm going to do it. And I actually prefer that. You know, speaking of some of the other cases, because a lot of the other cases did come up, they talked about the investigation in Georgia, which we can talk about a little bit later. And also, here's a good example, though, of how it went last night. Caitlin Collins is trying to

ask him about the document case at Mar-a-Lago. And this is how it went last night. Caitlin Collins is trying to ask him about the document case at Mar-a-Lago. And this is how it went, leading to one of the more striking moments of the evening. Listen to this. Why you held onto those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and then had given you a subpoena to return them. Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah, what's the answer? Do you mind? I would like for you to answer the question. Okay, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it. It's very simple to... You're a nasty person, I'll tell you.

Can you answer why you held on to the documents? I was negotiating... Again, to her credit, she is trying to get an answer, but the crowd was just totally jazzed up by the fact that he called her a nasty woman. Charlie Sykes, you are a nasty man, Charlie Sykes, to point that out. This is known. This is known. This is not controversial. But I guess, you know, part of this is the mind-blowing context of 24 hours earlier, he is found to have sexually

abused someone. And what is he doing? He's doubling down on the Access Hollywood video. He's making fun of his victim. He's calling Caitlin Collins a nasty woman. And the crowd is just eating it up. Okay, because we have limited time. And I really got to bounce this off you because we're talking about the political fallout of all of this. All right. I want to read you something. On CNN tonight, Trump spent an hour talking about, the bullet points, what he did or did not do on January 6, 2021, whether he will pardon people who harmed police officers, how the 2020 election was rigged, whether he supports terminating parts of the U.S. Constitution or the whole thing because the 2020 election was rigged, the sex abuse case he was just found guilty in,

a cat named Vagina, his defense of his comments about grabbing women by their genitals, the federal investigation into his stash of taxpayer-owned classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the investigation into his efforts to reverse his 2020 loss to Biden in Georgia, and then concludes, how does this make America great again? Was that a Republican accountability pack? Is this the bulwark? No, no.

Mr. Miller, tell our folks what I just read. That was a tweet by the Never Back Down super PAC, which is Ron De desantis's official super pack run by a bunch of former ted cruz staffers that's from the desantis folks i agree with the content so credit where due always want to compliment republicans when they say the right thing it's pretty confusing though since ron desantis never talks like that i don't recall ron desantis ever expressing any concerns about jan January 6th, about the election denialism. In fact, he endorsed Trump's concerns about phony election fraud. I don't remember DeSantis ever criticized. I guess he made that one half-hearted criticism about the

Stormy Daniels case. That's the only time I can ever recall him commenting negatively about any of Trump's investigations. I think that this reveals one thing, which is there's a really good book about this called Why We Did It. It's about how basically all these assholes that work on all these campaigns all agree with us on everything in private, basically, at least when it comes to Trump, maybe not on the issues, but at least when it comes to Trump. And occasionally it just slips out. Occasionally it leaks out their true feelings. The second thing, though, which I think is the most telling, is that they don't know how to run against this guy yet. And they're trying everything.

The same PAC tried to attack Trump for being moderate on guns. And it's just like, really? On the one hand, you're going to have this PAC out there attacking him over guns, attacking him over his investigations, attacking him over January 6th. And then Ron DeSantis is just going to do his weird bobblehead thing and talk about Fauci and Disney. Like, that doesn't work. This is a strategy by two clever consultants. This works in a house race. This is exactly what you do if you have a House of Representatives candidate that's horrible and can't carry a message and can't talk and is a bad speaker, and you have a super PAC run all the ads that carries all the

message for them. That works in a house race because people don't pay close attention to house races. People pay attention to what Ron DeSantis has. You can't have an attack making fun of Donald Trump's investigations and a candidate not doing that. People sense it. It seems phony. And if anything, it plays right into Trump's hands, this kind of authenticity issue that Ron DeSantis has, where Trump might be a liar, but at least he's lying and telling you what he thinks. I know that that's contradictory, but that's how people feel about Trump, that he's giving you his authentic feelings, even if they're not true. You got Ron DeSantis out here being a phony baloney politician and his pack, you know, kind of sounding like the bulwark. It just isn't going to work.

Yeah, it's going to be to see how that plays. I don't know whether you saw that, Ben, because I thought that was extraordinary. And I have to admit that I still am confused. Like, you know, what is this? Has Ron DeSantis actually been listening to us? Which I think is very unlikely. I just wouldn't be surprised if there is a change at the pack. Anyway, that's just something to keep our eye on. Tim, we're going to let you go

because we have to dive into the other trials of Trump because there are so many. So thank you for this emergency cameo appearance the morning after. We'll see you next week in New York. We will see you in New York. Okay. So we are now joined, by the way, in addition to Ben Wittes, editor-in-chief at Lawfare,

we're joined by Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, Washington-based journalist who has been covering the Oathkeeper and the Proud Boys case. So welcome back to the podcast, Roger. Oh, thanks very much. So tell us what is going on with the Oath Keeper sentencing, because one of the reasons we're doing this podcast is there's just so much stuff going on that we can focus on what's happening with Donald Trump and the civil cases, the criminal cases, but then you also have this penumbra of the ongoing January 6th cases. So, D.C. jury last week convicted four

proud boys for their roles in trying to, you know, prevent the transfer of power in the election. Now, federal prosecutors are also, same time, are asking federal judge to send an Oathkeeper leader, Stuart Rhodes, to 25 years in prison. So, give me your sense of how that is playing out. What's going to happen? Yeah, he's going to be sentenced next Thursday, a week from Thursday. I think that's a bit high. The government is seeking sentences on the first nine oath keepers to go to trial and be convicted. And all of those sentences, they range from 10 to 25 years. Six of them, if granted, if imposed as the government seeks, would be the highest sentences anyone's received so far. I doubt that's going to happen. Obviously, Rhodes is the strongest possibility.

What they're doing is they're seeking something called a terrorism enhancement. They've sought that only four times in January 6th cases and didn't get it any time. But this is very different. Those were cases of attacking police, but they were individual cases. They weren't conspiracies. Rhodes, of course, is really accused of being the leader of about 27 people who have been charged with respect to January 6th, with respect to conspiracy. And 22 of those have been convicted of something so far. So he is in a good position to receive maybe the first terrorism enhancement. So that would bring him up. The top for seditious conspiracy is 20 years, but there's multiple offenses. So you could tack a couple together as a consecutive. I doubt that will happen.

I want to keep underlining this because this is seditious conspiracy that we're talking about. This is not just a riot. This is not just a normal act of violence. You know, the prosecutors argue, this is according to CNN, that these defendants attempted to silence millions of Americans who had placed their vote for a different candidate to ignore the variety of legal and judicial mechanisms that lawfully scrutinized the electoral process leading up to and on January 6th, and to shatter the democratic system of governance enshrined in our laws and in our constitution. And when they did not get what they wanted, they acted by together

attacking the very people in place at the very time when those laws were in action. That's, I think, a very succinct statement. So we're talking about seditious conspiracy. We are also talking about some of the folks that Donald Trump is signaling that he might pardon. Roger, you shared some excerpts, though, of an interview with Stuart Rhodes's estranged wife, who is bolstering the prosecution sentencing request. Her name is Tasha Adams. So this is an interesting twist that the former wife of Stuart Rhodes, this is what she is telling the court. Let's play that. I think the best thing for Stuart is to be in a place where he can't harm anyone, or he can't manipulate more people. Stuart will never be someone who was radicalized, but he will radicalize others,

and he will keep doing that. He is extremely dangerous, and I don't wish horrible things on him, but I do wish simple consequences on him, that he can't harm others. He will not stop. He will regroup if he's out in the world and rename and start again and do something like this again I'm almost positive that he does not believe the election was even stolen I believe he saw that as an opportunity for chaos and a good opportunity to get people to gather around him and to use it as an excuse for violence because he's not in this for

the politics he's he's in it for the mayhem and the violence hmm sir roger what do you make of that yeah you know rhodes is a smart guy but it turns out that his wife is a smart woman. And she, in these tapes, gives some very devastating insight into the man she's been with, I think, since the early 1990s and knows quite well. They're very concerning. They have to do with the incorrigibility of the man. And, of course, there is also domestic violence allegations. So I think it's pretty powerful stuff. There's actually one tape that I neglected to include in the ones that I tweeted out,

where she talks about how manic he gets when there's an event that's potentially violent. And he'll say, this is what's going to kick it off. And when it didn't turn into war, he fell into a massive depression. And then the prosecutor asked her, what did he mean by kicks it off? And she says, he was always hoping for a revolution of some type. So. That's what they teach at the Yale Law School, where both Stuart Rhodes and Roger Parloff graduated. Oh, you know, I had forgotten. You were not classmates, were you? No, no, I did not know the man. I understand he did his dissertation on the enemy combatant law.

He was upset with the way they were being treated. But his wife thinks that was, you know, maybe because he anticipated one day being an enemy combatant. But anyway. Jeez. Yeah, I'd forgotten that little detail, Ben. Thank you for reminding me that he is a Yale Law School graduate. Roger, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. We will talk soon. Great. Thanks. All right, Ben, it has been such a busy week. I want to get a little bit more into detail in the E. Jean Carroll case, but let's talk about the George Santos indictment. I mean, you know, he's been kind of an ongoing joke and

an ongoing scandal. You know, we have these lies about, you know, his life story, his work history, but Republicans have been, you know, keeping him close. He's trying to reinforce his MAGA credentials. And now, 13 counts. 13 counts. Wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds, lying on disclosure documents. I'm devastated, Charlie. I'm just devastated. I mean, look, I had waited for years for somebody to come along in our political system whom I could really believe in. And I thought I'd found it with George Santos. Who would have thought that a guy who made up a fake animal protection agency would be pocketing campaign money and using it for car payments? Who would have thought

that a guy who made up a volleyball team that he was a star on and a university that he attended would also be engaged in illegal wire transfers of cash? And who would have thought that a man who made up his entire resume, lie to Congress on his financial disclosure forms and lie to the unemployment office to get benefits he wasn't entitled to. I mean, I'm just shocked by the facts alleged in this indictment. It's so unlike the man I thought we had all gotten to know as a society. There's so much disillusionment in our lives these days. So you mentioned this unemployment thing. I mean, that's one of those little details. I love that chart. He applied and he received more than $24,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits when he was actually employed. He had a job. And as one Capitol Hill reporter, Jamie Dupree tweeted,

I cannot make this up. And it gets even better because the House is slated to vote on a bill this week to help states recover fraudulent COVID unemployment benefits. And George Santos, of course, is a co-sponsor of that bill. Of course. Of course. I think we need to emphasize that when, you know, the Freedom Caucus and George Santos talk about waste, fraud, and abuse, they speak from experience. This is a waste, it's fraud, and it's an abuse. So, you know, let's listen to them when they talk about budget austerity. Okay, so let's talk about the big case of the week, the E. Jean Carroll verdict. We had talked about this last week, and you had explained how you thought that her testimony was credible. Obviously, this case turned on whether or not the jury believed her. But let's talk about the tapes that they played as well, including the Access Hollywood video and his deposition tapes. He himself did not show up

for the trial. He did not go under oath during the trial. But he was a major presence at this. Give me some sense of how damaging you think that was in the jury's eyes. Well, it certainly didn't help. And we don't know, obviously, where the jury would have been but for those deposition tapes. That said, boy, if you had any wavering jurors who were like, well, you know, I'm not sure I believe E. Jean Carroll about this. And then you played a tape where he says, oh, yeah, you know, people like me have gotten away with this for a million years, fortunately or unfortunately. What's the argument that it's fortunate, by the way? I think he all but said the subtext of that was, I didn't do it, and if I did, that's sort of my right as an alpha male. And I think you could imagine a juror being very offended by that sense of entitlement.

So I don't think we know what impact it had on the jury, but it would have affected me. I think it would affect most people. But then we have this weird moment, of course, where we have this jury verdict coming down that I think would have ended the career of any major figure in business, any major figure in entertainment, I think think would have ended the career of any major figure in business, any major figure in entertainment, I think probably would have forced the resignation of pretty much anyone else in public office. Do you disagree with me on this? Oh, no. I mean, just look at what happened to Roger Ailes or Bill O'Reilly. These are the closest things to Trump in the entertainment and business sector. You can also look at Harvey Weinstein. That's a little bit of a different situation, but not much of a different situation. These are career-ending, sometimes prison-involving type things. And for Trump, for some reason, he can go on CNN that night and make fun of her and get laughs. And make it a joke. Yeah. There is this process that we've seen in Trump where it

was, you know, no, he didn't do it. He absolutely didn't do it. It is a lie. Okay, well, maybe he did it, but, and then eventually they get around to, he did it, so what? And we've seen this in real time, but it feels like it's accelerating now, that it's gone from, no, I never said that on the tape to yes, I said it on the tape. Yes, it's true. And I don't know this woman, but if we engaged in some hanky panky, yeah, kind of funny. I wrote the other day, this is like a flashback for me to, you know, October of 2016 when the Access Hollywood video came out and people were shocked by it. But now we're going through it again. But the dial has been turned up because you can't just rationalize it as locker room talk.

He actually, this jury has found that he molested and injured and maliciously lied about a woman. And his folks are treating it as a joke. This is where we realize how much Donald Trump has coarsened our culture. I mean, what he has done to the rest of America. I mean, it's one thing that Donald Trump is Donald Trump, but what he has done in warping the reactions of millions of people who would never feel this way in any other context of life. Do you know what I mean, Ben? The people who are laughing about this would never feel this way in any other context of life. Do you know what I mean, Ben? The people who are laughing about this would never laugh about this

in any other context. If somebody was doing this in their church, if somebody was watching this, you know, happening at a little league game or in their employment or in their family, they would never think that this is nothing. And yet when it comes to Donald Trump, they're willing to go, yeah, give them back the nuclear codes. Who cares? Yeah, I have no explanation for that. I can do a kind of mass psychological analysis as well or as badly as the next guy, but I continue to be shocked by it. And I do think it says something very dark about where a large segment of society is right now. And, you know, other than doubling down on truth and decency, I'm not really sure I have any great suggestions for how to counter it. I do think it's amazing and shocking. And in this case, it involves no small degree of dehumanization, because this is

a woman who, you know, made herself extremely vulnerable in order to bring these allegations. And probably if you had asked her, what's your nightmare about this? She might have said that a large group of people would laugh at me on CNN. And that's exactly what happened last night. And so I do think there's a very, not a very ugly side to it. It's a very ugly thing. It's a very ugly side to it. And I don't think that it's going too far to say that what happened last night was re-victimizing the victim. If you have somebody who has been sexually assaulted and they have been lied about, and once she's been vindicated in court the next day, CNN provides a forum for people to mock and laugh about her and

continue to say the same things that the jury found was a malicious act of defamation. Okay, so in the last week, there've been a lot of developments in other cases. We spent some time talking last week about what's going on with Fannie Willis down in Georgia. That investigation came up as well during the town hall meeting, and Donald Trump was asked about his phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Let's play what Trump said about that famous phone call where he asked the Secretary of State to find him 11,000 plus votes. He lied about it, of course. With the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, given the fact that there are indictments expected to come in that case this summer, is that a call you would make again today? Yeah, I called questioning the election. I thought it was a rigged election. I thought I'd had a lot of problems. I had every, I guess he's Secretary of State. I called. Listen to this. There are like seven lawyers on the call, many of them from there.

We're having a call. We're having a normal call. Nobody said, oh, gee, he shouldn't have said that. If this call was bad, I questioned the election. You asked him to find you votes. I didn't ask him to find anything. We've heard the audio tape, Mr. President. There's an audio of you asking him to find you 11,000 votes.

I said you owe me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged. And if this call was bad, election, and we have, and when we can't make a call to question election results, then this country ought to just forget about it. You weren't just questioning the election results. You were asking him to find you votes. And I should note that there is no evidence of fraud.

There is no rigged election in the state of Georgia. I want to get back to the audience, though, Mr. President. Wow. So, Ben. Yeah. So, I think you've actually just seen a preview of what his defense in this case is going to look like. So imagine that you're a defense lawyer and you have to defend him in the Fannie Willis, Georgia election interference investigation. You look at this and you say, okay, he keeps going on and talking about it. He's not denying the facts. There's no way to change.

The call is taped. There's going to be lots of people testifying about it. We have to argue that he genuinely believed that there was a serious problem, that the results had been wrong in Georgia. And he was calling, not in his capacity as a candidate, but in his capacity as president to ensure what he earnestly believed, which was that there were irregularities and that the votes had been counted improperly. And I think that is going to be one of the rubs if this case ever gets to the facts. There'll be a bunch of issues before that. But I think that's going to be the factual rub of this case. And I think you just heard what's really going to be his defense, which was that, okay, it may seem crazy to you, but he really believes this shit. Yeah, that I think is going to be part of this. Okay, so what have we seen involving the Jack Smith investigation over

the last week? We continue to see more subpoenas, more push. Have there been any developments that you think are significant that you wanted to highlight? So there have been, as you say, another raft of subpoenas. There's been some tantalizing suggestion that some of them may involve Trump's arrangements or business arrangements with foreign governments. I don't know what to make of that. I take it as a very preliminary thing, but something to keep your eye on. I continue to think we are in the relative end stages of the Mar-a-Lago investigation, probably a bit farther out in the January 6th case. But again, I don't really have a sense of what end stage means in terms of time. I think we're not days away from charging decisions, but we might be weeks away. And again, if I were Jack Smith, I would not want

to drag this out too much longer, because once you get into the fall, and particularly into next year, it becomes complicated and difficult to, politically anyway, to actually bring cases against a candidate. Okay, so my apologies, I was going to raise this question a little bit earlier, sort of doubling back on the E. Jean Carroll verdict. I was struck by the reaction, the immediate reaction, not just by the CNN crowd, but by elected officials, including Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, who have accepted what appears to be another new narrative line on the right,

that any jury verdict from a place like New York is inherently questionable. And that would apply to Georgia as well, right? Won't that be the line that any prosecution or any jury verdict from a blue state, whether it is Fulton County or whether it is New York, will be considered to be illegitimate on its face? I mean, isn't that people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham did not haveimate on its face. I mean, isn't that, people like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham did not have to comment on this. I mean, doesn't this strike you? You don't have to comment on a civil jury verdict, and yet they felt it necessary. And again, you see where this pattern is going to go, attacking any of the prosecutions and the indictments and even the

convictions. Yeah. So first of all, just as a matter of the way the jury system works, it's wrong. The grain of truth to it actually cuts the opposite direction than they think. The way the legal system would look at that problem is if you think there is no jury in a given jurisdiction that would be fair to you, probably better to commit your crimes elsewhere. You know, if you don't want to be judged by a jury in Washington, D.C. or in New York City or in Fulton County, go elsewhere to commit your crimes. There's a heavy, heavy presumption about trying cases in the jurisdictions in which the crimes took place. Now, are there circumstances in which the local prejudice against the defendant is so extreme

that you couldn't find a jury you would be willing to seat in that jurisdiction? Yes. They tend to involve situations where the crime is so heinous and the saturation of local knowledge about it is so extreme that you can't get people to put their revulsion aside. It doesn't involve the voting behavior of local people as a general matter. So you don't get to say, hey, Charlie Sykes is a conservative. Waukesha County or Madison, Wisconsin is a liberal place, so he shouldn't have his trial there. That's not the way the system works. And Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio shouldn't be saying that. And there's actually a good piece by Roger Parloff in Lawfare a number of weeks ago about efforts to get some of these trials removed for these reasons and why they're failing in the District of Columbia in the January 6th cases.

It does seem relevant here, though, to note that Trump's lawyers signed off on that jury, right? I mean, when you go through jury selection, I mean, at some point, the Trump legal team had to say, yeah, we're okay with this jury. Yes and no. So they have an unlimited number of strikes for cause. So if there's a reason why juror X is not okay with them, and they can justify that to a judge, they can get that juror dismissed. And then they have a certain number, and I'm not sure what it is in New York State civil procedure of what are called peremptory strikes, which is you can just strike the juror for any reason, like that they don't seem like they'd likely to be sympathetic to you. And so, you know, at the end of the day, the jury is composed of people who are, in that sense,

acceptable to both sides. Yes. Is there anything else that we should be keeping an eye on over the next couple of weeks? I was thinking of it. I was going through a list of the various trials of Trump and realizing they know there are still fraud actions going on in New York from the attorney general. Is that correct? I believe so, although I have not followed those. I mean, look, I think the critical things

to be following are Georgia, which I think is going to come to fruition in July, August, Mar-a-Lago, which could happen any day, the continuing development of the January 6th case, and of course, developments in the already indicted case in New York. Those are the big four. And each of those four, with the exception of New York, has a million subparts. Ben Wittes is editor-in-chief at Lawfare, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. His books include Unmaking the Presidency. He also writes Dogshirt Daily on Substack. And Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, Washington-based journalist, has been covering the January 6 trials. And of course, Tim Miller, my colleague at The Bulwark. I want to

thank everyone for joining us on this special edition of The Trump Trials. Ben, we will do this again next week. Looking forward to it. 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.