The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Is Trump Being Politically Prosecuted? with Walter Olson

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and is known for his writing on law, public policy, and regulation. His first book, The Litigation Explosion, was one of the most widely discussed general‐​audience books on law of its time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy seller. I am the producer of the show. My name is Perrielle. I'm here with the owner of the world-famous comedy seller, Noam Dorman. His co-host, comic Dan Natterman, is somewhere at sea in the Caribbean. And we are joined by a very special guest from the Cato Institute, policy scholar Mr. Walter Olson, who is a senior fellow and is known for his writing on law, public policy, and regulation. His first book, The Litigation Explosion, was one of the most widely discussed general audience book on law of its time, and it led the Washington Post to dub him a, quote, intellectual guru of tort reform, close quote. Although I was advised to mention that he is not, in fact, an attorney, though he often seems to get mistaken for one.

I just criticized him. Welcome, sir. Actually, before we get into the... How was that? That was a very excellent parallel. This is fascinating. I'm hearing it for the first time. How does someone who never went to law school become qualified and teach themselves enough to feel that they can criticize lawyers?

Well, they couldn't really stop me, could they? and teach themselves enough to feel that they can criticize lawyers? Well, they couldn't really stop me, could they? I was trained in economics originally, and I think the proof of it is that lawyers are my best fans. I've written four books at this point and hear back a tremendous amount from lawyers. And when I keep hearing, yes, this is how it is in my practice,

a smile spreads across my face. I did the research not too badly, though. Yeah, well, I mean, you wrote about tort reform. Is that right? That was my first couple of books, yeah. And since then, I've spread out to writing about problems with the legal system more generally, and there are a lot of them. And so I've had a chance to write about criminal law and constitutional law and a lot of other areas like that so it's not just business law anymore i mean as a as a as a business owner we fantasize about tort reform because it terrorizes us and you have uh customers and employees walking around with visions of being a plaintiff in their minds at this point what i know i know you'll probably know what I'm going to refer to,

but one of my favorite columns ever written was by George McGovern for people, young people who once ran for president. And after he left the Senate, he opened like a bed and breakfast inn or something like that. And he wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal. And he went bankrupt. And he wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal saying essentially, if I had known then what I know now, I would have never voted for all these laws. Sometimes when somebody trips and falls, they just tripped and fell.

It's not anybody's fault. Do you know that column? I remember that column well. And you learn afterward, if you follow his career path, the numbers have to add up, which they don't on Capitol Hill, unfortunately, but they do if you're running a business. Yeah. No, I, I'll tell a story of my own, which is, my first book did so well that I wound up getting on the Oprah show. And it was really something but I found out afterwards, she was this very friendly interviewer, very, very good interviewer, but also also very friendly i found out afterward that she gets sued constantly of course so she does have that perspective of someone who who has seen both sides yeah i mean uh sometime off off the air i would i would tell you and and really i've had nothing compared to some of the other people i know

the stories that they've had but uh i can tell one quick story but it's because it's a so my father you know what workman's compensation for people don't know it's supposed to be a bar for employees suing the employer so if you if you work in as a cook and you cut your finger off you you get compensated through workman's compensation program and you're not supposed to sue your boss. So this is years ago. When I was a child, part of the job of the people in the kitchen was to take the greasy stuff out, to throw it out. And my father, I mean, I can remember it like it was yesterday,

used to constantly tell him, wear your rubber-soled shoes, wear your rubber-soled shoes. He wasn't just on top of this. He was obsessed with it because he didn't want them to trip and fall. And not just because he would get sued, but because they'd become complacent about the risks of it. And he would do it all the time. So sure enough, one of the cooks tripped and fell.

And he broke his thumb. And the end of the story is he was able to sue my father. No, he wasn't able to sue my father. His wife was able to sue my father for loss of consortium. Because he hurt his thumb, the pain of his thumb interfered with his ability

to get an erection. And his wife was able to sue successfully. I don't know how the thumb related to the consortium but yeah it's um and you know the courts differ a lot from state to state on how uh on whether they'll entertain that kind of thing or throw it out and that is one of the reasons why workers conference encourage people to move unfortunately from some states to others. You know, New York is very bad. A lot of businesses move to states like North Carolina, where the judges just ride herd on it more, trying to make sure that only the high-merit cases get through.

And so everyone's insurance and everyone's workers' comp is lower. And businesses move there. There's no getting around it. Yeah, I know a bar owner, one of the biggest bar owners, maybe in the country, who told me he'll never open another bar in New York for just the death by a thousand cuts of all the various little disadvantages.

Anyway, so let's get to the Trump thing. So the first Trump thing I want to talk about, and I actually don't know which side of this issue you're on. But I would like to talk about the Trump, the real estate case or the fraud case where he where he fraudulently valued his properties. Now, as a threshold issue to me is the politicization of the justice system of the legal system and I just want to set it up with two things that came to mind when Trump ran for president in 2016 one of the ugliest things he had ever done and when the other things he did was to say that when he if he became president he would

instruct his Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton on the email case and there was a editorial in The Times by Steven Levitsky you know the guy wrote the book about threats to democracy and this was one of his prime examples of how Trump would be a threat to democracy he would politicize law. And then I have another example here that just came to mind as I was in the car, which I think is really interesting. When Trump had that call with Zelensky that he was impeached for, one of the things he said, I just looked it up. That's why I was rushing in here, Max. He says to Zelensky, this is in regard to with regard to investigating Hunter Biden. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor. I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general, meaning he was going to have Bill Barr call Zelensky to see what they could

turn up on Hunter Biden. Now, fast forward. Go ahead. You want to cut in there? Yeah, there was a line from that same conversation that really sticks with me, which is that he told Zelensky, we don't need to have you find Biden guilty of anything. It's the investigation we want. And so often the process is the punishment. I mean, I come back to that line an awful lot, because if you can get the process going against someone, you have already dealt them an injury and maybe a reputational injury

that they can't recover from. So left, anti-trump people right and left rightfully so we're sickened by this i i am too and then we have a woman who runs for attorney general of new york state and she says as the next attorney general of his state i will be a shot i will shine a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings and every dealing demanding truthfuls in every. So she runs for office on the promise to get Trump. And she's lauded. She's a hero. We love this woman. OK, so start. Let's start there. What do you want to say about that? Well, and you have started with the single thing that gets me angriest on Trump's behalf

about the politicization, because my wider argument is that in order to evaluate his claim that it's all lawfare and it's all political and it's all because he's Trump, you've got to look at whether the cases are meritorious. If he really did do the crime or misconduct, then that's one thing. If he didn't do it and they just cobbled up the case anyway, that's totally different. But either way way whether she's got a meritorious case or not Letitia James should never have campaigned that way. It destroys people's confidence that they are going to get the impartial Justice that we should be demanding from an elected prosecutor and everyone else for that matter elected or otherwise so she herself dealt the worst blow

to the credibility of her prosecution. That having been said, as we go on in the show, we'll look at the merits of where she might be right and where she might be wrong. But yeah, she stepped in it there. And I never want to see another prosecutor do that if I can help.

Well, let's stop there for a second. Is it enough that it's a meritorious case? I mean, if she had said, if I become attorney general, I'm going to go after real estate fraud, you know, that would be one thing. But the idea that, what if she said, if I were attorney general, I promise never to look too hard into, you know, black people. Like, the meritorious case, I think, what if Trump had a meritorious case against Hillary Clinton? You know, what if what if Barr found a meritorious case against against Hunter Biden?

OK, fair enough. I didn't say it was the only thing to look at. I did say that it was kind of the biggest thing that you had to look at at some point is how meritorious the case was. And I will freely say, you know, there are situations, for example, where every car is speeding down the boulevard and they wait and stop until they get the person who ran against the mayor and only stop them for speeding when they let everyone go by. Yeah, you can find cases where even though the substance, the charges have substance uh something still went very wrong uh that having been said the um as a defense in a court of law that usually won't work right you might uh you know the judge will not throw out the case based on you let all these other people go so just bear that in mind as we talk about trump's words no no, no, of course. But I just like to, because this is, I can't unravel it from politics and also from what's best for our country, right?

So I analogize a lot of things to my experience running a business. And one of the things that I've dealt with many, many times is a manager who has it in for a particular employee in a personal way. And then they start to look for reasons to, you know, maybe to and I don't let this happen, by the way. But they start looking for causes and they will want to punish somebody for a particular role. And so they might that no one else gets punished for. But they did give that customer the drink. I said, I know that. But don't tell me the reason you're punishing them is because they did that.

You're looking for a reason to punish them. And it undermines our entire morale here. No one's going to respect us as bosses if they see that in a heartbeat you know go ahead no uh and you know from case to case and we'll be talking about you know there may be six different cases we'll be talking about and uh and it differs you know i myself think that uh one of the wrong turns we took on the road was in having prosecutors run for office by campaigning that does not lead down a good road. They pick unpopular people, they pick people they think their audience gets angry at, and they say they're

going to go after them and you'll never see the number of prosecutions they're going to file. Well, that's bad enough to start. And then, of course, Letitia James, and I think Alvin Bragg in New York, the state's attorney in Manhattan, did some of that campaigning, too, although not as bad as James did. So, yeah, as we get to the different individual cases, you always want to look at that and, you know, bear in mind, is the prosecution seeming to strain or stretch? Are they leaning over backward to be more punitive in what they demand or throw in more theories they wouldn't have used against another defendant? Valid thing to look at. Now, the next step, the next step is my kind of taking a step by step, is that for people who don't know about this, this is a very unusual aspect of law. This is a civil

case. It's not a criminal case. so it doesn't require proof by reasonable doubt. And can you tell us, if you know, how did the government get into the practice of bringing civil cases like this? What problem were they trying to solve? Because normally, so people know, normally if you've been damaged, you can sue civilly whoever damaged you. So somewhere in this and I don't know this history, it seems to imply that the government was going to step in because the people who would normally sue for themselves in some way were not up to it, were disadvantaged, couldn't be expected to serve their own interests. Let me try to condense 100 years of history into 25 seconds. First, we want to look at New York, because New York has special, very pro-prosecutor rules that are at issue in a couple of these cases, but especially the one we're talking about right now. So the first question to ask is, why did New York get out way in front of other states in giving

prosecutors the right just right off the bat to sue for fraud without having to prove reliance and damages, which are two classic elements that you would have to prove if you sued someone for fraud on a one-on-one basis. And so if you go back to that, New York has several of these laws, and they all kind of interrelate to create a toolkit for someone in Letitia James' position or Alvin Bragg's position or whatever. And so they, New York's philosophy, and I'm going to try to put myself in their shoes and give a positive account of what they were trying to do. They said, we want to clean up New York's market. New York is the most important financial market in the country and at that time was the most important commercial market in a dozen other ways.

And they said, we want to make it second to none in how clean it is. And that means rather than just wait until someone loses money to fraud, we want to actively patrol the marketplace. When we see someone committing a pattern and practice of fraud, not just one-off, but doing it a whole bunch, we need the right to shut them down from those activities before they actually victimize someone. This is the affirmative case for why New York passed these laws decades ago. And now those who write from a more civil libertarian point of view, and I count myself in thought, want to get a whistle at this point and say, wait a minute, you are putting an awful lot of power in the hands of the government. Maybe they will use it for good most of the time. But what happens if they decide to settle scores with it?

What happens if the evidence on which they're acting is not actually very good and someone gives them a bad tip and the person didn't violate the law, what's going to happen to them when you have given these very powerful tools and also these very high penalties that they can invoke? Let me pick one out from the case about Trump's business practices and lying to the banks and so forth. They did so-called forfeiture. Now, forfeiture is not unknown in regular law. But what happens in forfeiture is that if you did something based on dishonest premises, they can come and take all the money that you made from it, even though you may have spent a vast amount of time actually doing stuff. So the Washington Hotel that Trump owned, apparently he lied to the banks quite a bit to get the financing for that. He sells it after five years, makes a lot of money because obviously a bunch of things went well for him other than the bank believing his lies. You know, obviously there was some creativity or some, you know, some positive things that the Trump organization must have done there.

So the judge comes in and says, no, under the concept of disgorgement, you have to disgorge all the money you made by lying to the bank. Now, that's really harsh. The example I give as an analogy is suppose you lied in order to get a college diploma, and then 30 years later, your earnings were much higher throughout your life. Are you going to have to disgorge all that money that you got by lying once? Or is there going to be some more middle-of-the-road thing where you might have to give some, but not all? So for various reasons, the New York prosecutors are armed with the potential for very high fines and penalties. And all this adds up. This has gone on for 20 years or more. If people remember the name Eliot Spitzer, the name Eric Schneiderman, these were big national names. They were considered at

the time to be the most important adversaries of the business community in the entire country. No one in Washington was as menacing to business as the New York attorney general. So the powers have been there for a long time and the powers have been used in questionable ways, unfortunately, for a long time, too. The the the intended victim of the victim that is intended to be defended here is when they when they conceived of these fraud laws was the I would think the consumers who are being defrauded. They will usually describe these laws as being meant to protect consumers. If you clean up the market and drive all the fraudsters out of state, the ones who benefit most, they say, will be the little guys, even if the fraud that you've caught them in is lying to Deutsche Bank or some other big entity. I mean, normally it's the banks who are doing the fraudulent practice here and the little guy with their credit cards or whatever it is that is getting taken, right? There are a bunch of very strict laws against lying to banks. A lot of them are federal laws that are not at stake here. But one of the things that I think, you know, it's fun to talk about, but ultimately it's a side issue, is why didn't the banks complain? So far he's paid off the loans, although some of them are still outstanding.

And with the insurance policy, it's different. Let me just, so people understand, so maybe it's time to bring in the case. Trump overvalued. Why don't you give a nutshell of the case now? Because people aren't going to understand the stuff you're saying. Go ahead. Yeah. Every time Trump borrowed money from banks he just lied his head off and uh you know there are some famous instances where he uh multiplied the square

footage of his triplex and trump tower threefold making it out to be 30 000 feet instead of 10 000 feet but he did the same thing on a whole bunch of other things you know scottish golf courses and um there was one where uh he valued rent control departments as the landlord as if they uh as if he was free to sell them for full market value which anyone who's lived in new york knows you know is is wildly off it's like 80 or 90 off of what the actual value might be so he was lying in line and lying and the um uh so the judge judge engeron um uh accepted expert testimony saying that uh this was the underlying reason he was able to get favorable financing and sometimes why he was able to get financing at all for various real estate deals uh which meant that all the value of those things was potentially at risk. So let me stop you there because this is the part I really, I just, I have to call bullshit on it

from my own experience and from common sense, which is that any, I just recently was dealing with a bank about a loan. And hold on to your hat here. They did not take my word for anything, okay? I told them that my building here used more than 50% for commercial use. They came in with tape measures, measured the stairwell. This is for a small loan. There was nothing I said that they would believe. Nothing you won't believe. They asked me what my finances were, and I said, well would believe. Another thing you won't believe.

They asked me what my finances were. And I said, well, I can just tell you. And they said, well, can you send us a document? I said, you don't need the documents. I'll just tell you. No, no, no. We want to see your tax returns and your books. Let me take the other side on this.

Because legally, first, legally, it's not actually a good defense to say they should have done more due diligence. Oh, that's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm saying they went into this eyes wide open. I have no doubt that for a regular customer, they do that sort of thing. In the case of Trump, the court went through a bunch of reasons why the equities are not very much on Trump's side on this. One of them is his is a privately held company that is a family company, which means that an awful lot of stuff that other big businesses would have to disclose because of shareholders and the like, they can keep completely private. Like what? Like what? I can't keep anything private. I'm privately held.

Well, no, there's lots of financial stuff about the flows of money within the corporations. Like companies with shareholders have have to disclose for SEC reasons. You know what? What kind of business I've been? You know what? I love the advice. What can I keep a secret from the bank or from the other? You know, I've never heard of anything on how you negotiate with them. But beyond that, the bank, when it comes to people like you, the bank has other ways of checking. They have other ways of checking. But let's just not get off that early because I've heard this argument made.

And one of the reasons I wanted someone to say, well, what is it that Trump was able to keep secret that they could not have insisted on seeing? And by the way, what is it that he did keep secret that they could not have insisted on seeing? And by the way, what is it that he did keep secret? Nothing. Well, a couple of things. First, in several important stages, he would let the person who was checking the records into a room. They were not allowed to take or keep any records. They were allowed to look at things for a few hours and then had to leave now of course that's all part of the negotiation it indicates that he was keeping some information very close to the chest my favorite example and i brought up insurance because i think this is uh it was part of the substance of the case that he lied to his insurance companies to get better to appear a better risk than he really was. So, you know, directors and officers insurance,

all organizations practically have to have it to defend their directors and officers. So he was buying directors and officers insurance, and they asked standard kind of question, which is, do you have any reason to know that your company is about to be engulfed in litigation? Are there any investigations or are there any pending notices you've been put on? And according to the testimony in the case, the insurance company was told, nope, nothing of the sort. Well, almost immediately after they underwrote the policy, in comes these claims for them to pay out money based on the, I think it was the Trump Foundation scandal, that particular one.

At any rate, so big claims, they, you know, I don't know whether they rolled their eyes or what. They said that when we renewed the policy, we asked for five times the original premium now that we realized what the actual risk factors were. And implicitly gave, you know, an 80 discount uh because of the the lie about we're not facing any pending litigation now at some point uh you know i don't know even know how you ask someone to prove that they're not facing any litigation because are they supposed to show you every email i've ever received and it's just not practical other not to take the word of a lot of people in that situation so So anyway, that's my minicast.

It's a crazy question because, as you know probably better than anybody on earth, people are sued all the time. You're always in the middle of some incident which might metastasize into a lawsuit. And who is going to tell the insurance company, yes, I think I'm going to be sued, so the insurance company can then say, okay, well, if that happens, we're not going to show you for that. I don't suggest lying to insurance companies about this because you have the alternative of saying, yeah, there is this matter that we consider a small matter.

We've dealt with this kind of thing before. We think your exposure is not very great. And, you know, tell the truth and then get the resulting premium. But it does seem to me, and maybe I've just led a saint-like life over my years, but I've never lied to banks and insurance companies the way Trump just could not let 15 minutes go by without lying. The scale of this, was it V.I. Lennon who said that at some point quantity becomes its own quality? I mean, Trump's quantity of lying at some point does become its own quality.

Yeah, I don't want to defend Trump lying. I don't want to defend being a liar. But I will say this with intimate knowledge of these systems, especially insurance. The system is set up such that if there is anybody being totally honest, they can't survive in business. And the companies, for instance, if you get an audit from an insurance company, they will often say, we want these records or pay us 20% premium, meaning they know the game. It's all, everybody's in on the game.

And my suspicion with the banks, now you tell me if I'm wrong, is that because they are so regulated in terms of how much risk they are allowed to take because of all the trouble they've gotten this country into in the past by taking too much risk they are happy for the to for the client the the borrower to exaggerate a little bit then they can with a wink of an eye accept the exaggeration then they're allowed to make a loan and get themselves around the regulations that they that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to make well they wanted to make this loan right they wanted to make the loan oh let's go there how could they not know first of all okay i'm jumping around but as i understand it they wanted

to value trump trump said mar-a-lago was worth a couple hundred million dollars or something. The state wanted to value it at $25 million or $27 million. Now, this is an insane valuation. I would pay $27 million. I'm sure I could find it for Mar-a-Lago tomorrow. You know that it's restricted by deed covenant to be used only as a private club. Well, that, okay. No, no, I don't know. I know that, but I'm I'm going to I'm going to I want to dispose of that right now.

OK, that. But that was ready to pay more for it than other people were. And there were plenty of people ready to do it because I would then put more money in to change the nature of this opportunity and make the big score. Now, the idea that something Trump made a deal with the with Florida to have a certain tax rate in return for him keeping it as a private club. Now, this to me is the flimsiest of all deals, because if the private club goes out of business, I'm bankrupt, then Florida then has to change the deal because they can't have a piece of property which just gets abandoned because no one's going to put a private club there. And they can't order somebody to operate a private club. No, however, they can crack down if they try to use it for any other purpose but they but they wouldn't they would they would say i mean i had

to i had to tell the town i'd plant 30 trees in order to get my swimming pool i'm glad my money is not at stake because i would not lend it based on the hypothetical higher value if you could get the laws changed in your favor i would invest on the actual current economic value okay but i i looked and i look i'm not a bank you know no one no one has asked me to be a bank okay but i i look let me let me let me let me put this in i looked at i was looking in um just about the valuation of margaret and forbes magazine estimated the value of the state at 350 million dollars um another magazine another another newspaper said real estate experts outside of Palm Beach guessed the place was worth more than $200 million. Someone else invested $725 million. These are all experts.

Some Palm Beach luxury real estate agents have told the Associated Press the property would sell for $300 million, maybe $600 million. A bidding war could bring it up to $1 billion. These are all people who are aware of this deed. Now, it doesn't matter to the bank whether or not they could even succeed in changing the deed. It matters that they had no reason to think that a few people wouldn't take the risk. Okay, I don't know enough about Mar-a-Lago to keep on disputing that particular case.

I will go back and respond to a couple of points you made earlier, though, which I think are important. One is, can't banks simply send off the risk to some other holder of debt and free themselves from any of the default risk? And the answer, I think, generally is no, they have to keep some skin in the game by keeping some exposure to default risk themselves. That's the way it's set up in order to keep them on the ball about not taking horrendously bad risks. Now, it kind of fell apart during the 2000s, but that's the way it generally works. Secondly, you mentioned regulation, and I think you're on the right track, although in a different way than you were arguing, which is that all of these relationships, I am convinced, have an element of a bank trying to keep happy someone that they know perfectly well, you know, is a leading political figure whose goodwill is potentially going to be tremendously important if they get into some sort of regulatory issue in which they need a favor done or hope to get a merciful treatment. Wasn't this before he was in politics?

Wasn't this before he was in politics? Wasn't this before Trump was in politics? Trump, some of this was before, but I'm thinking in particular of the argument, why didn't the banks complain in recent years? Now, in recent years, when these issues came up and people said, I don't see a bank complaining, I think that's my answer to why you don't see a bank complaining is the bank desperately wants the relationship to work. All the more so now that the man has served four years as president and might become president again. Of course, the bank wants the relationship to work. Of course, the bank is not sending experts to give the worst possible version, if it can help it, of how he treated

things. Again, to retreat to the way New York lawmakers conceived of this, they would have swept all this aside and said, we are trying to clean up the market. It's not a good market if the amount of lying is as material as we've just described in the last 10 minutes. Let's do something to give prosecutors the power to clean up that market. Right. But the way to clean up the market would be to go after the banks just to insist that they do their due diligence. Well, prosecute the banks for making loans that were were they were lied to and i don't see how that works yeah in other words the i i don't know bank banking regulation i am sure there must be some regulation that requires the bank to take good faith actions to to verify that that they

what they're getting is that they understand that that's a matter of business judgment and that it's going to vary a lot from situation to situation what kinds of diligence makes sense depends on how well they know the person depends on um uh you know a lot what what information is is independently available about uh the business or the property uh No, I mean, there are wider things saying that banks cannot squander their assets in such a way as to leave their policyholders unable to redeem their accounts and all that. But there is not a law against long shot loans.

Here's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to this. Do you think the bankers, the banking industry in general, was happy to see Trump pay through the nose or unhappy to see this decision go there? My gut tells me the banking industry doesn't see this supposedly purported decision in there to protect them. I tend to think the bank's like, you know what? don't help us. We're fine without you.

I don't think the banks think this is good for them. Again, to reiterate, the point of the law is not to help the banks, but there was a lot of reaction in the New York business community. And I think, you know, to switch back to the line of argument I was taking, which is that these are dangerous powers that prosecutors have. And we have seen them use them for political reasons. We've also seen them use them against companies that were not guilty of anything. That's not this case, but it is other cases where they made companies spend tens of millions of dollars defending themselves, and the companies have done nothing wrong. Business is very afraid of activists, New York attorneys general, and they are very afraid that one of them who has just scored a big political victory is going to get

more funding and 100 more lawyers in her office. And before long, a lot of their businesses are going to be targeted. That's a reasonable thing for them to worry about. I don't blame them. Now, I'll tell you that when I hear that Trump said the apartment was 30,000 feet and it was only 10,000 feet, at that point, I'm like, you know what, no matter what else I think, they can't just sign off on that. That's an obvious misstatement. I don't know that the penalty should be hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm not offended by the notion that some penalty would be paid for that. But this valuation thing is, listen, I just I just bought a building, it's public record.

I bought it for seven million dollars. I asked professionals at the time I was bidding on it what it was worth. And when I say professionals, I mean seasoned professionals in the time I was bidding on it what it was worth. And when I say professionals, I mean seasoned professionals in the New York real estate business. And the answers I got varied by about 200 percent from people who do this every day. And I had people telling me that if I paid 11 million dollars for it, it wouldn't be too much. And I had other people telling me I shouldn't pay more than four. This is so offensive to me that somebody will pretend that there is a value to a property that is known, that can be compared to measuring the square footage of an apartment. This is a lie.

I have to say, part of what you say is right. If there weren't those variations in evaluation, the art market would be impossible as we know it. I mean, you know, that's how the art market works. And there are not many prosecutions in the art market, even if the dealer is sweet talking you into saying the painting is worth three times what it really is. But on the other hand, in this area, it is not all made up. It is not all completely subjective. As the judge said, it shocked the conscience as it laid on one after another after another of the types of, you know, judges deal with expert witness testimony all the time. And believe me, an expert witness testimony, exactly the same stuff goes on in which someone says, oh, the damages were three times.

And the other one hired by the other side says, no, the damages were only one third of the time. You know, judges accept that there is a range of reasonable opinion, but they also don't like it when someone comes in and just tries to completely pull the wool over their eyes or, you know, extending it to the papers filed in these cases when they try to do it in the business world generally. All right. It shocks the conscience. And again, you know, it's like I don't want to be arguing for the okay but much of the significant lie here in terms of actual having financial consequences was the Mar-a-Lago thing so they

and that shocks the conscience to me the notion that a property that I believe the property has a view of both sides of the Florida you know the Atlantic and the Gulf if you were free to build it would be an extremely valuable property there is no doubt a view of both sides of Florida, the Atlantic and the Gulf. If you were free to build, it would be an extremely valuable property.

There is no doubt. The notion that a property like that would only be worth $25 million when apartments in Manhattan are worth $25 million and that the judge knows that, and despite the fact that non-interested articles have been written about real estate brokers saying it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars this just doesn't hold up i'm no more lago expert i know that florida is a lot cheaper than manhattan as markets go but uh the um you know we we had a point in which i think we actually can agree in a pretty harmonious way, which is the thing that Trump, Trump's best argument here is that the numbers are way excessive.

That if he had done all those same things and had been hit with a much, much lower financial penalty, yeah, I would see that as rough justice. I think the numbers that Angeron came out with are way high compared with what I would have done as a judge. I think that's Trump's best chance on appeal is to figure out an argument to get the numbers knocked down. But let me just because I keep switching back and forth to make sure we see the arguments. reasons Trump did so badly on that is that Engelrand concluded that not just to the banks, not just to the insurance companies, but during the litigation, Trump lied and lied and lied in depositions and things, and so did all of his executives. And when you do that, you take a risk, which is first judges get mad. And we can argue about the extent to which Engelrand should have set aside his feelings of being mad and all the nasty stuff Trump had said about him on social media.

There's no argument. I think ideally a judge should set all that aside. He's supposed to set it aside. He's supposed to say he takes an oath to set it aside. Right. But aside from that, what judges do not take an oath to do is to not let a series of lies during the litigation affect their weighting of credibility. And so this hurt Trump very badly on things like the testimony of expert witnesses about the financial impact, the disgorgement and so forth, because Angeron wrote saying basically there were a

number of points where really you could have gone with Trump or with the opposing witness. And I chose to discount Trump's credibility to zero because of all these other laws. And so I'm going to credit the opposing witness. Right. Now, can I stop you there? Because this is this is a little much because when it came to Michael Cohen, the judge said, I know that Michael Cohen is a convicted liar and I know that he hates Trump deeply. But you know what? Not all liars never tell the truth. And he said and then the judge writes, Michael Cohen told the truth. Now, you know, I know how much Michael Cohen hates Trump.

So so what I'm seeing there is a judge who by fiat is saying, listen, you're a liar. So I'm mad at you. You're a liar, but you didn't lie to me, so I believe there's good in you after all. This is not—I don't see any justice here whatsoever. Okay, I will, up to a point, defend the judge on this. He is totally entitled to weigh the testimony of someone who has clearly lied in the past, and he is also, in my view, entitled to take into account lies during his own case. He's entitled to weight those more heavily. Sir.

I subvert the very process that he is trying to achieve justice in. Right, but I don't... There's nothing wrong about his taking those into account. No, no, but correct me if I'm wrong. You seem to be implying that because he was angered by the lies,

I mean, he didn't charge Trump with perjury or contempt of court. That led to a harsher decision. Now, now, now that's not supposed to go with the wrong word. I will say that it led by the judge's own account. He said that because of all these laws that were proven during our legal proceedings in our case, I am going to not give Trump the benefit of the bricks on the instances where there really is an insoluble conflict of testimony. I'm going to go with the person who testified, Trump. I don't see that as being reversed on appeal. I don't see that as being judicial misconduct.

I don't see it being reversed on appeal because he's the trier of fact and they're going to defer to the trier of fact the judge on appeal. They could look and see whether the judge acted in a prejudiced way, whether it's handling of evidence and evaluation of facts was appeals courts can review some of that stuff. I just don't think they're going to reverse them in this particular case. And we'll see, You know, at some point we'll find out. Well, I, you know, the whole thing really bothers me. I found what I had one more, so two more things. So correct me if I'm wrong. One of the theories here was that because, I think the spread was four points, because Trump got an interest rate four points less than he would have without a personal guarantee. This is the amount of money that he essentially robbed the bank of.

And then because he had that extra cash essentially in his pocket, then he was able to make another deal that he wouldn't otherwise have had the money to make. And now we're and then he sold that. Now we're going to get all the. This is this amount of this amount. Let all the money. This amount of fortune telling, knowing that if this hadn't happened, if this hadn't happened, we assume you would have taken the 8% interest. We assume you would have not found another way to get the other deal. We assume that if it went wrong, you wouldn't have found a partner to come in. Assumption upon assumption upon assumption.

We know, we can tell you that if not for this thing, you would have had $300 and something million less in your pocket. This is nonsense. Don't we all know this is nonsense? Nobody knows that. Let me say, first, in general, I agree. And that's why when we got back and i talked about discouragement and talked about the numbers being too high basically because i agree with what you just said now to switch over to what i guess i know but what did the judge misapply the law unfortunately

the underlying law just is very weird and the underlying law allows this kind of thing to go on which i think is good reason to go back and fix the law so that it stops doing that. But Trump is not the first, nor is he the hundredth, to have this sort of speculative disgorgement theories like a Lego set, you know, sort of piling up to, you know, he took the law as he found it, which is very hostile to defendants. And I think he's right to say that this is disproportionate. That's not because the judge was violating the law. It's because the law the judge was given to apply is, you know, I think a law that is is not well rooted in good legal principles, I think. Yeah. So so that's you know, the complaint is generally right. But it you know, it should be lodged against New York's lawmakers, really. Yeah. What would you say? What does your gut tell you?

The odds that this would have ever happened to anybody who was not hated like trump the uh you can never get into someone's mind and know for sure so i'll say that right off the bat on the other hand someone whose scandals had gotten into the newspapers as much as trump's had whether it be the uh trump university the Trump Foundation. Remember that it wasn't Letitia James's lawyers who broke the story about the square footage of the triplex. That was, was it Forbes? It was some private, like private business reporter. And so when all of those little explosions are going on of indicating that a business enterprise might be fraudulent, it would attract the notice of even a kind of slowpoke attorney's office. The New York attorney's office, the New York attorney general's office has people who do nothing but go through

the newspapers looking for news stories that might indicate that they so mr once again can i say this yeah when you have like if if trump told the bank one whopper and the bank didn't catch it so trump trump put one over on the bank when you tell the bank 20 easily verifiable whoppers and the bank which looked gave me a full proctological exam when the bank doesn't think they're lending a lot of money when the bank doesn't undertake the due diligence to look at a, take a magnifying glass to any of these whoppers. Isn't that a very overwhelming prima facie case that the bank was in on it and that the villain here is the bank? Because the danger to us is that the banking system is unstable,

not that they give a sweetheart loan. Read Judge Ageron's opinion, because there was expert witness testimony on these various points. There was a parade of people who talked about what the bank knew, what it could have known with more questions. They're not going to admit to it.

The testimony, and again, you know, maybe he shouldn't have credited the testimony, but the testimony was there against the general narrative that you just laid out so so my just my my you know i was also you know looking into this controversy about the chauvin case and dr michael bodden was one of the people who uh testified for uh the the prosecution against derek chauvin i was looking to dr michael bodden he was the guy who's who said that um oj could not have killed ron goldman and n and Nicole Brown Simpson because, based on his expert testimony, there wasn't time for O.J. to have done this and get back to, based on the coagulation, whatever.

O.J. had to be innocent because there simply wasn't time for him to. He could not have committed the crime. Now, we all know O.J. committed the crime, which is to say that everybody hires their experts and the experts say what they need to say. And judges need to listen to and invoke that testimony. Now, it's funny, we haven't gotten on to this point, but one of the possibilities on this case and virtually all of the others is that Trump didn't have the most competent lawyers in the world who did not develop the counter-expert testimony, did not object at the right times to possibly

get objections they could preserve. Trump has gotten himself into, you know, half of the trouble, it seems, is through hiring lawyers who aren't as good as they should. The other half is through the stuff that comes out of his own mouth, because, you know, very often it winds up being used against him. So, yeah, some of that expert testimony stuff. We'll never know if he had had a really sharp lawyer developing the best counter expert testimony where they might have gone with that. What I do know is what he got, which was a bunch of expert testimony that was very damning on these issues of due diligence by the bank and so forth. It just it didn't back up the idea that the bank was at fault so two things there's nothing

you could tell me i would take my family's life on it that if the bank took his word for the size of his apartment that they didn't that they what that proves to me they couldn't care less about the size of his apartment if they really cared about the size of his apartment they would have measured it i understand they just can't there certain... there has to be certain repercussions, but I live in the real world. I just know how the real world works. I know how... my limited experience with banks. There's no way that this is public record. They go in there... one... again, one thing he could pull over on them. They're friends.

They want to get him the loan. They hook him up. This is what you need to show. Hey, Donald, you need to show us this amount for us to be able to sign off on the loan. I need 40,000 votes. You need to show us this amount. It's the same kind of thing. You understand what I'm saying? And he shows them.

Okay, the apartment is 30,000 feet. Let's say you're right, and let's say that a bank that knew that it was going to put off 95% of the risk of default on this loan is going to find some other dummy financial institution that was very unsophisticated and throw off 95% of the risk by passing on all of the bogus paperwork about the assets. Because remember that all of these loans have to have covenants of percentage of value. So they're all backed up and would be in default if the numbers were. Suppose the bank were totally in on it and were helping its friend do a favor by conspiring with him in a fraud against a third dumb financial institution.

Don't you see that that leaves him completely liable under the New York law? He has committed the frauds, even if the bank were at his side, even if the bank were cheering him on, he still committed the frauds. Except now we have pointed to a different and more likely victim, which is whoever wound up holding the bag among third party financial institutions. Yes, yes. If they got sold off. I'm of the opinion that our legal system is such that if someone is hated and a prosecutor runs for office, I'm promising to get them,

they can interpret the law, and if they have a judge who hates them too, to elicit a penalty such that no one ever conceived of before. People who kill people drunk on the road and get sued for wrongful death get a few million dollars. Let me revert to my long career writing about tort law

in which things like a scratch on a paint job multiplied by class action multiples wound up being what was it hundreds of millions of dollars? Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this was new and one off in our legal system. It happens all the time that things that were the literal damages are very small, wind up getting blown up through a variety of different bad legal theories into nine-digit things. To that extent, we've already kind of agreed that we'd like to see the numbers cut on appeal. But as far as does it happen or not, oh, it sure wasn't invented for Trump. It wasn't invented for anyone in the last 20 or 30 years, the legal system has been doing this.

In the end, can we snap out of it for a second? In the end, a guy got a good rate from the bank by telling them that Mar-a-Lago was worth a lot more money, and his apartment was bigger. The bank took absolutely no care about it. They gave him the loan. He paid the loan back, and now they're getting for $400 million. And this has never happened before. It's never going to happen again.

Letitia James had found this. She said, she said, I want to be clear. White collar financial fraud is not a victimless crime, James said. When the powerful break the law and take more than their fair share, there are fewer resources available for working people. What does that even mean? There are fewer working people are worse off because Trump. It's such nonsense. But this is the best she can do to defend what she did. On the one hand, it's political boilerplate.

On the other hand, it actually is true that fraud against banks and insurance companies winds up getting taken out in the wash in the form of higher interest rates or higher insurance premiums for everyone. If someone files a bogus insurance claim, yes, everyone's rates go up by a penny or two. And, you know, I disagree with so much of what she said. I wouldn't pick on that as her worst statement. No, but prosecute the fraud that has a victim again this fraud does have victims and uh yeah i mean we just apparently disagree on this i think that trump um you know trump should stop committing so many palpable legal offenses if he doesn't want the law to catch up with him at some point we haven't talked about the five other cases.

Go ahead. I've talked a lot about this. I want to give you a chance to talk about whatever other case that you think is the most interesting to people listening. Go ahead. No, I mean, the most cut and dried is obstruction of justice on the papers he kept from the White House. As we know, a lot of politicians keep those papers. He was the only one who committed obstruction of justice against it. Pretty cut and dried.

I totally agree. With Gene Carroll, and here as an old litigation watcher, I had to just scratch my head because he kept going, he got he kept going back and defaming her again. And if he'd only left it alone, you know, if he had listened to any lawyer in the world who gave him good advice, he wouldn't have gone back and repeated the defamatory stuff, which was what gave her a big opportunity, because obviously she hates him and, you know, could find backing to keep suing him. And he's doing it again. I mean, how crazy can you get? And this gets back into the

fact that Trump himself, by being the worst client in the world, which is the lawyer's favorite phrase for him, you're the one who will never follow the advice that every good lawyer will give him, you know, steps much deeper in these legal situations than if he had been taking good advice and trying to pull back out of the quicksand. So, you know, let's leave it with that. I mean, we would not even know Gene Carroll's name if Trump had not made his fourth or fifth or sixth mistake after the original. You know, and of course, you know, we can we can decide separately about how badly he behaved in the original stuff. But the original stuff would all have been forgotten had he not gotten pugnacious about I'm going to go on saying that she was lying. I agree with you. I think the the the election election law violation is utter nonsense.

The Stormy Daniels thing. I oh, the Stormy Daniels one is by common consent, the weakest of the ones. And only because New York has this toolkit of incredible weapons for a prosecutor is it going forward. Because if he had done exactly the same thing in many other states, it just wouldn't have been against state law. Can I tell you and everybody how I always,

and I think this is a pretty powerful argument, for people who don't follow it, in the end, the argument in that case is that Trump was supposed to pay stormy daniels from campaign contributions that if he were that if he were an honest person what he would have done was raised money from little old ladies and then taken it to pay off his mistress that is actually the theory of the case that that is, that this should have been an election expense. Maybe raised it from RNC donors. I don't know.

But the underlying New York law, and again, New York goes way out on a limb in how punitive and stringent it is. But it says you can't falsify records to perpetuate or cover up a crime. And then if crimes are defined very widely, and some of the crimes here, I think genuinely do count as victimless, not all of them necessarily, but once you've got that thing about if they catch you falsifying the business records to cover your tracks,

then they've really got you and massive penalties kick in. Yeah, that's- No, no, no, no. You probably forgot something. No, in New York, they have this provision that and if it's in the furthest of committing a felony, then it becomes a felony in New York.

So they took the federal election law, which again- They're also alleging New York felonies. Right, but a misdemeanor. That would be a misdemeanor. That would be a misdemeanor. That would be a misdemeanor. That would be a misdemeanor. Bragg is resting it on two alleged New York felony charges. Nonetheless, we basically agree on this, which is the weakest of the cases. And then, of course,

there's the big one by Jack Smith in Washington, which is obviously over the most serious conduct. And it raises some novel legal issues. I'm not sure we have time to go into all the details. What's your conclusion on it? You think there's a good case against him? I think there's a pretty good case. I'm not sure the prosecutors are going to prove every theory. He's got a couple of defenses that he could get some of the counts thrown out on.

Now, Georgia today, and we haven't talked about Georgia either, he got six counts thrown out in the Georgia case because the prosecution had not done its homework properly, crossing the T's and dotting the I's. They have a chance to go back to the grand jury and get those same six counts reinstated. But again, I'll just pass on one bit of information from lawyers, which is you really can tell the difference between federal prosecutors and state prosecutors as far as who is ready for prime time and who can go on stage and not make a slip. In general, the federal prosecutions have been very, very carefully done.

And we just saw that the Georgia ones should have looked up Georgia law and they would have gotten the right kind of count out of the grand jury um if they had done their homework what do you think about that's why the look a lot of the federal uh authorities passed on a lot of these cases that the states then took up it's it's it's interesting i mean obviously the federal authorities in the form of jock smith uh wound up not passing you can argue about whether they should have done it earlier, and you can argue about Smith's decision to let the January 6th committee do its whole thing. That having been said, the interesting omission is they didn't charge Trump with the direct insurrection offenses. And that wound up being important in yet another one that we haven't talked about, which is the efforts to knock him off the ballot.

What did you think of that? What did you think of the Supreme Court decision? I thought it was inevitable. I had been following that very closely. The interesting thing is that intellectually, there's actually, you know, not bad case. Practically and politically, no, you weren't going to get any of the justices. They made that clear at oral argument. And, you know, they split on the rationale. The liberals plus Amy Coney Barrett wanted to decide it narrowly and not decide any issues. They didn't have to.

The five-justice majority said, no, let's slam the door, put nails in it, you know, put iron bars on it. States are not going to kick him off the ballot, period. We don't care what the next fact pattern is. They're not going to. So that's the side that prevailed. But again, intellectually is one thing. In the pinch, when they see potential rioting in the streets, the Supreme Court is not necessarily an intellectual institution.

Well, then I'll let you go after this. So I was on a podcast with Danny Savalos, the MSNBC legal analyst, and they were talking about this case. And at first blush, I pulled up the amendment and I hadn't looked into it at all, and I saw that the last line of the amendment was, Congress shall make all laws

necessary to enforce... Not all laws. And this was hinged in the Supreme Court's opinion because the whole rest of the 14th Amendment, which of course has like five clauses or so, Congress does not have to do anything in order to make all the other ones go into effect. But it is authorized to pass legislation if it wants to make sure that it's done effectively. It's an optional congressional enforcement power. And so the Colorado argued it's the same way on this as in the other four clauses. But the majority took a different view, which is no, this one is different. And we're going to read

the last clause as being restrictive in a way that we don't read it when it comes to the other parts of the Fourth Amendment. Sorry to be so nerdy, but I just had to jump in on that. Yeah, yeah, no, nerdy is good. But so anyways, I read it out loud. I said, well, it seems to me that this would have to this would this would have to apply in this case. I'll tell you why. And that is in the summary of the opening of that opinion. I didn't read the whole opinion, but I read the summary, was that because Congress has to do this.

And the reason was, you kind of alluded to it, that they didn't charge him with insurrection. So what it would amount to is that let's say they did charge him with insurrection. Let's say Colorado charged him with insurrection. And actually he was acquitted. The logic of the case meant they could still throw him off the ballot because it doesn't matter whether they were charged with insurrection. It's the notion that somebody could lose the right to run for president because lawmakers have decided you've committed a crime without any appeal or due process is so obviously un-American. And so it's just it's absurd. You're talking about you're talking about the Congress being able to do exactly that. No, Congress can do it.

By passing a law saying that such and such set of facts constitutes insurrection and thus making clear that Trump could be knocked off the ballot. Again, for the nine justices that decided, they agreed with a lot of what you said in that they saw 50 states marching off in different directions. And they said, this is ridiculous. Not only is it chaotic and yielding different answers depending on what state you go to, but the states just intrinsically can't make a single coherent answer the way the federal government could. Now, Congress could give a coherent single answer but you know what they didn't get to or at least the majority didn't want them to get to is what if this had happened in the federal court instead of the colorado supreme

court would and it went to the supreme court itself could the supreme court itself decide these issues like whether or not he had committed insurrection or not and so the supreme court in a way was taking power out of its own hands. They said, no, federal judges, including us, also should not be deciding this, which was interesting. The four dissenters, or not dissenters, but the four, you know, concurrence with objections said, wait a minute, you know, it wasn't raised here whether federal judges, who are a different case, have to also be stripped of that power. Let's wait and decide that if it comes up. You know, I could go either way at certain times, get back into a corner on originalism versus living document, blah, blah, blah,

on the Constitution. But there are certain times when it seems to me that it gets inverted, that the people who would normally vote one way find themselves voting the other way. Obviously, this was meant for the Civil War when the notion of what an insurrectionist was or wasn't was very obvious. It was just a different time.

And now we're bringing it to the front, and now there's this, even to call it an insurrection. But the idea that anything can happen to a person of consequence, that the state can do anything to a person consequential without any hearing or right to appeal oh they they they gave him a hearing and a right to appeal um the yeah i mean how trump had days to argue against the substantive charges and of course he appealed through the colorado court system um uh on the issues of colorado law and then could appeal to the as he did, but to the U.S. Supreme Court on issues of federal law.

No, he got lots of due process. He had an opportunity to try the issue of whether they don't even know. Well, yes, this happened in Colorado court. So they they defined insurrection as a matter of law to him such that he was able to defend himself against the various counsel people there's some sort of this this whole sequence during uh this case never got as much attention as it should but yes it there was a whole trial there were days of testimony on these very issues so what's the difference how do you define insurrection do you know you'll have to go back and look at the colorado uh series. But yes, they were giving exactly the kind of due process that you would have a right to demand. In that case, I might be wrong.

All that having been said, the states were the wrong place to do this litigation. That's what all nine justices said, and I don't blame them for that. I think that they also look at this. You mentioned originalism, and I want to get back to that for a moment because the law review articles that developed this case, fascinatingly, were not only written by originalists, but mostly by conservative originalists, who, like me, have a Federalist Society sort of background.

But when I saw all this, I thought of one of the favorite sayings of the late Justice Scalia. I was lucky enough to work for Scalia early in my career for a year or two. But he described himself as, quote, a faint-hearted originalist. When originalism can be done without making the pillars of the temple fall, without having the building crash down around you, then, yeah, see if you can put in or respect the originalist reading better. But if it's just going to cause the building to collapse on our heads, no, I'm faint-hearted. I'm not going to destroy big, important institutions of the country just because of it makes for a better original screening. That was Scalia's view. And I think ultimately it's all of their view. People always have to be practical. Do you think do you think they're going to also go

unanimously against his immunity claim in September or March? There's there's going to be some issues where they're going to get down into disputes. In general, all nine of them are going to reject his view of immunity, which is basically he gets to do anything he wants anytime. That's the easy part. None of them, even the ones who are most sympathetic to him, are going to go for the full breadth that he's claiming. But they will probably say, and he might get liberals and not just conservatives to say, there are some things presidents do that the courts cannot second guess uh and so the the so when it gets batted back to the lower court it's probably going to be under some instructions saying here's some guidance as to whether or not uh his actions

would be within that core immunity like you know does it have to do with pursuing foreign policy or i mean whatever they say and then the court will compare each of the actions that he's alleged to have taken and say, is that in or out of the line? I think he's, by and large, not going to come out well in that, but I think that's how it's going to wind up shaking out. I agree with you. This is really the last question.

If you were Jack Smith, that's his name, Jack Smith, right? Yeah. What would be the time? I mean, I'm assuming for the sake of argument that Jack Smith doesn't would like to see Trump's election prospects foiled. When would you like to bring this case? I first it is not a proper motive. No, it's not proper.

It is obviously against their rulebook, which he has been very meticulous about following in the prosecution. All that having been said, except they suspended a 60-day rule. Prosecutors have some control over timing. They obviously have control over when to file the charges, and that sets the clock going for the case itself. And we've seen that big controversy over whether he waited too long on that. It is very common among meticulous federal prosecutors. They take the view, I'm going to nail down the evidence very, very thoroughly before I file the charges, because that's the best way to make sure that everything will stand up,

rather than trying to research the case on the fly after it's already up and running with the judge and do all the research first. And so that having been said, he also has various choices that affect the timing along the way as they do motions practice and so forth. And that turned up in questions of the review of the immunity issues by first the D.C. Circuit and then the Supreme Court. And it was a tough puzzle to crack. I looked at it and I thought, you know, there are legitimate reasons pointing in every direction. There are legitimate reasons to want the D.C. Circuit to weigh in. You know, I think Smith wanted to bypass them. But in fact, there were reasons, legitimate reasons, to accept Trump's argument that, no, you want the D.C. circuit to be able to weigh in traditionally, especially on the most important issues. If you can get the second most

respected federal court to say what it thinks is the best view of the thing, then the Supreme Court is less likely to make a mistake than if the Supreme Court had to decide on the thing for the first time. So yeah, getting their opinion was helpful, and getting the oral argument, you know, the way in which the DC Circuit, so each of these things, as far as, and also, should the Supreme Court have just said, nope, we're upholding the DC Circuit, and that's, you know, that obviously would have sped things up. But again, the Supreme Court might be adding value by refining and or even correcting particular ways in which the D.C. Circuit wasn't 100 percent on target. I don't blame them for wanting to decide the most important issue they're going to hear. I have. By the way, I knew Tanya Chutkin in my 20s for a very short time. And she's very smart.

I don't know if she'd remember me, but I remember her. But anyway, I think it worked out perfectly for them. But as you're talking, I realize the biggest difference between you and me is that I have less faith in people. But I think he's only human. He wants to see Trump defeated in the election. And this is perfect for him because if the trial had come sooner and, God forbid, Trump was acquitted, this could energize Trump going into November.

The best thing that could happen is that they present all— They're not allowed to take that into account I know I'm too trusting I just said you have more faith in people than I do but let me tell you for them to be able to dump all that evidence in October

in October you can see that as backfiring against Trump's own tactics of delay because if he said I'm innocent and I want a fast trial on this it would have been over a long You can see that as backfiring against Trump's own tactics of delay. Yes, that's my point. Because if he said, I'm innocent and I want a fast trial on this, it would have been over long, long before October, one way or the other. And, you know, let's face it, the issues are not so mysterious that he could not have said, look, you know, it's only going to take my lawyers a month to come up with good arguments on all the issues. Let's have a fast trial. I think it's a backfire.

Of course he chose delay instead. I don't think, except he might go to jail. I don't know if there's a jail in this. But listen, the reason I don't think you're right is that there was a 60-day rule. They normally don't hold trials 60 days around an election of someone who's running for office. They're

suspending it in this case. What's the actual rule? It's a little bit different from that. But anyway, go ahead. No, they're suspending it. He's suspending it in this situation. No, I don't think it. He's suspending it in this situation. No, I don't think it's quite that way. But again, we don't have the papers. Okay, okay, okay. We can refer them. That's what I heard.

That's what I heard somebody say. We'll have to leave that aside for another day. Okay, I saw a meme that said that, so I know it must be true. Oh, yeah. Rude of all evil is passing memes around. Anyway. All right, so it's a pleasure.

I'm very grateful that you had me on to talk about all this. It's a pleasure, and let's see what happens. Maybe after all the dust settles, we'll have another session where we can review it all. Sounds good. Okay, thank you, sir. Okay, thanks.

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