The Daily Beast Podcast - ‘They Might as Well Have Torn Up the Constitution’

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

For years, a central goal of the conservative movement was to install right-wing judges. A Republican president delivered, big time. And these Trumpists are still pissed.  Which tells you one thing. For the authoritarian wing of the Republican party, this was never about interpreting the American legal code. It was always about raw political power.  “It's not about the rule of law. It's not about getting good qualified judges. It's about results- oriented litigation,” former U.S. Attorney for Alabama Joyce Vance tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “They want judges who will vote to save the election for a president who has clearly lost it. And that's just out of bounds. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that the courts could be used to steal an election is really the epitome of being anti-democratic. It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous. It just shows you that these folks are off the rails. They might as well have stood on a stage at CPAC and torn up the Constitution.”  Vance adds, “We should immediately begin to identify what's being done here as anti-democratic. I don't believe that that's where my Republican friends in Alabama are. Many of them are good people who have different principled views than I have on policy issues. They believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. And they're horrified by what they're seeing.”  Because the Trumpists aren’t just looking for judges that overturn elections they don’t like. They don’t want anyone outside of their crowd to be able to vote, period. “These efforts to suppress the vote previously have been relegated to dark corners of political operatives. It's now actually the platform of the Republican party to make it hard for people to vote, because they're afraid that they might not vote Republican. They should be expending half the energy they're expending on voter suppression on trying to win voters over, on creating policies that are appealing to the population,” Vance says. “This is a sickness in the American political dialogue.”  Vance also looks at the mushrooming scandals around Andrew Cuomo, and the mounting legal cases for Trump. Then, Olivia Troye, who worked for Trump and Mike Pence during the early days of the pandemic, talks about their botched response to COVID. “It turns out nobody in the White House cared about spreading the virus,” she says. And the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, fresh from CPAC, talks about how even straight-laced Republicans are now espousing the Big Lie. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at the Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything doesn't go too far off the rails, while we have fun discussions about our world gone mad. And while I take that

duty seriously, ourselves, not so much. On this episode, we're going to talk to former district attorney Joyce Fats about what's going on in the legal wars around voting rights, as well as Trump's legal woes. And Olivia Troy is going to tell us her perspective on some of the things that are going on after working under Mike Pence. But first, we're going to talk to the Washington and post-political reporter Dave Weigel about what he saw at CPAC this weekend. Hi, Dave. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on.

Happy to do it. I'm so thrilled. This whole weekend, I've been, like, watching you because this is, like, my first CPAC in a while where I haven't been, and you have been on the ground, interviewing people and just, like, drinking in the weirdness. Yeah, and trying to be respectful of the conference. I mean, I, because I've covered, I cover the left more. that I cover conservatives at the moment, but I covered conservatives quite a lot for years.

And I'd have to get some of the past out of my head because parties change and ideologies and movements change. But I have so much CPAC knowledge that one thing I don't do is say, let me find I'm the craziest person. But what I found is that if I just go around and talk, a question like, hey, was the election stolen, did the January 6 riots happen? And I find people who are not wearing crazy hats and what else people wear besides hats. I guess T-shirts, crazy hats and T-shirt. I wish I had some more interesting item of clothing I mentioned. People are just laymen just kind of saying, I mean, there's one woman I talked to at CPAC final day who I had a good conversation with about how she became a conservative. And then she just started to free associate on.

Like, well, you know, Trump gave the speech at this time a day. And the Capitol's breached at this time of day. And there's no way that Trump could have inspired as even though the NG's. Jesus. And so that. So without looking for people to, by no means I was looking for people to embarrass them, I just kept finding that everyone had this experience, finding people whose catechism of conservatism now includes the 2020 election was stolen.

That seems to be like a pretty commonly held belief at this point. Among conservatives, and that's the thing. So it's not new that one party has very different than the other or that they've diverged more and more every few years. Yeah. There's a lot of policy on this, that Democrats generally think the country's more conservative if it is then, and also Republicans think the country's more conservative than it is.

But so when you cover Democrats, some of the younger Democrats that say under 35 have kind of a brio in the sense that they don't need to compromise with conservatives. And this is kind of the AOC style. But it's based on polling. It's based on what they want, but it's also tied to something. I mean, the point of the Green New Deal, for however, the rollout was sloppy and botched was we have this agenda and we have this existential. threat, how do we make it into something big and popular? Whereas the thing about CPAC was there

are a lot of ideas that are very popular inside the conservative base. The assumption is that the conservative movement is a natural majority and that it might have been even been a majority last year. So we just need to express it and tell more people and we're fine. I'm not sure that's naive in most cases. There are backlashes that the media does not see coming that come from the right. Sometimes backlash is from the left. But on the election stuff, you, you I do wonder who is going to be recruited into the, I'm still angry that Donald Trump, that Donald Trump lost, and I think it was stolen club, which independence and which Democrats, they're going to pull over with that. I don't see much of it happening. I think it's gotten worse or gotten less attractive since January 6th. With those backlash, one of the things that struck me with CPAC was just how much it was this Joe Biden as a socialist lack of reality going on. Do you think that that's going to hold much currency to anybody that doesn't attend that conference?

or read Q drops. Some of the Q stuff. And so I honestly blinked and missed it. I think I walked out of the room one point. But there was Angela Stanton King, who people had pointed out, was a Q person, got time at CPAC and said from the stage, the kind of teach the controversy take on Q, which is like, well, if this is real, we need to look into it. I'm like, okay.

Yes, of course. If 9-11 was actually a hologramed, we need to look into it, sure. I mean, we can say that for anything. That wasn't probably. And the conference did some things to minimize the amount of dangerous. crazy people inside. Yeah, I wondered about that. So it's at this High Regency, and there's a section of Orlando on an international drive, which is just conference centers and conference hotels, the convention centers there. The conference itself, you had to have a badge to get in. You had to

have applied and been confirmed to get into it. So there comes a point in the hotel where you can't get past the security into anything unless you have a badge. You have completed a little health survey and you've had a one of the thermometer guns that I don't think actually work that people point at your head. Yes. And so if you were in the area and taking your mask off for a length of time, you'd get shamed by a hotel staffer. And if you kept it off, you'd get kicked out.

And they really were kicking people out. So I kept hearing people back in D.C., oh, does nobody have a mask? And say, no, they have masks on. I mean, do they enjoy it? Not especially. but they'd rather be indoors at a conference with masks on than not at any conference at all, which they thought was the other option. Now, in addition to that, outside, there were people who couldn't get in and didn't even try,

but they just showed up to protest. Right. So there was a small cadre, I don't know, 20, 25. Is that Nick Fuentes? Well, he was part of that. So that's the two things. I'm glad you point that out. There was a small group of Democratic liberal protesters, not that many, just kind of, you know,

getting on the news to say we're against this thing happening. There was an outdoor kind of rollicking mega rally on Saturday and Sunday. A big one on Sunday, I mean, really kind of lined a bunch, a lot of the drive. And you had cars in a caravan going in a loop with Trump flags and which what you see a lot of at mega events is these sort of anti-Chinese communist organizations like the Epic Times. Saw their merch. They were in the caravan. Saw that. And then separately there was this America First.

this Nick Fuentes. Can you explain to our listeners? Because not, we always have to think of my dad. My dad is not going to know who Nick Fuentes is. Yes. I was kind of rolling on and trying to explain 12 things at once. I mean, I feel like if there is a audiovisual component of this podcast or I can just like throw it chart up, it'd be ideal. We're there yet. Glenn Beck it up. Who Nick Fuentes is this young podcaster who's been taken off a bunch of popular platforms like YouTube because he's, you know, Holocaust, he's told Holocaust denial jokes. He's white nationalist. He's basically, I'd say, how would I put it? You know how, like, you maybe kill some weeds in the yard and then, like, even crappier less than like a week comes up a year later? So if Richard Spencer was alt-right mark one, he's kind of alt-right mark two.

And to me, as a, and nobody take this out of context, I don't know what it is that. as a rhetoritian and a pundit and a commentator, completely ignorant but very good at it. You know, very punchy and witty and sarcastic and very racist. I mean, he's had people, he's kind of the adopted leader of this Groyper version of the alt-right, you know, where people have a grosser version of the Pepe cartoon. I mean, that's almost the metaphor tells itself.

They went from Richard Spencer, had Pepe, this guy has Groper. And it's a card, I'd say it's unclear how many people are following him at this point. Wherever he went at CPAC, around CPAC, because he was not allowed in. He'd have a few dozen people chanting slogans as he said them. Right. I mean, it really was kind of creepy at point. It's how much you could get people saying his slogans. But he's very immature.

I mean, at one point he'd be kind of mockingly tries to get in without a mask, throws his mask on the ground, and says that CPAC is gay. All right, all right, dude. You're 22, you insist, okay. But he had his own conference. It wasn't really a conference. It was like an evening dinner gala and a bunch of speeches near the hotel, but not with press a lot in it.

And this became a controversy because one of CPAC's guests spoke at both. So everything that happened to CPAC is basically the extremism that Trump himself endorses. And then there were stuff outside CPAC, which is stuff that Trump has not endorsed. You know, whatever one says of Trump, he's not out there making jokes about the Holocaust. Right. I think it's important that we talk about the sitting congressmen who spoke at both. CPAC and Nick Fuentes. Paul Gozar, an Arizona Republican, who I believe he came in the Tea Party class, but he's always had a very safe seat in Arizona. He's got Yuma. He's got the kind of red, super red, you know, California exile chunks of the state.

He is not as high profile as a Steve King or some of the other guys in the hardcore Freedom Caucus, even Andy Biggs. But he is very far right, very anti-immigration. He was one of the crime movers on once Trump was losing Arizona, Trump had lost the state, the count continued. One of the guys saying that we needed to overturn the election somehow. So having stopped the steel rallies, advocating for the state legislature, having a special session to investigate it, and then finally challenging the vote on the House floor. He had a panel at CPAC, and he also spoke at this AFPAC conference, America First Conference. And to be fair to him, if you want to, he did not say anything racist. He was just in the audience as the speaker went on for more than an.

hour with a bunch of racist comments and making fun of the disabled, et cetera, et cetera. He leaned into that, and his explanation to me was that it was a young audience with a lot of energy and he'll speak to that group because he wants to have the debate in the conversation. Okay, whatever. I don't think he did not go there and stand up and say, I'm debating you right now. He gave his own speech and they sat and listened to the whole thing. That was one story I wrote off the conference because I was saying, okay, well, this is happening. The conference has been somewhat careful about keeping out true fringe, racist activists, but how. How do they navigate around this?

The way they navigate around was that Gozart just said he denounced white racism at the very top, I should say, of his panel. He talked to me a little bit, and I think later in the day he finally had some staffers stopping him from talking to reporters. That wasn't clear what he did after that. What do you think, like, you have been to many CPACs? Do you notice a difference between this one and previous ones? I sometimes worry that I get lost in the details because I've been to CPACs, most of them since 2006. I skipped last year only because I was covering. the Democratic primary.

Right. I think I wasn't even back in D.C. for like a month. Maybe for a day to, you know, do a, do a Ben Carson and get a new suit. Or new clothes aren't really wear suits in the trail. But, yeah, I've been since, with the first one I went to,

George Bush was president, Iraq war was not very popular. There's a sense that Republicans were going to do badly in the midterms. Wow. Bush's priority for a second term included an immigration bill. So you had basically the more powerful people in the conservative movement at that point, like match lap on the AC.

I'm not sure who's in the ACA board at that time because he was working in a Bush administration, but a lot of conservative saying, all right, well, here's what, what does our movement stand for? Let's, you know, let's debate it. Should we be, was Iraq a good idea? Should we have some sort of immigration dynasty plus border security or is any of that going to destroy us? One thing they were very careful about doing to stick on immigration is not to give the impression. We want to slow down immigration because we are worried demographically that it will bring in people

who are not white and will vote against us. They were accused of, and I'm saying that in kind of blunt and paraphrasing, because no one would go out and say that. It's such a radical difference from now. Right. And now it's been, even before Trump took the stage,

it's been default messaging for last year, too, but really since Democrats took power, is Republicans are pointing to immigration, refugee programs, asylum programs, and saying, why are Democrats spending money on them instead of us? Right. They'd rather,

the way the Rick Scott formulation was they're closing the schools and opening the borders. I think Steve Scalise at one point, who, you know, Steve Scalise has had his own run-ins with white supremacist, you know, why are they vaccinating illegal immigrants before even some Americans? When they have an amendment to something, it's usually the money in this bill can't be used for illegal immigrants. And so that style basically has completely triumphed. And I talked to Matt Schlapp who runs the Americans for Conservative Union about it before the conference.

He said, yeah, I mean, that won. Like, I was skeptical. some of this and Trump's president Trump won and he did the stuff and it worked so we're for it now and you people can read my interview to see what he actually said but it's that was the gist of it so that's the biggest difference I'd say is that now at the same time it's a more diverse crowd than some CPECs I've seen there are a lot of black conservatives a lot of them a lot of black conservative groups had sent folks there were I met some uh you know some this is Florida where you've got a lot of immigrants from central America who hate communism you

had some of that so it wasn't an all white crowd by any means it was actually fairly diverse for a conservative audience. For a Republican Party audience in the year 2021, probably about as diverse as you get. But at the same time, the premise is we can have a diverse voting block, but we can be against raising the refugee cap. We can be against any form of immigration industry. We can be against non-citizen health workers getting the vaccine. And those themes, I mean, this is the thing about CPAC is in addition to the most hooky and clicky stuff, you have to kind of pay attention to the, to the, to

the melody under everything. And that was really the trend I saw with Trump out of power. I felt like, and again, I was not there. I was just watching it. But it felt like a cult without a leader in my mind. And then all of a sudden I thought, well, Trump will come in and sort of claim the party. And then that straw poll, I was surprised. I was surprised by the top line numbers.

But the poll included a couple things. Every year they do a straw poll at CPAC where they vote for kind of. of who their presidential dream pick is. Yes, and I was double-checking because I have the PowerPoint. I think they said from the stage how people participate they might not have announced how many people voted because the attendance was lower this year. And it's not their fault. There's a pandemic.

But they, it was scaled down. But they like to say, this is the most ever. And they guess you're going to say that. Yeah, the polling when they just asked the pure horse race question, you know, who would you vote for with Trump as an option? It was 55% of them would vote for Trump. 21% for Ronda Santas. No one else got more than 5%, more than 4%, actually.

But this is like Trump's place. Right. But at the same time, the poll asked, do you approve or disapproved the job Trump did his president? And that went from the first year they asked, he'd been president a month, and it was 86%. The last year of his presidency, 2020, it was 95%. And then this year, considering what had happened the last year.

So, I mean, if you're into confirming judge is great. if you're into anything else, not great. 97%. And when they asked if you wanted the party to follow his agenda, continue his agenda, or to move away, and they didn't explain what moving away meant, that was 95%. And what's his agenda?

Well, and that's the question, because Republicans have not, and they get annoyed sometimes when you ask about this, because they'll say, well, people don't, people don't pay attention to platforms. I take that, I take offense with that. have every four years, like a pretty robust platform debate. We'll see if they have one of an incumbent president. But they actually, one party fights over the platform and says, okay, here's

our policies. Or there'll be legislation. Here's our legislation. You're right. There's not a clear agenda from Trump. It is now, it encompasses the immigration stuff I was talking about. It basically, imagine the last four years and keep it going and like keep it going is the Trump agenda. On the details, there's not a lot. So you're right. From my conversations and anyone, reporter who was there, we'll tell you the same thing. You were not meeting people at that conference who didn't want Trump to be president again. They really read that. So I was looking at that and said, okay, the delta between 97% approval of Trump and 55% would want to vote for him. I think that some people seeing the question for the first time and saying, well, gosh, let me give a vote to Ron DeSantis

because I like him and I want to see him do well. Or gosh, I don't know. Maybe the media is going to be so, you know, bullied Trump out of it. So I think it was some strategic. that's the right word voting and not a bunch of people at this conference based around on Trump saying, you know who I'm sick of? I didn't read it that way. But again, it involves reading like thousands of minds at once, I'm not good at. Right. And it's impossible. So I have a question, though, about that.

Because I will admit as somebody who follows this closely, I was a little shocked that the Santis was the guy up to Trump. What do we think that these people find so appealing about a man who I look at it? I'm like, oh, who would want to see this man for one more second? When he's going through might be like a bizarre version of what Andrew Cuomo was going through a year ago, which is people are enjoying. It's open. People like to go there. Enjoying, I guess, is a better way. Yeah.

It's not the same as Cuomo because of Cuomo was people were scared. And it looks like he's getting this under control. With DeSantis, instead of reacting to the liberals and keeping everything locked down, he kept some things open, including schools. And we feel great. And I think there's a little bit of, it's not quite misinformation. The sense you get in Florida or at the NCPAC was that every blue state is 100% locked down, only only red states are free. That's simplistic. But because that's the shorthand, DeSantis is the, importantly, the governor who's gotten the most crap from the press.

He got the most negative coverage for how Florida is handling. I mean, I honestly think we were in Florida, but if another Republican governor looking at the press, like if, if, um, not Charlie Baker or something. Right. But, yeah, if, if Greg Abbott had been the one attacked the most by the press, I think Greg Abbott would get a, would get a boost. It's a combination of he kept, he kept things mostly open and the press was mad at him for it. And I think that really fueled it.

And he also fights with the press all the time. So that is very trumpy. Yeah. And he's, uh, he's got the Florida press corps and a banter back and forth. I haven't followed every step of the, uh, the situation with the, the former state health worker who's been laid off and feuding with him, but things like that. I think it's, and so at this moment, every year is different. Some trends, last some trends don't look at Republicans who underrated Trump. But I don't know how much of the DeSantis interest is a version of what happened

with Scott Walker, which is Scott Walker is at the tip of the spear. He's fighting the unions and the media hates him. He was the guy getting buzz at places like CPAC for quite a while. And, you know, pretty forgettable speeches, sometimes kind of silly speeches. But because he was the the guy who beat. And remember, he had a recall election he beat that helped him. So that impulse of the, this is the person who's getting them into the most scraps with the press over stuff that we agree with is like rocket fuel for anyone with these big ambitions. I mean, it's the Republicans who are not in that position, I think, if they do want to run for president, 22, or just are not part of the conversation right now. And even like a Josh

Hawley and Ted Cruz who challenged this electoral vote, although Holly is still the one. He keeps saying that he challenged it because he wanted to have a debate and then whimped out of actually saying anything because they wanted they wanted to be over. So I don't know what his position is in any of this. But those guys, that has not ironically, considering how much passion there is about the election, about 2020, and that was rated as the top issue on the CPAC straw poll. For all that, that issue has not lit a fire. And I think it's just because if your big thing is, I think the election was stolen, you can just say you're, you want to want, you want Trump back. And if your big issue is I hate the lockdowns. You want DeSantis.

You want one of the, yeah, Desantis or Republican guys. governor who was fighting the lockdowns. Don Jr's speech struck me as odd. He got up there. I mean, I thought he cut it off or something because it was very short. So a couple folks were out of the schedule fairly late. Like Wayne Lafierre, who just really just sounded like a like a shell of a man. Like he just got to, it was like it was this weird speech that was like a man who had to return a lot of suits. Well, it was like there were two speeches, one that was about Biden's arrested gun rights,

one that was about the NRA legal fights, but without getting into detail, and somebody dropped the speeches and they kind of got mixed up. So he had just, like, by far the dullest speech ever heard from him, but he was a late edition, and he went on for a while. Don Jr. was a late edition, kind of just was in and out. I think it was, it was terribly short, but that's the Don's style. I mean, I covered him a little bit as a surrogate for his father in 2020, and his speeches were not like, here's the argument for my father. It was, can you believe these schmucks attacking him? I wasn't say schmucks. Do you believe? Do you believe? the people talking my father and what hypocrites and liars they are. I mean, he's a, he is a pure

kind of speaker. So the Don Jr. speech, I thought, was on his terms, effective. And a lot of speakers, I thought, they have their own style. And it was not in the bloodstream of this year's conference the way that Don Jr. was. I mean, there's stuff I think Don Jr. does better than his dad, because he doesn't have to get into the details of like, we got the DHS to make a deal with the Honduras. You don't have to say that. He's like, and that's, like, and that's, Brian's stealth is fat. And he just goes that, he goes that well. And, you know, that that kind of insult comedy kind of works. Do you think he could ever run for anything? Yeah. I mean, I think if, if, I'm trying to think. So he, he currently has a place in Florida. I think if a one of the conservative

Republicans in Florida in any district, I mean, one that he doesn't live in, I think if somebody in like a plus 15, 20 Trump seat retired, he wanted to be a congressman, he could win. If he wants to do more than that, you know, it's a Senate race or something. You know, there'd be, he in the way. But any race, I think anywhere where Trump is popular, within the Republican Party, he's incredibly popular. And I mean, I've met in talking to Republican voters, despite, Don Jr. doesn't really have much of a career apart from his dad's company, which is, that's fine. I mean, family builds a company and you're next in line. That happens. But the adoration for him is pretty similar where I'll talk to folks and are like,

I like that he's not a politician. He's a businessman. He tells it like it is. I mean, it's a version of what you get from Trump. This was so great. Thank you so much. Joyce Vance is a former U.S. attorney as well as a co-host of the Sisters in Law podcast. And today she's going to talk to us about voting rights along with some of the legal jeopardy the former president Donald J. Trump is about to go through. Hi, Joyce Vance. Good morning, Molly. How are you? I'm good. I'm so excited to have you on. This is really fun. I'm really glad to be with you. I've loved your podcast ever since you guys first started. So this is a real honor for me.

Oh, well, I love that. That's really cool. The first thing I want to talk about, because this is really, I think, very interesting. It's CPAC, and I don't know why this was, but many of the voting panels had people complaining about the judges. Yes, you know, that's really unusual for CPAC because an enormous part of the Republican political agenda, and particularly CPAC and federalist society folks, has been getting, you know, what they perceive as their judges on the bench. And Mitch McConnell has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in packing the courts, including the Supreme Court. These judges, some of them came to the bench without qualified ratings from the ABA, which is a shocking thing for a federal judge. Many of them are very young and lack experience on trial courts. Many of them, frankly, are fine judges to whom I have no objection.

But the point is that at CPAP for there to be objection, to the judges that they've been able to put on the court over the last four years, tells you one thing. For them, judges are about politics and these close call cases, whether it's election cases or abortion or other issues that they care about deeply from an ideological point of view. It's not about the rule of law. It's not about getting good qualified judges.

It's about results-oriented litigation. Yeah, what is that? They want judges who will align with their preordained view. They want judges who will vote to save the election for a president who has clearly lost it. And that's just out of bounds. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that the courts could be used to steal an election is really the epitome of being anti-democratic.

It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous. It just shows you that these folks are off the rails. They might as well have stood on stage at CPAC and torn up the Constitution. It definitely feels like it's part of this anti-democracy move. Molly, can we stop? That's the first time I've heard somebody call it that, the anti-democracy move. But I was having a conversation with a reporter friend last night.

We were talking about how long it took the press to call what Trump was doing lying, right? That was a big step for folks. We should not make that same mistake with what happens in the post-Trump era. we should immediately begin to identify what's being done here as anti-democratic. I don't believe that that's where my Republican friends in Alabama are. Many of them are good people who have different principled views than I have on policy issues. They believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, and they're horrified by what they're seeing. We need to create space in the American political conversation for people on the right and left to come together and take a stand in favor of democracy before they go on to.

to disagree about politics. Right. Now, here's a question. So this gets to, and I heard this a lot during CPAC too, which I thought was wacky, was they were like, everyone has to vote no on HB1. HB1 is this voting rights bill? It's always been a bipartisan effort to re-up the Voting Rights Act. It's, I think, deeply painful to live in a country that's based on the principle of one person, one vote. Sure, that's aspirational, but that's, you know, that's, you know, that's, That's what we look to in this country. And to have a political party that now understands it can't win elections if too many people vote.

Former President Trump said that out loud in March of 2020 on the campaign trail. And so what they're actually doing is these efforts to suppress the vote that previously have been relegated to dark corners of political operatives. It's now actually the platform of the Republican Party to make it hard for people to vote because they're afraid that they might not vote Republican. They should be expending half the energy they're expending on voter suppression on trying to win voters over, on creating policies that are appealing to the population. And I think this is a sickness in the American political dialogue.

Yeah, and it seems like, I mean, it just seems like they don't have anything to offer, so they've decided they're just going to make it hard to vote. That voter rights, HB1, that was the sort of legacy of John Lewis, right? Well, that's right. And it's necessary in the wake of the Shelby County decision, which was a case the Supreme Court handed down during the Obama era that gutted the Voting Rights Act. It used to be that states had to do something called preclearance to change voting rules. If you wanted to change polling places or shorten the number of early voting days you had or whatever, you had to either go to DOJ or to a court in the District of Columbia to get approval for that. County ended that process. Shelby County is where? So Shelby County is in Alabama, about 30 minutes south of where I'm sitting right now. That case came out of my district while I was the U.S. attorney. It had been started much earlier. And DOJ vigorously defended that case. But the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts, what he wrote in the majority opinion was, hey, the Voting Rights Act has worked over the years.

more need for it because we've fixed the problems. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg got it exactly right. She said, you don't throw away your umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm because you're still dry. Right. And that's what the Shelby County decision did. That's why we so desperately need HR1. Sorry, I should say HB1. I'm leading you down the path there. HB1 was historically bipartisan. Well, re-upping the voting rights, which you had to do periodically, number of years was always as strong bipartisan effort. That has not happened since Shelby County. And so here's what that case said. It sort of put the burden back on Congress. And it said, Congress, if you want to have a Voting Rights Act that looks like the one that we've just gutted,

then you need to build a stronger record showing where there is discrimination, where there is impact on voting rights. And then you can go ahead and have a new voting rights bill. So what will happen here is that Congress will have to provide a legislative record with lots of evidence in the course of passing this bill in order for it to withstand judicial scrutiny. And that's a little bit of a complicated process. That's not as easy as just bringing the bill to a vote and voting on it quickly. It's so interesting. Now, talking about bipartisanship-ish, in Georgia, Republicans are bringing a case against Trump. Can we talk about that? Yeah. So that is, Is a Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, who has decided that Trump trying to blackmail him for votes is worthy of prosecution?

Is that correct? So it's a pretty interesting dynamic. You know, Georgia, the statewide leadership leans heavily conservative. I assume Raffensberger would want to be in any position other than the position that Trump forced him into and would be just as happy to let the whole thing. die now that the election is over and his family is no longer being threatened, which I think is what prompted him to speak out publicly. But we now have this situation where there's a tape that's been released of the former president clearly, clearly trying to engage in voter fraud. And that has to be addressed. And interestingly enough, the appropriate person in the state

of Georgia to do that is the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, which happens. to be a not, you know, exclusively Democratic county, but it is heavily Democratic. It interestingly enough, includes some very wealthy zip codes that lean more Republican and the north part of the county is Republican. But the DA brand new in January of this year is an African-American woman, very experienced prosecutor. And she now has the job of figuring out whether she can find evidence to prove that Trump intended to violate the Georgia law. And this will turn in large part on his intent. Do you think they have a case against him?

So, look, I've listened to the tape, Molly. It's really, really easy to be an armchair prosecutor. I listen to the tape and I'm ready to go to the grand jury. It's just that good. As a prosecutor, though, before you indict, you do need to sit down and think about what's the defense going to be. Can I overcome the defense? And Trump's defense here is likely going to be that he really be.

that he really believes that he won. So what he was doing was just asking for a fair outcome. Now, look, judges always instruct juries before they go to deliberate, that they don't have to leave their common sense at the door, that they can take it into the jury room with them and use it to evaluate what they heard. And using your common sense and listening to that tape, it is really pretty clear that Trump is just desperate to steal the election,

that it's classic voter fraud. But I would want to talk to some of the people around him and get access to some of his communications. As a prosecutor, you really need some evidence that shows that at some level he knew he had lost in Georgia and was seeking to commit fraud before you're ready to indict. So I assume that that's what the DA is working on. There are other legal cases against Trump. One of them, or I don't know how many, but Tish James is definitely working around the clock. What are you seeing there and what?

Do you think has the best chance of sending him to jail? And do you think there's a world in which that guy goes to jail? Those are a lot of really good questions. Right. Part with what the New York Attorney General is doing. Interestingly enough, New York, the way their system is set up, she doesn't have a lot of primary criminal jurisdiction. So most of what she's looking at are civil cases.

No, we're just going to go to jail at the end of these. Although she can refer them to folks. Hello, side amounts in Manhattan, who have criminal jurisdiction. But ultimately, it may be her cases that really do a lot of damage to Trump. My sense, and look, I might be wrong about this, but my sense is that she's not preparing to bring one big civil action against him. She appears to be looking at a variety of civil and regulatory transgressions. And she could be lining up what we call term of art in the South a mess of cases against the former president.

on all sorts of things that could carry relatively difficult, expensive financial penalties and try them up in court. So I think that that is really problematic for him. The question of whether you can put a former president in prison, like so many other things that we've been forced to deal with in the legal system in the time of Trump, is a very novel question. At first blush, it seems pretty obvious. No man's above the law. he can go to prison like anybody else. But there are obvious security issues. He has had access to classified briefings and a lot of sensitive material over the last few years.

And I think you can't responsibly throw him into the general prison population. I've seen the Federal Bureau of Prisons craft some very smart solutions to keep very unusual prisoners safe. And at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, I'm sure it could be done. The question is, what happens if the state of Georgia has to incarcerate a president? That's a little bit more dicey. And then, of course, you just have the practical legal issue here, which is that say the Georgia case, if that were brought criminally, he would be a first time nonviolent offender facing a maximum sentence.

If they charge the case very aggressively as felony voter fraud, the sentence range would be one to three years. I'm not positive that a Georgia judge would put him in custody. But look, home confinement with onerous probation conditions and with a fine, that could be real accountability. A criminal conviction carries with it a lot of really important consequences. He would forever be referred to as the first president of the United States who was a felon. And so accountability comes in a lot of different shapes and forms. Do you think Sivant has criminal charges go?

or now? So it's tough to make these big financial cases come to life. The defense is always intent. And here when you've got tax cases and other financial cases, the question is, can you directly link Trump to the crime? He's always going to be saying it was my accountant or it was, you know, one of my children who I barely knew. And so you have to go through all of these documents. It's It's not the tax forms. You know, the tax forms are just clean documents. They say what they say. What's really interesting to me as a prosecutor is the underlying documents and records of

conversations. And I think this is a unique situation where it's very difficult for Trump, who is on videotape all over the place, talking about how he was smarter than everybody else. And he used the tax code in very creative ways to minimize his payment. And there were years when he paid nothing, and the year he was elected, he paid $750 in taxes. And he was proud of that. He bragged about that. As a prosecutor, I am playing that for the jury in opening argument and in closing argument.

Yeah. So that's interesting. Can we talk about Cuomo? Yeah, sure. So we have two allegations on the record. Can you explain to me this sort of in the weed stuff? He had wanted a special investigator. and then he was given another investigator. Can you explain that to us?

Look, first let me just say, when women come forward with credible allegations, they should be investigated. We should treat them with respect. We should investigate despite the passage of time. Because as a woman in her 60s, I'm going to just say that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it would have been very difficult for these women to come forward. Five years ago, two years ago, it was still very difficult with powerful men. Who was going to believe you when it was your word versus theirs? Fortunately, the world is evolving. And something that I think that's important here that we should note is that Cuomo is now agreeing that there has to be investigation. So that's a big step forward. The question is, who does the investigating? And initially,

there was the suggestion that it would be someone who politically wasn't very many steps removed from Cuomo. Now the Attorney General has stepped in, and it looks like there will be more of an independent investigation. And there's a lot of precedent for this in some of the collegiate sports programs where they've had problems. They've brought in outside investigators who are neutral. Louis Free, the former federal judge and former FBI director, conducted one of the ones in Pennsylvania. That's, I think, the gold standard for the process. Bring in somebody who doesn't have a dog in the hunt, somebody who's experienced at conducting investigations, and just let them follow the facts wherever they lead. Do you think that Cuomo should resign? So I think that's a

political calculation that I'm not qualified to make. I try to look at it through the lens of the woman who came forward with Joe Biden, with allegations about Biden. And I had the same position in that situation. When someone comes forward with credible allegations, they should be investigated. In that situation, her allegations did not bear much scrutiny at all, and they were ultimately revealed to be false and nothing happened. I'm willing to give Governor Cuomo that same space. He's denied the allegations. That's fine. Let's look at the allegations brought by these two women who seem to have come forth with a lot of detail, and investigators ought to be able to begin forming judgments about whether there's enough to go forward.

here. That's great. Thank you so much, Joyce. It was really great to have you. I hope you'll come back soon. Hey, folks. If you haven't heard every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner. And sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism as well as getting full access to podcasts and

articles to become a member head to new abnormal.com that's new abnormal dot the daily beast.com Olivia Troy is a national security advisor who worked at DHS under the trump administration and say she's going to talk to us about what she sees going on in the Biden administration and how it compares to what she saw during her time in the Trump administration. Welcome, Olivia, to the new abnormal. Thank you. So you worked for Mike Pence. I sure did.

You were on the coronavirus team. I was. I joined the task force, actually, from the very first meeting. I was on the COVID task force even before Mike Pence was on the task force. So I was attending those meetings since mid-January time frame of 2020. Did you think we were in big trouble? Yes. I don't know that I knew the extent of how bad it was going to be back in January,

but certainly by February, I had concerns. about what this pandemic could potentially become. And look, I'll tell you this. I actually was supposed to travel to California in mid-February to the Carmel area, which I love. And trust me, I would not cancel a trip willingly. It's hard to keep me away from there. But I ended up canceling a trip out there because I was watching the numbers of travelers coming in to California and other places.

And I was getting increasingly concerned that we weren't able to contact trace people on planes and things like that. And so I end up canceling that trip because I realize, I don't know if it's safe for me to travel right now. And I certainly don't want to bring this virus into the White House. Now, fast forward, it turns out nobody in the White House cared about spreading the virus. But right, the irony is not for whatever it was worth, I was trying to protect myself and my boss. Jesus Christ. Did you think to yourself like, oh, God, we are, like, I remember hearing that woman who's, and now you can maybe you can remind me who it was, who spoke in February.

who was like you're going to have to change her whole life? Yes, that was Nancy, and she was a CDC spokesperson. And that is actually, she is one of the main cadillus. I would say that causes Mike Pence to be put in charge in the task force. Can you explain that story a little bit for people who don't know the whole thing? Yeah, so Nancy Messmer. She is a longtime CDC professional. She really knows pandemics.

She really, I would say she has, the ultimate expert on this type of scenario, right? She is the person that would normally be speaking to the public during an outbreak of such magnitude. And so she goes on and she does a briefing and she tells people basically the flat-out truth. She says, we are going to have to change our ways. She gives a suggestion and she talks about the virus and the reality of it. and she doesn't sugarcoat it. Well, that causes the stock market to plummet. I remember this because

I was sitting in, and right outside of my Pence's office, and everyone is staring at the TV. And I'm, you know, everybody knows this is the way. I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off. So I'm carrying like five million notebooks and, you know, briefings and I don't even know what else. And I walk in and I'm like, why is everybody staring at the TV? Like, what did I miss? And everyone's in shock just watching the market drop and they're like, this is awful. Can you believe this? this is awful. And the next thing you know, there's a meeting called, and people are really angry at Nancy and what she said. And they thought that she was alarmist. She thought that she was the cause of the market drop. Well, she was just communicating in a very factual, honest manner, because what

she was trying to do was she was trying to prepare Americans for what was to come. And she was trying to get Americans to take action to protect themselves from this. And ultimately, that is something that the White House is not okay with. They want to control the messaging on this and in walks my Pence. So, Olivia, with that, you obviously left around August, but one of the things Adi Slavitt said is it seemed that the Trump White House was only concerned with a cure, not a rollout plan. Did that square with what you saw there? Yes, absolutely. I think, you know, Operation Warp Speed launched. It was clear there was a lot of money devoted to the development of the vaccine, and rightly so, right? This is how we get past this pandemic. But the problem is it's not just about the development of the vaccine, right? It's about operationalizing the delivery of the vaccine and getting it out to people. And this is something that I think the Trump

administration repeatedly failed at, whether it came to PPE and getting it out to communities and hospitals that needed it. And then it plays out again in terms of the vaccine distribution where you, I feel like the emperor has no clothes, right? You get there. There's no implementation plan. and then there's no backup surge of supplies there. There's actually no thought into once we have the vaccine, how are we going to do this? Which is astonishing because they had months and months to plan this. Yeah, why do you think they didn't do that? Well, one, I think that they were, the vaccine was sort of always, from my perspective,

it was always something that I think Trump wanted to claim as a win prior to the election. He wanted this to be a campaign win. And you see him, you know, he gets angry with the FDA and the scientists and he bullies them and he's angry that they're not moving fast enough. Well, the truth is that. I mean, they're just trying to follow the regulatory process and make sure that the vaccine is safe. And that is what they did. But I think in terms of the delivery and the distribution, I think the Trump administration always approached this pandemic response as a state problem that they could just blame the governors in the states for and sort of let them take the ownership of all of the bad and aspects that come with

this, right, the challenges. And then they would just take the claim for the positive things of it. But unfortunately, you can't do that when it comes to crisis response, right? That would be like, after a tornado hits a community or a hurricane, that would be like saying, hey, we're not going to send FEMA, this FEMA surge capacity force to help you out. You're on your own. We're just going to maybe throw money at the problem and good luck. even though you, you know, half your community is devastated and you don't have the people on the ground to help you. Do you think that this was a situation where Trump thought he could blame? Because we saw early on and there was some reporting and value fare that Jared was like, we're going to blame the states.

Well, I heard Jared Kushner say that directly. What did you hear him say? You know, he would talk about, for example, New York City, which was ground zero for quite some time. It was awful there. And he would say, well, that's their problem. We don't want to own this. And to me, I was like, but you own it because these are Americans, right? You should care about their life.

Also, he's lived in New York City. Right. These are the New Yorkers that he socialized with and he cared about at the time. I think that's probably why you haven't seen them return to New York anytime recently. It's a weird flex. Did you feel like there was any time? Like, there was one press conference where I thought, oh, he's, finally taking it seriously. Did you feel like there was a moment or now? Well, it was hard because

we'd sit in these task force meetings sometimes that he would attend, not often, but he would join them. And in these meetings, he would be listening. And he would ask the right questions. He would ask about the data. He would compare where things were going, how things were developing. So he was clearly processing the information, right? And Bob Woodward actually, you know, shows that to the entire world when he says he plays the tapes and he says here is Donald Trump talking about the severity and his concern for the virus. And so he goes out, he would go out and do these press previews where it would start off very seriously. But with Donald Trump, the problem is you can't keep him on message. Right. It's only a matter of

like minutes when he'll start to go off message and it'll go off the rails. And so he would start with a tone of seriousness. But then all of that would be destroyed. And, and I, mind when he then goes out and tells people that they have the option not to wear a mask. And he himself doesn't wear a mask. And he's creating divisiveness and doubt in the people's heads when he calls it the Democratic hoax from the very beginning. He calls it the China virus. And I mean, that is just all of those things combined are never going to lead to a scenario where Americans are going to unite together to counter a pandemic of this magnitude. I want to ask you about hang Mike Pence. So you have a lot.

So you have your former boss who has been really quite loyal to Trump this entire time. And then you have his supporters chanting, hang Mike Pence. What do you think, I mean, you know Mike Pence. What is going on? I'm pretty sure he was really angry. Yeah. I can't imagine what it must feel like to say after everything I've done and put up with, this is how it ends, right?

Four years. And it ends up with people sitting on the other side of that. wall calling for my hanging and putting the life of myself, my daughter, my wife in danger, and the lives of many others. And, you know, Mike Pence, you know, whether you agree with his politics or not, I have seen him be very passionate and caring towards others, right? And I am sure that it was not lost on him, all the hurt that was caused that day and all of the pain. At that moment, you have a choice going forward on whether you actually want to take a stand and lead. Yeah. And I think this is the fundamental problem with Mike Pence that I saw while working on his staff, on his

national security team, is that he just, he doesn't take a stand. I mean, here's someone who basically called for his assassination, right? Yeah, yeah. You're seeing the reports that Mike Pence continues to praise Trump, right? The amount of times that he brings greetings from Donald Trump during my tenure working for him, I can't tell you, it used to make me sick hearing that in the speeches over and over and over. I was like, why can't you just go on stage and just speak? Do we always have to go into a three-minute diatribe about Donald Trump and how great he is and then continue on? But he knows his boss and he knows the base of the Trump Republican Party, as I now call it. So the Biden administration just announced they're going to let families separated under the

Trump administration reunite inside the U.S. was just announced by NBC. Do you have any reaction to that? I think that was one of the most horrendous. darkest moments for our country. I think what happened there. Look, I'm from the border. I grew up in El Paso. El Paso really took the brunt of a lot of the immediate, extreme implementation of the Trump administration's executive orders. And this was one of them. And although it is a very challenging problem, I don't know how, one, you lose children's parents and how you continue to push a message that this is okay. So I think that Biden administration is doing the right thing by addressing this for hand and trying to unify these families and try to figure out the way forward for this

complicated situation. I won't be easy by any means. But I think that that speaks to the greater problem that we, I think that lawmakers have struggled with for decades, right? We've got to fix the immigration system. I think the mandate approach just doesn't work. I think Republicans and Democrats that's need to come together and actually work on policy, real policy, not just vitriol and hate and just espousing it, but actually sit down and say, how do we fix us so that we don't have this scenario happen again? So with that, the Biden administration is getting a lot of criticism from people like AOC and the rights and it's been announced that they have. I don't want to say cages for kids, but they're still doing child detention. Do you have any feelings about what that policy should look

like since you worked so closely on it? I was not at DHS when they were operationalizing it, but I will say that it is no easy task to try to do this. And there's no immediate solution. Right. So I think what from what I've seen, I think Biden is trying to find put these children that are separated in in better conditions, right? So they're not in these cages. They're in facilities that are nicer. They're a nicer environment where they feels more, you know, like a supportive atmosphere while they continue to grapple with this problem. I mean, I don't know, you know, not to be, not to criticize AOC, but what do they think? Like, how does this happen overnight? Are they expecting these children to just be released into the world? I mean, it's a dangerous world out there.

We have a lot of challenges in terms of that. And I want ultimately, for me personally, I would want I just want these children to be safe, right, and have the opportunity to have, you know, educators come in, tutor them, provide them with these opportunities. And, you know, it's not lost on me that we're in a major pandemic still right now, right? And that's something that I think the Biden administration really is grappling with is how do you solve all of these things that have happened that are legacy of the Trump administration as fast as possible, but also taking into account that you're in the middle of a pandemic. And you've got to figure out how you balance that and the implications of that.

I know that there was a story that after the election, Mike Pence was sleeping on people's couches. And now he sort of found a home with heritage. But do you, like, how do you see this? Like, I feel like Mike Pence had all these chances to stand up against Trump. He didn't take them, but he still ended up in this very scary situation. Where do you think this ends for him? I don't know.

Personally, I don't think that Mike Pence has a political future in terms of, of being able to win a presidential election. I think that the legacy of what Trump did and the fury that he brought towards him has all of these Trump supporters still very angry at him. And, you know, they, I think that they're not going to come out and support him because you have Donald Trump at CPAC repeating over and over this claim that the election was still stolen from him. Right. And he's still feeding the big lie to a whole population out there that is listening to. and still believes it today. And that is all fundamentally dangerous

because that is what led to the calls for my pens is hanging, right? So I don't know how you overcome that within a party that Trump clearly still is claiming to be his own. Hi, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly John Fass. I heard that you have a pointed fuck that guy for us today.

Well, I have a very musy fuck that guy because, you know, it's funny, it's one of those things. I saw it early. earlier in the day, and I thought, wait, what? And then I saw it later in the day when it had been confirmed on MSNBC, and I was like, the president lied and was vaccinated in January and didn't tell anyone, the president, the ex-president, the former guy, Biden calls him the former guy, the former guy was vaccinated in January secretly. He and Melania were secretly vaccinated, were secretly vaccinated,

And they didn't tell anyone. Now, again, there are a number of reasons why this is bad. There's lying. There's this, there's that. But really, the main reason it's bad is that Trump supporters, the highest level of vaccine hesitancy is in Republicans. So actually, you know, as you and I both know, because I was in this Pfizer trial,

vaccination is part of the vaccine thing, is get it, is watching people in your community get vaccinated to know it's safe. So the idea that Trump had this moment to show people that vaccines are safe, and instead he secretly got vaccinated and didn't tell anyone. And so he should go fuck himself and show should float us. Yeah, and it really is gross because we really do have to normalize vaccination. You did a great thing by telling everybody about it when you were really early to the game about it. I'm getting vaccinated within the next week and I'm going to be telling everybody about it.

And this just goes to show it's always about him and never about what's doing good for the country. Yeah, exactly. And so, and it's just so sleazy. And think about all the people who are Trump supporters who aren't getting vaccinated and who could have been getting vaccinated. And it's just sucks. Jesse, who is your fuck that guy? But, you know, I've been really happy to start doing this segment because I get to get out so much rage towards people I really don't like. So Pete Hegseth, who is the weekend edition of the world's worst TV show Fox and Friends.

That's right. So he said some things at CPAC this weekend that I really found a little gross. For one thing, he was talking about all these biblical values. Yet there's this report that I'm reading from right here that during his marriage, Hegsteth had a daughter with Fox executive producer, Jennifer Rauchette, with whom he was having an extramarital relationship in August 2017. Aside from that, he's talking. talking about elites all day.

It's like, just like Holly and Cruz and all these people who love to talk about elites. It's like, dude, you went to an Ivy League school. You're a fucking elite. Yeah. No, it's amazing. So Pete Higgsith, go fuck yourself. Truly, you know, I just really would love for these people to stop pretending that they have values. It's fucking gross.

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