Aug. 12, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:14
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| you you you Okay, welcome to the War Room. | ||
| We're going to have a very special showing tonight, something that was so extraordinary and moved me so much. | ||
| I thought it was very important to share this with the Warren Posse. | ||
| If you haven't already seen it, I think most people have not. | ||
| It's PBS's renowned series called Frontline. | ||
| These are these documentaries they make, and they're of extraordinary quality, but obviously being Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, they're always slanted very progressive. | ||
| Although this one in particular, they try to give a balanced idea of what's going on. | ||
| This is at the heart of the Trump revolution. | ||
| This is President Trump about his Article II powers. | ||
| Remember, we've talked about this, the theory of unified executive, right, where he is both chief executive officer, commander-in-chief, and chief magistrate. | ||
| It all comes together in the office of the president. | ||
| And that is what's going to separate out not simply his second term from his first term, but his second term really from any president we've had, I think, all the way back to General Washington. | ||
| They did an hour and 25-minute special documentary on this. | ||
| We're going to play this over two nights, both tonight and tomorrow night. | ||
| And we'll break it down and I'll come in for various little bit of analysis. | ||
| This stars Megan Kelly, Mike Davis, of course, a whole host of people on the left. | ||
| I think it has 15 or 20 major voices. | ||
| I'm also in the film. | ||
| As you know, I've put up, or Grace has put up and most put up over the last couple of weeks, the full interview I did with PBS to put it out. | ||
| But now you're going to see it in actually the form of the documentary itself. | ||
| The title of it is Trump's power in the rule of law. | ||
| And this gets back to these 175 to 200 lawsuits that the left has to try to slow President Trump down, to try to slow his implementing of his plan down. | ||
| As we say, power delayed is power denied. | ||
| And so that's what they're trying to do. | ||
| This explains, I think, very well from the very start of the administration and flashing back to the first term and flashing back to the interim, to the interim period. | ||
| And you're going to see a lot of familiar faces from the war room on this, but done by a bunch of progressives. | ||
| But I think you'll find you will learn a lot. | ||
| Even those of you that have been watching the show every day, I think in particular, we always like to show different perspectives and perspectives on the progressive left. | ||
| So now, a encore presentation of Trump's power and the rule of law from Public Bar Kissing. | ||
| Let's let it rip and I'll be back in a little while. | ||
|
unidentified
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The United States Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with their cuts to the Department of Education. | |
| The showdown over the power of the president. | ||
| The Constitution invests all of the executive power of the federal government in a single person, the president. | ||
| Do we have the rule of law or do we have royal decrees? | ||
| That's what's at stake here. | ||
| You're not going to scare us. | ||
| And we're not going to stop. | ||
| Our constitutional structure is definitely stressed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now on Frontline, Trump's power and the rule of law. | |
| The Trump administration. | ||
| President Trump is at the Capitol One arena for his inauguration parade. | ||
| He is expected to fire up that packed crowd there. | ||
| President Trump will sign in the arena from cheering crowds a number of executive orders. | ||
| Norms and institutions are a thing of the past. | ||
| The wrecking ball is back. | ||
| And this time, he and his supporters mean business. | ||
| Things aren't going to get wrecked because they need to be. | ||
| Why don't you say what I'm saying? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The first night of the President Trump is signing is the rescission of 78 Biden-era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda and others. | ||
|
unidentified
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The first night of the President Trump is the president of the United States. | |
| For a lot of Americans, it just looks like change. | ||
| Donald Trump is someone who campaigned on saying he would test American institutions. | ||
| And it looks like Donald Trump is delivering on these promises to upend Washington, to drain the swamp, to do it completely differently. | ||
| It was as if he was sending thunderbolts out to the country. | ||
| And here is the withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty. | ||
| All I have to do is put my Sharpie on the page and I can make law a reality. | ||
| And he did one after the next, after the next. | ||
| The next item, sir, is a freeze on all federal hiring. | ||
| There were so many things happening at once that it was very hard to focus on any single one thing. | ||
| To address the cost of living crisis that has cost Americans so dear a requirement that federal workers return to full-time in-person work immediately in the restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship of free speech going forward, | ||
| ending the weaponization of government against the political adversaries of the previous administration as we see. | ||
| That was what Steve Bannon used to call the flood the zone approach to politics. | ||
| Just drown them in it. | ||
| Could you imagine Biden doing this? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| That's President Trump. | ||
| I mean, he's all about action. | ||
| You know, all gas, no break. | ||
| I want to hit it and just overwhelm the system with action, action, action. | ||
| that's why we call it days of thunder President Trump ran on very specific campaign promises. | ||
| He's going to reform our government to make our governments work for real Americans instead of the other way around. | ||
| He's going to secure our border. | ||
| He's going to get illegal immigrants, including dangerous terrorists, the hell out of our country. | ||
| And President Trump is doing the unthinkable in Washington, D.C. And he's actually delivering on his campaign promises to the American people, and he's doing it very fast. | ||
|
unidentified
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*Tonk* | |
| What he's saying in that day is: I'm going to be a man of action. | ||
| That's a phrase he likes, a man of action. | ||
| And he's going to do it with a stroke of a pen. | ||
| We saw a president using his power from the very first moment in very expansive ways to put his fingerprints on all sorts of areas of the government and society. | ||
| He signed more executive orders on day one than any of his predecessors ever did in their early days. | ||
| And they stretched the power and the authority of the presidency beyond what any previous president had done. | ||
|
unidentified
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President Trump leaving the White House for the last time as president. | |
| Just how quickly and how fast things fell apart from this president. | ||
| He is leaving the White House with much fewer people standing by his side in the wake of the January 6th riot. | ||
| After January 6th and what happened on the Capitol that Day. | ||
| It was universally terrible. | ||
| There wasn't even the most ardent Trump fan defending it. | ||
| He had been entirely ruled out. | ||
|
unidentified
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He leaves office in disgrace, the only ever president to be impeached twice. | |
| Trump leaves Washington seemingly for four years of exile, maybe a lifetime of exile. | ||
| just utter bottom After President Trump left in January 2021, your audience should understand that President Trump and the core team around him, we were deplatformed by big tech. | ||
| We were debanked. | ||
|
unidentified
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Steve Bannon was Trump's 2016 campaign CEO, his White House chief strategist. | |
| He was charged with fraud and went to prison rather than testify about Trump's role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. | ||
| In those years of 21 and 22, when the entire world was against President Trump and his team, it looked like the odds were so incredibly long. | ||
| It was a very lonely time around Mor-a-Lago. | ||
| President Trump was essentially a dead political body left on the side of the road. | ||
|
unidentified
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In isolation at his Florida state, more trouble for the former president. | |
| The FBI raided the former president's Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, unannounced, breaking into the home. | ||
|
unidentified
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump once again found himself the target of an investigation. | |
| A cascade of other legal problems, multiple civil trials. | ||
| Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Egypt. | ||
| Business fraud. | ||
| Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. | ||
| A federal grand jury here has indicted former President Donald Trump on four counts. | ||
| Indictment after indictment. | ||
| Charged with leading a criminal organization that worked to overturn the results. | ||
| The most serious charges that he'd worked to overturn the 2020 election, culminating with a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol on January 6th while Congress was trying to certify the results. | ||
| An indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. | ||
| Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day. | ||
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unidentified
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Special Counsel Jack Smith had prosecuted Democrats and Republicans, but Trump's supporters saw this case as politically motivated. | |
| What they were doing was so wrong and so destructive to the presidency that you can have a president throw his predecessor in prison for non-crimes. | ||
| And that's how we destroy our country. | ||
| That's how we become a third world Marxist hellhole. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mike Davis is one of Trump's trusted advisors, known in Trump's circle as the Viceroy, a Washington insider, a former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. | |
| I was the only person, it seems, who would go on Fox News every day and defend President Trump. | ||
| We've seen that they have weaponized, they have politicized law enforcement repeatedly to get Trump. | ||
| I've done over 4,500 media hits supporting and defending President Trump. | ||
| They have completely politicized the Justice Department. | ||
| This Justice Department is rotten to the core. | ||
| A lot of what they're trying to do is recast the narrative of what happened to him during his impeachments, to recast the narrative of what happened on January 6th, to suggest it was a day of peaceful protest and not a violent attack on democracy. | ||
| I think the public record in the investigations would show otherwise. | ||
| This is lawless. | ||
| This is Democrat lawfare. | ||
| This is election interference. | ||
| He has presidential immunity for his acts as the president of the United States. | ||
| Trump has come right up to the edge of saying, you don't get to tell me what the law says. | ||
| I get to say what the law says. | ||
| He believes, as he once said, that Article 2 of the Constitution means that he could do whatever he wants. | ||
| He believes that if the president does it, it can't be illegal. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was a familiar argument that a president was above the law. | |
| It went back more than 50 years to another president dogged by legal problems. | ||
| So what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations where the president can decide that it's in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal. | ||
| Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal, by definition. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If you think back to Richard Nixon's period, people called Richard Nixon an imperial president. | ||
| He violated the laws and his administration was corrupt. | ||
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unidentified
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Nixon was accused of weaponizing the FBI and IRS against his political enemies. | |
| The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. | ||
| Of covering up the break-in at the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate complex. | ||
| What did the president know and when did he know it about the cover-up? | ||
| And refusing to comply with court orders to turn over Oval Office recordings. | ||
| President Nixon announced that he will neither appeal nor comply with a federal court order to turn over the Watergate tapes. | ||
| The news has caused a storm in Washington, and some of Mr. Nixon's most loyal supporters are calling for his resignation. | ||
| When the Supreme Court weighed in, Nixon relented, turning over the tapes and resigning the presidency in disgrace. | ||
| The president now at the door? | ||
| A final wave. | ||
| After Watergate, there was an effort to reform the presidency and to put some constraints on it. | ||
| A lot of ethics laws were passed. | ||
| Independent agencies were safeguarded. | ||
| The whole effort was to fight corruption, to fight tyranny, to make sure that a president didn't become a tyrant. | ||
| Congress tried to take some power back. | ||
| One way to think of it is, you know, Gulliver is the president. | ||
| And then after Watergate, what Congress did is they tried to tie him down, just like the Lilliputians tried to tie down Gulliver. | ||
| Inspector Generals, special counsels, these efforts to reduce the president's ability to control the cabinet agencies. | ||
| That was an effort to fragment the executive branch. | ||
| I think that was the mistake, to try to solve the Nixon problem by making the executive branch less effective. | ||
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unidentified
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Law Professor John Yu has long been an advocate for strong presidential power and a controversial doctrine called the unitary executive theory. | |
| It is the idea that the Constitution vests all of the executive power of the federal government in a single person, the president. | ||
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unidentified
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It was a fringe theory that had been rejected by the Supreme Court. | |
| And in those years after Nixon, president after president would find their power constrained. | ||
| The power of the presidency was probably at its weakest in the post-Watergate years. | ||
| I don't think it really picked up steam until the post-9-11 era. | ||
| 9-11 obviously was a significant event that required strong executive action. | ||
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unidentified
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The Twin Towers, the New York landmarks, have collapsed and are gone. | |
| 9-11. | ||
| Thousands of Americans dead. | ||
| A nation in crisis. | ||
| I can hear you. | ||
| The rest of the world hears you. | ||
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unidentified
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And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. | |
| A presidential administration wanting to respond forcefully, exercise its power without constraints. | ||
| We also have to work the sort of the dark side, if you will. | ||
| We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. | ||
| A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly without any discussion using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton had said, the definition of good government is an energetic executive. | ||
| You want someone who can act with speed, decisiveness, energy. | ||
| You could see the presidency is trying to reassert itself to break free from these bonds that have been with us since Watergate. | ||
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unidentified
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John Yoo was at the Justice Department office of legal counsel at the time. | |
| The Bush administration relied on you more than any other lawyer in government to justify what they were doing. | ||
| We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad and increased vigilance at home. | ||
| Yu is on the extreme of legal debate over presidential power. | ||
| That the law allowed the president to do extraordinary things after 9-11, including secret rendition to black sites, including torture, including spying on Americans with the NSA. | ||
| Those things were nearly all repudiated, either by his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel or by courts who said that's not legal. | ||
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unidentified
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But in the years that followed, the Supreme Court was ready to enhance executive power. | |
| Justice by justice, the conservatives were taking over the Supreme Court, and the theory of the unitary executive was becoming more widespread. | ||
| And finally, this came to a head, really, in the final session of the 2024 Supreme Court. | ||
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unidentified
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It was that Trump case about his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. | |
| It had gone all the way to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Trump's lawyers made the Nixon argument. | ||
| If the president does it, it's not illegal. | ||
| And in large part, the court agreed. | ||
| In Trump versus United States, the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts' writing, says the president is the chief of the executive branch, and the president is also in charge of executing the laws. | ||
| And for this reason, he must have immunity from presidents later on prosecuting him or her for those decisions. | ||
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unidentified
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The president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers. | |
| One of the reasons the Chief Justice gives is so that the president can fully run the executive branch without having to worry about his criminal liability or civil liability after. | ||
| The immunity decision was arguably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, legal victory that Donald Trump has had in his entire time in public life. | ||
| It essentially spelled the meaningful end of the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump. | ||
| That immunity decision, you could say that was like the precursor event to Trump 2.0 in almost every respect. | ||
| It was hugely important. | ||
| It was the difference between President Trump going to prison versus going back to the White House. | ||
| It was hugely consequential. | ||
| It was one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in our history. | ||
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unidentified
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Trump won the presidency and a get out of jail free card. | |
| He has now been gifted legal immunity. | ||
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unidentified
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After winning an election, the federal cases all go away. | |
| In his hush money case, unconditional discharge covering all 34 counts. | ||
| No prison time, no fine. | ||
| Psychologically, it was a big stamp of approval for the sense that the president is kind of above the law. | ||
| I mean, literally above the law. | ||
| That's what the immunity decision found. | ||
| You can't find, he's immune from a normal legal challenge. | ||
| You got a pretty powerful feeling that you're kind of unconstrained. | ||
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unidentified
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I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will. | |
| Now, that sense of power would fuel his presidency. | ||
| It signals a very different kind of president and a president who doesn't want to be bound by either the Constitution or statutory law. | ||
| He believes he has literally unrestricted power. | ||
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unidentified
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So help me, God. | |
| So help me God. | ||
| Congratulations, Mr. Cooper. | ||
| The strategy is to flood the zone, to overwhelm the opposition, and stun people who are used to the legal constitutional order and the rule of law. | ||
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unidentified
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Donald Trump immediately getting to work with a remarkable show of the use of executive power. | |
| We're going to see a president pardoning people who participated in this erection that he supported. | ||
| So this is January 6th. | ||
| These are the hostages. | ||
| Approximately 1,500 for a pardon. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Full pardon. | ||
| Full power commutations. | ||
| Full pardon. | ||
| He issues pardons and commutations to everybody who had been convicted of crimes in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol. | ||
| We hope they get him. | ||
| We hope they come out tonight, frankly. | ||
| He said it was a grave national injustice, in his view, that they had been convicted and prosecuted. | ||
| And he called them hostages. | ||
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unidentified
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Peter Kaiser, a prominent voice in the conservative legal world, was acting Attorney General for George W. Bush. | |
| He has become a critic of President Trump. | ||
| There's really no way to understand that decision except as an effort to protect people who had committed serious crimes simply because they'd committed those crimes in the course of supporting the president's effort to stay in power. | ||
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unidentified
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With the stroke of a pen, the legal consequences virtually undone. | |
| The largest criminal prosecution in U.S. history is abruptly over. | ||
| The prosecutions, persecutions of these January 6th defendants was so politicized, made it illegitimate. | ||
| They went through years of suffering. | ||
| They had their lives destroyed, bankrupted, lost family members. | ||
| Some people killed themselves. | ||
| So I have no problem with President Trump pardoning almost all of those January 6 defendants because they've suffered enough. | ||
| People who attacked Congress, people who used violence to spread their political message, people who had no regard for our institutions and our democracy. | ||
| That's who he was issuing pardons for. | ||
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unidentified
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This was a day of violence. | |
| This was a day in which 140 police officers were injured, and we cannot rewrite the history of that day. | ||
| Property was destroyed. | ||
| People were injured. | ||
| Police officers trying to defend the democratic process die. | ||
| We stood up against a stolen election. | ||
| We will be vindicated in the pages of history as patriots and freedom fighters. | ||
| He's put my family back together again. | ||
| Without him, I wouldn't be out right now. | ||
| We don't condone violence, but we're also not the insurrectionists here. | ||
| I feel, yes, I feel vindicated and validated. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| It really sends the signal that people can engage in violence on his behalf, and he's got that pardon power there for them. | ||
| He wants people who are on his side to think, you know, what if I go a little bit too far? | ||
| You know, they got a president there who's kind of watching out for you. | ||
| It really puts us on a road that goes pretty far from the neutral rule of law and pretty far, unfortunately, towards a kind of personalized use of government to go after your enemies and to forgive those on your side who break the law. | ||
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unidentified
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Trump and his advisors were pushing to go further. | |
| Exact retribution for what they called lawfare. | ||
| I think retribution is a very important component of justice. | ||
| It serves as a powerful deterrent to people who may commit crimes in the future that there are going to be consequences. | ||
| The president and his Justice Department team should hold accountable those who wage this unprecedented Republic-ending lawfare against President Trump. | ||
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unidentified
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The first target, the Department of Justice itself. | |
| I got American faith in America's heart. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | ||
| What I'm really happy about in seeing this, obviously a slanted because it's done by PBS documentary, but the frontline series, I think, has overall been pretty good over the years. | ||
| It's done things that I'm familiar with. | ||
| And what I'm really proud about is how engaged this audience has been in this from the beginning. | ||
| I mean, when you look at this and they see the detail, they go back to the beginning and think about all the shows and then all the phone calls you made and all the various situations like on confirmations early on and you're fighting nonstop for these to support President Trump. | ||
| You see how historic it has been. | ||
| And that's why I wanted to play the over the two nights is actually to play the documentary itself because I think it gives you a chance to see how we're viewed by the other side and how we're viewed historically. | ||
| And this is a historic fight. | ||
| We said from the beginning. | ||
| And remember, for those of you who have been with us for a number of years, you go back to 21. | ||
| Would I say those dark months of the first part of 2021? | ||
| It's been pretty extraordinary about how the issues we talked about at the time and we'd had the Rust votes on and it's the beginning of Project 2025 and beginning of CRA and America First Policy Institute and Stephen Miller's America First Law. | ||
| But these issues, and a lot of it revolved around as the Mike Davis's world started coming on the show and getting to know him, this whole concept that we had not executed on in the first Trump term, and that is this unified executive, right? | ||
| The unified executive, where he is the chief executive officer of the U.S. government, that he is the commander-in-chief of the United States military, and that he is the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer. | ||
| Go back and see that, and it just warmed the cockles of my heart to see about President Trump going to the Justice Department, which remember back at the shows, we were advocating that every day, and then President Trump went over there. | ||
| And what do we say? | ||
| Oh, my gosh, he's gone. | ||
| He soiled the temple because that was the railhead post-Watergate. | ||
| That was actually the railhead of how they ran the deal. | ||
| They ran it through both the CIA, but really the Justice Department. | ||
| So to see President Trump go over there. | ||
| And then the voices, the voices that PBS had, I think it was Judge Lustig and others that are sitting there going, oh, he sold, you know, he soiled the temple. | ||
| Exactly what we told you they were going to say. | ||
| So really want to, I think they've done an extraordinary job. | ||
| And I believe, and if you look at the chats, that you guys, understanding it is from a left-wing perspective, and this is what's essentially been defunded. | ||
| PBS and NPR have had a billion dollars cut of their funding. | ||
| The Democrats did not put it back in, which I think is pretty extraordinary. | ||
| So just incredible. | ||
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| Okay, we're going to be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time when you'll be in the war room. | ||
| We're going to leave you now with the music from the right stuff. | ||
| My favorite to take us out. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Department of Justice itself. | |
| They fired more than two dozen career prosecutors, people who had worked either on the investigations and cases against Donald Trump himself or against the people who had stormed the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| The message that I took out of it was: if you persecute Americans as a Justice Department prosecutor or agent, you're going to lose your job, and you should. | ||
| When you try to throw President Trump in prison for the rest of his life, when you try to bankrupt him, when you throw his supporters in prison after January 6th, when you do these things, there are consequences. | ||
| They also forced out about half a dozen or so of the senior career leaders at the FBI. | ||
| They were fired as a group because they were not deemed to be sufficiently politically reliable. | ||
| The message that sends is your job may depend on you being perceived as supporting the president's personal and political interests. | ||
| And that sets the stage for turning law enforcement into another instrumentality of politics. | ||
| Where if you're the subject or a target of an investigation, how you're treated may depend on what your politics are. | ||
| And that's the opposite of what the system should be doing. | ||
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unidentified
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It was time for Trump to deploy his own team to the Justice Department. | |
| One he could depend on. | ||
| At this stage of his presidency and what he wants to accomplish, he really only values loyalty and virtually nothing else. | ||
|
unidentified
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Criminal defense attorney Ty Cobb was part of Trump's legal team during the first term. | |
| Now he's a critic. | ||
| He's not looking for them to tell him what to do. | ||
| He's looking for them to do what he tells them to do. | ||
| He learned a lot the first time around, I think, in terms of how far he could go. | ||
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Trump's first attorney general was Jeff Sessions. | |
| Sessions was a constant object of his ire, in part because of the recusal. | ||
| Without consultation with the White House, I have now decided to accuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States. | ||
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Trump saw Sessions' decision as disloyal, not protecting him from a DOJ investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. | |
| The Justice Department naming the former FBI director, Robert Mueller, special counsel to take over the investigation. | ||
| That rubbed the president the wrong way, and he never got over it. | ||
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Time and again, during Trump's first term, it was the lawyers who got in his way. | |
| There were people in the first Trump administration, the so-called grown-ups in the room, were traditional conservatives, Federalist society lawyers who were very conservative ideologically, but were also very serious lawyers as well, | ||
| who were occasionally willing to say no to ideas that they thought were outside the bounds of legitimate legal interpretation or just simply bad ideas, to raise objections, to slow things down. | ||
| One of the lessons learned for the people who stuck with Trump after the events of January 6 was that one of their mistakes was having too many people like that around the president. | ||
| And there was a very deliberate effort to vet people to ensure that they would be more in the MAGA mold, more permissive lawyers, people who were not going to be obstacles slowing down ideas coming out of the White House, but accelerators. | ||
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His new Attorney General this time would be Pam Bonte. | |
| I think she's going to be as impartial as you can possibly be. | ||
| I know I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats, and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be. | ||
| I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally, but she's going to be as total as you can get. | ||
| They were friends. | ||
| They've known each other a long time. | ||
| Part of this with Trump, yes, it is loyalty, and part of it is personal. | ||
| She has served as his personal lawyer. | ||
| I think he just really likes her. | ||
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The top deputies, Todd Blanche and Emile Beauvais, had both served as Trump's personal criminal defense attorneys. | |
| The truism that he's treating the Justice Department as a personal law firm is almost literally true in the second term here, where he has filled its upper ranks with people who previously had been his personal lawyers. | ||
| Defense lawyers for him have abruptly gone from trying to counter federal prosecutors and FBI agents to being the bosses of those people and being the instruments of his revenge against that institution. | ||
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It was breaking a barrier that had been erected after Watergate. | |
| The Justice Department was not always as independent as it has been in my adult lifetime. | ||
| Jen F. Kennedy did name his brother as Attorney General, but post-Nixon, because of who Nixon was and what he did and how the Justice Department abetted what he did, it has been separate. | ||
| Since Watergate, the norm, and it's been a healthy norm, has been really to keep hands off the Justice Department, hands off the FBI. | ||
| I was in the White House many years ago. | ||
| I actually went to the Justice Department very rarely when I was the Vice President's Chief of Staff. | ||
| And partly that was because we were really not just encouraged, but required not to deal directly with the Justice Department. | ||
| It was just considered a terrible abuse of power to try to use the Justice Department for your own personal purposes or political purposes. | ||
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But Trump wasn't going to follow those rules. | |
| He's the chief magistrate and the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. | ||
| And the Attorney General reports directly to him. | ||
| The FBI director reports to him. | ||
| That's one of the keys to the unitary theory of the executive, that in the office of the president is executive power, which has really been lost since Watergate. | ||
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Trump decided to make a statement. | |
| He would go to the Department of Justice, make it clear he was in charge. | ||
| By going to speak at the Justice Department, he is reasserting the president actually is under the Constitution ultimately responsible for the execution of federal law, for federal law enforcement, all of it. | ||
| The Justice Department is not independent of the president. | ||
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Others who had worked in the Justice Department saw it differently. | |
| Presidents only infrequently go to the Department of Justice at all. | ||
| And for good reason. | ||
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J. Michael Ludig was a lawyer in the Reagan White House, a veteran of the DOJ under George H.W. Bush, and a prominent conservative appeals court judge. | |
| After January 6th, he became a vocal Trump critic. | ||
| There's every reason in the world under our constitutional order for the President of the United States to keep his distance. | ||
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*Rainful music* | |
| He was such a nice person. | ||
| That's a rough picture. | ||
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It's a rough picture. | |
| The president's political rally at the Department of Justice was reprehensible. | ||
| And of course, it was unprecedented in all of American history. | ||
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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Attorney General Pamela Bondi. | |
| Hi, please, please be seated. | ||
| Welcome to the Department of Justice. | ||
| It is an institution whose goals have uniformly been revered as a place where you try to at least achieve your vision of equal justice, unbiased justice, and depoliticized justice. | ||
| Bondi didn't even try to talk about those things. | ||
| And we all work for the greatest president in the history of our country. | ||
| We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump. | ||
| It is. | ||
| He will never. | ||
| She made it plain that they were all there for him and voted him. | ||
| That's just not, that's just not the way it's supposed to work. | ||
| They're supposed to preserve and protect the Constitution, and they're not there to preserve and protect the presidency. | ||
| During the previous couple of years, while Trump was being prosecuted and convicted for crimes, he must have been seething and just waiting until he could take his revenge, because that's basically what he announced he was going to do when he walked into that Justice Department that day. | ||
| So now as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred. | ||
| There's a new sheriff in town. | ||
| The American people elected President Trump back into the White House, and that Justice Department works for President Trump. | ||
| Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. | ||
| And there's going to be much needed accountability in his second term. | ||
| It's a campaign, and it's by the same scum that you have been dealing with for years, like guys like Andrew Weissman. | ||
| The message, to me at least, was this is going to be the Department of Justice that is basically the right hand of the White House. | ||
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Andrew Weissman was a federal prosecutor who worked for Robert Mueller, investigating Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election. | |
| And the years since, he's become a legal analyst and outspoken Trump critic. | ||
| If you are thinking about the attack on the rule of law, having a Justice Department that is not making decisions based on the political party or whether you're an opponent or a supporter of the president is absolutely central. | ||
| There's a guy named Norm Eisen. | ||
| I don't even know what he looks like. | ||
| His name is Norm Eisen of Crewe. | ||
| He's been after me for nine years. | ||
| He's singling me out as an example. | ||
| Hey, all you other lawyers, I'm going to make a target of you as well. | ||
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Attorney Norm Eisen was a White House counsel under President Obama that helped Democrats build an impeachment case against Trump in 2019. | |
| And he filed numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration. | ||
| His sole life is to get Donald Trump, and he's been vicious and violent. | ||
| When I see Donald Trump lashing out against the legal profession, I see a loser acting out of rage at the institution, rule of law, that he thinks is right, is holding him back. | ||
| They're not legitimate people there. | ||
| They're horrible people. | ||
| They're scum. | ||
| It is the unambiguous declaration of an enemies list. | ||
| People to become the targets of retribution from the federal government under his command. | ||
| I want these Democrat prosecutors and agents and judges and other operatives to understand there are still going to be severe legal, political, and financial consequences. | ||
| The only way this will stop is if we give them very severe consequences. | ||
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Trump expected results. | |
| I delivered a message directly to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. | ||
| And the reason I'm saying this, Todd, is I'm only going to get one chance to say this. | ||
| But these are bad people. | ||
| I don't know who. | ||
| When he said Todd, referring to Todd Blanche, who's now the number two person at the Justice Department. | ||
| Todd, this is the only chance I'll get. | ||
| He means Todd Blanche, use the Justice Department and the weight of the power of the American government against Norm Eisen. | ||
| He puts his arm around the Justice Department and essentially recruits them into his mission to take control. | ||
| We will revive these stories. | ||
| And in the kind of Orwellian guise of ending weaponization of the Justice Department, actually weaponizing it. | ||
| We will bring back faith in our justice system for the citizens. | ||
| I was shocked beyond words. | ||
| Even after all that we've seen from the president over the past eight years, to watch him stand in the great hall of the Department of Justice, a sacred place in America, | ||
| and claim that now he was going to get even by politicizing and weaponizing the Department of Justice and the FBI against his political enemies was a travesty in all of American history. | ||
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*music* | |
| I happen to think President Trump should go there every week. | ||
| They are shocked that he's in the sacred temple of the Justice Department. | ||
| Them, right? | ||
| This is what democracy is about. | ||
| These are anti-democratic forces. | ||
| They have to be broken. | ||
| They are shocked because the president of the United States and worst of all, Donald Trump, actually soiled their temple by going in there. | ||
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You. | |
| He's president of the United States. | ||
| He's the chief magistrate and the chief law enforcement officer by the Constitution. | ||
| The message could not have been clearer. |
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