Aug. 13, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
46:59
Participants
| 
| 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 lie? | ||
| 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
|
Stephen K. Banff. | |
| Okay, welcome to the War Room. | ||
| We're having a kind of an encore presentation of something I think most of the audience hasn't seen, played part one last night. | ||
| If you haven't seen that, you can catch up with it. | ||
| We've got it in our inventory. | ||
| So you can go to warm.org and watch it. | ||
| It's Trump's power in the rule of law. | ||
| This is a documentary made by Frontline. | ||
| The PBS operation does all the different state-of-the-art documentaries. | ||
| They normally do a great job professionally. | ||
| These are masterpieces as far as cutting, editing, camera work, interviews, etc. | ||
| Obviously, it's PBS, so it always has a slant, particularly it has a particularly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA slant. | ||
| That being said, this about this essential beating heart of this administration, which is about the Article II powers of the president. | ||
| Remember, we talked about unified executive theory, that he's both CEO, commander-in-chief, and chief magistrate, and he is going to basically push those out in this term. | ||
| And he's doing that. | ||
| And that's where we have 175 or 200 court cases for the left realize, you know, action delayed is action denied. | ||
| And they've been very smart about doing this. | ||
| So this is what this whole battle is about. | ||
| And now you see the historic way they've kind of put it in context. | ||
| It's quite powerful. | ||
| And they reached out and they have the voices that they should. | ||
| They have like Mike Davis is all over this, Megan Kelly, myself, others, and of course a number of people from the center left and from the left. | ||
| And so I think you get a pretty good perspective. | ||
| It helps you, as war room watchers, you know the fights we've gone through. | ||
| So now you're seeing how the other side presents it. | ||
| I think it's a very powerful tool for you, a very powerful lesson in what we call narrative warfare. | ||
| And so we're going to continue with the second part all the way through of Trump's power in the rule of law. | ||
| I want to thank our sponsor, Birch Gold. | ||
| If you take your phone out and text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N, at 9898-98, you get access totally free to the ultimate guide to invest in gold and precious metals in the age of Trump. | ||
| This special from PBS is about the age of Trump and, quite frankly, the intellectual framework of his second term, which is so powerful. | ||
| And Birch Gold has written something about how you understand the economics of President Trump's term and how you think about gold and precious metals investing. | ||
| So go to birchgold.com slash bannon, the end of the dollar empire. | ||
| All the installments are free as the ultimate guide is free. | ||
| Everything, all the content we're associated with Birch Gold is totally free for your perusal, study, and understanding. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take off now with the second part of Trump's power in the rule of law from PBS, Frontline. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Outside Washington, Trump was also exercising power over the DOJ. | |
| Targeting its most prominent office in New York City. | ||
| There are 93 U.S. trades across the country. | ||
| But the Southern District of New York is the most prominent in the country, often called the Sovereign District. | ||
| Because for so long, the Southern District has acted with the kind of independence from Maine Justice in D.C. that other offices have only dreamed of matching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The case, the prosecution of New York City's Democratic Mayor, Eric Adams. | |
| The charges against Eric Adams were brought by the Southern District of New York. | ||
| I think it's the first time that there's been a federal indictment against a sitting mayor of New York City And charged with corruption charges, with bribery, all high profile. | ||
| And Eric Adams went down to Mar-a-Lago to appeal to Trump. | ||
| And his lawyers made a case to the new team at the Justice Department that this case was interfering with Eric Adams' ability to help Trump in his mass deportation agenda. | ||
| And they made a deal. | ||
| The deal that they came up with was one of the most transparent quid pro quos that you could possibly imagine. | ||
| We made a deal to drop this prosecution, and in exchange, he's going to help us. | ||
| Emma Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, sent a memorandum that the case should be dismissed so that Mayor Adams could help the president achieve his immigration agenda in New York City. | ||
| The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams' ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime. | ||
| Now, that's as nakedly political a rationale as you could imagine. | ||
| What it says is that because Mayor Adams has said he's supporting the president's immigration agenda, he doesn't get prosecuted. | ||
| But presumably, if he had been an opponent of the president's immigration agenda, he would have been prosecuted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bovay's memo went straight to the desk of acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon. | |
| Danielle Sassoon, who had been appointed by Trump, a conservative attorney, member of the Federalist Society, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Scalia. | ||
| She tried to convince DOJ, appealing directly and sort of going around Bove to Bondi and saying, this is not how criminal law should be used. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The reasons advanced by Mr. Bove for dismissing the indictment are not ones I can in good faith defend. | |
| That's when the issue catapulted into national prominence. | ||
| It's when conservative lawyers and the Department of Justice objected to this because they knew they knew what this was. | ||
| They knew this was a quid pro quo and that was deeply unethical. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because the law does not support a dismissal, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. | |
| Very truly yours, Danielle R. Sassoon. | ||
| Danielle Sassoon was not the kind of person who you would have thought was going to stand up to Donald Trump, at least not politically. | ||
| But she believed in the rule of law and she saw this as a corruption and she said, I want no part of it. | ||
| Bondi refused to even meet with Sassoon. | ||
| In her letter, Danielle had said, if you're not going to meet with me, if you're not going to reconsider this, then I will resign. | ||
| She then got a letter from Bove, which said, okay, I accept your resignation. | ||
| The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination and apparent misconduct reflected in the approach that you and your office have taken in this matter. | ||
| I would say to Danielle Sassoon and the others that they work for the Deputy Attorney General, who works for the Attorney General, who works for the president, who's elected by all Americans. | ||
| And if you don't like that, then get out of the Justice Department. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And many would. | |
| Nearly a dozen prosecutors in New York and Washington resigned or were forced out. | ||
| People in the Department of Justice don't just up and resign. | ||
| When you resign, it's because it's either, in your view, amoral or it's a quid pro quo that you think is illegal. | ||
| And that is the reason that you saw so many career people, including conservatives, say, I can't stomach this. | ||
| Upheaval in the Justice Department. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A showdown between the Trump administration and its own Justice Department prosecutors. | |
| They wanted prosecutors across the country to see that this time around, they would not be standing for any pushback, that they would not be permitting offices, even the Southern District of New York, to push back against Maine Justice, and that if you did stand up, that you would lose your career. | ||
| It's all about sending the chilling effect across the department and across the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sweeping federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams is now officially dead. | |
| Mayor Adams denied there'd been a quid pro quo or that he'd done anything wrong. | ||
| But regardless of guilt or innocence, for the advocates of the unitary executive, Trump's decision was well within his power. | ||
| I think the criticism of Trump deciding not to prosecute Adams is way overblown. | ||
| The president and the Justice Department have the right to choose who to prosecute and not to prosecute. | ||
| The president says don't prosecute this person. | ||
| That is not illegal or unconstitutional. | ||
| That's certainly constitutional. | ||
| And presidents can do it for reasons that don't have to do with guilt or innocence. | ||
| The message out there to the public is: even if you've committed a serious crime, if you support the administration politically, you can get off. | ||
| If you haven't, we'll throw the book at you. | ||
| But if you've supported the administration politically, you may get off. | ||
| It sends that message to the public at large. | ||
| From now on, there is no concept of an independent law enforcement function in this country. | ||
| It exists purely to carry out the personal will of the president. | ||
| The era that began with the disgrace of Richard Nixon and the forcing from office of a president who sought to use the machinery of government on his own behalf, that era is over very definitively. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trump's transformation of the government and his use of presidential power would be far-reaching. | |
| When Trump came into power, he was surrounded by ideologues who have been nursing these theories for quite some time that are really quite extreme. | ||
| One of the principal ones is a man named Russell Vogt. | ||
| He is someone who is a self-described Christian nationalist who has been around Washington for a long time. | ||
| He's seen how government works. | ||
| And he has an idea of really kind of radical changes he wants to implement. | ||
| And he's someone who knows how to do it. | ||
| My belief is that the president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before the election, Vogt laid out his vision in a chapter he wrote for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump's return. | |
| The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch. | ||
| He told us quite explicitly he wants to search out for pockets of independence from presidential control and stamp them out. | ||
| He's made no secret of the fact that he wants to wrest for the presidency more power over spending decisions away from Congress. | ||
| Trump and people around him understand what we have to do to get back to a constitutional republic. | ||
| We're going after the infrastructure and the plumbing and the wiring of the whole system. | ||
| We are not going to quit. | ||
| We're not going to surrender. | ||
| We're not going to take our foot off the gas pedal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now with Russell Vogt, the head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Trump would take on departments Congress had authorized and funded, starting with the agency that handled foreign aid, USAID. | |
| President Donald Trump is calling for USAID to be shut down, calling the organization that delivers aid to people around the world corrupt. | ||
| Many people see as frivolous, if not outright wasteful spending. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shutdown of USAID could mean less medicine for the sick and less food for starving families, including babies. | |
| This is a power grab. | ||
| You're watching the presidency turned into something much more imperial than we've seen for a very long time and maybe ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Trump administration's efforts to reshape the federal government and its workforce, USAID's workforce will be whittled down from about 14,000 employees to fewer than 300, a 98% cut. | |
| Large chunks of USAID employees were placed on administrative leave and cut off from agency, email systems, and other databases. | ||
| We had hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in play around the world in ongoing programs all came to a dead stop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paul Martin, USAID's inspector general, had spent decades in government, but had never seen anything like this. | |
| People have dedicated their lives trying to make a difference at USAID and to sort of overnight without any engagement, without any warning, it was a massive shock to the system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hundreds of workers at USAID are cleaning out their desks. | |
| An emotional exodus at the former headquarters of USAID. | ||
| Recently fired federal workers were given just 15 minutes to clear out their desks. | ||
| I do think that USAID was the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| The speed and the rapidity at which this occurred was pretty breathtaking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A senior official at USAID called it a mafia-like takeover. | |
| It's less than 1% of the federal budget. | ||
| The fact that this was the very first agency they chose to target in force underscores that this is not a cost-cutting exercise. | ||
| It's an exercise in power. | ||
| It was a classic demonstration execution. | ||
| We'll kill one federal agency in order to terrify thousands of others. | ||
| When Congress establishes an agency by law, that's not optional. | ||
| That's a law, and the agency exists and then has to discharge the responsibilities that Congress has given it. | ||
| So when the president tries just to shut down an agency that has statutory responsibilities, that will in many cases be inconsistent with the law. | ||
| What's the point of having the authority to enact laws, which is Congress's big power, if the president can then disregard whatever they enact? | ||
| Go back to the unitary theory of the executive. | ||
| The president of the United States, as chief executive, has the ability to make personnel decisions and to fire anybody. | ||
| You don't have permanent employment in the federal government. | ||
| USAID was a perfect political target from their point of view. | ||
| A lot of Americans don't feel all that aggrieved by that. | ||
| And so, yeah, it was a test case and wanted to see how far he could go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As he cleared the ranks at USAID, there was one more target, the agency's independent watchdog. | |
| I too received a two-sentence email thanking me for my service, but dismissing me as Inspector General. | ||
| Dear Paul, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Inspector General is terminated effective immediately. | ||
| Thank you for your service. | ||
| No explanation, no 30-day notice, no reasons. | ||
| It seems pretty clear a violation of the law. | ||
| You can fire inspectors general, but you have to notify the Senate. | ||
| You have to give 30 days notice. | ||
| He was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
From agencies all over Washington, 17 other Inspectors General were purged. | |
| The Inspector General community has been a concept created by Congress to help Congress and the administration conduct meaningful, effective oversight of federal taxpayer spending in executive branch agencies. | ||
| We are Congress's eyes and ears. | ||
| When you dismiss 17 Inspector Generals, you've turned the system on its head. | ||
| The role of Inspector General was created by Congress as a response to the Watergate scandal. | ||
| And often Congress will ask IG offices to conduct investigations that Congress doesn't have the staff or the power or the ability to do because they're not housed inside these agencies. | ||
| So firing the IGs isn't just about creating a less transparent government, but also really cuts off a channel to Congress. | ||
| These inspector generals are a great example of these Watergate reforms that try to chip away at the unitary executive. | ||
| If the president can't fire them, then they don't have to listen to the president. | ||
| They don't have to take orders or direction from the president. | ||
| And that, I think, is really an affront to the idea of a unitary executive. | ||
| What he's doing is systematically removing any instrument of independent accountability in the government. | ||
| If Congress was healthy at all, it should rise up and say, our creations, we're going to protect our creations. | ||
| There really is no dissent, certainly within the Republican Party, which is what controls Washington. | ||
| Lawmakers are almost uniformly aligned behind the president right now. | ||
| And they also see that there is almost no upside to being publicly critical of the president. | ||
| This is not a usurpation of authority in any way. | ||
| It's not a power grab. | ||
| I think they're doing what we've all expected and hoped and asked that they would do. | ||
| Congress under the Constitution has plenty of authority to fight for itself. | ||
| The founders wanted the president and Congress to fight. | ||
| What they did not anticipate was political parties. | ||
| The reason why Congress isn't fighting now, if people want Congress to fight more, is that Congress is controlled by the same party as the president. | ||
| Congress, the majority of the House and Senate probably agree with what the president's doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Donald Trump is delivering on his promise to shake up the status quo in Washington. | |
| I think all of us believe that we want to be good partners in making sure that the agenda that he campaigned on and which the American people voted for is accomplished and delivered on. | ||
| The fact that the Congress of the United States is silent is unforgivable. | ||
| The system created under the Constitution was one of separated powers under which each branch serves as a check and balance on the other branches. | ||
| Right now in America, one could not say that we have the separation of powers that was envisioned by our founders and written into the Constitution of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Without a functioning Congress, without an independent Justice Department, without inspectors general watching things, literally the only real check on a president's power at this point would be the courts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be up to the lawyers to confront Trump. | |
| When I saw the dismantling of USAID, I said, I'm going to sue. | ||
| I'm going to go to court. | ||
| I'm going to file a case. | ||
| I'm going to argue this is against the Constitution. | ||
| It's against what Congress has commanded. | ||
| No element of Donald Trump's attacks are going to go unmet. | ||
| We're going to litigate it and win. | ||
| And we did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump was dealt not one, but three legal defeats in the span of just 90 minutes yesterday. | |
| The legal challenges to the president's efforts to reshape the government mounting. | ||
| In the first months of the Trump administration, at this point, there's almost 200 lawsuits that are on file. | ||
| And whether it's Democratic or Republican judges who are deciding them, Donald Trump is losing the majority of the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The battle is significantly slowing down the president's efforts to downsize the government. | |
| The lawyers are part of the problem. | ||
| These lawyers and these law firms are oftentimes partisan actors, and they are coming up with plaintiffs to sabotage the president of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trump would send a message to the lawyers attacking powerful law firms that had crossed him in the past. | |
| What they've done is just terrible, and it should never be allowed to happen again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He ordered the firm's security clearances revoked, that they be denied entrance to all federal buildings, their government contracts canceled. | |
| This is just gangster stuff. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| This is mob-style intimidation. | ||
| Because what it is saying nakedly is that I can essentially destroy the law firm. | ||
| And you're looking at about 15 different firms? | ||
| That or more, sir, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I am so impressed. | ||
| The power of what President Trump did. | ||
| I was stunned of how brilliantly thoughtful it was. | ||
| What the firms need to understand is that if I were their clients, I would probably find new attorneys because if you've made it on one of these lists, you're probably not going to get a very good reception at the Trump administration for the next four years. | ||
| The law firm of Jenner and Block, this is a law firm that, as you know, employed Andrew Weissman after he came off of the Mueller investigation. | ||
| He is one of a number of reasons that we believe this executive order is warranted. | ||
| He's a bad guy. | ||
| That is really insidious. | ||
| That is saying that I'm going to target you if you take positions and bring cases in front of judges. | ||
| In order to have a functioning judiciary, you need to have lawyers who don't feel threatened by bringing good faith litigation. | ||
| This is an executive order that takes certain measures against Sussman Godfrey, given their previous activities. | ||
| These attacks on the nation's law firms are intended to put the individual firms out of business. | ||
| But then larger to send a message to the nation's 1.2 million lawyers that they better never take again a case representing a client against Donald Trump and his administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some firms fought back. | |
| Hundreds of firms denouncing the president's executive orders. | ||
| Some even won in court. | ||
| But the vast majority of the country's largest law firms stayed silent. | ||
| Some firms fighting back while others are bending the knee to Trump. | ||
| By and large, the legal industry has kind of folded. | ||
| These orders are certainly unlawful, and a judge has already said so. | ||
| But it's very difficult for courts to really remedy the situation because at the end of the day, even when a court says that an order like this is unlawful, everybody still knows that the law firm is persona non grata, in fact, toxic inside the administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Several of the firms have come to the White House seeking a way to avoid punishment. | |
| Paul Weiss, now reaching a deal with the president to get the president to drop the executive order against the firm. | ||
| After that was said, they collapsed in their opposition. | ||
| And here's what I tell people. | ||
| They're not that powerful. | ||
| This whole system has been so powerful and so overwhelming. | ||
| They created the most powerful law firms in the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The word that largely defines the response is capitulation. | |
| Five war law firms have now struck deals with the Trump administration. | ||
| It sent a message to the administration that this works, meaning do it again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The law firms claimed the deals didn't threaten their independence and denied they were payoffs to Trump. | |
| Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump? | ||
| They give you $100 million and then they announce that, but we have done nothing wrong. | ||
| And I agree they've done nothing wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But what the hell? | |
| They give me a lot of money considering they've done nothing wrong. | ||
| All together, they agreed to give nearly $1 billion in legal services to causes that the firms and Trump support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All in an effort to sort of appease him and keep him from criticizing them or targeting them. | |
| I want these lawyers to understand that this is not the George W. Bush Republican Party. | ||
| We're not going to turn the other cheek. | ||
| The American people elected President Trump with a broad mandate. | ||
| So time to deliver. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got American Paul. | |
| I got American faith in America's heart. | ||
| Waru. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann. | ||
| All American people should be worried about what we're seeing. | ||
| I know lawyers are not the most favored group in society, but lawyers are who you go to when you need your rights defended. | ||
| Lawyers are who you go to when you need to access the courts. | ||
| And I think it begins with lawyers, but this kind of trend will expand across the board. | ||
| He is extending his reach really far, much further than most presidents have. | ||
| And it's not just on politics. | ||
| What's striking is how much he wants to impose his point of view on different aspects of society. | ||
| He is trying to reshape the country in a way. | ||
| It's not just whether the USCID should be an agency or not. | ||
| It's what should be played at the Kennedy Center. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump now is the chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. | |
| Trump plans to fire Kennedy Center board members and appoint himself as chair. | ||
| It's what we should call a body of water off our southern shores. | ||
| President Trump is calling it the Gulf of America as opposed to the Gulf of Mexico. | ||
| It's what the Associated Press can put in a style guide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trump has barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and White House press pool. | |
| It's what is taught in the classrooms at Columbia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Columbia University will comply with policy changes demanded by the Trump administration. | |
| Trump calling for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status. | ||
| He wants to have everybody defer to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paramount announcing they will settle President Trump's lawsuit over a 60-minute interview for $16 million. | |
| And he is accomplishing a lot. | ||
| And a lot of his people are very happy about that. | ||
| Here's what we know. | ||
| If you take power and exert it, this system's not so tough. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| They're all gutless cowards. | ||
| The university administrators, they're not that tough. | ||
| The big law firms, they're not that tough. | ||
| The media, look who's cratered. | ||
| How many times? | ||
| Look how they're settling with Trump. | ||
| They're not tough. | ||
| We're resilient. | ||
| We're anti-fragile and we're tough. | ||
| The people around Trump are battle-hardened, okay? | ||
| You're not going to scare us, and we're not going to stop. | ||
| And what we know is you guys are a bunch of. | ||
| You will crater. | ||
| PBS is going to crater. | ||
| You don't believe actually at your core and what you're trying to do. | ||
| And you'll fold. | ||
| like the law firms, like the universities, like the media, like all of these institutions, you will fold because we're relentless and we're not going to stop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| PBS and NPR sued Trump over his attempts to defund them. | ||
| Harvard also refused to back down. | ||
| Many of Trump's efforts were blocked by courts. | ||
| But he has been pressing ahead. | ||
| Our golden age has only just begun. | ||
| We will never give in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We will never give up. | |
| We will never back down. | ||
| We will never ever surrender. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win. | |
| Together, we will make America powerful again. | ||
| This is new territory for people. | ||
| And a lot of people are very courageous in their heads when they imagine themselves facing the government. | ||
| But then, when the actual reality is looming in front of them, when the actual crushing weight of the federal government comes upon you, or the thought that you could be publicly named and shamed in a way that could bring threats and intimidation to your family, an awful lot of people are going to say, well, somebody else can take on this thing. | ||
| I've lived in Washington my whole life. | ||
| I've never seen people in Washington scared the way they are now. | ||
| I've never seen people in Washington as scared as they are now. | ||
| They are scared to talk. | ||
| They are scared to pop their head up. | ||
| They are scared to be noticed. | ||
| They don't want to be on his radar screen because they fear that he will use his power against them. | ||
| When I call people to talk to them and Quote them in a story. | ||
| They say, hey, I can't be on the record anymore. | ||
| I have a kid who works in the government. | ||
| I have a brother who has a federal grant. | ||
| My law firm doesn't want me to talk. | ||
| I'm scared, they say. | ||
| I don't want to be prosecuted. | ||
| I've never seen that before in Washington. | ||
| There's never been a situation where adversaries of the president, Democrat or Republican, felt afraid in the same way we're seeing now across the board to speak their mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was attacking government agencies, overpowering Congress, threatening law firms, the press, and more. | |
| Trump's far-reaching use of presidential power was leading to confrontation with the Supreme Court. | ||
| I think the administration is seeking an opportunity to create a constitutional crisis. | ||
| By that, I mean a crisis to test the scope of the judicial power to control the executive. | ||
| That's why the attack on the rule of law is really Trump's focus now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trump's test case, an unprecedented campaign against illegal immigration. | |
| A massive immigration enforcement crackdown has led to hundreds of arrests in a matter of days. | ||
| The administration claimed it was targeting violent gangs and criminals. | ||
| You had President Trump rounding up international gang bankers. | ||
| They are robbing, kidnapping, raping, torturing, and murdering Americans. | ||
| The president has absolute statutory and constitutional authority to get them the hell out of our country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But many others were being swept up too. | |
| Immigrants with legal status or no criminal history are also being detained and deported. | ||
| Many of the deported men lack criminal records in the United States, according to ICE. | ||
| The families of some of those men deported say not all of them are gang members. | ||
| How do you know that this person in front of you actually is a gang member? | ||
| What if they say they're not? | ||
| Do they have a right to some kind of process to go before a judge and say, mistaken identity, I'm just a barber. | ||
| I'm just a soccer player. | ||
| This tattoo you say is a gang tattoo is just my favorite team. | ||
| What's your proof? | ||
| They are deporting people they've said are very dangerous gang members. | ||
| But everyone in the country who's accused of something has basic rights of due process, which in this case would mean a hearing, to determine whether they are in fact members of this gang and whether they are subject to deportation under the law. | ||
| That's the process that the administration has tried to short circuit. | ||
| He's saying, all I'm doing is deporting criminal gangs or I'm taking action against murderers and rapists. | ||
| And it's very hard to get people worked up over concepts like due process, a legal term, right? | ||
| But you know who does get very, very agitated about due process? | ||
| Judges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In an emergency lawsuit, ACLU lawyers presented federal judge Jeb Bozberg with startling evidence. | |
| The government was racing to deport alleged gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without any judicial review. | ||
| Trump was rushing people onto planes. | ||
| Judge Bozberg said, slow down, temporary restraining order. | ||
| Let's figure out. | ||
| Let's freeze the status quo into place. | ||
| Let's figure out whether this is legal or not. | ||
| You need to turn those planes around, bring these people back to the United States. | ||
| And the Trump administration did not turn the planes around. | ||
| They handed more than 100 people off to a prison in El Salvador. | ||
| So that raises the question: not only was this legal to do in the first place, but did they violate a court order? | ||
| That was an extraordinary act. | ||
| Virtually all presidents throughout history have acknowledged that you have to obey court orders, that if you disagree with a court order, it's not optional to refuse to comply with it. | ||
| The answer is to appeal. | ||
| It's very close to just the kind of clash that everybody's fearing. | ||
| Between the executive branch and the judicial branch, it seems possible that for the first time in the United States history, a president might just say he's not going to listen to the courts. | ||
| I'm happy those planes landed in El Salvador because the president had a constitutional duty to ignore that lawless and dangerous order and land those planes in El Salvador. | ||
| This Bozberg, the clown, thinks he's the commander-in-chief. | ||
| He thinks he can order the president to turn around military planes carrying terrorists. | ||
| What the hell is Jeff Bozberg thinking that he thinks he can expose and sabotage an ongoing military operation? | ||
| Judge Bosberg does not have the jurisdiction to do what he did. | ||
| He did not have the power to do what he did, and what he did was lawless. | ||
| The judge in this case is essentially trying to say that the president doesn't have the executive authority to deport foreign terrorists from our American soil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Judge Bozberg fired back, ruling there was probable cause the administration was guilty of criminal contempt. | |
| And Bozberg wasn't alone. | ||
| The immigration standoff is heating up between the Trump administration and the courts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Court after court ruling against Trump. | |
| U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ruled the U.S. government must retain custody of migrants. | ||
| Challenging the deportations. | ||
| A federal judge appointed by President Trump blocked the administration from summarily removing migrants in South Texas. | ||
| Finding the administration was violating people's due process rights. | ||
| A federal judge says the Trump administration violated a court order for again sending migrants to a country they're not from without due process. | ||
| The Trump administration is now formally complying with the Supreme Court order to bring back the Brego Garcia. | ||
| This is a victory for due process. | ||
| It's a victory for the Constitution. | ||
| The American public may not even know it as due process, but they know that whenever the government comes against them, whether it be in a criminal proceeding, a civil proceeding, where the government intends to take away your property or your liberty, that you're entitled to be heard. | ||
| The Trump administration does not want to give those people the opportunity simply to make their case to the federal government that they're not members of the gang at all. | ||
| That's about as rudimentary and fundamental to America as anything that I can conceive of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Despite the challenges, Trump and his team haven't let up. | |
| And the question should be: why is a judge trying to protect terrorists who have invaded our country over American citizens? | ||
| The broadest theme that arises from it is a White House that is unafraid to provoke legal challenges and enjoys the fight as an end to itself, is not embarrassed by the prospect that it might be accused of doing something illegal, but revels in it. | ||
| We're not stopping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't care what the judges think. | |
| I don't care what the left thinks. | ||
| We're coming. | ||
| I deplore the rhetoric that suggests that anyone in the government doesn't have to follow the Constitution or the laws or obey court orders. | ||
| I think it would be a dangerous path for our country if any president starts saying they're going to act outside the Constitution. | ||
| And so I hope it's just careless rhetoric. | ||
| We have bad judges. | ||
| We have very bad judges. | ||
| And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Trump administration is escalating its fight with federal judges. | |
| Trump suggested that the judges, including one he appointed, were backroom hustlers. | ||
| He went after the Federalist Society, a longtime ally that had helped him select judicial appointments. | ||
| Why is he attacking the Federalist Society when it was an ally in the first term? | ||
| Trump wrote on Truth Social, I am so disappointed in the Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on judicial nominations. | ||
| It seems like what Trump wants is just judges who will agree with him. | ||
| Loyal to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And loyal to him. | |
| You have to think that it's a knowing effort on the part of Trump to delegitimize the power of the judiciary. | ||
| I mean, what he's basically also saying is that there is no such thing as neutral law or principled law. | ||
| It's all just politics. | ||
| And that's basically Trump's view of judges. | ||
| This radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator, was not elected president. | ||
| This judge should be impeached. | ||
| This is unequivocally, indisputably an attack by the president on the independence of the federal judiciary, pure and simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amidst the attacks, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an extraordinary rebuke to the president. | |
| Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. | ||
| The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose. | ||
| Even Chief Justice John Roberts, who doesn't enter the political fray very often, felt compelled within hours to put out his own statement saying, you don't agree with his ruling, you go to the appeals court. | ||
| You don't like the appeals court, you come to me, the Supreme Court, and we'll deal with it. | ||
| What he did there was lay down a marker. | ||
| Because what he said is, this isn't about Judge Boesberg. | ||
| It's not about a rogue judge the way the president would like it to be. | ||
| It's about the whole system. | ||
| And Roberts took that arrow for himself. | ||
| He was saying, it's about us. | ||
| It's about the system. | ||
| And do you respect the system? | ||
| Justice Roberts needs to remember that he is a federal judge. | ||
| He's not a politician. | ||
| And when judges take off their judicial robes and climb into the political arena and throw political punches, they can expect political counterpunches. | ||
| And so it's probably not a good idea for judges to make political statements like he does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, Chief Justice Roberts, who had written that pivotal presidential immunity decision a year before, is the face of a court at a crossroads. | |
| It's a little bit hard to reconcile Justice Roberts, who has claimed to stand for the balance of powers in our system, with the same man who wrote this decision granting Donald Trump sweeping unfettered power. | ||
| And now it seems to me that with many of these actions that Trump is undertaking, he's seeking to test the Supreme Court. | ||
| Did you really mean it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The last democratic institution that remains between us and the precipice of a constitutional crisis is the Supreme Court. | |
| There have been more than 300 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since he took office. | ||
| All the big cases are going to end up in front of the Supreme Court eventually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These legal challenges are making the way up to the appellate process. | |
| Some will land in the Supreme Court. | ||
| Chief Justice Roberts is on the hot seat because the judiciary doesn't have the powers of the purse and it doesn't have an army. | ||
| So the only thing it has is its own legitimacy. | ||
| And so they don't want to be in a position where they make a decision and Trump defies it because then it makes them look like a paper tiger. | ||
| So it's a tight spot. | ||
| What happens if there's a definitive ruling and Trump just decides, I don't care? | ||
| The president has acted as prosecutor and judge, but he's going to have to understand at the end of the day that for the federal judiciary to yield to him would literally be to surrender its constitutional role to Donald Trump. | ||
| That's simply never going to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the president and his advisors are betting that the Supreme Court will see it otherwise. | |
| They want to get a lot of these challenges into the courts because they believe that the Supreme Court, with a conservative 6-3 makeup, is a more friendly place to wager some of these fights over executive power. | ||
| And I think that a lot of the people around the president have a higher degree of confidence now that the Supreme Court will rule in their favor and ultimately codify the expense of presidential power. | ||
| There's nothing to compromise. | ||
| There's two different theories about what the Constitution says, what the framers had in mind, and what this country is. | ||
| It's going to build up to a crescendo. | ||
| One side's going to win, and one side's going to lose. | ||
| Trump is not only not going to blink, he's going to win. | ||
| A big win for the Trump administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Supreme Court slammed the brakes, saying no to nationwide injunctions. | |
| And in the final days of the Supreme Court's term. | ||
| The Supreme Court potentially cleared the way for even greater presidential power. | ||
| Victories for now. | ||
| The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration's efforts to deport migrants to third countries. | ||
| The White House is claiming victory after the Supreme Court allowed the White House to move forward with the mass layoffs of federal workers. | ||
| The battle here may on the face be between Trump versus the courts or Trump versus the rule of law. | ||
| But this is the battle for what is going to be normal in America. | ||
| What are our norms? | ||
| What is our system of government that we are all going to subject ourselves to? | ||
| Do we have the rule of law or do we have royal decrees? | ||
| That's what's at stake here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump seems to be riding a major wave of momentum these past couple of weeks. | |
| The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its staffing cuts at the Department of Education. | ||
| The FBI is now investigating former FBI director James Comey in conjunction with the genesis of the Russia investigation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In Los Angeles, tensions flaring after President Trump deployed National Guard troops. | |
| Our constitutional structure is definitely stressed. | ||
| Thanks for watching. |
Export Selection