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unidentified
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
| Ankush Kadori joins us now, a former federal prosecutor, current Politico magazine senior writer. | ||
| His recent story on the Epstein files bears this headline. | ||
| Trump's Wall Street Journal lawsuit raises new constitutional questions. | ||
| And one of those questions you explore is why we now have a dynamic where the president can sue you, but you can't sue the president. | ||
| Explain how we got here in our legal system. | ||
| So Trump has managed to push this to an entirely different sort of set of dynamics. | ||
| But originally, you know, under American law, constitutional law, the president is entitled to immunity from civil lawsuits under law developed by the Supreme Court, not based in a statute, not based in the Constitution. | ||
| So to the extent that the president is engaged in conduct that falls within what the court describes as the outer perimeter of his official duties, Trump is immune from civil lawsuits for damages. | ||
| However, Trump is free to go around and sue people himself. | ||
| Now, this is not something we have seen from prior presidents, but Trump is sort of unique in his litigiousness. | ||
| So we have this sort of asymmetric dynamic where if somebody now reports on a story that concerns him and he does not like it, which is what happened with the Wall Street Journal's story on the alleged letter that he sent to Jeffrey Epstein in this book, then he is free to go out and sue them as he has done for defamation. | ||
| But at the same time, if you or I wanted to sue him for similar sort of under considering the same facts for whatever reason, we'd probably be precluded from doing so. | ||
| Even the Wall Street Journal, if it wanted to bring a counterclaim against Trump in this lawsuit for defamation, because of the way in which he's denied it, maybe alleging that it's fake and that may have concocted it, it's not clear that they would be able to assert a defamation claim against him because of his immunity. | ||
| And his claim, his argument would be, which he's asserted before, that he's sort of free to respond to critics on matters of public concern, and that falls within his presidential zone of duty. | ||
| So this is how he approached the E. Jean Carroll case. | ||
| It's how he's approached the January 6th civil lawsuits against him. | ||
| Those lawsuits have moved forward despite this defense, but they went through years of litigation on just this issue. | ||
| On the Wall Street Journal lawsuit specifically, what does he have to prove for a defamation lawsuit against a media company? | ||
| And what is the process he will have to go through here if he moves forward with this lawsuit? | ||
| And as you point out in the article, that's not necessarily a sure thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the standard is he has to prove that the Wall Street Journal defamed him with actual malice. | ||
| And for a public official, that means either they knew that it was, the reporting was false or they acted recklessly with regard to their reporting, meaning they had some reason, substantial reason to believe it was false, but they proceeded nonetheless. | ||
| So that's just sort of the broad contours of what he needs to establish. | ||
| That I think is going to be very difficult in this case because I think the, I would assume that the journal spent a lot of time and careful thought that went into its reporting and that they involved lawyers as well because of Trump's litigiousness. | ||
| The prospect that he faces if this case actually proceeds, the journal could get it dismissed. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I'm sure they'll move to dismiss the case. | ||
| But if it proceeds to discovery, Trump will then be exposed to civil discovery like any other plaintiff. | ||
| That would include requests for, I would think, extensive documents from the Wall Street Journal, both from his private and public archives, so to speak. | ||
| And they will want to depose him under oath, not just about the letter ed issue and whether or not he wrote it, but about his broader relationship with Epstein going back decades, because that relationship is probative of his credibility on the denial, right? | ||
| And it goes to his motive to potentially falsely deny that he wrote the note. | ||
| So you would expect a very aggressive deposition from them. | ||
| And those depositions have typically not gone well for Trump in the past. | ||
| You may remember he was deposed by Eugene Carroll's lawyers in that civil lawsuit, and a lot of very unpleasant clips emerged from that, some of which were used against him. | ||
| So he faces a real risk of a messy discovery process, assuming the case goes forward. | ||
| Do you think it will go forward? | ||
| You know, I think the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good shot at getting it dismissed because I think it's not a very strong case on its face. | ||
| If it does not get dismissed, it's possible the journal will settle the case with him as we've seen other media companies settle cases. | ||
| I doubt that they are prepared to settle this. | ||
| I would assume that when they published this story, they were prepared for a lawsuit, prepared to proceed without settling the case. | ||
| It is also possible that Trump at some point could voluntarily dismiss the case. | ||
| And he has done that before, for instance, in a case of a lawsuit he filed against Michael Cohen when that case was approaching discovery and when he was on deck for a deposition. | ||
| He voluntarily dismissed the case. | ||
| So we have seen in the past when he is exposed to discovery that may be unflattering or unpleasant for him personally, he just sort of quietly dismisses the case. | ||
| I would not be surprised if we saw that here, but it's among the options. | ||
| What is President Trump's record when it comes to suing media companies? | ||
| It is quite poor. | ||
| He generally loses these cases when they actually proceed to a judicial resolution. | ||
| The exceptions, which have gotten a lot of attention, understandably in recent months, are the settlements that he's gotten. | ||
| One with ABC News and the other with Paramount Global, which is the parent company of CBS. | ||
| And those are the exceptions rather than the rule. | ||
| They've attracted a lot of attention, understandably, but they're outliers. | ||
| When he sues a media company based on its reporting, sort of rigorous reporting, and that is a credible media company, as of course, the Wall Street Journal is, he tends to lose. | ||
| Ankush Kadori is our guest. | ||
| His piece in Politico magazine, Trump's Wall Street Journal lawsuit, raises new constitutional questions. | ||
| The president is wielding lawsuits as both a sword and a shield. | ||
| He is taking your phone calls and with us until about 8.45 Eastern, so another 35 minutes or so. | ||
| Get your phone calls in. | ||
| Time to do that on phone line split as usual by political party. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And as folks are calling in, we mentioned at the top your background as a federal prosecutor. | ||
| Can you talk through that and how long, when you moved to journalism and how long you've been writing for Politco? | ||
| Oh, so I was a federal prosecutor for about three and a half years. | ||
| From summer of 2016 to early 2020, I was based here in Washington, D.C., and I was specialized in white-collar crime and financial fraud, cases that concerned people throughout the country and potentially international cases. | ||
| I was not in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. | ||
| I was in a specialized unit within Maine Justices that focused just on large complex financial fraud cases. | ||
| How I came to journalism is sort of an interesting little story. | ||
| I mean, I left the Trump administration in January 2020. | ||
| I left the Justice Department, I should say, under the first Trump administration in January 2020. | ||
| Long story short, I was not pleased with how the Justice Department was being run within my office under the management that had emerged under the Trump administration. | ||
| And then in January 2020, we're close to the pandemic. | ||
| So at that time, I was sort of taking a break, and then the pandemic came along. | ||
| And so like many other people was like, well, what's the point of looking for a job at this point? | ||
| We may not need any money. | ||
| We may be bartering for goods and services. | ||
| This could be like a walking dead type situation. | ||
| So I didn't know what was going to happen. | ||
| So I wasn't looking for work, but I was writing to sort of pass the time. | ||
| And I got very lucky. | ||
| People were supportive and picking things up that I was writing. | ||
| So I was a contributor at Politico doing kind of freelance alongside a column I was writing for New York Magazine for a couple of years. | ||
| I came on full time last March, so a little over a year. | ||
| And what is your beat now that you're on full time at Politico? | ||
| Do you have a specialized beat? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a columnist for the magazine. | ||
| I'm not on the news side. | ||
| We have excellent news reporters, including legal news reporters. | ||
| I write a column about national legal affairs and the intersection between national legal affairs and legal issues. | ||
| So I kind of have a wide remit and I have the luxury of being able to sort of pick and choose the things I focus on. | ||
| And a lot of your focus in recent weeks has been on the Epstein files and the Epstein cases. | ||
| Your most recent piece, the Epstein Files Timeline, raises real questions for Donald Trump. | ||
| We can go through that, but let me get a few phone calls in. | ||
| There are several waiting for you already. | ||
| This is Patrick out of Fairfax, Virginia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Patrick, you're on with Ankush Khidori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Question is, does the Supreme Court ruling about not being able to sue a president, does that apply to former presidents like President Obama? | ||
| So yes, if the conduct concerns his official duties or the conduct that falls within the outside of perimeter of his official duties, it would apply to conduct that occurred while he was in office, both on the civil side and the criminal side of liability. | ||
| You make the case in your piece, though, that Donald Trump has blurred those lines between official and unofficial. | ||
| How do we find the difference between the two? | ||
| This is the tricky part of this, right? | ||
| Because you take a look at this particular story, right? | ||
| The Wall Street Journal story. | ||
| It is, of course, a personal matter to him because he knew Jeffrey Epstein personally, and Trump is very concerned, I would say, about the extent of his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| But that personal relationship now has political implications, right? | ||
| Because the Trump administration, not just Trump himself, but the vice president, the Attorney General, the FBI director, and the FBI deputy director all spent years cultivating these Epstein conspiracy theories as part of a political process that is now playing out in the current administration. | ||
| So we've seen the public and the private, the political and the private, sort of merge under Trump. | ||
| So now for him, he views this as a personal matter that he can sue about, but it's also a very political hot topic, one that's very, very important to many Americans. | ||
| So effectively, he's in a position where he can file a lawsuit that is looking to essentially squelch reporting on a matter of public concern. | ||
| Joseph, New Jersey, Republican, good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Just listened to somebody from the media that's telling me that President Trump is sue happy or whatever the word he used. | ||
| This man, president I voted for, has been destroyed by the media and my own government with fake stories like Russian collusion. | ||
| That was all made up. | ||
| I don't know if political ever apologized for that. | ||
| The man for three years, he was undermined. | ||
| The guy I wanted to be in the White House was undermined, couldn't get things done because of phony and fake stories. | ||
| Now, here's another one, Epstein. | ||
| Is Politico are they investigating President Clinton and how many times he's been over there? | ||
| President Trump has every right to defend himself because we know the last 10 years of his life has been destroyed by people like him for politico. | ||
| Did you guys ever apologize with the Russian collusion? | ||
| It was all made up. | ||
| It was a soft coup. | ||
| Joseph, got your points to a couple different topics he touches on. | ||
| So Politico does not apologize for reporting true facts. | ||
| I'm not going to do it here either. | ||
| The Mueller investigation was not based on a hoax. | ||
| The hoax is the claim that it was based on a hoax. | ||
| The Mueller investigation was predicated on intelligence that the government obtained in 2016 from an Australian diplomat who suggested there may have been untoward relationship between the Russian government, Russian intelligence, and the Trump administration. | ||
| That kicked things off. | ||
| Now, there were undoubtedly, like the Steele dossier, in hindsight, clearly a mess. | ||
| But it was not a hoax. | ||
| Several people pled guilty, were charged. | ||
| Things did not move in the forward in the way that many people anticipated, but that often happens in large and complex criminal investigations. | ||
| That doesn't mean it was a hoax. | ||
| With respect to, you know, why isn't Politico looking at Clinton? | ||
| Look, Clinton is not the sitting president. | ||
| This is a very, very simple answer to this question. | ||
| Clinton is not the sitting president, nor did Clinton, or in the top levels of his law enforcement, spend years cultivating conspiracy theories about Epstein. | ||
| Nor is Clinton now in office, evidently sitting on information from the quote-unquote Epstein files that references him, despite all of the promises that Trump and his vice president, Attorney General, FBI Director Anod, made to the public for years. | ||
| And you were talking about the other Wall Street Journal story last week saying that Pam Bondi let the president know that his name was in the Epstein files, whatever the Epstein files officially are. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So look, I respect everybody's opinion, but like the notion that like, why isn't Politico focused on Clinton? | ||
| I mean, it's an absurd question. | ||
| To Janet in Florida, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my phone call. | |
| Yeah, I am around 60 years old, and I actually grew up in Queens, New York. | ||
| So I was very aware of Donald Trump when I was growing up and the fact that he was very litigious in terms of how he conducted his business. | ||
| And last 20 years, I've actually lived in Florida where I've seen how the, especially in the last two terms of the DeSantis administration, and there's now this supermajority in our state legislature. | ||
| They seem to be conducting a very Trump-like strategy of enacting unconstitutional legislature and then just leaving it to the courts if someone can come in and fight these unconstitutional decisions. | ||
| But they pass them nonetheless, and a lot of damage is done in the meantime while we hopefully can fight some of these unconstitutional decisions. | ||
| So I guess I'm realizing now that this does seem like a very Trump-like strategy. | ||
| And I don't know that I can, you know, I thought I followed politics all my life, but it really seems to me like this is this, it is strategic and they can market their, you know, their messaging bills while unfortunately, you know, it's common. | ||
| The average American who may not be paying too much attention suffers from the consequences of some of this, a lot of this legislation. | ||
| But it does seem to me like it's strategic and it's very Trump-like. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| Ankosh Khadori, give you a chance to respond. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, the Trump administration has taken a particular strategy upon entering office, which is to move very quickly and very expansively and aggressively on a host of fronts, violating quite a few laws that are on the books that were written by Congress. | ||
| I'll give you just very one example, which is he was supposed to provide notice to Congress before he dismissed any of the inspectors general. | ||
| They deliberately did not do that. | ||
| That's a very low-hanging example of violating statutory law. | ||
| And yes, it does appear to be the case that they then draw the lawsuit and then kind of see how it plays out, and some of it gets upheld, some of it doesn't. | ||
| It is a very, very unusual strategy coming from the executive branch. | ||
| It's unlike anything I've seen, at least during my lifetime. | ||
| Usually, when you have an administration pushing all of these things so aggressively, we would regard that as sort of politically unpalatable. | ||
| A question from Kristen in Maine via text message. | ||
| Do you think that Donald Trump will try to sue South Park over that last episode? | ||
| Kristen saying, watch or beware. | ||
| They literally and figuratively exposed him for ridiculousness. | ||
| I do not know if Trump will sue them. | ||
| I highly doubt it. | ||
| If he tried, that would almost be a certain loser because it's satire and parody. | ||
| And there's not an assertion of fact that he would be able to challenge. | ||
| You need an assertion of fact to be able to mount a defamation suit. | ||
| And this is, to me, just seems very classic political satire. | ||
| It falls within the heartland of the First Amendment. | ||
| When we come back to your most recent story for Politico magazine, the Epstein files timeline raises real questions for Donald Trump. | ||
| What are some of those questions? | ||
| Look, I mean, I think the questions that have emerged concern like the shifting rhetoric over time and the ways in which I think they've tried to deflect attention from the material in their possession that their supporters have been wanting to release. | ||
| Now, the Wall Street Journal reported in May, as you noted, that there was a briefing in which the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General told Trump that he was actually referenced in the so-called Epstein files, which is, I think, just the investigative file. | ||
| After May, I think we have seen sort of a conspicuous shift in their rhetoric. | ||
| Like this was an inflection point, you're right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it seems to have been a bit of an inflection point. | ||
| So after that, we've seen sort of a series of evasions and non-sequiturs. | ||
| For instance, Pam Bondi saying that there are, I think she said, tens of thousands of videos of child pornography for your assault. | ||
| Of course, no credible outlet, media figure, political figure, public figure has ever suggested that any of that material should be released. | ||
| Never. | ||
| There's also been Trump saying, oh, we only want to produce or release credible information. | ||
| We only want to release grand jury testimony, but it should also be pertinent grand jury testimony. | ||
| He has begun blaming Democrats for ginning all of this up and the media for ginning all this up, which is false. | ||
| I mean, he and his allies did more in the political and media spaces to amplify this than anyone else. | ||
| And so I look at that as a former prosecutor, and you just invariably have to ask, and we do this in criminal investigations. | ||
| Now, Trump has not been implicated in any criminal wrongdoing. | ||
| I'm just trying to explain how I think about these things. | ||
| You sort of look at these evasions and you wonder whether the people doing the deflecting are trying to suppress information that is unhelpful to them. | ||
| This is Rush in Pennsylvania, not Rhode Island, independent. | ||
| Rush, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, John. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, I'm 73 years old. | ||
| Retired mill worker. | ||
| worked numerous jobs. | ||
| I don't know if it's hoaxes or not, but I tell you what, I haven't watched the mainstream media since I followed Tucker Carlson for about the last 26 years. | ||
| And when he got fired off of Fox, I was done. | ||
| I tried watching, I used to watch Meet the Press Fascination, and this week with George Stephanopoulos, I used to tape two of them and watch all three of them. | ||
| So Rush, bring me to your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question is, okay, on the Epstein thing, I've seen numerous, forget about this Ghislaine Maxwell, her dad's the one that, you know, got things running going there. | |
| I think Epstein was an agent. | ||
| Bill Barr's dad, Don Barr is the one that got him started in that college and this and that and the other. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| Forget about her. | ||
| I have seen two, I would say, very reputable, you know, girls that were molested by him. | ||
| Not him, maybe, per se, but whatever. | ||
| The whole nine yards. | ||
| One's his niche. | ||
| So Rush, bring me to your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question is, you're never going to get the truth from Ghislaine Maxwell. | |
| You got to get to, there's a lot of these girls that are older now, and they'll come out and talk. | ||
| That's where you're going to get the truth. | ||
| There is no list. | ||
| There is no this list they're talking about. | ||
| Got your point, Rush. | ||
| Agush Kadori. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I actually think the key points he made at the end are correct. | ||
| I think it is appalling that the Justice Department is spending time with Guilay Maxwell, the Deputy Attorney General, spending days with her. | ||
| This is somebody who's in prison on heinous charges, 20 years, child sex trafficking. | ||
| Government's already charged her with perjury twice. | ||
| They fully discredited her. | ||
| She has plenty of reason to curry favor with the administration to shave the truth or to lie about it in order to try to get a commutation or a pardon. | ||
| I would not touch this person with a 10-foot pole if I were in government right now. | ||
| I think it's terrible. | ||
| I wish they would stop engaging with her. | ||
| And I think it is a bad idea on many levels, both legally and politically. | ||
| Now, with respect to who might have information about the extent of the criminal misconduct here, again, I think your caller is correct. | ||
| You actually would want to speak extensively to victims about this. | ||
| Now, the problem is this happened already, right? | ||
| The government conducted this criminal investigation. | ||
| They charge Epstein and Maxwell. | ||
| This process occurred. | ||
| And instead of now us being in a situation, oh, we should go now talk to the victims, gather this information, I think actually what we're doing is kind of re-traumatizing the victims by extending this saga past the point at which they thought it was closed, at least publicly. | ||
| And these are terrible things that happen to these people, unspeakable things that happen to some of these people. | ||
| And I'm so, I feel so terrible for them to have to be now confronting this on a daily basis in the media and from the president and the White House and the top levels of the Justice Department. | ||
| And it's a lot of flailing, and I think it's very counterproductive. | ||
| You know, it's a situation that the administration created for itself, but that does not obviate the harm and the trauma that I think that we're putting these victims. | ||
| So is that an argument to not release the Epstein files, whatever that phrase refers to? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It is the best argument. | ||
| In fact, we're not releasing the Epstein files, not just the extent to which there are references to them. | ||
| I think anyone would redact them if there were some sort of release, but also because it will prolong this issue potentially for years and years to come. | ||
| And I have to say, you know, Thomas Massey and RoConna have gotten a lot of attention for the discharge petition that would force the release of all of the Epstein files with redactions for the victim. | ||
| That is a terrible idea. | ||
| That is an absolutely terrible idea. | ||
| All it is going to do is give the public and conspiracy theorists years and years and years to rummage through Lord knows how many documents and spin up Lord knows how many other conspiracy theories. | ||
| I cannot think of a worse idea than dumping this on the public. | ||
| If they're not released, the counter argument would be that it's years and years and years of being able to guess or say there's something in there with no information, no ability to refute it. | ||
| And so the conspiracy continues. | ||
| Yes, but what should happen, and I don't know if this administration is capable of it, is that the president and or the attorney general and or the FBI director should get in front of a microphone and explain what is actually going on, explain that they had this wrong for years, explain why they had it wrong, whether it was deliberate or whether it was a mistake on their part, and level with the American public in a way that is credible and that gives us some assurance and to try to put this to the bed. | ||
| Now, I think they've created such a mess that I think you're right. | ||
| I don't think there is a way for them to put this to bed, possibly ever now. | ||
| But that is what I would like to see. | ||
| I would like to see a highly credible effort to explain what's going on at the public and to try to put a stop to this. | ||
| I'm Kush Kadori, a senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| His columns in Politico magazine. | ||
| You can find that at politico.com. | ||
| He's with us for about another 15 minutes taking your phone calls. | ||
| And this is Remy out of Brooklyn Park, Maryland, line for Democrats. | ||
| Remy, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, gentlemen. | |
| I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me. | ||
| But I just have some quick questions to run by the gentleman. | ||
| And basically, a little background. | ||
| I'm a retired trade forwarder, 79 years old, pushing 80. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But one of the things I'm seeing here that I think Politico needs to really start to focus on besides what's happening here with the Epstein files, which is really, to me, I'm seeing nothing more than, well, let's put it diversionary action. | |
| It's a diversionary action to take away from what's actually happening in Gaza. | ||
| When I see a country like the United States of America that is complicit to supplying the weapons of mass destruction that are being used to decimate these starving people, and why is it? | ||
| We can't just stand up and say, hey, look, we're going to talk about the Epstein files. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, we've got some bigger things going on where we're trying to come to a conclusion as to how did we end up in Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did Israel have the right to go into Gaza? | |
| Because we haven't answered all the questions. | ||
| And when talking with people from Syria and Israel and also Jordan, with the perimeters that we have around Israel, the Hamas took a year and a half to put something together. | ||
| And with the border security that they have in Israel, how did it get through that border without the massage and the IDF already there and awaiting for Hamas? | ||
| There's something got your points, Ankush Kadori, on the idea that this is a distraction. | ||
| Well, I think there's no question that there are many, many more important, substantive, and consequential things that we could all be paying attention to. | ||
| I totally agree with your caller, including the issue that he described, which raises a host of legal issues that are entirely different from why we're here today, but agreed. | ||
| I will just say, though, that the reason we're in this position is because of the Trump administration. | ||
| So I don't, it is now maybe serving as a de facto distraction from those other things, but this is unlike the other situations. | ||
| I don't think the Trump administration wants this to be in the news, right? | ||
| It may be sort of boxing out some of those other things. | ||
| This isn't a strategic distraction. | ||
| No, I don't think this is a strategic distraction. | ||
| In fact, I think they wanted to move very quickly beyond this after they put out this very terse joint DOJ FBI memo. | ||
| I believe it was back in June. | ||
| Now they find themselves here because they sort of created these expectations among their supporters and the folks interested in this. | ||
| And they've been fumbling around, quite honestly, for the last couple of weeks with public remarks and comments that have just not come close to putting this fire out. | ||
| And now we have front page headlines like this from the Washington Post today. | ||
| Trump fumes as the Epstein files overshadow his agenda. | ||
| The administration's plan to quell the crisis is dependent on the public forgetting about it. | ||
| Do you think the public will forget about this? | ||
| I think it's hard to see them forgetting about it anytime soon for several different reasons. | ||
| One is there are now several different sort of markers in the future for things that we now are looking to see how they unfold, right? | ||
| One is if the House comes back, is there going to be a vote on the discharge position or similar things? | ||
| So, right, that's going to be a news thing until that gets resolved. | ||
| The Trump administration has also moved to unseal grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. | ||
| There's going to be a story until at least that's resolved. | ||
| They're also doing this whole thing with Glene Maxwell, which is a terrible idea, but they're doing it nonetheless. | ||
| And it's unclear how long that process will extend. | ||
| So they've actually created a situation where there are multiple sort of reasons why this will not exit the news anytime soon. | ||
| This is Dorothy out of Baltimore, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Ankush Kadori. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think he said he was a lawyer. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| But I thought he said he was a lawyer. | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Former federal prosecutor, legal background. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that's good. | |
| What I want to ask you is about these two things we're speaking about: Epstein and I'm going to say the Obama situation that they brought up. | ||
| Now, I would say, okay, let's use this for example. | ||
| And you're a lawyer. | ||
| Tell me, if I incited a riot, though, I didn't do it. | ||
| I just told people to go up and tear up the Capitol or whatever, and you heard me do that. | ||
| And that's not the only question, so please don't hang up. | ||
| There's something to follow up to this. | ||
| Would I be responsible for any of that? | ||
| Got you, Dorothy. | ||
| And give me your second question just so we can get it on the table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my second question is this: We heard Trump say for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's email. | |
| They did it. | ||
| They did do that. | ||
| And today, you all cannot tell us, well, they're journalists, cannot tell us anything Trump ever said behind closed doors with the two Russian, what was his name? | ||
| Sergio Lavro when he first got in. | ||
| Also, Helsinki, y'all can't even tell us what they said behind closed doors. | ||
| So I think y'all are not doing justice to that. | ||
| And you all know that the Russia thing, the government, our government always checks out Russian agents who come to America. | ||
| We do. | ||
| And we found a lot of them was going into Trump's campaign. | ||
| And yes, they colluded, but they were communicating. | ||
| Dorothy, got your points. | ||
| January 6th, Russia, Hillary's emails. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I got to say the fact pattern that your caller outlined sounds suspiciously like Trump's speech on January 6th, which resulted in a siege of the U.S. Capitol. | ||
| Would you be liable for inciting the insurrection? | ||
| Look, there is a statute that holds people liable for inciting insurrection. | ||
| There were multiple reasons why that was not a good fit for the facts on the ground. | ||
| I say that as someone who wrote for years, actually, including on January 6th itself, about how Trump's conduct, including around the call he made to Brad Raffensburger, deserved immediate and aggressive attention from criminal investigators after the Biden administration took over. | ||
| So that's how I guess I'll address that. | ||
| With respect to the questions about Trump's connections to Russia, I mean, look, I think the media did quite a good job, a pretty good job during the first Trump administration. | ||
| There were definitely missteps, including around the coverage of the Mueller investigation, which I think was over-torqued. | ||
| However, I'll just say, you know, it is not for lack of trying that the media is not able to get the sort of details that your caller wants. | ||
| The reason that the caller and other people know that we're missing that information, for instance, is precisely because the media told us that, that they haven't gotten all of the ins and outs. | ||
| Now, so I think that's what I have to say about that. | ||
| Not for lack of trying. | ||
| This comes up from the several books that have come out on the 2024 election. | ||
| I'm thinking the Jake Tapper book in particular on the media lack of trying to get the story about Joe Biden's cognitive capacity and ability to run another campaign. | ||
| Do you fault the media for lack of trying on that story? | ||
| Yeah, I do actually. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think that was a combination. | ||
| Obviously, I've not read Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book, but I think we're all familiar with the thrust of it. | ||
| But yeah, I do think on the whole, the media did not perform well on that subject. | ||
| I mean, there were months of time beginning in 2023, maybe even 2022, where you could see visible deterioration. | ||
| And what you had was Democrats going out into the media calling him cheap fakes, and you had members of the Democratic Party saying he's great, and like we don't see any sort of missteps in cognitively. | ||
| And this was opposed to what Americans thought and saw for themselves, which is why the polling did so poorly. | ||
| Can I say one last thing, which I think really aggravates me to this day, quite honestly, in terms of the media's coverage. | ||
| You may recall vaguely when Rob Hurr, special counsel, issued a report on Biden's handling of classified documents, right? | ||
| There's a special counsel investigation releases the report, and it contains some derogatory, or you know, some references to Biden being elderly, well-meaning, not speaking well. | ||
| That report comes out the same day Biden goes and convenes his own impromptu press conference, at which I think he effectively confirmed Hearst's conclusion by stumbling and misspeaking and being kind of lashing out at MJ Lee, a CNN reporter at the time. | ||
| I was very struck by the lack of aggressive coverage of that event because I thought it was, again, staring us in the face. | ||
| But then you had a whole bunch of Democrats and too many figures in the media saying, well, let's just move on and move past this. | ||
| And it's just Republicans spinning this up. | ||
| And then it was months between that event and the June debate, in which this became impossible for anyone to deny. | ||
| So a caller may then call in and ask, why is there no lack of trying of coverage on a potential scandal surrounding Donald Trump? | ||
| And why was there a lack of trying during a potential scandal with Joe Biden? | ||
| Sorry, can you reconstruct that for me? | ||
| There's a lot to do. | ||
| Why does the media try when it comes to Trump and they didn't try when it came to Biden? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| You know, I wasn't covering, I'm not a White House reporter. | ||
| A columnist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With respect to Trump, I will just say on this issue, it is one that he and his administration created the expectations around, right? | ||
| So I don't think there's a situation where the media can be faulted for attending to this. | ||
| They created with their own public comments. | ||
| I mean, to this, I mean, I just say, like, you look at Vice President JD Vance on the campaign trail. | ||
| You've probably seen the clip many times now. | ||
| He's on a podcast with this guy, Theo Vaughan, and he said, let's release the Epstein list. | ||
| And he sort of chuckles about it. | ||
| I think it's a really appalling display on the part of a public official and wannabe public official to be chuckling about anything like this in public or privately. | ||
| That is just to say, though, that they created this mess for themselves. | ||
| To Sharpsburg, Georgia, Dick's Waiting Independent, just a few minutes here with Ankosh Kadori. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I feel the Epstein files is a smokescreen also. | |
| I wish they would release everything unredacted, and I would fire anybody that does any redaction. | ||
| But As far as a smokescreen, I think it's a smokescreen because of the insider trading that's going on amongst our elected officials in the amounts of money they're making. | ||
| And the Palestinian thing, I believe it is a smokescreen, and the news media is falling for Hookline and Sinker. | ||
| But I wish they would release all the files unredacted. | ||
| It is so foolish to redact 10-year-old files. | ||
| And what was it, 30 years ago, Trump was running with Epstein? | ||
| Who cares about that? | ||
| Ankush Kodori. | ||
| So look, I respect the notion that we want to put this to bed quickly, but again, I have to underscore this is a really bad idea, releasing all the files. | ||
| It's an extraordinary volume of information. | ||
| And just dumping this into the public domain, I think, is not a good idea. | ||
| It may be that they need to release something now in some fashion, or they may be forced to because of the political firestorm. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But under ordinary circumstances, the government would never do this. | ||
| And I just have to say, with respect to your color, the idea of producing them, releasing them without redactions is a terrible, terrible idea. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| There are going to be references to victims. | ||
| There's going to be sensitive financial information. | ||
| There's going to be derogatory information that was never corroborated about people. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| Just a few minutes left. | ||
| I did want to ask you about one of your other stories. | ||
| And again, you can find all of Ankush Kodori's columns for Politico magazine, Politico.com. | ||
| This one is about Donald Trump's deals with law firms. | ||
| The fallout is growing on Trump's deals with law firms. | ||
| The deals are looking worse and worse for both Trump and the law firms. | ||
| Can you just explain why? |