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On C-SPAN. | |
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| Joining us now is Ellie Mistal, justice correspondent and columnist for the nation. | ||
| He's also author of the books called Bad Laws and Allow Me To Retort. | ||
| Ellie, welcome to the program. | ||
| Hi, Mimi. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| First, your thoughts on the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. | ||
| Baseless and stupid. | ||
| There is no evidence in this two-page indictment brought by a first-time prosecutor that was handpicked by Trump because other more senior, more experienced prosecutors refused to bring it. | ||
| She's the only person who even signed the charging document, and it is, it lacks to say it lacks substance is an insult to cotton candy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Like there is nothing in here. | ||
| They're accusing Comey of making false statements in a congressional testimony. | ||
| They have no evidence that those statements were false. | ||
| But more to the point, even if they were false, which again, they weren't. | ||
| He wasn't lying. | ||
| But even if he was, they have no evidence to show that his false statement, again, if he made one, was material to anything that he was talking about or anything that Congress was talking about on that day. | ||
| So it's completely baseless. | ||
| Ellie, how do you know that there's no evidence? | ||
| They literally did not say anything in the charging document that suggests that there is any evidence whatsoever. | ||
| Is that typical? | ||
| Is that typical that you would put that information? | ||
| They're not going to pull out their Trump card, but usually they'll put forth something. | ||
| We know because yada yada yada that this happened or that happened. | ||
| There's none of that here. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| It's trying to find a great way of explaining it. | ||
| Like usually when you see a charging document, you're looking at a, it's like a coloring book, right? | ||
| Like you'll, you'll see the outlines of things, right? | ||
| And maybe it's not, maybe not everything is colored in. | ||
| Maybe you don't have the red nose here or the you know blue hair there, but you see the outline of the clown that they're trying to make. | ||
| This, there's not even a clown. | ||
| This is just, they're not even dots that can be connected here. | ||
| It is just, it is just the ravings of a lunatic thrown, you know, through the lens of this inexperienced, unqualified prosecutor, right? | ||
| Again, remember, Mimi, this is Jim Comey we're talking about. | ||
| And one thing we know about Jim Comey is that he takes notes, right? | ||
| That's that's a note-taken man. | ||
| We know that from all of his previous history. | ||
| And there is no indication in any in any of the documents in any, and again, the two-page charging document that they got a note, that they got a letter, that they got a wiretap. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| And then, Mimi, you just kind of pull back to the larger kind of context of all of this. | ||
| What he's accused of lying about is saying, is authorizing a person from the FBI to leak to the New York Times. | ||
| We already know the people who leaked to the New York Times, right? | ||
| Like, that's already kind of like out there in public information. | ||
| And none of those people have said that they were authorized to do so by Jim Comey, right? | ||
| Like, McCabe hasn't said that. | ||
| The Columbia professor hasn't said that. | ||
| So, like, nobody's flipped on Jim. | ||
| So, they can't be getting any evidence from the people that we know to be leakers. | ||
| Now, it is possible, it is possible that they have some mystery never known before leaker who is telling stories to the DOJ, but that strains credulity. | ||
| There's no, again, there's no reason to believe that unless you were trying to find ways to justify this charging document, which I don't think we should waste the intellectual time or energy to do. | ||
| We know what happened. | ||
| We know what he said. | ||
| It's not a lie. | ||
| And if it was, it doesn't matter. | ||
| So, Ellie, let's go back to the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| We're going to show kind of what started all this. | ||
| We're going to go back to 2017 and then the testimony about that 2017 that happened in 2020, and then we'll talk about it. | ||
| Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
|
unidentified
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Never. | |
| Question two on relatively related. | ||
| Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
| You responded under oath, quote, never. | ||
| He then asked you, quote, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration? | ||
| You responded again under oath, no. | ||
| Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. | ||
| Now, what Mr. Kitten McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. | ||
| One or the other is false. | ||
| Who's telling the truth? | ||
| I can only speak to my testimony. | ||
| I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. | ||
| So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak. | ||
| And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
|
unidentified
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Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today. | |
| Ellie Mistal, what do you make of that contradiction in Andrew McCabe and Jim Comey? | ||
| And do you see that as a problem? | ||
| Okay, so two things. | ||
| First of all, I disagree with the framing that this is what started it. | ||
| What started this persecution of Jim Comey is that he did not give Donald Trump his loyalty back in 2017. | ||
| Like, let's not get it twisted here. | ||
| This is happening because Donald Trump doesn't like Jim Comey, not because of anything Jim Comey said to Congress. | ||
| Now, they were trying to use this congressional testimony as a hook. | ||
| And when you say the incongruity between Comey's testimony and McCabe's testimony, that incongruity only exists in the head of Ted Cruz. | ||
| Because Andrew McCabe is not, in fact, saying that Jim Comey authorized him to leak to the Times. | ||
| He's saying at best that he was aware that McCabe was out there talking. | ||
| That is very different than authorization. | ||
| Charlie Grassley is a lawyer. | ||
| Ted Cruz is a lawyer. | ||
| When you use words like authorize, that has kind of a specific meaning, right? | ||
| That means Jim Comey says, hey, Andy, go do this. | ||
| You're my employee. | ||
| Go do this. | ||
| I'm ordering that to you. | ||
| And that's not what anybody is saying happened, right? | ||
| So when they asked Jim, hey, did you authorize this guy to leak? | ||
| He's like, no, no, I didn't. | ||
| Did you know that he was leaking? | ||
| That's a different question. | ||
| They didn't ask him that. | ||
| Maybe he didn't know. | ||
| Maybe he didn't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What I do know is that Jim is saying that he didn't authorize him and McCabe is saying that he didn't authorize him. | ||
| But here's the other point, Mimi. | ||
| What was this? | ||
| What was this congressional hearing about? | ||
| Because once again, I don't think James Comey is lying. | ||
| But let's say that he is. | ||
| Let's say that that clip that you, dead to rights, he told Andy, you go, he ordered the code read. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Let's say you got him dead to rights. | ||
| Is it a material false statement meant to mislead Congress about the thing that they were having a hearing on? | ||
| Because their hearing in that Ted Cruz clip is not about leaks from the FBI. | ||
| That's not the material point of that hearing. | ||
| That is a hearing on Crossfire Hurricane, which is the investigation into Trump's potential Russian connections, right? | ||
| Like that was the point of that testimony. | ||
| So if Jim Comey lied, and again, I don't think he did, but if you think that Jim Comey lied, you don't just have to show that he lied. | ||
| You have to show that he lied knowingly, willingly, and with the intent to mislead Congress on their inquiry into Crossfire Hurricane, which ain't got nothing to do with Andy McCabe or leaking to the New York Times. | ||
| If the Congress had had an entire hearing about leaks from the FBI, which are not actually illegal, but whatever, an entire hearing about leaks from the FBI or the dissemination of top secret documents or whatever, and then Comey lied. | ||
| Okay, that would be what lawyers would call a case. | ||
| This is not a case. | ||
| This is a vendetta. | ||
| Ellie Mistal is our guest. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation, you can start calling in now. | ||
| Lines are biparty. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Ellie, if you say, I mean, this case is completely without merit. | ||
| How did, why do you think that the grand jury voted to indict? | ||
| Something, something ham sandwich. | ||
| Like, think about just how you phrase, how you organize these clips, right? | ||
| Like, if you take a person who doesn't know anything about the law and is not hearing the other side and you say, Jim said this and Andy said that. | ||
| Well, then if you don't know anything else, if you don't know anything about materiality, if you don't know anything about false statements, if you don't know what McCabe's testimony was because you're only going on what Cruz, because the prosecutor only showed you what Cruz said about McCabe's testimony, as opposed to what McCabe said about McCabe's testimony, if that's all you're going on, you might return the indictment. | ||
| Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to crap on the grand jury. | ||
| They're people who are doing their civic duty and we thank them for it. | ||
| But the grand jury literally only gets one side of the story. | ||
| And with this administration, there's no There's no surety that the grand jury had a full and complete understanding of the facts or the law before they made their charging indictment. | ||
| So I don't fault the grand jury, but their indictment doesn't mean like, oh, well, 12 random people agreed with this. | ||
| So clearly there must be, no, no, that's not how, that's just not how it works. | ||
| The prosecutor in a grand jury situation gets to control what the grand jury sees and what the grand jury knows. | ||
| And with that power, that's why you have the old, the old adage, a prosecutor can get a ham sandwich indicted in front of a grand jury. | ||
| Like, that's why that exists, because when you control the information, you generally control the outcome. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's show what President Trump said last week outside the White House about the indictment of James Comey. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| Not a list, but I think there'll be others. | ||
| I mean, they're corrupt. | ||
| These were corrupt, radical left Democrats, which Comey essentially was a Democrat. | ||
| He's worse than the Democrats. | ||
| I would say the Democrats are better than Comey. | ||
|
unidentified
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He'll be honest, but it was, that's my opinion. | |
| They weaponize the Justice department like nobody in history. | ||
| What they've done is terrible. | ||
| And so I would, I hope they're, frankly, I hope they're honest because you can't let this happen to a country. | ||
| He said they weaponized the Justice Department. | ||
| What's your reaction to that? | ||
| First of all, I finally agree with something Donald Trump said because he said that James Comey is worse than a Democrat. | ||
| And I agree with that because James Comey is a Republican. | ||
| He was a Republican appointee. | ||
| He was a lifelong Republican. | ||
| And he did Trump the biggest solid in the world, which was napalming Hillary Clinton's campaign right before the 2016 election. | ||
| So I kind of agree with Trump on that. | ||
| However, just because I don't like James Comey doesn't mean that I think he should be persecuted and maliciously prosecuted by Trump over this over this vendetta that he's had for him since 2017, which is clearly what happened. | ||
| In terms of weaponization, you've got to remember that, you know, I started with the fact that the prosecutor who charged Comey was handpicked by Trump after the guy in charge refused to do this work. | ||
| This is Eric Sievert. | ||
| Yes, because they didn't have a case. | ||
| And Siebert didn't want to sully his name with this case. | ||
| So when you are the president and you are pulling out prosecutors and putting in political appointees, this woman has never prosecuted a case before. | ||
| And when you saw her at the arraignment, I mean, it was a train wreck is what it was, right? | ||
| That is the definition of politicizing the DOJ. | ||
| Pam Bondi, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, handpicked by Trump, a true MAGA sycophant, was like, well, that case, we had a case. | ||
| And Trump responded to that by blasting her on Truth Social, which is like the only currency in MAGALAN that matters. | ||
| Like the mean tweets is the only currency that matters in MAGALA. | ||
| And Bondi caved after she got blasted by the president on Truth Social. | ||
| That is politicization of the Department of Justice. | ||
| All right, let me ask you this. | ||
| This is a headline from CNN. | ||
| Why the Comey indictment is different from the Biden DOJ's indictment of Trump? | ||
| Can you answer that question? | ||
| How is that different? | ||
| Trump committed crimes. | ||
| They had evidence of those crimes. | ||
| They had so much evidence of Trump's crimes that the Supreme Court had to change the rules to make it so that Trump couldn't be indicted for the crimes that he was about to be convicted for. | ||
| That's how many, like, I understand that there are people in this world who think, well, if you do X, then I do Y. That's fair. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| But no, that's not how the law works. | ||
| Like, the feelings are not the thing that motivates the law. | ||
| If you have evidence of crime, you are supposed to prosecute the wrongdoers, right? | ||
| Like that is what the Justice Department is there for. | ||
| It's not there to play tit for tat. | ||
| If you don't have evidence of crime, I don't care how much you don't like the guy, you're not supposed to prosecute him, right? | ||
| And again, I say this as a person who is no fan of James Comey. | ||
| And frankly, Mimi doesn't like having to go on television to defend him. | ||
| Like, I don't like the guy. | ||
| I think he did bad things, right? | ||
| But they don't have evidence of crime. | ||
| And so he shouldn't be prosecuted. | ||
| With Trump, they had evidence of crime. | ||
| And so he should have been prosecuted. | ||
| Two things are different. | ||
| And people need to be able to live at that speed where different things are treated differently. | ||
| Ellie, do you think that the country is at a point of no return? | ||
| In other words, if the Justice Department is no longer independent, as you would say, if there's a Democratic president that comes in in 2028, are these things going to be rolled back? | ||
| Is the Justice Department all of a sudden going to be independent again? | ||
| Or will that president have the Justice Department indict his perceived enemies? | ||
| I mean, there are two ways of answering that question. | ||
| One, are we at a point of no return? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| This country was a slave country for 100 years. | ||
| It was an apartheid country for 100 years after that. | ||
| And yet we have overcome. | ||
| Like, so I can't say that this is the worst it's ever been in this country. | ||
| You know, like the worst is probably, you know, 1810, probably the worst for people like me. | ||
| So I can't say this is a point of no return. | ||
| In terms of the more focused question on is this a point of no return for the Justice Department, I think that the entire Trump administration has proven that the institutions cannot hold, will not hold, and have not held, right? | ||
| People who are institutionalists, which I never was to begin with, I think have egg on their face. | ||
| I think they're seeing the weakness of their guardrails, the fecklessness of the people in charge. | ||
| How do you overcome complete institutional failure without completely reforming and reimagining the institutions that have so clearly failed? | ||
| I think that is the challenge that we will have to reckon with going forward after the Trump administration, after this flare-up of authoritarianism leaves us, whether that leaves us in two years or four years or 100 years. | ||
| But after this flare-up of authoritarianism is over, we will have to not reform, but rebuild the institutions that have clearly failed in this moment. | ||
| And that obviously includes the Justice Department. | ||
| That obviously includes the Supreme Court. | ||
| I think it includes the entire criminal justice system. | ||
| How we rebuild those institutions will be important. | ||
| But the idea that we're just going to roll it back, we're just going to go back to the way it was and pretend like the last two or three years hasn't happened, only a Democrat would say that, right? | ||
| Only an establishment Democrat would be like, oh, all we need is some super blue guys and some duck cake and we can put Humpty Dumpty back. | ||
| No, it's broke. | ||
| It's broke. | ||
| This shows how broken it always was. | ||
| The challenge now is to build something stronger than a Justice Department that could so easily be taken over and corrupted and co-opted by an authoritarian as opposed to trying to restore what once was. | ||
| I have long argued, Mimi, this is a little bit off to your point, but I think goes to the spirit of your question. | ||
| I have long argued that the Attorney General of the United States should be in elected position separate and apart from the rest of the administration. | ||
| I think that at best you should run on a ticket in the same way the president and vice president run on the same ticket. | ||
| It should be the president, vice president, and AG all separately running on tickets. | ||
| I think the attorney general should be voted for separately than the president. | ||
| We do that in the states, right? | ||
| The New York Attorney General election is separate and apart from the New York gubernatorial election where I live in New York, and that's true in almost every state, I believe. | ||
| So having political separation, not tying the political future of the Attorney General to the political future of the president is clearly the kind of alpha reform we need to fix what has clearly broken and failed at the Department of Justice. | ||
| All right, let's go to calls and start in New York City. | ||
| Line for Democrats, James, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, good morning. | |
| It's a pleasure to speak to you, Mr. Mistar. | ||
| I'm a big fan of yours. | ||
| Two questions. | ||
| One, can a judge throw out the case before the grand jury? | ||
| Number two, with what is the protocol or the procedure that is needed to expand the court? | ||
| I know you have been espousing that for quite a few years, and it is clearly evident that we have a rogue Supreme Court thanks to Judge Roberts and the destruction of the 2013 Voting Rights Act. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Thanks for your call, James. | ||
| Yes, a judge can dismiss this case. | ||
| I'm sure after an initial round of cross-filings, one of the first things that Comey's lawyers will ask is for a motion to dismiss because, again, the charges here are baseless. | ||
| Now, I don't know, maybe I should know, but I don't know, actually, Mimi, which judge pulled the case. | ||
| I'm sure that information is probably out there. | ||
| I just haven't seen it yet. | ||
| I don't know the partisan background of that judge. | ||
| And to act like that doesn't matter is just being naive and stupid in this time. | ||
| So I don't know what judge they pulled, but yes, a judge, a good judge probably would dismiss this case. | ||
| I saw this morning that Comey has retained the services of Pat Fitzgerald, the famed prosecutor who cracked the mob back in the day as his defense lawyer. | ||
| So Comey's lawyer. | ||
| Comey's got better legal representation than the government, I'll tell you that. | ||
| And so we will play our game. | ||
| I don't think Comey is in any real legal danger from this because this is a clown lawsuit. | ||
| The danger comes from being able to harass people like this. | ||
| It's happened to Jim Comey. | ||
| Now that's going to make Trump feel like it can happen to others of his political enemies. | ||
| And the whole point is to have a chilling effect on everybody who crosses Trump. | ||
| You piss off Trump. | ||
| You might catch charges, even if they're completely trumped up. | ||
| Again, Jim Comey, former FBI director, well suited to defend himself. | ||
| You keep knocking over dominoes. | ||
| You're going to find somebody who isn't well suited to defend themselves. | ||
| And then we see what happens, right? | ||
| And Ellie. | ||
| To answer the second part of James's question, just really quickly, expanding the Supreme Court is a super, it's super simple. | ||
| You need a bill, you pass it through Congress, you pass it through the Senate with 51 votes as opposed to the filibuster, which is not a constitutional thing. | ||
| It's signed by the president, and boom, you can have as many justices as the president picks. | ||
| It has been done six or seven times in American history, all through normal legislation, and it can easily be done again if the party has the will to do it. | ||
| Okay, and just to get back to your point about the judge, so Politico has this meet the judge who will oversee James Comey's criminal case. | ||
| It's U.S. District Judge Michael Nakamanoff. | ||
| He's a 2021 appointee of President Joe Biden. | ||
| He was randomly assigned last Thursday evening to the Comey case. | ||
| Thank you, Mamie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that sounds good, right? | ||
| I mean, that sounds good. | ||
| It sounds like Comey will at least be in a situation where he can get a fair trial, right? | ||
| He's not being sued in Amarillo, Texas, right? | ||
| So that's good for him. | ||
| Again, I don't think that this puts Jim Comey in mortal danger. | ||
| He is well suited to defend himself from this claptrap. | ||
| The question is, what happens when Trump keeps doing this and keeps doing this and keeps doing this? | ||
| He's going to find officials who are not well suited to defend themselves and it gets much worse from there. | ||
| Here's Rob in New York Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Rob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hi, Mr. Mistal. | ||
| Yeah, it is very frightening to look at a Justice Department that's corrupt. | ||
| And I had a few questions for you. | ||
| And if you could ask for him yes or no and then please elaborate. | ||
| It would be appreciated. | ||
| Do you think that the Hunter Biden laptop was real? | ||
| And do you think it affected the election? | ||
| And do you think that the Steele dossier was real? | ||
| And do you think it affected Donald Trump's administration? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I do think Hunter Biden had a laptop. | ||
| I do not believe anything that they have said was on it, except for what I can independently verify. | ||
| Do I think it affected the 2024 election? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I think it affected Joe Biden and his family. | ||
| And I think that the Republicans glommed on to that. | ||
| And I think that was sad. | ||
| And I think it's sad for Hunter Biden, but I don't think it actually affected the macro political environment that we're living in. | ||
| What was the second one? | ||
| Do I think the Steele dossier was real? | ||
| Again, I think there was a Steele dossier. | ||
| Yes, I think it was real. | ||
| Do I think it was true? | ||
| Probably not at this point. | ||
| I mean, I thought it was true for a long time. | ||
| I have seen evidence, you know, in the past like three or four years to suggest that some of the stuff was not true. | ||
| So I've kind of changed my opinion on whether or not it was true. | ||
| I know it existed. | ||
| Do I think it affected the 2016 election? | ||
| No, I really don't. | ||
| I think that Trump's criminal behavior, I think that his crass behavior, I think that his corrupt behavior has been baked into the electorate since 2016. | ||
| I think that people who voted for him already know what he's like and they like him anyway. | ||
| I think people who didn't vote for him already know what he's like and they don't like him and they didn't vote for him anyway. | ||
| And I don't think that had anything to do with anything specifically in the Steele dossier, right? | ||
| And I think that that is, if anything, it's a problem that I have with the approach to 2024 because I think that there was a lot of thought in 2024 that kind of exposing Donald Trump for who he is was going to be a motivating factors for voters. | ||
| But I think that sometimes Democrats, and especially kind of elite level, intellectually elite Democrats, I think we forget that people like this about Trump. | ||
| They like the corruption. | ||
| They like the racism. | ||
| They like the authoritarianism. | ||
| That's a feature, not a bug of his thing, right? | ||
| And so kind of pointing it out all the time, he's a racist authoritarian, like nobody, people like that about him. | ||
| People like that he's mean and mean spirited and lacks compassion. | ||
| That's a feature, again, of his personality. | ||
| So like talking about it doesn't actually motivate votes. | ||
| And I think that's, so I think that's a thinking that like, oh, the steel dossier, that's the nobody cares. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| And we have to move on to things that people actually care about. | ||
| Well, let's talk to John, a Republican in Hallsville, Texas. | ||
| John, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, let me clear one thing up. | ||
| Anthony Blinken, it was reported that he sent a memo out to 50 people that that laptop was disinformation to use that. | ||
| And then lo and behold, he became Secretary of State. | ||
| But that's for another day. | ||
| When it comes to the indictment, this is simple. | ||
| They got an indictment, and when they start shaking the sugar tree, when you put Andy McCabe on the stand and say, Did he say this? | ||
| Did he lie? | ||
| And you start to show a pattern that he lied. | ||
| And also, Comey went before a FISA court with that steel dossier, knowing it was not real and obtained a warrant so he could spy on Trump. | ||
| That is a fact. | ||
| I see you shaking your head, but that's a fact. | ||
| Because, John, if it was a fact, they would have indicted him for that. | ||
| If it was a fact, John, that would be in the charging document. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, John? | |
| Like, you have, as much as you want to believe that, and I get you, John, it's not in the charging document. | ||
| So, do you think, John, do you think, given how pissed Trump is about the steel dossier, do you think if they could have charged him over lying to a FISA court under oath, that's not false statements, John, that's perjury. | ||
| Do you think that if they could have possibly charged him with perjury, they wouldn't have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, let me go to the Constitution. | |
| You talk about the Justice Department being weaponized. | ||
| Well, let me give you this: Donald J. Trump is president, CEO of the executive branch, and it falls within his realm. | ||
| He can, if he wants to, get involved in every one of those cabinets, and there's nothing that the court can do about it. | ||
| Actually, the court can do something about it. | ||
| It has allowed him to do this under a ridiculous theory called the unitary executive theory that we have not ever used before. | ||
| The theory that everybody in the federal government in the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the president is simply not a thing that we've done before. | ||
| And I'm not sure that's a road you want to go down, John, because again, at some point, the wheel is going to turn. | ||
| At some point, the worm is going to turn. | ||
| If you want a fire-breathing Democratic president with the ability to hire and fire every single person in the executive branch, you are just asking for a Democrat to one day come in and do exactly to the system what Trump has done to the system. | ||
| And I don't think that's the kind of system that works out for the Johns and Hallsville Texases of the world in the long term, right? | ||
| So, like, again, the Supreme Court are the people who are allowing Trump to do this. | ||
| They could just as easily be the people who stop Trump from doing this, but they decided to go a different way in part because the Republican and handpicked by Trump to begin with. | ||
| Here's Ted, Independent, Minneapolis, Minnesota. | ||
| Hi, Ted. | ||
| You're on the air with Ellie Mistall. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, good morning. | |
| And I think Ellie's hit it right in the nailhead. | ||
| If you look at the article that Trump had wrote on X, it absolutely proves that the Justice Department is not for independence at all. | ||
| It is for the pleasure of Donald Trump. | ||
| And I would just say one other thing, too. | ||
| What I cannot believe is that the Supreme Court, how they bought time so that they could not charge Donald Trump with treason over the election, how he tried to overthrow the election and brought forth all of these faked electors, the Sydney Pauls, the Cheeseburls, these people, he should be in prison. | ||
| He is a dictator. | ||
| He's a wannabe dictator. | ||
| And hopefully, this country will boot his fat ass. | ||
| All right, Ted. | ||
| Any response, Ellie? | ||
| Thanks, Ted. | ||
| Look, I obviously think the Supreme Court made terrible decisions and has been complicit and feckless in the face of the authoritarian takeover by Donald Trump. | ||
| I think the Supreme Court is one of the biggest problems, not one of the smallest problems that we have. | ||
| And it's beyond buying him time. | ||
| Again, they declared him immune. | ||
| They gave him kingly powers, which had heretofore never been even articulated in this country. | ||
| And if they hadn't, I do believe he would have been indicted for the election fraud. | ||
| But here's the thing for, again, the people who think that, oh, both sides are the same here. | ||
| If the Democrats were like Trump, Joe Biden would have been on the phone with Merrick Garland every single day about charging Donald Trump, right? | ||
| Like Merrick Garland would not have gotten away with spending four years hiding under his desk, being too afraid to charge Trump and his kids with crime, right? | ||
| We wouldn't have needed Jack Smith if the Democrats, if Joe Biden had acted like Trump and put this kind of pressure on the Justice Department. | ||
| I don't think Biden called Merrick Garland more than to wish him happy birthday. | ||
| I never saw Biden tweet at Merrick Garland. | ||
| I never saw the president put pressure on Garland to prosecute Trump, and they had a case against Trump. | ||
| So that right there, to me, is the most obvious difference between how Democrats and Biden went about this thing versus how Republicans and Trump is going about it. | ||
| Here's Tad, a Democrat in Burrellville, Rhode Island. | ||
| Hi, Tad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, folks. | |
| I want to thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Mr. Mistall, I also am a fan of yours. | ||
| And you were talking about rebuilding our institutions or reforming them coming down the line. | ||
| Well, I agree wholeheartedly. | ||
| And I read three books by Sebastian Hafner, who was born in Germany in 1907. | ||
| Anyway, he was a lawyer. | ||
| And the way they work it over there is if you want to become a judge, you have to take a civil service exam, which would be much better than having political appointees. | ||
| And I'm going to leave it at that, sir. | ||
| And thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, how we pick judges in this country is weird. | ||
| First of all, at the state court level, which are the judges that most people actually interact with, right? | ||
| If you're going to be in front of a judge, you are most likely going to be in front of a state court judge. | ||
| A lot of those positions are elected. | ||
| And people have no idea who they're electing. | ||
| I'm an expert in the law. | ||
| And very often on the day before the election, I find myself Googling, oh, who is this judge again? | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Like, these are, it's incredibly difficult to find good information about the elected judges that we're getting. | ||
| And then obviously the political appointment process of judges has been, the appointment process of judges has been completely politicized for going on, you know, decades now, both at the state court level where governors appoint state court judges sometimes, and certainly at the federal level, where the president appoints every Article III federal judge with the consent and approval of the Senate. | ||
| I think that the proof that this system was broken and needed to be, again, ripped up from root and stem and rebuilt was what Mitch McConnell did with Merrick Garland when Merrick Garland was appointed to the, was nominated to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Refusing to give that man a hearing. | ||
| I mean, give him a hearing, vote up or down, do whatever you're going to do. | ||
| But refusing to give him even a hearing proved that the system of judicial appointments is completely broken. | ||
| And again, can't be just restored. | ||
| We don't want to go back to the point where Mitch McConnell can steal a Supreme Court seat. | ||
| We want to build something newer, better, more durable, less feckless. | ||
| And that has to be Project 2028, Project 2032 on the left to actually think about how to rebuild these institutions so that they can't be intruded and taken over by authoritarians in the future. | ||
| Here's David, a Republican, Hendersonville, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I watch C-SPAN a lot, and some of your guests are very good. | ||
| I have absolutely no respect for this guy. | ||
| He has no credibility. | ||
| I would like to ask him a couple of pointed questions. | ||
| What crimes did Mr. Trump, President Trump, commit, which he brought up several times this morning? | ||
| Falsifying business records, mishandling of national security documents, attempting to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and racketeering to overturn the 2020 presidential election. | ||
| And that is just what he's been indicted for. | ||
| And I looked that up on Google while you were talking. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Google was another very credible company. | |
| He did not try to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| He sued 63 times to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
|
unidentified
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Would you shut up about it? | |
| Hold on, hold on. | ||
| David, go ahead. | ||
| You continue with what you were going to say about the 2020 election. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let me finish. | |
| He did not try to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| I'm not going to let you finish lying. | ||
| He did, in fact, try to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
|
unidentified
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There were lost that he lost. | |
| Ellie Mistall, let's let David finish. | ||
| You said the 2020 election. | ||
| What else was your point, David? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I want to know how he tried to overturn the 2020 election. | |
| Okay, let's get a response on that. | ||
| The fake electors. | ||
| All right, David, he tried to have a fake slate of electors stand in for the real slate of electors to overturn the results in states that he lost. | ||
| He was sued for this. | ||
| He was indicted for this. | ||
| That is how he tried to overturn the election. | ||
| I cannot help you further than that, David. | ||
| I suggest you go read a book about the 2020 election where this information is also available. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's Barbara, Midwest City, Oklahoma Independent. | ||
| Hi, Barbara. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Hi, Ellie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I'm glad you're on. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm so nervous because I'm so thankful to see you on here after all these lies this morning. | |
| We have three hours of lies on this station every day now. | ||
| We just have the Trump lies. | ||
| Every five minutes, they play Trump. | ||
| I had no inflation. | ||
| I'm so sick of hearing that. | ||
|
unidentified
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He had 9.8 inflation. | |
| That's what he handed to Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
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He says, oh, and I fixed the, he said he fixed the border. | |
| That's what Biden did the first thing, and Trump tore it up. | ||
| I mean, please go through some of these things. | ||
| Please tell the people that this man is lying about things like you're doing. | ||
| And God, I love you. | ||
| And people who don't like you, they don't like truth. | ||
| Thanks for the compliment, Barbara. | ||
| Look, I think one of the problems Democrats have sometimes, though, is that we think that telling the truth is going to be enough, that hitting people like David with facts is going to be enough. | ||
| David doesn't care what I just said. | ||
| David's not going to use the Google machine. | ||
| David's not going to read the books that I suggested he read, right? | ||
| Like he doesn't care. | ||
| They don't care about these truths that we're telling them, right? | ||
| And that goes to, I think, a fundamental, again, problem the Democrats have in trying to wrestle with the pig, you know, that has them on the ground right now. | ||
| Trump voters are getting what they wanted, right? | ||
| They're not getting jobs. | ||
| They're not getting a good economy. | ||
| They're not getting lower inflation. | ||
| They're not getting the economic stuff that they wanted, but they didn't actually want that. | ||
| What they're getting is the racism. | ||
| What they're getting is the cruelty. | ||
| What they're getting is the smashing of elites. | ||
| That's what they wanted, and Trump truthfully delivers on that every day, and they couldn't be more thrilled with it. | ||
| Trump hurts people they don't like, and it is that pain that motivates them to vote for Trump. | ||
| And until Democrats kind of wrestle with the fact that at least half of this country votes for pain for others, not help for themselves, but pain for others, we're going to continue fighting this losing battle. | ||
| All right, that's the last word. | ||
| Eli Mistal, justice correspondent and columnist for the nation. | ||
| His work is at thenation.com. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me, Mimi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Federal funding has expired and the government has officially shut down. | |
| Lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on either Democratic or Republican short-term funding measures, which would have funded the government through November 21st. | ||
| Democrats continue to block any funding measure that does not include Affordable Care Act subsidies. | ||
| President Trump said on Monday that he's in favor of a riff or reduction in force for federal government workers should the government shut down. | ||
| Congressional leaders from both parties will hold news conferences Wednesday morning. | ||
| House members could be called back to Washington, D.C. if an agreement's reached. | ||
| Stay with the C-SPAN networks for continual updates. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | ||
| Coming up Wednesday morning, we'll discuss the federal government shutdown first with Axios Congressional Reporter Stephen Newcomb. | ||
| Then, Maryland Representative Sarah Elfrith talks about the shutdown's impact on the federal workforce and Democratic budget alternatives. | ||
| Also, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins discusses the shutdown's impact on his department and veterans' care. | ||
| And later, notice White House correspondent Jasmine Wright and Roll Call Editor-in-Chief Jason Dick review the policy and political ramifications. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Wednesday morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Heading into day one of the government shutdown, here's a look at some live coverage coming up Wednesday on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Over on C-SPAN at 10 a.m. Eastern, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune will hold a press conference on Capitol Hill to discuss government funding after the Senate failed to pass short-term measures. | ||
| And at 11 a.m., House Minority Leader Jeffries and Democratic House Leadership will hold a press conference to address government funding and the shutdown. | ||
| Over on C-SPAN 2, the Senate's back in session. | ||
| Lawmakers are set to work on several measures, including further work on government funding. | ||
| The chamber does not plan to meet Thursday to allow members to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. | ||
| You can also watch all of our coverage on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and C-SPAN.org. | ||
| And past president, why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is a kangaroo clause. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. |