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June 24, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:50:55
20240624_trump-picks-his-vp-and-jack-smiths-election-interf
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Denmark Sweden Turf Wars 00:05:46
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at Moon East.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
It's debate week.
Yes, we are getting a general election debate this Thursday, Thursday night.
The 2024 campaign is officially on.
Yeah, it's been on.
I realize that, but this is it.
This is in earnest.
All that other stuff we did was just build up.
As you know, what else was there to talk about other than who's going to take over as the leader of the free world?
We've got so much to discuss today.
I've been off for a bit, as you know, went on vacay with my family.
We went to Scandinavia.
We went to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a place I've never been before.
And it was very eye-opening for me.
More on that later.
But we have a first-time guest on the show next hour, not a first-time interviewee of yours, truly, my old pal Jonathan Churley of Fox News.
He teaches at GW Law School, George Washington University Law School.
But he's going to be here.
He's got a new book out, and we'll discuss that Tan's free speech, plus the latest on the Trump trials and the Supreme Court decisions we expect this week.
But we begin with Victor Davis Hansen, author of The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.
Go buy it if you haven't yet.
Victor, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It's funny, like how wars descend into annihilation.
I'm just thinking when I was over in Scandinavia, we were talking, you know, like there, Sweden used to be this epic power.
And now, you know, in Denmark, they talked all about like the turf wars between Denmark and Sweden.
And now it's like, no one really cares that much.
I mean, like, Denmark, I mean, they're very proud of the fact that they have very low crime and they have almost no terrorism, and no one's interested in attacking them.
And like, they have a king, their king rides his bike to work in the morning and rides his kids around and has no security concerns.
And that all sounds lovely.
But I couldn't help but think, you know, one of our tour guides said to us, We chose during World War II to be occupied.
I couldn't help but think you chose.
Like, there are certain responsibilities that come with being the leader of the free world.
That's us.
And we weren't really able to sit out World War II.
And the truth is, the reason they're not speaking German there is us.
And it's just a very different way of life and very different upsides and downsides to the way these countries have come to where they have.
You're an expert on all this stuff, so I'd love to get your take.
Yeah.
Well, I'm Swedish, so I have my father's side.
We're all Swedes.
I heard you talking about that on your podcast.
My brother's name is Nels Hansen, and my nephew is Leif Hansen.
So they went full Swedish.
But they always said Swedes were, they always told us that Swedes were Danes with their brains blown out because we like to drink, I guess.
I don't drink my brother's drink, but any of you.
They're big drinkers in Denmark.
The drinking age in Denmark is 16.
The Danes, there's a community right near where I'm speaking called Kingsburg that was founded by my great-grandfather and grandfather and other Swedes from Lund.
And then there's a Danish community.
And the Danes all said the Swedes were stupid and workaholics.
And the Swedes all said the Danes were crafty and clever.
I don't know what was true, but there was a lot of rivalry.
In World War II, they were very different, though.
Sweden was neutral, but it actually sent, it supplied about 90% of Hitler's iron ore, and they even gave them free transportation across the Baltic.
So they were actively collaborating with Hitler until at least 1944.
Then they got scared and cut him off.
The Danes were overrun in three days in 1940.
But, you know, Megan, they were one of the only European countries that actively tried to protect Jews and get them out of the country and away from the Nazis.
They did a really good job of that.
The Norwegians fought.
Of the three, they fought very fiercely.
They were overrun and they tied down two Russian German divisions through the whole war.
About 30,000, 40,000 troops Hitler could have used anywhere else.
He needed them in North Africa.
He needed them in Italy.
He needed them, but he didn't dare take them out of Norway.
And so that was, they were very different.
The Norwegians were the toughest of all of them.
Sweden has a really, I think it's a pretty valuable NATO member.
It's got one of the best per capita arms industry.
And the Finns do.
So when they both joined NATO, the Finns brought the best artillery of the NATO powers, at least in terms of quality and per capita platforms.
And the Swedes have the SAB fighter platform and they're right on the border with Russia.
So, you know, they were always neutral.
And now they got scared after Ukraine and they really want to be muscular members because they're afraid they're next.
And when we were there, we saw French boats patrolling in Sweden as a result of the NATO membership.
And those, I'm not surprised about the Norway thing because they've got that Viking heritage.
I will say, and I'll show you some pictures later, but truly one of the most beautiful places on earth, like all three of these places, but especially those fjords or as Abby kept calling them, the Fajord.
Trump Nevada Minnesota Shift 00:08:49
I'm trying to see if she can get Wi-Fi on a Fajord.
Anyway, those beautiful bodies of water ensconced between three mountainous regions.
They used to be glaciers.
And if you can ever go, it's a long plane ride, but my God, well worth your time.
Okay.
So anyway, let's get back to news domestically because I've missed talking about it.
And I have been listening to your show, which I love.
The debate.
Let's talk about the big debate.
It is going to happen on Thursday, barring some crazy circumstance where somebody bails at the last minute.
And Trump, wisely, is finally not playing down expectations for Joe Biden, finally trying to hedge a little on just, you know, what he might be dealing with.
He is reportedly not doing debate mock sessions with anybody.
He did before where Chris Christie played his opponent, Joe Biden.
But reportedly, he's not doing that this time.
And Joe Biden is doing that.
And I do think, just given reality, I don't think this is a mistake by Republicans, but just given reality, the stakes could not be lower for a Joe Biden performance, right?
For him to emerge victorious.
He's just going to have to not die during the 90 minutes.
But what do you think?
I think it's kind of like the State of the Union.
Right before the State of the Union, he had been stumbling again.
He was at his low point, and they did the same thing.
They put him on, they put a lid on everything for about five days.
And then he came out.
And, you know, when you talk about his cognitive challenges and Adderall and all these jokes, you get all these neurologists.
Maybe you've talked to them.
They call you or they write you and they give you a whole menu of pharmaceuticals or neutracils that can help him.
And I think that's what happened in the State of the Union.
He wasn't coherent, but he was animated.
He was angry.
He was fiery for over an hour and a half.
So I expect the same thing.
I don't, I think he'll come out.
He'll, he'll want to show everybody he's muscular.
He'll have to stand and he will yell and that kind of mean grimace.
And if Trump can just keep quiet, just keep calm and just talk about what the Biden record is versus what his record was and what his plan will be, I think he'll do fine.
But it's in a weird way, Megan.
They've kind of slanted, as you know, the rules of the debate because they have, but I don't think it's going to help Biden because cutting the mic, I think, helps Trump in a weird way so that he can't interject.
The idea they stand for, I think they're going to stand if I'm right, if I remember correctly, for an hour and a half.
I think that helps.
Yeah, they're standing.
And then the idea that all of these, especially Jake Tapper, have this record of sort of overt bias or dislike of Trump, I think will actually, he'll be on his best behavior.
If he is not, people will notice it and empathize with Trump.
So if he can keep calm, and I think he'll do well.
But if he goes out like he did in the first debate, and I don't think it's going to be as easy to do that under this platform.
The other thing is really quickly, we've never had, you know, we don't really talk about why we were debating at all.
We've never had a debate before in the history of these debates when neither of the candidates has been nominated.
And it's obvious that this is some kind of stress test for Joe Biden, that if he doesn't do well, there's going to be talk that he'll get off the ballot and they'll be able to have both the convention and put another person's name on most states in time.
Whereas if he had debated in October, it would have been too late.
So the pressure is on Biden, but it's kind of self-induced by his own party.
Yeah, no, that's what's fascinating.
The Daily Mail had a piece on this saying they'd spoken with some top Dem operatives who are saying that really is the purpose, that if Joe Biden falls down at this debate, or if his poll numbers continued cratering, this is a few days ago now, this would at least this early debate date give them a chance on the Dem side to sub somebody else in.
But at the same time, they're making plans to nominate Joe Biden virtually, even prior to the Democratic convention, which is seen by some as a move by the Biden allies to lock him in and make sure he cannot be subbed out no matter what happens.
I am fascinated to talk about what's happened in the polling since I was last on the air live two weeks ago, because there has been some erosion for Trump with independence in the wake of that conviction.
And you can see the argument by the Dems that everything is going to plan, that Joe Biden's not the ideal choice, but he beat Trump once before.
He'll beat him again by running on Trump's personality as opposed to his own accomplishments, Joe Biden's, and that all he really needs to do on Thursday is irritate Trump.
Like do like just keep poking him because Trump's goal is to try to, you know, maintain some sense of dignity and strength, but not pettiness.
And if Joe Biden just keeps nadling him, Trump has some sort of a nasty meltdown that causes interrupting Trump to come back and the numbers with women start falling, et cetera.
What do you, what do you think of that plan?
I think that's mostly right.
Absolutely.
And I think he'll call him a convicted felon or it'll be January 6th abortion, destroying democracy, and you're a felon and all that.
But one thing about the polls, you know, the Fox poll had Biden on the national level up two.
And then the Rasmussen poll came out and you probably saw that one that just came out.
And in that, Biden was down when it was a head-to-head, I think nine.
And with the three, a tripartite field, he was down by seven.
And I think that was revealing because we've all been watching these stories, the black community, the Latino community, young people, independents, that they had been drifting, that the never Trumpers were kind of dead enders now.
Nobody listened to them, that these big fat cats were starting to come back to the Republicans.
And yet that wasn't reflected in the national polls.
It was in the state polls.
We look at Georgia, Arizona, or Nevada, and to a lesser extent, maybe Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
And then you had these huge leads in Iowa, 18 and almost dead even in Minnesota.
So I was trying to figure out, all of us were trying to figure it out.
And then when this latest Rasmussen came out, it kind of made sense that Trump is actually, I think, doing a lot better than the Fox poll suggested because you couldn't have all these constituencies that are starting to change or starting to evolve toward Trump and have not reflected in some sort of poll.
They were reflected in the state, as I said, but they hadn't been the national.
I think a lot of these polls were just oversampling or reflecting these huge blue margins in New York, Illinois, and California.
But I don't think that it's even on the national poll.
I think Trump's got a four or five point lead.
That Philadelphia rally was very, I mean, I don't want to get into that because the same thing happened in 2020.
He had enormous rallies and then Biden had these cars honking like a drive-in movie set or something and he won.
But I do think that Trump is a lot stronger now than he was in 2020, both as a candidate and support and financially.
Well, and here's what's crazy.
You look at the polling.
And yes, there's definitely been an erosion, or at least according to most polls, at the national level for Trump amongst independents.
Not huge, but significant since the verdict.
But in the Battleground states, he's still ahead of Joe Biden in all of them.
And the fact that it's even possible that Trump could win Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, not to mention Nevada.
I mean, Nevada is certainly not a lock for any Republican running.
Trump's playing Nevada very brilliantly.
This, you know, no more taxes on your tips pitch is very good politics, especially in Nevada.
I mean, I'm sure it's designed to get to win Nevada.
Anyway, all of that is very interesting.
However, when I was reading my research for today, the single biggest thing that stood out to me among all the news updates that my team put together for me was something that was a piece of old news.
At this time during the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton was up in the polls over Donald Trump 5.8 percentage points, almost six percentage points.
Carter Points Paul Ryan Debate 00:17:31
So we love to read these tea leaves, but they honestly tell us almost nothing.
Like at some point, you're almost just going on instinct.
You can feel the shift in the electorate.
You can feel the mood of the country.
You can, and maybe you'll be right, maybe you won't.
But we obsess over these numbers as if they really are meaningful.
And yet, Hillary Clinton up by almost six points at this point.
16.
I think that's absolutely right.
I remember the 1980 race.
You could feel something was going on.
And yet the polls had Carter and Reagan almost even.
In fact, I went back and looked at the Gallup, the second to the last Gallup poll in mid-October had Carter ahead by six points.
And they only had one debate.
And it was very similar to this race.
There was a third party, John Anderson.
Carter wouldn't debate him.
He wanted him off, tried to get him off the debate, tried to get him off the ballot.
Reagan debated him.
He took only 7% of the vote eventually.
But people were kind, they were getting sick of the Iranian hostages.
They were disappointed about the failed rescue.
There was this hyperinflation.
There was this oil problem.
And then there was the stagflation.
And then you had Carter, and he was berating the people just like the Biden people.
He was angry and he was, you know, the Malay so-called Malay speech.
It's your fault.
And then Reagan was just sort of.
I'm going to do it.
There won't be hostages when I'm president.
Don't worry.
They will not be there.
I'll tell you that.
And we're going to deal with it.
We're going to get the country back.
We're going to make America come back, come home, America.
And everybody laughed at him.
He's never been a fed.
He's just a buffoon.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He didn't have a really great debate against John Anderson.
Maybe he lost that debate.
And then the second one with Carter, I thought he did pretty well, but he just kind of said, you know, he really, Carter gave all his staccato facts and data as he did.
And he'd say, there you go again.
There you go again.
And people didn't, the polls didn't catch up that people were, they were tired of being lectured.
They were tired of you can't do this.
America's through.
We have this age of limitations.
You've got to turn down your thermostat.
We can't get the hostages back.
We don't dare try another rescue.
This was a mistake.
We warned you.
And Reagan was saying just the opposite.
We're going to do this.
We can do this.
We're Americans.
And people waited a long time.
And then finally, it was almost like a tidal wave.
They just said, you know, I'm done with Carter.
I'm just, I don't care what my affiliation.
I'm going to vote for this other guy.
And I think there's some of that going on right now.
Well, this is why Joe Biden will not be arguing his record in these final months of the campaign.
That's, that's, he's not going to win on that.
He's got to make it about Donald Trump and Trump's character.
And he's already starting to do that.
We saw as Trump is now marking, at least in the polls, historic numbers with black voters.
The Biden campaign is fighting back.
That is the one thing.
I mean, the Democrats cannot lose.
They're starting to see Trump erode their margins with women.
The Dems are going to win women, but it matters by how much, because Trump's going to win men.
So it really matters by how much.
They have started to erode with young voters, the Biden campaign has, though they're making inroads with seniors.
But the one thing they will not allow to bleed out is the black vote, because that is really the core of the Democratic vote.
And therefore, they're now releasing this ad, which goes all in on calling Trump a convicted criminal.
Listen here, Sat one.
In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is.
He's been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden's been working, lowering healthcare costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.
This election is between a convicted criminal who's only out for himself and a president who's fighting for your family.
So there's that.
On top of that, we expect perhaps we might hear Joe Biden directly call Trump a convicted felon for the first time at the debate.
He did it behind closed doors, but will he do it for the first time publicly on the debate stage?
And one third piece of information to add to the analysis, Victor, and that is this guy, Harry Enton over at CNN, who's all about the polls, who has been tracking how Trump is doing with black voters and can't believe his eyes.
Watch.
I keep looking for this to change, to go back to a historical norm.
And it simply put has not yet.
I keep looking for signs that this is going to go back to normal, and I don't see it yet in the polling.
Look at black voters under the age of 50.
Holy cow, folks.
Holy cow, look at this.
Joe Biden was up by 80 points among this group back at this point in 2020.
Look at where that margin has careened down towards.
It's now just get this 37 points.
I just never seen anything like this.
I'm like speechless because you always look at history and you go, okay, this is a historic moment.
So to your point of you can feel something happening.
I mean, you can feel something happening with black voters.
And that one is being reflected in the polls and it's causing a panic among team Biden.
Yeah.
I'm not sure that commercial works, though, because 60% of most polls feel that the prosecutions were somewhat politically tainted or a lot politically tainted.
And then about 50% think the Biden family is culpable.
So when you have him with his picture as a convicted felon, there's going to be a lot of people who say, yeah, but it was political.
And even Robert Herriff, to the degree they know about that, said he was culpable.
And there's going to be a disequilibrium in how the law is applied.
And if that's part of the package to appeal to young black men and they see that Trump with this convicted felony and the Biden is kind of lording it over, I don't think that's going to work either because they feel that a lot of the social justice system is weighed in certain ways.
And I don't think that's a wise strategy.
It brings a larger question, though, Megan.
You can see that he doesn't have a national unity.
And he doesn't, you mentioned the issues, but he doesn't say Americans like what I did on the border.
Americans like the inflationary or the Inflation Reduction Act.
Americans like what I did in Afghanistan.
They like I'm pulling away from Israel.
They like were, you know, that we're more sensitive to crime and we're not just going to fund the police.
I don't think he's going to, as you said, he's not going to run on that.
So in lieu of that, besides the negative campaigning, he's dice, he's taken, he's sliced up the electorate and he's saying, well, I can still win.
I can give the public purse to student loan amnesties.
Then I can give amnesties.
Then I can drain the strategic petroleum reserve.
Then I can work with Obrador to police the border better.
Then I can job on the Fed so that they're going to lower interest rates.
Then I can give amnesty for this particular subset of illegal.
And I'm going to, you know, the student loan, all of that together will give, I don't think it works.
I think the more that he does that, people say you're doing this for your own, I don't know, your own political agendas at the expense of all of us, because they all have downsides, that particular pandering.
But that's what they're doing.
Instead of just saying, I'm going to win over the majority and what I did and what I'll do, it's I'm going to give this group and that group and this group and these people and those guys something right before the election that I would never do before any other time except this year.
The black vote is absolutely critical, obviously, to Joe Biden's reelection.
And Harry Enton wasn't kidding around.
Biden has dropped among the women, as I pointed out, but he's really slid with the black and the Hispanic women, which I mean, that's a nut.
I can just imagine them having to deliver that news to Joe Biden.
You know, you are losing the very core constituency you've always counted on and always believed you could take for granted.
He has fallen, Joe Biden, 18 points with black women since the 2020 election.
18.
He has fallen 12 points with Hispanic women since the 2020 election.
Kellyanne Conway saying days ago, the reason is Joe Biden and the Democrats seem to only talk to women from the waist down.
I've never heard it put so well.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
And it's also a stereotype to say women understand inflation better than men because they tend to do the shopping or they are more sensitive to grocery prices.
And that's true too.
And then, of course, a lot of suburban women, especially in places where I live in California, especially Los Angeles, San Francisco, when you talk to people who say, I don't like to walk out at night, I can't walk down Market Street.
I don't go down to downtown.
They're all women, professional women.
And I think there's a lot of them that think Joe Biden and what he represents had a lot to do with the destruction of the safety and security in urban America.
That'll help a little bit.
But the other thing is Joe Biden always does better when, as all candidates, but especially him, when he's even or a little ahead in the polls, and then he feigns that, I'm an old Joe Biden from Scranton, Uncle Joe.
But when he started, when you saw him in the primary and he was down, that was when he started to hear corn pop and hay fat and lying dogface pony soldier, or when he feels that the mega is starting to increase.
You get that phantom of the opera speech about semi-fascist ultra-maga, the screaming at the, and if Trump can at least seem like he's ahead and put Joe Biden on the defensive, and then Joe Biden, they're telling Joe Biden, you've got to go after Trump.
You've got to go after his criminality, supposedly, you've got to go after his business, you've got to go after his crude, then that's where he does not do well.
Because you look at that face and it gets, it gets contorted.
He grimaces.
It's almost reptilian.
He gets really angry.
And that's, that's what I think that turns off people just as much as his cognitive lapses and hiatuses is when he gets angry and he's mean, he looks mean spirited, you know what I mean?
And that's when he gets confused too.
The angrier he gets, that's when he starts to have these word salads that you can't translate.
But if Trump keeps Tom in the debate and Biden feels that he's got to do something or go after, then he gets, he shows, I guess what I'm trying to say, he was never Uncle Joe from Scranton.
He was always had a mean streak in him, even before these cognitive lapses.
I remember, you know, he dropped out of the 2008 race because he said Barack Obama was the first clean black.
And then he got angry in the 88 race about all the plagiarism and lying about his education.
And he always got angry.
And I just don't, you know, I'm not underestimating.
He did beat Paul Ryan in the debate, but that was a different Joe Biden.
He beat probably beat Sarah Payton in the debate earlier.
But those, that was a very different Joe Biden.
And even very different Joe Biden.
Yeah.
And I think if they raised that issue with Paul Ryan, he spoke with our pals over at the All-In podcast.
And he raised this point.
He was lowering the expectations.
Sorry, raising the expectations on Joe Biden's performance because he doesn't want people to have a zero expectation of Biden.
And he mentioned that thing with Paul Ryan.
Take a listen to SOP3.
You have a prediction for the debate next week.
What's going to happen?
Well, all I can say is this.
I watched him with Paul Ryan and he destroyed Paul Ryan, Paul Ryan with the water.
He was chugging water at a left and right.
I didn't think a human being would be able to drink so much water at one time.
And he beat Paul Ryan.
So I'm not underestimating him.
I'm not underestimating him.
It is what it is.
I assume he's going to be somebody that will be a worthy debater.
Yeah, I would say.
I think I don't want to underestimate him.
Very smart.
By the way, here's a bit of that debate he's referring to between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.
It has never been done before.
It's been done a couple of times.
It has never been done.
Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth.
Ronald Reagan.
Now you're jacket.
Ronald Reagan.
With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey.
So he, as you point out, though, Victor, Joe Biden, he's not even the same man as he was since 2020.
Never mind back when he was debating Paul Ryan.
It's just he, I don't think he's capable of that.
No, he's not.
He couldn't.
And that all-in podcast, I watched that.
Joe Biden couldn't do that for five minutes.
And those guys would never have voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020.
And when I look at the, I was curious, I didn't realize the last two months Trump has either matched or exceeded the Biden fundraising.
A lot of it came from the conviction, but there's just things that are so different this time around.
And you've got tech people and capitalists that are very, that don't like Trump personally and feel felt that it was socially taboo, kryptonite, even to mention you were going to vote for him.
And now they're openly coming out and saying they're going to vote for him and they're going to give money to him.
And that's new.
That's a lot.
That's new.
And it's because they look at this as an existential vote.
They don't look at the personalities.
They just look, they just, these tech guys and a lot of very wealthy people, especially never Trump Republicans, they say, I don't really care anymore about tweets.
I don't, this is an existential vote.
This border is not sustainable.
10 million people is not sustainable that we don't even know who they are.
What happened in Afghanistan, turning on Israel, that's not sustainable.
It's not sustainable with the crime in our downtown.
It's not sustainable with the law fair.
None of this, if we vote for this, we're going to get it.
There's going to be no check on it.
It's going to be coming back in spade.
We cannot do this.
And I've talked to a lot of these guys and they, I think a lot of them are not going to talk about it, but they're going to give money or vote for Trump.
And I knew they wouldn't in 2016 and 2020.
The other thing is you don't really hear these prominent Republicans anymore as you did in 2020, the Bill Crystal, the David Frums, George Wills, all these guys that come out and they weigh in and everybody's, oh my God, the traditional Republican, everybody, they either have embarrassed themselves because they have no, they either have to vote for this nihilistic destructive agenda that we've suffered through the last three and a half years, or they've gone full Democratic.
I mean, they're no different than the left.
And so that's different.
That wasn't true before.
People listened to them.
They said, wow, these are the stalwarts of the conservative movement and they can't vote for Trump.
So there's something in the air that's different this time around.
And a lot of it will depend on these, I suppose, Jack Smith.
And if we have some startly new indictment or conviction or Alvin Bragg tries to put him in jail.
But even then, history shows from these convictions that it does not hurt Trump and occasionally it helps him.
So you're making such a good point.
I saw just this morning on X, I think it was Stephen L. Miller who posted a Bill Crystal then and now side by side.
Bill Crystal, who you point out, editor of the Weekly Standard, formerly used to be a god of conservative thought and became a never Trumper to the point where now he's completely crossed over.
And it was meaningful at first to have somebody like that put the nose up at Trump and say no.
And this guy, he pointed out that Crystal today on the anniversary of Dobbs, it's the two-year anniversary of Dobbs reversing Roe versus Wade, overturning, saying, this is Bill Crystal.
Okay.
The conservative, conservative Stalwart formerly saying this is how Democrats should play it today, that Trump is directly responsible for the overturning of Roe, taking away the constitutional right to abortion.
And of course, he puts next to it a screen grab of Crystal with a headline of his own in an earlier writing, Roe must go.
They have no credibility with conservatives or right-wing voters anymore.
And the whole, you don't have to be a politico to know that, to know that names like Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, Bill Crystal are lefties now.
They're not, they don't speak for conservatives.
No, they're not conservatives.
In 2016, Bill Crystal was pontificating that he was going to help pick, remember, a third party candidate.
He even mentioned people like David French.
JD Vance Brett Solidarity 00:14:27
He thought he had that influence.
In 2020, he was saying, you know, I'm a real conservative, but Joe Biden is a decent guy and he's going to unite the country and he's moderate.
And all of that fell apart.
And now all he can do, and he reflects a lot of the subsidies that go to the platforms he works on, the bulwark, for example, a lot of left-wing money goes there.
But they're not conservatives.
And when they start to tell people what to do, everybody who said thanks that follows them are used to follow and say, wait a minute.
We believed you at one time.
You were the one that were to the right of us.
You were telling them no compromise.
You were telling us that they just are destroying the country, the left.
You were the one that raising money for yourself.
You had the weekly standard day in and day out.
You were beating that drum.
And now all of a sudden it was all fake.
It was all what?
Just because you're careful.
You gave up your belief in your pro-life beliefs because Trump, like that, that got you off of believing abortion's murder?
How exactly?
Here's the tweet, by the way.
He tweeted out Biden campaign message on the second anniversary of Dobbs can be pretty simple.
It's because of Trump judges that Roe versus Wade was overturned.
If Trump gets to pick more judges, more freedoms will be at risk.
No more Trump judges, which means we cannot elect Trump president.
And the earlier headline in 1998, which was a position he maintained for years thereafter, was Roe must go in the Washington Examiner.
It's just, I mean, it's just absolutely transparent to anybody that it's about their personal grudges with this man that have deranged their thinking on the issues.
Who, like, who goes the other way?
Who grows up pro-life and then at age 70 becomes pro-choice, but a never Trumper, right?
Just like only a never Trumper goes there.
All right.
I want to get to a couple of other things with you.
First, just another point on that all-in podcast.
Jason Kalakanis, I'm sure I butchered the last name, Calakanis.
He's been on our show.
He's one of the all-in hosts.
And he's, I think it's fair to say, the most left host on there.
Trump won him over.
And I guarantee he doesn't like Trump.
When he came on our show, he's the only guest in history I've called a prick to his face.
But I said it lovingly, Victor.
He wound up getting a little wooed by Trump.
Take a listen.
J Cal, what are your, what are your big takeaways?
I'm undecided, as you know.
We had a limited amount of time with him.
And I'm J. Cal, just say it.
Just say it.
You like him.
You didn't.
Just say it.
Just say it because it's written all across your face.
Just say it.
You like him.
You're confused.
I have some questions.
He crushed your questions.
No, he crushed your questions.
You asked great questions and he just dealt with them head on.
Just admit it.
You like him.
You like him.
Look at him.
He's smiling.
He's laughing.
I told you you'd like him.
I told you you'd like him.
That's the thing about Trump.
You know, I've said before, if he wants to charm you, you're going to be charmed.
Yeah, I think, and that's a good point.
But getting back to all of this, it just, it's kind of vanished.
The whole idea of never Trump, there's now either people who are going to vote for this agenda and there's going to be people who are going to vote against it.
And that's as simple as that.
And the people who are going to vote for it are hardcore progressives and diehard Democrats.
And Bill Christ, another thing is we never talk about, but if you and I had this conversation in 2016 or 14 or 12, we would be telling, you would be asking me or I would be commenting back to you.
Did you see what Bill Crystal wrote in the New York Times?
Did you see what George Will wrote in the Washington Post?
Did you see what David Frum said the other day?
Did you see what Jonah Goldberg said on Fox?
And that's all gone now.
It just vanished.
And I think a lot of this animus and invective and virulence comes from the fact they think, what happened to me?
I was at the zenith of my conservative career.
I had grants.
I had money coming.
I had foundations.
I'm John Bolton.
I had a huge pact.
And all of a sudden, that guy did it.
He, I was principal.
I was idealistic.
And he, he's a scoundrel.
I couldn't make people.
They're all suffering from false consciousness.
And now Donald Trump destroyed my career and I'm going to get back at it.
And that's how that, that's kind of reductionist, but that's how I think what happened.
I totally agree with that analysis 100%.
This is one of the reasons why, you know, I like some of the more, I think, reasonable voices on the right who definitely don't like Trump, but are able to analyze his policy soundly and fairly.
They don't like him.
You wouldn't look to them for advice on whether Trump's a great person necessarily because they're not objective on him, but they can analyze his policies.
But the people you mentioned are not in that boat.
Okay.
Let me take a quick break and we'll come back.
There's we've got to talk about this other incident in the media talking about these illegal immigrant crimes.
These illegal aliens are here murdering and raping 12 and 13 year old girls.
And I'm sorry, it's a new low even for them.
MSNBC is laughing about it.
We'll show you the clip next.
So Victor, before we get to what happened with these illegals, I want to spend a minute on Trump and the VEEP stakes on the Republican side.
Trump telling NBC News at that Philadelphia campaign stop where he just got tons of crowds and so much enthusiasm.
This is like the heart of the Democratic Party, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden's 2020 campaign headquarters were in this city.
He's been there at least five times this year.
Trump went and crushed.
You never know about crowd size, et cetera, but it happened.
Anyway, he told NBC in Philadelphia he has decided, quote, in my mind, who he will make his vice presidential running mate and says the person most likely will be at Thursday's debate against Joe Biden.
By the way, we will be doing live coverage of that debate right here on Megan Kelly show, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly, if you want to see our live reaction right after.
Now, there is a report in Puck News by Tara Palmieri that the Veep stakes on the Republican side has turned into a proxy fight between Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch, that Rupert wants more establishment types along the lines of maybe a Doug Bergham, that he would be fine with Marco Rubio.
His number one love is Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia.
And Tucker is good friends with, I can confirm, JD Vance.
And JD Vance is ready to accept the America First baton from Trump in a way arguably those others are not.
And the reporter makes the point that this is why this sort of proxy fight, we've seen some Murdoch publications not so kind to JD Vance, not hugely fans of him, apparently.
And it did remind me of this exchange that made headlines the other day where Brett Baer had on JD Vance, and this is a completely fair line of inquiry, but asked J.D. about his original, back in 1615, thoughts on Trump.
Watch.
You know, Senator, this is an evolution.
And I know you've been asked about this before, about past comments that you've made about Donald Trump.
You've said, I've never, I'm a never Trump guy, never liked him.
Terrible candidate, idiot if you voted for him, might be America's Hitler, might be a cynical a-hole, cultural heroine, noxious and reprehensible.
Those are things that the left is going to come after you, and they're probably going to be put in ads should you be chosen as the VP pick.
How do you deal with them now?
Yeah, well, I think the simple answer is you've got to respect the American people enough to just level with them.
Look, I was wrong about Donald Trump.
I didn't think he was going to be a good president, Brett.
He was a great president.
And it's one of the reasons why I'm working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.
I think you should.
When you're wrong about something, you should change your mind and be honest with people about that fact.
What do you make of it, Victor?
And whether this is a proxy fight and whether JD Vance could still be chosen, notwithstanding calling Trump America's Hitler.
Well, you know, it works both ways.
The left was, and when he said that about, I know JD a little bit, but you remember he had just done this book about growing up in Appalachia, Heelbilly Elegy or whatever.
And the left loved it.
They loved it because it wasn't just empathetic to the working class.
It was also self-critical and self-critical of pathologies that made people in Appalachia stuck in poverty.
And the left then thought, and then he was, they kind of canonized him.
It was a bestseller.
They made a movie out of it.
They just embraced him.
And in that period, I think he reflected that.
And then when he started to change a little bit in 2016, after that, they just turned on him and they despise him now.
And I think he was wrong.
And I remember talking to him in that period at one point.
I met him and the first time I met him.
And he was very polite about it.
He just said that he disagreed with Trump.
He didn't like him.
I didn't know he'd called him the other things.
But it's always better to be transparent.
On the larger, and I think he's doing that, but Brett Baer is exactly right.
They're going to have a lot of tough commercials about that.
I think when you look at all these candidates with Trump, I think people are not going to go with a typical, this person balances them racially or gender-wise or this state or that state.
They're going to look for somebody because both vice president candidate, if Biden should get the nomination, both are Septogenarians, and he's an octogenarian Biden.
And people are going to say, we want somebody that we can rely on.
And that's going to, and that's not Kamal Harris.
We don't want a Kamal Harris.
We don't want anybody on the Republican side, not that there would be any, but we want somebody who has experience.
And the other thing that's really important, you've got to have somebody who genuinely likes Trump and knows both his strengths and weaknesses, his foibles, his occasional slanders or whatever, his toxic tweets, and can put that in perspective given what he's done for the country.
And I think that feels comfortable with him.
So when I don't see that big, maybe you would disagree with me, but I don't really see that big difference between JD Vance, Glenn Younken, Marco Rubio, Doug Birkin, and the ability to run the country.
I think they're all able to do that.
Maybe the others have a little bit more executive experience than JD.
But they're all, I think they genuinely like or they've come to like Donald Trump.
They're not going to be leaking about him if he were to be elected.
They're not going to whine, say, oh my gosh, you don't know what it's like to work.
There's not going to be an anonymous on their staff.
That's very, very important.
Pence had that for a while, but at the end, you got the impression that although he was capable and he was very loyal to Trump, and Trump in many ways was not nice to him or didn't treat him well, but you got the impression that his Christianity, his morality, it just couldn't stomach Donald Trump.
And that kind of exuded that.
And then after, you know, January 6th and that, that came out very strongly.
And it came out so strongly that I don't know if he's going to vote for Donald Trump.
And that tells me that when he was vice president, he had to suppress that all the time.
And he did a good job of that, but there was a natural antipathy for who Trump was or what he represented or his behavior.
And I don't get, I don't sense that with any of the people, whether they're Murdoch or Tucker people.
I feel like they all, for one reason or another, they feel they're at the 11th hour of this country.
And they look at Trump and they say, this guy is the only person who on the, of all the available alternatives that's got the agenda last time, that got the agenda to work.
And more importantly, he's indestructible.
You know, and I'm going to support him.
And I don't really give a blank blank if he says something or that because it's the country's at stake.
And you have to have that solidarity at this point.
You have to have somebody who is very articulate.
And when you listen to JD, the way he handled Brett Bart, I've been really amazed how well spoken Marco Rubio is recently.
I know that he drank water in that reply to the State of the Union that time, but he's really developed into a skill.
I love that that's his sin.
He drank water.
Yeah.
How are we going to get past it?
But no, the problem wasn't the water drinking.
It was that he didn't instill confidence.
It's like you just looked at him and like, I don't think he can do it.
Remember Chris Christian.
But he has matured.
He's destroyed him.
He's based very Christmas.
Here's my own take on it.
I love JD Vance, like really love JD Vance and think he's such a good, good man.
We would be so lucky to have him in public service, whether it's as vice president, president, or senator for a long, long time.
And I think one thing that will be appealing about him to Trump is he's young.
You know, I've discussed it with the audience before, like the Willy Wonka approach to successorship, you know, that I can't bring in a grown-up who already has all their views already formed and cemented.
I need somebody on whom I can make an impression with my own view of how to do things.
And I think JD is young enough and hasn't been in public service long enough that he would qualify as someone who could take that baton from Trump and let his own views be very Trumpified.
It's already happening.
Marco Rubio's got the same problems JD does in terms of past criticisms of Trump.
Marco Rubio was standing.
I was the one cross-examining these guys while they were on the stage back in 2016 and beyond.
He said a lot of negative things about Trump too.
Citizenship Child Dual Status 00:03:12
So he's also going to get hit.
He's not a solution to that problem.
Doug Bergham might be.
And Trump likes business leaders and he loves billionaires and Bergham's very successful and he does give me the feeling he could run the country.
But would he actually be loyal to Trump when the chips were down?
And I think Trump is, you know, he wants somebody who he can control a little bit more than a billionaire like Bergham who doesn't need any of this.
You know, he might be tough to control, if I think from Trump's perspective.
And Tim Scott might have none of these problems exactly, but I have a feeling that Trump is not going to pick Tim Scott because Tim Scott has been so obsequious to Trump, like so over the top.
And I know Trump loves praise and all that, but I think it's undermined Tim Scott's credibility and strength in the eyes of the voters.
And Trump sees all this stuff better than anybody.
He's a great reader of people.
and their reactions.
And I think he's kind of helped himself with Trump, but at the same time, hurt himself in the Veepstakes, which leaves us where I have no idea.
If I had to put money on the ones I just mentioned, I think I'd go with JD or Marco.
Marco's got the Florida problem too.
One of them is going to have to move out of Florida because under our Constitution, you can't have both the vice president and the president running from the same state.
All right, stand by.
I do have to squeeze in one other break.
When we come back, we've got to talk about these illegals and what happened on MSNBC.
VDH stays here.
Don't go away.
Victor, Joe Biden continues to try to, I don't know, split the baby by offering amnesty to hundreds of thousands of people.
These so-called DACA undocumented spouses could be eligible to stay and get benefits, 50,000 children under the age of 21.
They're easing work visa processes and so on.
He's basically saying you don't have to be deported if you're an undocumented spouse or child of somebody who's here lawfully, right?
Which is such BS.
I have to tell you, I have a nephew.
He is American.
He went over to Korea.
He taught little kids for several years.
He met a Korean woman.
He married her.
They have a child with dual citizenship.
My nephew moved back to America with his son, who has American citizenship.
They cannot get the mom over here.
Of course, they're doing it legally, but she wants a green card.
She wants permission to work here.
She's a lawyer.
She can't get in.
She can't get in to be with her son and her American citizen husband.
But these illegals can, because Joe Biden only favors those who do things unlawfully.
You have to break the law and then seek amnesty.
And then that makes you somehow more sympathetic.
Anyway, he's doing that.
At the same time, he's trying to sound hawkish on the border and coming up with all sorts of new rhetoric on how he's going to crack down with these executive orders, which are utterly meaningless.
All right.
Against that backdrop, because this is a massive campaign issue, we see not one, but at least two.
Young Girl Rape Investigators 00:03:51
And there are multiple crimes that have happened against young girls, young adolescent girls over the past two weeks.
But I'm just going to take two in the news, which Trump is just crazy if he does not bring up at this debate.
Someone needs to answer for what's happened to these young girls.
It's like what happened to Lake and Riley.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said, say her name at the State of the Union.
Somebody should say that at this debate.
It needs to be Trump.
In Houston, Monday, June the 17th, Jocelyn Nungari, age 12, was murdered.
She was, according to the mayor there, walking.
She was at a convenience store and was talking to her 13-year-old boyfriend on the phone.
She had sneaked out of her family's apartment.
Kids do that.
And the boyfriend told investigators he could hear her talking with two people who we now believe may have lived in the same apartment complex that the young girl did.
And they left the 7-Eleven.
Then the three of them walked to a bridge and investigators say she was strangled to death.
The mayor says that she was raped on this young girl, age 12, by these immigrants, illegals from Venezuela, Johan Jose Rangel Martinez, 21, and Franklin Jose Peña Ramos, 26, who sneaked into El Paso, Texas in May and March, respectively, and were caught.
They caught them and then released them, of course, which they do with virtually every single one that they catch.
And they went on to rape this girl.
Both have now been caught and charged with capital murder.
Secondly, there's a little girl in the state of New York.
She was just 13.
And she was raped by an illegal immigrant.
And this has come into the news because given the nature of what happened, she was picked up by this guy and raped in a park in Queens.
He was from Ecuador, Christian Giovanni Ingalandi, 25 years old from Ecuador.
He first came into the country in 2021.
He was captured by the Border Patrol.
He was released as well.
This guy was ordered to leave by immigration in 2022, but never did.
He held the victim and the teen boy at knife point before tying them up and sexually assaulting this young girl.
It's the second case that they were discussing on MSNBC of the 13-year-old girl in New York.
Joy Reed and her guest, Pramala Jayapal, Democrat from Washington, member of the squad.
And the reason they think the rape of this young 13-year-old girl is relevant is because Fox chose to headline it.
And headlines like Fox's are what's leading people to wrongly, on the Dem and Republican side, want deportations of illegals.
Now, it's not the rapes and the murders.
It's the misleading Fox headlines, which wasn't misleading at all, or just the headlining of it at all that has them upset.
Look at this clip.
Soon Biden announces legal protections for undocumented spouses.
Citizen CNN's banner said, Biden announces new protections for some undocumented spouses.
Here was Fox's banner.
Migrant arrested for raping 13-year-old New York.
Yes.
And so I think that's part of the problem.
You have a lot of fearmongering.
That's it's they're able to laugh about it, Victor.
They think it's kind of funny.
It's so funny of the fear-mongering.
Tell it to this little girl's father, last point, who said to the New York Post, it turned my world upside down.
Elite Illegal Immigrants Steele 00:08:54
The healing process has yet to begin.
My mind is really swirling with all of the anger I have right now.
When asked about his daughter's state, he simply replied, you can't even imagine.
Let's just leave it at that.
But they think it's funny over at MSNBC that they chose to highlight her condition at Fox News.
Yeah, this goes on.
You know, I wrote a book, Mexico, 20 years ago, and it was happening then.
And I got really criticized for it because they said, you're an alarmist.
It's not that bad.
But these people, Jory Reed is a multi-millionaire.
She's protected by her zip code, her influence.
Same thing with the squad.
Same thing with Kamala Harris.
Same thing with Joe Biden.
Same thing with Nancy Pelosi.
Same thing with Gavin.
All the architects are Chuck Schumer of these policies.
It's all predicated on one thing.
They live in areas or they associate in areas or they have resources that this doesn't happen to them.
It never happens to them.
And it's not just the murders, which is horrific.
It's the assault.
It's the rape.
And, you know, where I live, Megan, we had the cartels execute five people last year.
They went into a house and just wiped them out.
And when I go, I mean, it's the little things.
I pick up the Fresno Bee every day and there's a hit and run with horrific traffic accidents and the person leaves the scene of the accident.
It's a mess.
Half the accidents in Los Angeles County, the perpetrator leaves, the responsible party leaves the scene.
And if you lived on my boulevard and you drive to town one day and you see 15 people stripped down to their boxer shorts and SWAT teams are there, and then you ask them later what happened.
Well, it was gun running.
It was trafficking.
It was drugs.
They're all illegal.
And then they're all back.
Or if you're walking on your property and you turn around, you know, you turn a corner and you've got a freezer, you've got car seats, and you've got a ton of trash, and it's all in Spanish.
And you ask yourself, this is an environmental desecration.
You call the authorities.
They say, don't call us.
Don't call us.
So what I'm getting at is all of the fallout from this insane policy of open borders falls on people that these elites who were the architects never experienced.
And they don't care.
They're very callous, cruel people.
They don't care about the detreatis and the damage that they do to other people.
And the problem is when you have an ideology where an immigrant says to themselves, I'm going to intentionally, the first thing I'm going to do is break the law by illegally entering the United States.
The second thing I'm going to do is illegally reside in the United States.
And the third thing I'm going to do illegally is find some type of ID or illegal means to perpetuate what I had done prior.
Then that creates an ideology and mentality that I am protected.
I'm exempt for whatever reason these crazy Americans will punish the legal immigrant.
They'll make it, but not me.
And therefore, if I have a bunch of, if I have a used dryer, I'm just going to go out in the country and dump it.
If I go to the local supermarket and I have six different EBT cards or WIC cards, that's fine.
Or if I'm going to drive and I happen to hit somebody, I'm just going to leave the old clunker and take off.
It creates a mentality.
And everybody understands that.
And Joe Biden, the fact that he was, he created this surge with eight to 10 million people.
And only now as his election looms, is he even trying to do something, both pandering and then feigning that he's trying to close the border.
But it reflects about this amorality of these people.
They don't care.
They don't care about anybody but their own little sense that I am progressive and I am so nice to people and I'm compassionate.
I've got to show you the next soundbite because that's exactly right.
Simone Sanders is a woman who worked for Bernie Sanders when he was running and then went on to work for Joe Biden's reelection and then for the White House for a stint and now hosts her own show on MSNBC.
They're over there talking about these cases, how, you know, illegals, murdering Americans.
And she doesn't like the use of the term illegal.
Look at this.
What are they doing now?
Which people?
The folks, the 11 million, 20 million, whatever you want to do for them.
A lot of them are committing crimes like murdering the 12-year-old girl in Houston.
In fact, that's one out of 11 million.
Here's the difference between an illegal immigrant who unfortunately engages in that activity.
And we don't like that.
I want to be clear.
We don't do the term illegal.
Yeah, we don't have to undocumented undocumented.
That's the head of the Heritage Foundation talking to former Republican Michael Steele.
I mean, they say he's still a Republican, but he used to run the RNC.
Michael Steele gets chastised in asking questions about the murder of this 12-year-old girl we just discussed and uses the term for her perpetrator, illegal immigrant.
And that's where she saw fit to jump in.
You're not allowed to refer to this murderer as an illegal.
That's offensive to this person.
Victor, I can't.
I don't know what to tell you about it.
All I know is that both Simone and Michael Steele, if they lived in the Rio Grande Valley, if they lived in rural Fresno County, if they lived in the inner city of Chicago, if they lived in Los Angeles County, and they had to deal with this problem every single day, the least of their worries would be undocumented, illegal.
And what does she prefer, undocumented?
Did she really believe that these people just forgot their documents and now they're undocumented?
They never had any documents.
They never had any intention to get any documents.
They didn't want any documents when they came across.
They came across because they felt that there's a bicultur elite that's guilt-ridden and feels good about themselves when they open the borders at other people's expenses that they never see, they don't care about, and they deprecate and call illiberal when they have to deal with the consequences of these people's abstract ideologies.
And you know what?
And that's why you're seeing a big surge for conservative candidates, not among so-called white people, but among Mexican-Americans and black people who have to deal with this.
And what's really weird, just in finishing, Megan, is the Simone Sanders and the Michael Steele's and the Joy Reids, they are becoming to the Black community exactly what the white elite became to the deplorables, the irredeemables, the dregs, the chumps, the clingers.
In other words, they're out of touch this bicosto black elite, wealthy, privileged, left-wing with the people in the inner city and the average things that black people have to go through.
The same thing is true with Latinos.
The Latinos that you see on TV that pontificate and are absolutely ideologically identical to the white elite privileged.
They have no resonance anymore with, it doesn't work anymore to say, all these people are racist and we're your champions.
Trust us.
No, they don't trust them.
They think they're elitist and they never have to suffer what they, the implementation of their policy and what falls on others.
And that's one of the reasons that this whole Black Latino dynamic is starting to change.
It's also got a class element to it.
A lot of Latinos and Blacks are feeling that they have the same concerns as the white middle deplorable class.
And they feel that they have been shortened and betrayed by their elites, just as that white deplorable class has been by the Republican Romneys and that part of the Republican Party and of course the left.
And that's what they don't understand.
And they say, you know, blacks are never going to vote conservative.
They're never going to vote for Trump.
There's going to be more than they ever have that will do that because of this class concern.
These people are really disreputable people.
They're so selfish and callous, this elite bicostal class.
It really drives me crazy to listen to that.
No, no.
And nor is there anything wrong with calling them illegal immigrants.
That's exactly what they are.
They broke our laws to be in this country.
They are here unlawfully.
They are not legal immigrants.
They are illegal immigrants.
There's an important distinction.
Dean Harvard Opposing Views 00:16:04
And while you may not be able to say that on MSNBC here on the Megan Kelly show, you can say it all day long.
Illegal, illegal, illegal.
That's what they were.
Illegal.
And they're going to understand the context and the consequences of being illegal as a person here in America very, very soon when they face charges for capital murder of a 12-year-old.
Victor, thank you.
Always a pleasure speaking with you.
Great to see you.
Thank you, Megan.
We're back with Jonathan Turley next.
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We are on Supreme Court watch this week as the justices consider two key cases that could make or break the prosecutions against former President Donald Trump.
I have to tell you, I was very relieved this stuff did not come out while I was on vacation.
I wanted to be with you when they hit, and now I will be.
It comes as a series of hearings in the classified documents case out of Florida is going on right now, and things are getting very interesting down there.
Could Jack Smith be booted off of this case as Trump's prosecutor?
All this as former President Donald Trump is just weeks away from learning whether this New York judge, Judge Murshan, will sentence him to prison in connection with the business records case.
We've got the perfect guest to discuss this and much more.
You may remember his frequent appearances on my old Fox News shows, and he's all over Fox News these days as well.
Today, though, it's his first time here on my current show.
Jonathan Turley is author of the brand new book, The Indispensable Right, Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
He's also George Washington University Law Professor.
Professor Turley, welcome back to the show.
Welcome to see you.
Hi, Megan.
It's great to see you.
Oh, it's great to see you.
I remember coming to see you at your offices when I was just a young cub reporter.
And I think I've had you on every show I've ever had since maybe not the NBC, but everything other than that.
So wonderful to see you.
And I think well timed on this book.
So what I want to get into it and I want to get into some of the things in the news that are relevant to it, but why?
Just explain why now.
Well, that's a great question because this book is 30 years in the making.
I've been writing about free speech for 30 years in law reviews.
These are like mini books and litigating in the area of free speech.
But I didn't want to publish a book until I could present a sort of comprehensive understanding of what free speech is, but also what we need to protect free speech.
And the subtitle is an age of rage is something I've said before, but this isn't our first age of rage.
In fact, this country was born in rage.
The Boston Tea Party was an act of rage.
And we have struggled since then in how we deal with rage rhetoric, how we deal with free speech.
And what's interesting is when I went back and I really took us back to the beginning.
And at the start of this republic, we did it right.
There was a moment of clarity that was truly revolutionary.
The framers defined free speech as a natural right, a right that belongs to us as human beings, not bestowed upon us by the government.
And that was captured in the language of the First Amendment, which is still the most revolutionary statement of free speech in the world.
There's a movement among law professors and others to amend the First Amendment.
One law professor said it's just excessively individualistic.
And this movement's gaining steam.
In fact, my book, when my book was released, two anti-free speech books were written by law professors saying that we have to get away from rights because these rights are interfering with what we want to do for social and racial justice.
Well, that's the fight that we are going to have to bring.
That is the opposition we face.
And what happened early in the Republic is that that clarity was lost within a few years as U.S. judges re-embraced the sort of British Blackstonian view of free speech, that it's something that we only tolerate when it's to the advantage of the democratic system.
And that allowed for endless trade-offs and the denial of free speech.
And so today we are living, in my view, the most anti-free speech period in our history.
Joe Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams.
But we are facing an alliance now of media, corporations, academia, and Congress and the government that has never assembled before against free speech.
And that's what makes it so dangerous.
I couldn't agree more on every word of that.
I want to get into what's happening to Trump, but you mentioned academia, and this is a good headline to kick it off.
Something extraordinary happened, even for Harvard, out of Harvard, just today.
This is Breaking Via Forbes.
The Harvard Dean, Lawrence Bobo, a Harvard dean, he's the dean of social science over there.
And he has written that any faculty who criticize the university too severely should be subjected to sanctions.
Now, this guy happens to have been one of Roland Fryer's biggest critics.
Our audience may remember Roland Fryer was the black professor at Harvard who dared to go open-minded into the question of whether police really are guilty of bias in their interactions with black suspects, in particular when it comes to shootings, and concluded that there's not evidence of that, that the numbers just don't support it.
And he soon thereafter lost his funding for his research lab at Harvard.
They blamed it on some false Me Too allegation that was trumped up against him.
It was obvious.
And he was ruined there.
He's still there, but he's been completely hamstrung, or at least he was until recently.
In any event, this guy Bobo writing, it's outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate university leadership.
He says, as the events of the past year evidence, sharply critical speech from faculty, prominent ones especially, can attract outside attention that directly impedes the university's function.
I'm happy to report that some like Steven Pinker, who's a more reasonable professor over there, came out and said, this is downright alarming that such a stunning argument would come from a dean who currently wields power over hundreds of professors without indicating that he would refrain from implementing his views by punishing the faculty he oversees.
He's coming under some scrutiny.
But to your point, Professor Durley.
Absolutely.
I wrote about Dean Bobo's statement on my blog.
And of course, it is horrific, but it is not in any way a departure from the norm.
I have an entire chapter on higher education in the book, and it details all of these circumstances.
You know, in most universities, they have eliminated, they've purged every Republican, conservative, and libertarian member of the faculty.
These are self-reported surveys.
And according to one, 40% of the schools they looked at didn't have a single Republican.
And so the funny thing, of course, is that Dean Bobo doesn't have to worry because most faculties now run from the left to the far left.
So very few people actually speak out against universities.
But this is in many ways consistent with what we've seen for over 30 years.
I'm a bit of a dinosaur.
You know, I write in free speech and I believe in the original idea of free speech.
Now it's in vogue.
If you want to get published, you have to say that the First Amendment is a tragedy.
Free speech is dangerous and harmful.
That's how they've raised these kids.
We've raised a generation of speech phobics who believe that you shouldn't have to hear opposing views.
And now you have a Harvard dean that says, you know, I could punish you for speaking out against me and other administrators.
It goes against everything we believe as academics and as intellectuals.
But that is the culture now of intolerance that we live in.
You write in the book in chapter 28, the conversion of college campuses from bastions of free speech to the current ideological echo chambers is arguably the greatest threat facing free speech.
Completely agree with that writing.
We are raising a generation of speech phobics who have been taught that speech is harmful and that speech is protected according to its inherent value or costs in a democratic system.
This narrow view of free speech has been embedded in the minds of these students from an early age.
They've been insulated from opposing views.
And I would submit, you tell me, that is what leads to a sitting Supreme Court justice, Katanji Brown Jackson, saying in one argument to a litigant, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.
It's like, right.
Your concern is totally valid.
That's why it was written in there.
No, it was a shocking seminar.
You have to be right, Megan, to bring that up.
And, you know, the impact on our campuses has been chilling.
I have to tell you, I don't think I'm naive, but if you had asked me 30 years ago when I started to teach whether higher education would ever be this intolerant, this orthodox, I would have said you were crazy, that that's not why we went into teaching.
But I don't feel as bad for people like myself.
We're a dwindling number.
And I've had probably the longest running cancel campaign in history, ever since I testified in the Clinton impeachment.
But I really feel sorry for my students.
You know, I talk in a book when I was at University of Chicago as an undergrad, I loved every minute of it.
It was like the Star Wars bar scene.
It was like every different view you could imagine was on campus.
And I loved it all.
I loved listening to people who I thought were absolutely insane.
But I love to see how they could look at something that I was looking at and see something completely different.
That is no longer the case.
I mean, students today hear largely the same view from the left or the far left.
Opposing views are not tolerated.
People are canceled.
Even a federal judge at Stanford was shouted down.
That's part of this new culture that you shouldn't have to tolerate opposing views.
And the result is that they really didn't have the education that you and I had when we were able to make our own choices and look at the sort of smordersborg of different viewpoints.
Now, as I say in the book, it's a happy meal that's prepared by the faculty and nobody's particularly happy.
Yeah, right, exactly.
So what's some of this is manifesting in the law fair against former President Donald Trump, whose trials you've done such an amazing job of covering.
I love your blog.
I go there all the time.
It's .org, jonathanchurley.org.
Don't forget, sometimes you get caught up if you do.com.
And he's in it up to his neck today because down in that Florida case, the Mar-a-Lago case regarding his documents and whether he turned them over or didn't and whether he should have had them in the first place, there is some interesting stuff happening.
I want to talk about whether Jack Smith might get booted, but first let's talk about the free speech angle on the docket today, because the prosecution down there is trying to gag Trump there, trying to gag him there, saying that he shouldn't be free, for example, to speak about the FBI and its raid on Mar-a-Lago, because they say Trump's characterization of the FBI's policy, this is via CNN,
about the use of deadly force during that search could lead to threats and harassment against the FBI.
Here's their evidence, Jonathan.
On Friday, the feds made a filing that said a supporter of Trump called an FBI agent and said, if Trump wins reelection, agents are going to be thrown in jail.
If he doesn't win, agents are going to be hunted down, slaughtered in their own homes.
We're going to slaughter your whole effing family.
Okay, a very clear threat.
Who made it again?
Some supporter of Trump.
Some rando made a threat against an FBI agent.
And now because of that, they want Trump to be silenced in this case to the point where, like the New York case, he won't be able to talk about it should Joe Biden raise it in a debate on the campaign trail or when just trying to defend himself and be critical of FBI overreach.
What do you make of it?
Well, it's bizarre as I'm sure you face this.
Many of us receive death threats from people on the left, but it's rarely covered by the media.
They even threaten the life of my dog.
And Luna's a golden doodle, for God's sake.
Who threatens a golden doodle?
I can understand a shih tzu, but a golden doodle?
Who threatens that?
But, you know, what is really amazing about Jack Smith is that he has always followed Oscar Wilde's rule that the only way to be rid of temptation is to yield to it.
And it has always been his undoing.
You know, he was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court.
He never shows any sense of restraint in litigation.
And he's not doing it now.
I've also written about that gag order that you described, Megan.
It's ridiculous.
It is basically gagging a presidential candidate for talking about an entire department of the government of criticizing the department.
It is so far afield from what the purpose of a gag order is.
And I've been a critic of gag orders for over 30 years.
I've never liked them.
I believe they are a limit on free speech.
Hopefully Judge Cannon is going to swat this down.
But now I just wrote a column just was posted a few minutes ago on the New York Post about these attacks on Judge Cannon that are vicious on every single network.
Now, many of these same media outlets were experiencing vapors when anyone criticized Judge Mershon in Manhattan and said, how dare you question the integrity of this judge?
And now they are just piling on Judge Cannon because she allowed Trump a hearing on the constitutionality of Jack Smith's appointment.
That's that's the level of hypocrisy now is really overwhelming.
Driving Line Judge Murchan 00:04:02
I know it's dark.
And the Florida case is driving them nuts because Judge Aileen Cannon has been fair.
She hasn't been overly friendly to Trump, but she's been fair.
She hasn't been a Judge Murchan or a Judge Engeron, and it's driving them crazy.
So we'll see.
And by the way, I do want to say something to my audience.
Right after Trump got found guilty in that, you know, hush money, whatever, documents case with Stormy Daniels, there was a report, and I quoted CBS News at the time or CNBC, and I said, this is just CNBC.
I haven't yet confirmed this, saying that the gag order has been lifted.
And I said, I want to find out whether that's true.
And it has not been lifted.
And even in the New York case, they're arguing that Trump should remain gagged, I guess, indefinitely through the pendency of his appeal.
So that would take us all the way easily through the debates and the election.
So in both cases, he has to just be quiet about the jury.
He can't come out now like any normal defendant and say the jury was biased against me.
You're not allowed because you're Trump.
Yeah, I mean, think of the implications of that.
You know, you have this single judge sitting in Manhattan with a throttle control over what the leading presidential candidate can speak in the election.
And he's keeping a gag order after the verdict is in, the jury is out, and we're just awaiting sensing.
So there is no justification for the gag order, but he's just using it now gratuitously to silence this presidential candidate.
That's what we've become.
And I have to hand it to a couple of people on the other side that said, wow, this is pretty much out there.
But most of them haven't because you can't, as a legal analyst, you can't say anything that might be deemed as positive to Trump.
So they're watching this abuse occur in Manhattan and they're not saying a thing.
And that's what we've had in higher education.
You know, we've had many faculty have written me recently about they're being attacked because of the Gaza Palestinian protest.
But these same academics have been silent for 20 years as their colleagues have been fired and investigated.
And suddenly they're discovering the value of free speech.
You have to, unfortunately, someone has to pursue you before you realize the importance of the rule of law.
You know, when we flew back in from our vacation, when we flew in from Denmark just two days ago, we had to go through customs, right?
And we have global entry.
So you go with global entry where you just look at the camera and it sees your face and then your face comes up in front of the guard and the guard tells you you can go in or you can't.
And all four of my family members, my three kids and my husband, their faces came right up.
Mine, when it took the photo, it said C agent.
I'm like, oh, great.
So I get in the long line to go see the age.
I see the agent.
My family's through.
And I say, it said to see agent.
And he goes, get in the line.
I'm like, I was just in the line.
He's like, get in the line.
Okay.
I go back to the line.
I get back up.
I'm like, it said C agent.
He goes, you need another picture.
Like, okay, all right.
Could have told me.
Okay, fine.
So I go, I get another picture.
I go back up.
This time I do cut the line because now I've been up there twice.
And he's like, you have to wait.
Wait until what?
I don't know.
Wait.
Okay.
So I have to wait in the side.
I'm getting frustrated.
My family's waiting there.
Okay.
Finally, he's like, it's not in here.
I'm like, what, what should I do?
You tell me what to do, sir.
He gets very angry, starts yelling at this other woman.
Follow the path.
The woman doesn't even speak English.
She's like, what path?
What path?
Anywho, the bottom line, the reason I'm telling you this story is what I was dealing with there is a man who was drunk on his own limited power.
He was given a little bit of it by the TSA or whomever empowered him to be a customs agent at JFK.
And he needed it.
His little ego needed it.
And he needed to put this other woman in her place for stepping out of line.
And I guess me, because he couldn't find my face on the screen, which my son later did over his shoulder saying she's right there.
And then he had to let me through.
Garland Attorney Cuomo Responsibility 00:15:49
And that's what's happening with Judge Murchan.
The fact that he would try to extend the gag order past the verdict to when the jury is back home.
We don't even know the jury's identity.
The papers haven't been reporting it.
They haven't been giving interviews.
So even now, Trump can't come out and be like at this debate.
It was a bunch of partisan Democrats from a place that went 87% for you, Joe Biden.
That's why they did what they did.
He could get in trouble on appeal, Democrats salivating every day on MS and CNN about how if Trump doesn't want jail time, he better feel really sorry about those gag order violations that he did.
He needs to not do it.
He needs to feel sad about it.
He needs to be apologetic for saying anything about the jury and it's partisan.
I mean, that's what you have, a man drunk on his own power, Jonathan.
What do you make of it?
Well, I think you're right that in the sense that there's no reason for this gag order to continue.
So he's doing it for some other reason.
That gag order also keeps him from talking about Coangelo, who came from the Biden Justice Department to help lead this case.
That's a legitimate issue to talk about.
Now, I'm not saying that everything Trump has said has been established, but this is an election turning on, in part, the weaponization of the criminal system.
And the Biden administration, these Democratic district attorneys have fulfilled the narrative.
They've proven it.
That's what Manhattan was.
Manhattan was a raw political prosecution.
We can debate Mar-a-Lago.
You know, there are issues there which are pretty difficult for the president, but Manhattan is a straight up political prosecution.
Even CNN's senior legal analyst said this would never have occurred outside this district.
And he was right.
And of course, he was immediately shut up.
But it's obvious to every one of us what is occurring.
You cannot plausibly argue that that case would have been brought against anyone other than Trump because it had never been brought before.
I mean, they never zapped a misdemeanor like this.
Not only do we have to listen to, you know, Ellie Hoenig, the senior CNN political analyst, but take a listen to the former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who sat with Bill Maher the other night and said this.
The Attorney General's case in New York, frankly, should have never been brought.
And if his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn't running for president from the former AG in New York, I'm telling you that case would have never been brought.
And that's what is offensive to people.
And it should be, because if there's anything left, it's belief in the justice system.
The two trials in New York, New Yorkers said 66% said the justice system is politicized.
And there's nobody in New York who likes Trump.
And you want to talk about a threat to democracy.
When you have this country believing you're playing politics with the justice system and you're trying to put people in jail or convict them for political reasons, then we have a real problem.
Wow.
How about that?
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny because Cuomo, I adored his father.
And Cuomo is a case in the movie The Bronx Tale, they talked about wasted talent.
In some ways, he is.
It took his own being pursued.
And a lot of things that were done in the Cuomo cases, I criticized because I felt that they had not given him due process.
I felt that many of these cases were handled in alarming ways.
But it took that experience for Cuomo to become a voice of clarity.
He was not that way in the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings where he demanded Kavanaugh take a lie detector test.
But it is an unfortunate aspect to both law and free speech that many people require the denial of those things to appreciate them.
I'll talk to Cuomo once he apologizes more full-throatedly and actually takes ownership for killing 15,000 senior citizens in New York, including my dearest friends in Los Jannistines.
But on that point, he raised a good issue and he's right.
I mean, for him to have said that is significant because he's of the left and he gets it.
And even the left is having to admit it, Judge Judy said the same to Chris Wallace over on CNN.
All right, let's talk about what's happening to Judge Cannon because our mutual friend and colleague, Andy McCarthy, has a long piece up on nationalreview.com right now suggesting Jack Smith may get booted out of this Mar-a-Lago prosecution because of the way that he was appointed.
Trump's lawyers raised the case that this is the way Jack Smith was appointed a special counsel was a violation of the Constitution's appointments clause, which says that the president is the one who shall nominate, buying with consent and advice of the Senate, any basically officer of the United States.
And he goes on to say that Jack Smith was not chosen or appointed by the president.
He was appointed by Merrick Garland.
And there may be a serious problem with his selection in this particular case that actually Andy says has a very good chance in his view of succeeding.
So do you agree that there's a real chance here Jack Smith could get bounced off of that prosecution?
Yeah, I wrote about this today because a lot of the criticism was about that hearing and the argument from the left, including an MSNBC legal analyst, gave Judge Cannon a lecture saying, stay in your lane, girl.
You should never have given a hearing.
Other courts have ruled against this.
And yes, other courts have ruled against this, but there's no controlling authority for Judge Cannon.
This has never gone to the Supreme Court.
So what she's doing is normally viewed as good judging.
She's allowing the party to make the best argument, including, by the way, two former attorneys general who are there as amicus, and to create a record so that this can be appealed potentially to the Supreme Court.
And what they're arguing is not frivolous.
And MSNBC, CNN, are portraying this like it's some kooky idea.
It's not.
The Constitution says clearly that you need to be appointed or nominated and then confirmed to be U.S. attorney.
You have to either have that type of confirmation or you have to have an appointment pursuant to a statute.
Neither of that is present here.
The Independent Counsel Act expired.
And so what the Department of Justice is saying is that despite the act expiring, they can basically circumvent the need for confirmation in the Senate.
And this is precisely why the framers wanted confirmation.
Would Jack Smith have been confirmed as a type of special U.S. attorney?
Not sure about that.
You know, he was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court.
That would have bothered a lot of senators.
But the question is, why have this system where to be a U.S. attorney, you've got to go through vetting, you've got to be not just nominated, but confirmed.
Or Garland can just pick a guy off the street according to his claim of authority.
He could pick anyone.
He could pick his barber and make him a special counsel, and you can't say anything about it.
That doesn't sit well with the language of the Constitution.
So while the odds are against the Trump team because of these previous arguments, those judges summarily dismissed these issues.
I mean, they didn't, most of them did not grant a hearing.
They decided on the pleadings.
And Judge Cannon is simply allowing oral argument to occur in this case.
And yet everyone is attacking her for doing it.
It's really crazy.
If he goes, the case doesn't necessarily go away, but he's in real jeopardy now.
And I know the thing about Merrick Garland is, remember when we used to think he would have been a decent choice for Supreme Court, given the others that Barack Obama was considering, right?
It was like on a relative field.
Okay, Merrick Garland seems like he wouldn't be that extreme.
I see him very differently now.
And I read your piece the other day saying, I think it was called The Corruption of Merrick Garland.
I mean, that you too see serious problems in the way this guy has approached his role.
Absolutely.
You know, I actually called for a vote in the Senate on Garland.
I felt that he was entitled to it.
I enthusiastically supported his nomination for attorney general.
And I was wrong.
I mean, I hate to say it, but he's not the Garland that most of us thought we were getting.
He does, he seems to be adrift in his own department.
He's not taking responsibility.
He's washing his hands of everything happening in these investigations, including that gag order from Smith.
The Attorney General should at a minimum say, you know what, we don't do that.
We don't do gag orders to keep people from criticizing us.
And when Jack Smith said, you know, I don't think I have to follow the DOJ policy on trials before an election.
I think I could take this trial through the election.
Garland was totally silent instead of saying, you know, here's a flash for you, Gordon.
You're still part of the Justice Department.
And you are going to honor that policy.
But Garland is just absent without leave.
And it's a great disappointment to me because I think as a person, he's a nice and well-meaning person, but he is an empty suit right now at justice.
Yeah, I haven't forgiven him since domestic terrorist.
That was just so insane with the parents who were speaking past their three minutes and then got a label like that thrown around in discussing their behavior.
One of the things that you point out in the book, and I love this, is how the trickiest examples, as it always has been, are the ones that muck up people's clear views of free speech.
And there's been no better example of that over the past few years than January 6th, which just inflames tempers and incites the left, in particular, anybody who has a dissenting viewpoint on it.
Well, in the news this week is a sound bite of Nancy Pelosi.
And I found this very fascinating because she in the soundbite is taking responsibility for not having secured the Capitol.
And we know this because a Republican-controlled House subcommittee obtained the footage recorded by her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, on January 6th, 2021.
And per that now GOP-controlled committee, the January 6th select committee had this same footage, but did not release it publicly.
Here's the soundbite.
We have responsibility, Terry.
We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have.
This is ridiculous.
You're going to ask me in the middle of the thing, but they've already breached the inaugural stuff that should we call the Capitol Police?
I mean, the National Guard?
Why weren't the National Guard there to begin with?
I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for war.
Pretty extraordinary that that's now coming out, raises some serious questions about the January 6th committee and its commitment to transparency and honesty.
But you write a bit about January 6th and free speech in the books.
Take us there.
Well, first of all, I agree with you.
You know, I was critical of January 6th because they could have been so much more.
But Pelosi, of course, did not allow the Republicans to pick the members on that committee, departing from tradition.
And the result was that they presented this univocal, one-sided narrative.
They would even remove whenever they quoted or played the tape of Trump.
They would not allow the public to hear him say, go peacefully to the Capitol.
They even got a producer from ABC to create this whole production.
And we now know that they withheld evidence.
For example, they knew that the Secret Service driver was denying that the infamous scene of the president trying to grab control of the presidential limo was completely absurd.
And yet they did not tell the public.
They got witnesses to recount that false story all the time knowing it was false.
And we also know, of course, that National Guard troops were offered to Congress and Pelosi and others turned them down.
But when I write about January 6th in the book, there's a large amount of it in the book because it does capture the difficulty in dealing with free speech.
But it also allows us to see the path forward.
You know, I was doing the coverage on January 6th.
I disagreed with the president's speech.
I disagreed with his view of what Pence could do legally.
And I also disagreed with aspects of the election, fraud allegations.
But that doesn't matter.
The president had every right to give the speech the way he did.
In my view, it's entirely protected speech, which is why I oppose the prosecution in D.C. by Jack Smith.
I think that he is prosecuting the president in part for speech protected by the First Amendment.
Let's keep talking about January 6th because I mean, I completely agree with you, President Trump.
I didn't agree with his analysis and I didn't agree with his behavior after he lost the election.
But January 6th holds a special place for the free speech censors who really don't want any free and fair conversation of it happening.
Look at the blowback, even on Fox or even within Fox.
I won't ask you to criticize Fox because you go on there.
When Tucker Carlson tried to air other tapes of what happened that day, it just seems to be such a third rail.
And so on the larger point, what does this tell us about free speech in America?
Why is it that like they can't hear it?
They can't hear the other sides.
They can't hear Nancy Pelosi say this kind of thing.
Well, it's interesting.
When I was doing the coverage outside the Trump courthouse in Manhattan, I was sitting next to a NPR reporter, and she was practicing her lines, including constantly referring to insurrectionists on January 6th.
This is a reporter.
And January 6th wasn't an insurrection, as I go into in the book.
It wasn't even close to an insurrection.
It was a riot.
It was a protest that became a riot.
During the coverage, I remarked before the violence occurred, I just remarked, I've never seen the Capitol so lightly protected because our cameras went over and it showed main entrances with just three bicycle cops.
And I'd never seen it so light.
And I was not surprised when they breached the Capitol because of how they had prepared.
Remember, it was just that previous summer that riots occurred at the White House where National Guard had to be called out.
Official Proceeding Conspiracy Charge 00:09:24
There were more people, more law enforcement injured outside the White House than there was on January 6th.
And yet they didn't put up the fencing used at the White House until after the riot was over.
And so what the book says is, look, punish people who committed property damage.
Punish them for their conduct, not for their speech.
That's the line of difference.
Now, sure, speech can be a crime sometimes.
If you have a conspiracy to commit a crime, that's speech.
But you have to establish the crime itself.
And so, for example, they use seditious conspiracy, which is something that I argue in the book.
We should just take off the books entirely.
It should not be a crime.
We've had a sedition addiction in this country since the founding of the republic, and it punishes speech.
Seditious conspiracy is an effort, is another way of saying to obstruct a proceeding, but they charge these people with that crime.
So charge them with it.
Don't try to create a speech, you know, a parallel speech crime by calling it seditious conspiracy.
So it is an important thing for us to look at.
It shows how we can deal with conduct without trying to criminalize speech.
Speaking of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, that is one of the cases that's pending before the U.S. Supreme Court right now as a different group of January 6th protesters, not Trump, try to challenge this claim, this case against them, saying that's not a real claim that you can bring, that you've expanded this claim well beyond what you can do as a Congress.
And we're waiting for a ruling on that.
We're waiting for a ruling on whether, well, I mean, a president can claim some sort of immunity, but how much and, you know, in what role?
We're waiting on that opinion.
Any thought on what's likely to happen in those two cases, which really could affect Trump directly?
As you know, we can hear this week on one or both of those cases.
I expect they're going to have to add at least another day for opinions.
I think we have like 14 remaining.
They usually don't release that number on the final day.
The Fisher case is actually the case I think is most important.
Fisher is the case involving a January 6th defendant who's challenged the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding.
The interesting thing about the array of hundreds of cases by the Department of Justice is they were sort of like a roulette player who would only bet on red.
I mean, every single case was that charge, and it occupies the majority of charges.
If it goes against them in Fisher, all of those cases collapse, including charges pending against President Trump.
I think that there is a chance that indeed they may lose that case because the underlying statute was designed after the Enron scandal.
It was designed for the destruction of documents.
And it's now being used to include anything that might interrupt the proceeding.
And the justices made mincemeat out of the government.
They said, well, what if there's a protest in the rotunda and members can't get to the floor?
Isn't that obstructing an official proceeding?
And the DOJ didn't have an answer for that.
So we'll see how that goes.
The immunity question obviously could have a huge impact.
On that one, it was a very interesting oral argument.
Unlike the coverage, which has been absurd, the justices, I thought, did a really darn good job.
I thought on both sides, they really were trying to get this right.
One of the justices said, look, we're going to do right this one for the ages, because the court has avoided this question for decades, and they want to get it right.
But I think the court had sticker shock on both sides.
They didn't like the absolute privilege arguments of the Trump team, but they also didn't like the lower court's absolutism.
It basically gave presidents nothing.
And so there's a good chance that they may say, look, we want a more nuanced approach here.
And if this was a speech that came out of official duties, then it might be privileged.
The problem is that Judge Chutkin was all on board in D.C. with Smith in trying to get a trial before the election.
And I, look, I handle cases in D.C. I've never seen a case move this fast.
It's like the rocket docket, as we call it over in Virginia, but this is D.C., which is the opposite.
And she was doing all she could to get a trial of Trump before the election.
But there was a cost to that.
She didn't create much of a record because she was going so fast.
So if they say, look, we want to see if this is an official, these are official acts, they've got to send it back and she's got to actually hold hearings.
The very thing people are criticizing Cannon for, she's going to have to do serious hearings and create a record.
That would make it hard to try Trump before the election.
That's right.
But Jack Smith or whoever could potentially drop the rest of the claim against Trump after an adverse ruling to him by saying, okay, I'll only try you on the things your counsel admitted you're not immune for.
And that could fast track it again, potentially.
We'll see.
I don't, he doesn't seem to me like a man who's willing to drop any piece of his claim, but we'll find out soon.
Okay.
You made a good point the other day that I want to ask you about because as a longtime court watcher and one of the best things I ever did at Fox was for three years, I was the Supreme Court correspondent.
Right.
And I wanted to sit.
Oh, thank you.
But I loved getting to sit in that courtroom for a living and just listen to the lawyers on their toes doing battle with these great legal minds and watch the justices when they were really fired up.
And this is back in the day when Scalia was up there and there was nobody better to watch and learn from.
And you have defended the court, which is under a coordinated attempt to delegitimize it right now by the left because they don't control it right now.
I mean, the right didn't do this to the court when the left had the majority of seats, but now the left is used to controlling everything, media, corporations, academia, and so on.
So they're upset.
And you pointed out something I thought was a great point the other day.
While I was on vacay, the Supreme Court upheld the bar on guns to those who are under domestic violence restraining orders eight to one in a decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts.
The Supreme Court struck down a ban that was issued by the Trump administration on bump stocks in a six to three vote.
The Supreme Court preserved access to the abortion pill in a unanimous decision.
And your point was people are missing the fact because we get so focused on the most divisive cases that actually the majority of Supreme Court decisions are decided overwhelmingly in unison by the justices.
And they're not five, four decisions that are split right down the middle.
The court generally can work together and whatever their ideological approaches are can come to the same conclusion on the vast majority of issues that come before it.
Absolutely.
And, you know, when I teach a Supreme Court class and I speak about the Supreme Court around the country, and one of the things that I do when I speak to groups is to try to educate them that everything they've read about the court is wrong.
That if you look at the mainstream media, they portray this as a hopelessly divided, ideological court and totally dysfunctional.
It's entirely nonsense.
I mean, the vast majority of cases are unanimous or near unanimous.
But also the ones that are not, if you look at the last two weeks, the mix wasn't right down the line.
You had Kagan and Sodomayor joining conservatives in different cases.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, these justices are trying to get it right.
I disagree with them at times, but they are not dysfunctionally ideological.
They get things done.
Now, does that mean that they don't break along a 6-3 line?
Sure, they do.
There are some cases like that.
But by the way, that's not so upsetting.
These justices are trying to have a consistent jurisprudential approach.
And yes, that means they can be more predictable in a few of these cases each year.
But when I testified in favor of Gorsuch's confirmation, and I remember, I think it was Senator Whitehouse.
It was either that or another hearing.
He said, you know, how can you support people like Gorsuch, Professor?
They're just robots.
They just vote.
5-4, 5-4, 5-4.
It's always the same 5, Professor, always the same 5.
And I said, Senator, you see, we forget the four on the other side.
It's always those four too in those cases, but you don't view them as robotic or ideological.
You view them as right, right?
So it's so transparently dumb to these attacks on the court.
Court Packing Ultimately Howard 00:02:44
But I've never seen a period like this.
The left has turned on the court.
They've supported court packing.
The president didn't even come out against court packing until midway in his term.
If you remember, he refused when this issue was one of the big issues in the presidential campaign.
He refused to say how he felt about it because he said, I'm not going to give you that.
Well, really?
I mean, because it says something about your fealty to the Constitution.
They turned on the court because they no longer control it and they turned on free speech.
The ACLU used to be known as a leftist group.
I mean, a left-wing group that most Democrats supported and donated to.
And they fought for free speech no matter what the issue was.
They thought the KKK had the right to go out there and say what it wanted to say.
And only now is everything getting redefined.
That's why this book is very important.
I mean, it's genuinely important.
It's called The Indispensable Right, Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
I misspoke earlier.
It's actually available right now.
The Wall Street Journal calls it a learned, embracing book, rigorously detailed and unfailingly even-handed.
That describes you too, Jonathan Durley.
Thank you very much.
Saying ultimately, though, despite the grim recounting of the assaults on free speech, yours is ultimately a buoyant book.
It is buoyant.
I think they've nailed you.
Learned, bracing, rigorously detailed, unfailingly even-handed, and despite some grimness on recounting the problems, ultimately buoyant.
That's you.
Yes, unfortunately, as I've gained weight with age, I'm too buoyant.
But the book cannot be used for life-saving purposes in water situations, but I do recommend it otherwise.
Definitely.
I loved every minute of it.
It's great to see you again.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you, Megan.
Great to see you too.
All right.
Don't forget, indispensable, the indispensable right, free speech in an age of rage.
We'll be back tomorrow with Howard Bloom on his new book about the Brian Kohlberger case and those Idaho murders.
This is his first big interview here on the podcast lane.
And he's getting, I mean, the Daily Mail, everybody's trying to rip copies of this book, not rip, like criticize.
I mean, rip it before it's out because they wanted to steal it off the back of a truck so they'd get the first previews.
You'll hear about it in detail for the first time here when Howard joins us tomorrow.
Don't miss that.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
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