And Merrick Garland Didn't Even Want To Indict Trump
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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the things that stood out to them from Trump's latest indictment, including the fact that these charges would never have been brought until Trump announced another run for the presidency. The problems for Rudy Giuliani don't stop at being Co-Conspirator #1, as he's being sued for sexual harassment and it's as gross as you think it is.
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Welcome to a new era of The Weekender of the McCraig Podcast.
I'm J.D.
Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, we have a game changer of a show today.
We have more indictments of Donald Trump.
We have Rudy Giuliani saying some of the most disgusting things that I could ever possibly imagine.
We have a whole host of things.
But today, for the first time, we are going to feature in The Weekender calls, voicemails, and messages, questions from our listeners.
I could not be more excited.
I am positively vibrating at the moment.
Well, who knew?
You set up a little voicemail line and people will actually call in.
You're right, it is very exciting.
It turns out that people care about this show.
It turns out that people want to be involved in this show.
So you know what?
Nick and I, we said we're doing it.
So, again, if you want to get involved with that, go over to patreon.com slash smuckrakepodcast.
We got a whole slew of things that we're going to get to.
But listen, Nick, we have to talk about the big news of the day.
We are recording this on Thursday, August 3rd.
Just a few minutes ago, former President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, appeared in a court in Washington, D.C.
and pled not guilty to four more There is a lot of meat on this bone.
These four, of course, are linked to the January 6th attempted coup.
The list goes as follows, Nick.
There is conspiracy to violate civil rights, which we got to talk about in just a second.
Conspiracy to defraud the government.
Obstruction of an official proceeding.
And conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
There is a lot of meat on this bone.
This is a big, giant mess.
I know historical doesn't begin to cover it, but I have to say this is a pretty historic moment.
You know, it is.
I will not deny that.
He's already been indicted.
We've seen him get rung up a couple times already.
And so it was a little bit weird when you're listening to all the breathless historic moments and they're all trying to make this a weighted thing on the TV to get people to watch.
But you're right.
This one in particular was the one we've been waiting for.
This one is the one that's particularly damning and this one is the one that would have never come to pass and it got even close had Donald Trump not intended to run again for president because Merrick Garland would never have gotten Jack Smith involved and then we would never have been here.
How crazy is that?
It's wild and and that is what I keep sitting around thinking about again and and I don't want to I don't want to underplay what has happened here Nick because a president of the United States was was charged with a post-civil war crime like that was that was put aside for the KKK during reconstruction.
Documenting in Mar-a-Lago just seemed kind of quaint and you know funny.
He stole state secrets.
Let's go ahead and restate what had happened because there's so much that has happened.
There's so much criming that has occurred with Donald Trump.
It's hard to keep track.
This is a former president who stole state secrets.
This is a former president who tried to overthrow an election and violate the civil rights of millions of Americans.
And you look at this thing and you really start to try and wrap your head around it.
Unprecedented, again, gets thrown around all the time, but this is one for the books.
I'll just say that.
This is one that we're going to be chewing on for a long time.
Oh, I'm going to have fun this episode because I'm going to probably end up voicing a little bit of the rights, you know, the MAGA people's arguments in what they're going to do in court because it's interesting.
And there are lawyers out there that you can hear that would probably take the case to defend Trump In that sort of exercise of cable, can we get him off?
But I think that there's probably some lawyers out there that think that they could and it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
But again, Jack Smith has got a he kind of has that you've got a horse and a Lance is it a Lance?
What is a joust?
In his hand, and he's galloping very quickly.
I don't know.
Yeah, you gotta lance with the joust.
That's what you do.
You joust?
I don't know how you feel about it.
Whenever I see, like, the old movies with knights jousting each other, it seems like not a great way to settle differences.
Arbitrary?
It just seems like not a lot of skill is involved.
It seems pretty dangerous all the way around.
I don't care for it.
I would say this, I would like to get rid of jousting.
I'll take that hard stance.
But this indictment, Nick, I want to talk a little bit about it to go ahead and set the table.
Along with this, there are six unnamed co-conspirators.
The general consensus is that five of them have been identified based on information within the indictments.
Rudy Giuliani, who we're going to have to talk about here pretty soon, unfortunately, John Eastman, again, the lawyer who cooked up the, again, heavy scare quotes around legal scheme, that Claremont stooge.
We have Sidney Powell, who I know like a lot of things get lost in the Donald Trump haze, Nick, but had months of just getting out there and trying things.
Just really unlike most anybody else.
We got Jeffrey Clark, we got Kenneth Jezebel, and then nobody really is sure who the sixth person is.
There's a lot of theories out there.
They have not been charged.
Which now starts to really beg the question, Nick, which is, what are these people doing in this equation?
Because what you just said about the case that needs to be proved, You kind of have to show that Donald Trump knew that he was lying about the 2020 election.
You have to also show the conversations he was having with all these people.
I want to point out real fast before I get your thoughts on this, Nick.
In none of this are we talking about any of these donors.
In none of it are we talking about the people, again, who paid for this thing, organized this thing, put it together.
I remain completely skeptical that we're ever going to deal with that, and I still resent people telling me, just wait, trust the process.
But these people who are now being named in this thing and have not been charged yet, again, it begs a whole lot of questions, does it not?
Oh, it does.
And so there's also some interesting omissions of who wasn't included in this as well, which like you alluded to, as far as the money, you always like to follow the money.
For me, I'm kind of thinking of, well, first of all, in terms of state of mind, this indictment is just every point they make, It literally is buttressed with the next sentence saying that they told him he did not win the election.
You know what I'm saying?
Every other sentence is that.
Just to make it clear, so it seems like they're going to be able to present an ironclad case that at the very least there were important people that were in charge of things telling Trump that he did not win the election.
Right.
Okay, so that's going to be something that, you know, is provable in court.
I can get that far in there.
But what was interesting was, I was compelled in the middle of doing this and going through all sorts of rabbit holes.
I was like, okay, like, who were the Congress people that requested cartons again?
You want to know the list real quick?
It's Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, Scott Perry, Marjorie Taylor Greene, probably more, and Jim Joyner.
Murders Row is what they're at.
And so you have to think that other than maybe Matt Gaetz, who was probably just trying to cover his ass on some other things that he might be involved with, the other ones clearly were in these meetings and clearly understood that when it didn't work, They were now on the hook for some sort of coup light thing that they thought they needed a pardon from.
That is very interesting to me and that doesn't sound like maybe Jack Smith doesn't want to go that far.
I gotta tell you, one of the things that I've been sitting around with, Nick, is that this indictment sort of sketches out a larger story.
Of course, this is coming off the heels of the January 6th Commission.
You know, we talked about the effectiveness of the communication of the January 6th Commission.
We also criticized, of course, the leadership of Liz Cheney and the framing of the idea that Donald Trump was a bad apple in a barrel that could be saved.
The Republican Party was outside of Trump.
He was an aberration that could go away.
Again, in all of this, there is There are notes in the indictment, and John Eastman is one of the people that starts to speak towards this.
There's a gaggle of bozos around Donald Trump, right?
And we've talked about that.
He attracts these people who are on the margins of the Republican Party because most people are more than happy to use him as a battering ram, but they don't want to get the stink on them completely, you know?
And there's like this weird sort of layers to it, like the people who want to get close to him, the people who stay away from him.
It was throughout the Republican Party.
And let's make it clear, if we're going to charge, the United States of America, is going to charge Donald Trump with these crimes, and by the way, they absolutely should, how can you make the argument that the Republican Party should still exist?
At all levels, Nick.
Not just the representatives, the ones who were asking for pardons, the ones who went into the building after the attempted coup and continued to vote to support it, and on top of that, Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC, who was involved in a scheme that, by the way, we're going to talk more about these fake electors in a minute,
The entirety of the RNC, the entirety of the Republican Party, was involved in an attempted overthrow of the 2020 election.
And I gotta tell you, the indictment doesn't go far enough in that.
It doesn't get enough into it.
We're not having conversations enough about it.
We're still sticking with this idea that Donald Trump is the cancer on the Republican Party.
He's the disease.
If we can just get rid of him.
And I gotta tell you, this indictment, it feels like at times, It starts to look at it and then pulls away.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it looks at the overall sort of infection of this thing.
But I gotta tell you, the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, you name it, it still is not going the full distance.
You know, it's possible that they're not going to, you know, lay everything that they have out in the indictment.
And there might be more they have.
I would think that's probably unknown.
But as far as right fingering other people, I'm sorry, pointing at other people, then that's you're right.
If it was anybody big ticket, like what you're thinking of, they would have had to have been mentioned in the indictment.
So yeah, you know, it really is too bad because again, you know, there's enough people involved in this that should have known better.
Do you remember how many congressmen voted to not certify the election after the insurrection?
147.
That's not a couple.
No.
After that.
Now, a few people who had pledged to, you know, honorably, decided to go and actually, you know, affirm the election as it stood.
And that was good on them, I guess.
Congrats!
Yeah.
Now, there were some senators out there, too.
Because remember, we'll get into some more details on how this all worked out, but the most interesting thing to me about the indictment is the fake electors.
I think the reason is because that's probably the easiest thing they're going to be able to prove, and maybe up the chain, get all the way through.
Because remember, these electors had these letters that were all written almost the same exact way across the states, right?
It's almost like it's an organized conspiracy, and it always is.
And by the way, but the indictment is pointing at the defendant, at the defendant, Donald Trump, as being the guy behind all this.
So they clearly have, you know, Mark Meadows' emails, who clearly is a, you know, a cooperator in this.
They have, they have the goods on that.
They clearly have ways of being able to prove, I suspect, that Trump was involved in these decisions to do the fake electors.
And that's going to be, you know, as jammy as anything.
You know, the felony is, I think, maybe like five years, but I'll take five years for doing that.
I mean, at the very least.
Do you think Mike Lindell feels left out?
Do you think like, because listen, he came in with like a piece of paper that basically had written do something about this on it and slipped it to Donald Trump.
I think he so desperately wanted to be part of the intellectual conspiracy of this.
And a reminder, this was a conspiracy top to bottom.
This is where all of the money, all of the focus of all of these different groups... By the way, we haven't said the name Ginny Thomas yet on this show, so let's just go ahead and say the name Ginny Thomas.
Just, you know, for S's and G's.
I had a good joke on that, but that's okay.
But I will say that it's a reflection on Mike Lindell that he couldn't even manage to get indicted on this thing.
That's how unserious he is.
But like you said, the person that really should be on this is Ginny Thomas.
And I think that goes to what you're trying to say, or what you are saying about him not going to expand it to really just indict the government itself.
Because there is evidence, right, that Eastman was a clerk for Clarence Thomas.
There is evidence that there's a notion that he got a sense of what the Supreme Court would vote on as far as if it's got in front of them for the fake electors.
And the only way that happens is through the Ginny Thomas connection and all that stuff.
She's the one serious person, and you're talking about the money as well, that should have been probably wrapped up in this.
And maybe that could happen later if maybe they give up more of the goods.
But that one was a little bit interesting to me that didn't come out like that.
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