Sean Hannity Show - David Schoen - December 27th, Hour 1

Dec. 28, 2024 - Sean Hannity Show

31:09

David Schoen - December 27th, Hour 1

Jeffrey Lord sits down with David Schoen to talk about the politics behind the many investigations and court actions against President Trump.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	This is an iHeart podcast.
	Hello, America, and welcome to the Sean Hannity Show.
	As you have already instantly guessed, I am not Sean.
	Sean is enjoying the last of his much-deserved 2024 end-of-year vacation.
	Getting ready to get back, and as we all head into the first year of the Trump presidency, I am Jeffrey Lord, contributing editor of the American Spectator, Newsmax TV contributor and columnist for Newsbusters, the Media Research Center's media watchdog.
	So let's get right into it, if we can do that.
	We've got some great guests coming up.
	We have Civil Liberties and former Trump attorney counsel David Schoen.
	We have our friends Matt and Mercy Schlapp from the American Conservative Union and CPAC.
	And my friend and fellow Pennsylvanian Jeff Bartos, who has run for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania himself and spent some significant time helping Dave McCormick win this Senate seat in an unbelievable race against three-term incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, the namesake son of his late dad, Governor Robert P. Casey.
	So we've got a good show going for you here.
	And I just want to I want to start with talking a little bit about what Sean loves to talk about, the media mob.
	And one of the things that has gotten me going here in the last few days, I saw a, you know, I read the Washington Post, so you don't have to.
	And one of the things I noticed was this column.
	It was written today, published two days before Christmas in the Post.
	And it was by a columnist of theirs named Eugene Robinson, who I'm sure is a nice enough guy.
	But his headline was, we cannot abide Donald Trump's wish for a compliant news media.
	Fight the president-elect's attack on independent journalism with a pro-truth stance.
	Now, in this stem, in this gem, rather, he begins by saying this.
	Anyone who doubts the incoming Trump administration poses a serious threat to independent journalism, catch that phrase, independent journalism, has not been paying attention.
	An attack, he says, is already underway, and we journalists must not allow ourselves to be intimidated, unquote.
	Now, to which one can only reply with a considerable burst of outright laughter.
	In fact, I would suggest Mr. Robinson has it completely backwards.
	The Washington Post and its allies in the so-called quote-unquote mainstream media are anything about being seeking quote independent journalism, quote unquote.
	They are themselves central players in what is much more accurately known as the liberal media.
	They themselves are the compliant ones who have long ago abandoned independent journalism to take sides, one side specifically, in our political discussions of the day.
	Some examples.
	Back before the 2024 election in October, the New York Post headlined this.
	More Washington Post staffers resign over papers' failure to endorse Kamala Harris.
	That story reported, quote, at least two more staffers have penned their last story for the Washington Post, don't you love this, as employees resign in protest over the broadsheet's decision not to endorse Kamala Harris for the 2024 presidential election.
	Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts have issued their resignations.
	Semaphore media journalist Max Tanay reported on Monday the two longtime Washington Post staffers each authored resignation letters slamming the paper's decision not to endorse Harris.
	Quote, they said, I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump, unquote, said Hoffman, who took home the Pulitzer Prize last week and first joined the paper in 1982.
	And he was writing this in his resignation letter, which, of course, was posted on X.
	He went on, I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment, quote unquote.
	And Ms. Roberts, another longtime employee of the Post, who first joined the paper as a student intern while studying at Harvard University, said she was resigning due to the paper's refusal to endorse Harris.
	Quote, I'm resigning from the Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets, she said.
	She went on to write in her resignation letter, worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants, for the media, for us to keep quiet, unquote.
	So, right there, the veil gets torn away from Robinson's supposed, quote-unquote, independent journalism at the Washington Post.
	Interestingly, the same situation arose across the country at the Los Angeles Times.
	CBS News headlined that story this way.
	Two more LA Times editorial board members resign after the paper withholds a Harris endorsement.
	Unlike columnist Robinson, over there in the New York Post, where a great columnist named Michael Goodwin has reported the reality of the fanatical and decidedly non-independent journalism of the day from liberals, Mr. Goodwin headlined, the left-wing media created their own crisis and now have to pay the price for repeatedly attacking Donald Trump.
	Goodwin wrote, even as defeated Democrats try to decide who they are and what they believe in their media handmaidens, what they believe in, their media handmaids face a crisis of their own.
	The comeuppance against their politically driven bias, say again, bias, has arrived and it's proving to be expensive in more ways than one.
	ABC News and its chief Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos, he writes, fell into another trap.
	They, meaning ABC, put their agenda of defeating Trump ahead of the facts and the law and faced with depositions that likely would have supported his claim of defamation, ABC caved.
	In a settlement, I still find this incredible, in a settlement, the network forked over $16 million for a Trump library and his legal fees and had to publicly say they, quote, regret, unquote, Stephanopoulos's false claims that Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil case.
	Says Goodwin, ouch.
	The apology surely stung much more than the money, unquote.
	Well, I think that is safe to say.
	And, you know, it isn't just major newspapers that have the left-wing bias problem.
	As this is written, Fox News is headlining something else.
	Quote, TV, Saturday night, late-night TV, Saturday night lives, boring anti-Trump scold routines go unheeded.
	Well, expletive, I can't say on the radio, it happened again, they said.
	Late-night hosts melted down the night after Trump's 2024 victory after making him the butt of 98% of their political jokes.
	The story goes on to report on the antics of late-night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and others, including, of course, NBC's Saturday Night Live, going all in on pro-Democratic and anti-Trump humor, quote unquote.
	Well, exactly.
	Yet with all of this out there, not to mention oh so much more in the way of a decidedly far-left-leaning media, there is the Washington Post, Mr. Robinson, saying, quote, and when Trump takes office, the threat will escalate, perhaps dramatically, unquote.
	The real threat, let me just say this, to American democracy is the central fact that Robinson simply ignores.
	That central fact being that American journalism has overwhelmingly abandoned the idea of so-called independent journalism.
	And it should be noted, this problem has been around a long time before Donald Trump came on the political scene.
	You read the memoirs, as I've done over the years, of Republicans like 1964 Republican nominee Senator Barry Goldwater, or former President Richard Nixon, or the Bush's father and son, and others from the conservative side of the aisle.
	And there is reference after reference to the liberal media and the hard fact, and that person's days on the active political scene, that they had to constantly deal with a far-left-leaning media.
	You want an example?
	In August of 2018, the Washington Examiner's Paul Beddard took a look back and headlined, Publix media hate fanned by Trump started with George H.W. Bush.
	And Beddard wrote, former President George H.W. Bush had it a lot better than President Trump.
	Economic growth was humming at 5%.
	His polling was high, and he was on duty in the Oval Office when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled.
	But the press attacked him.
	And as he headed to defeat to Bill Clinton, Bush became the first president to publicly rip on the media at campaign events, even handing out red hats, I remember this, that had the words, quote, annoy the media, re-elect Bush on them.
	Former Bush aide Mary Madeline is quoted by Bedard as saying, quote, Madeline isn't surprised the public has turned on the press again.
	The assaults on freedom of speech, religiosity, combined with the hypocrisy of a ruling class exempting themselves from all the degenerative policies they imposed on the electorate created a combustible environment, and Trump picked up the fire starter, she said.
	In short, the idea being pushed in the Washington Post by one of its own, Mr. Robinson, is completely upside down and backwards.
	He ends by saying this, we work for the people, not the president.
	Whenever it's necessary, we'll remind the president that he works for the people too, quote unquote.
	Well, suffice to say, when large media organizations present themselves as doing, quote, independent journalism, unquote, when in fact they are about furthering a far-left-wing agenda, not independent journalism, they are not, quote, working for the people, unquote.
	The irony, the American people have long gotten onto this game of the media pretending to be doing independent journalism, when, in fact, they are doing the opposite.
	In October of 2024, the Gallup organization headlined this story.
	Americans' trust in media remains at trend low.
	Trust in political and civic institutions highest for local and state governments, lowest for media and Congress.
	The story reported for the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media, that would be 36%, than trusted a great deal or fair amount.
	Another 33% of Americans express, quote, not very much confidence.
	There is a reason for this.
	And when a Washington Post columnist so prominently denies the reality of that reason, media credibility takes suffer another hit.
	Shocking not.
	And I'm sure you have all seen the stories of MSNBC and CNN losing their audience and having all kinds of problems out there.
	And interestingly, I vividly remember a personal note here.
	When I was on CNN in the 2016 election campaign defending then-candidate Trump, it drew, as I began to understand, it drew considerable attention.
	And I was told personally by the president of the network that my appearance on the shows there was actually helping the ratings at CNN.
	You can't make this stuff up.
	So we're going to go on and we'll talk a little bit more about this.
	One of the things that sort of is a corollary, I think, to all of this, and we're going to talk about this with David Schoen, and that is the rise of lawfare and weaponizing the law to go after your political opponents.
	You know, I always find it very interesting that when you are accused by the left of whatever terrible thing they want to accuse you of, in point of fact, they're the ones that are guilty of it.
	They're the ones who do this.
	And when they talk about Donald Trump wanting to be or he is a fascist or he's going to do this or he's going to do that.
	And then at the same time, they talk about all of the legal things that have been hurled in Donald Trump's direction.
	Well, who's doing that?
	We're getting some music here, and we'll come back and talk that in just a little bit.
	But wow.
	We're done now, I guess, saying Merry Christmas.
	Happy 4th of July.
	No, happy New Year.
	Welcome back to the Sean Hannity Show.
	And let me start out the segment here by giving you the phone number to call in.
	It's 800-941-7326, or in other words, 800-941-Sean.
	And I hope you will holler a little bit.
	You know, we've got some very interesting times coming up.
	President Trump, I always find this comeback of his absolutely remarkable.
	And for those of you out there, and I'm sure it's a lot of you who know your American history, this kind of thing has not happened since Grover Cleveland was president of the United States.
	Grover Cleveland had been mayor of Buffalo, the governor of New York.
	He was elected president of the United States in 1844, I think it was.
	I'm sorry, 1884.
	And four years later, he was defeated by the son or grandson of President William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison by name, and William Henry Harrison was famous in history.
	He was the hero of the Battle of Tippy Canoe, and the slogan on the campaign was Tippy Canoe and Tyler II, John Tyler of Virginia, Senator from Virginia, I think, being his running mate.
	Well, he got elected, gave his inaugural address, caught a cold and died in office.
	So that was about it.
	So Grover Cleveland eventually came back four years later.
	So President Trump is repeating, and we will see what's going to happen here.
	So we've got a little break here, and we will go from there.
	And welcome back to the Sean Hannity Show.
	This is Jeffrey Lord filling in for Sean.
	And I want to start out by giving our call-in number here, 800-941-7326, or 800-941-Sean.
	I want to bring on now our guest, David Schoen, who is a former counsel to President Trump, a noted civil liberties attorney.
	And David, before we start to talk, I have a, our friend Jason has a clip here of District Attorney Bragg in New York that he's going to play for us, and that I think can help us set up our discussion here.
	I know a lot of people are wondering, whoever has this job, are they going to convict Donald Trump?
	Look, that is the number one issue.
	The Times calls Bragg a talented prosecutor whose successful suit of the Trump Foundation could be invaluable experience for the investigation he'll take over.
	As the Chief Deputy Attorney General in New York State, I oversaw some of the office's biggest cases.
	From exposing illegal behavior by the Trump Foundation, we know there's a Trump investigation.
	I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation.
	I also sued the Trump administration more than 100 times.
	We know that the DA is investigating Trump.
	When I was at the AG's office, I sued Trump over 100 times for his administration's misconduct and brought a case against the Trump Foundation and held him accountable.
	All right.
	David, welcome to the Sean Hannity Show.
	Thank you very much.
	I got to add, I am not a lawyer, but I listen to that kind of thing, and I've watched the whole business unfold with all these legal proceedings against President Trump.
	And it just seems to me as a non-lawyer that this is about a bunch of insider inside legal system that doesn't like somebody.
	And so whether it's the U.S. Justice Department or district attorneys in New York City or Fulton County in Georgia, they're going out to get him.
	What are your thoughts?
	Well, you're 100% right.
	Your instincts are right, whether lawyer or not.
	That's been the nature of things for the past few years that we've seen.
	I don't think we've ever seen anything like it.
	First of all, there are tremendous ethical violations in Bragg running for office on a platform to get and target a particular citizen, hadn't been accused of anything.
	He promised to be the guy to convict him.
	We saw that entire case unfold as a complete mess, miscarriage of justice.
	Andrew Cuomo, who had been the Attorney General, New York, and the governor of New York, of course, a no Trump fan, said that had he been Attorney General, that case never would have been brought.
	As you know, the book out by Mark Pomerance, who had been appointed sort of special counsel to investigate it, that office was against the prosecution until things changed politically, so it became advantageous for Alvin Bragg, in his view, at least, to bring the case.
	The case is a travesty.
	It will never hold up on appeal if it's not dismissed outright.
	It should be dismissed, frankly, for a number of reasons.
	It should be dismissed on presidential immunity grounds.
	It should be dismissed on the election that just happened, that kind of immunity.
	But even if it weren't dismissed, on appeal, it has to be reversed for a number of constitutional infirmities, including never identifying the target crime that made it a felony in the case, giving a jury the choice and then not having them identify what crime it was.
	But there are many other errors in the case.
	The judge never should have sat on the case.
	clear conflict of interest.
	It's an abomination.
	And that's just one example.
	But, you know, you mentioned the others.
	The others have all have infirmities of their own.
	Yeah, I mean, it just astonishes me.
	And as a layman, the question that I have is how do we hold how does the system hold these people who are doing this, the lawyers, and whatever, whether it's Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York or Alvin Bragg or Fannie Willis or whatever.
	How do they get to be held accountable for what they're doing or what they have done?
	It's a real problem in a situation like this, especially, because you think that ultimately the check on an abuse of power is the ballot box.
	But if you're in a jurisdiction where the elected official is playing to the worst instinct, worst human instincts in that jurisdiction, they don't like a particular person.
	They don't like someone because of race or gender or some other reason.
	And they have an electorate filled with that kind of viewpoint.
	Then the person can stay in office.
	If you can prove that there are professional violations, for example, we saw in the Georgia case with Fonnie Willis.
	Now, the Georgia Court of Appeals has removed her from the case as she had to be.
	That's because in her zeal to get President Trump and to advance her interests and the interests of her lover, she really overstepped boundaries and created a clear appearance of impropriety and impartiality.
	It was removed from the case, and hopefully that case is going to be dismissed.
	But you're right.
	You've identified a real problem.
	What do we do to hold them accountable outside of the ballot box?
	Is this something that on the federal level Congress can deal with or in a state, a state legislature can deal with to change the rules and all that?
	You know, one of the things that, and we're old enough to remember this, is President Nixon's Watergate situation.
	And it has occurred to me more than once that once that occurred, then all bets were off.
	And every president, every public official was going to be targeted or could easily be targeted by prosecutors because, well, gee, if they got Richard Nixon to resign and almost, you know, other than Gerald Ford's pardon, he might have had more problems.
	What else would have happened there?
	I keep having the feeling that opened the floodgates for all kind of conduct here on the part of the legal community, which is just not good.
	I think that's absolutely right.
	And, you know, we saw in 2019, Jerry Nadler, Democratic congressman from New York, made this comment in the context of the first Trump impeachment proceeding.
	And he said, basically, we can't trust the voters.
	We can't wait for another election.
	We have to find some other way to get rid of President Trump, in effect.
	And that's about as anti-democratic a statement as I can imagine from an elected official.
	You know, on the one hand, with our separate branches of government, often we like to see, you know, different parties having different branches as a sort of check on the other.
	But in this case, I think that President Trump provided the ultimate answer to the unfair attacks.
	I think the American people, I've said this many times now, are basically a fair-minded people in the majority.
	I think that this lawfare and the weaponization of the criminal justice system was just too much for a normal American person to take.
	And the backlash was seen through the ballot box.
	And so ultimately, he gets the last word.
	President Trump gets the last word in this because now he has both houses of Congress and the presidency.
	And so if someone's going to try to abuse the impeachment process again, as we saw last time, they're going to have a tough row-to-hoe with the Republican Party in power in both houses.
	Yes.
	You know, back in 2014, I interviewed then-private citizen Trump for the American Spectator.
	And one of the things I said to him was that Republicans that I had talked to, and mind you, this was after the McCain and the Romney campaigns, was that they get attacked by their opposition and so savagely, and yet they don't fight back.
	And so I said to him, if you run for president, will you fight back?
	To which his response was something like, oh, don't worry about that.
	I will fight back.
	Do you think we're fortunate that we've got somebody here who is just not going to let people get away with it as opposed to just rolling over here?
	I mean, I can only imagine the conversations that you and his staff and friends have had with him.
	I saw him in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, during the campaign.
	And because I know him, they asked if I would come out and talk to him.
	I did.
	And I have to say, David, I was standing, you know, like almost nose to nose with him.
	I'm sort of tilting my head a little bit to see the condition of his ear where he'd been shot.
	And he notices, and I said, are you all right?
	He said, yeah, I'm doing great.
	I'm doing just great.
	I'm fine.
	And then he went out on stage and delivered this, you know, incredible speech that had thousands of people all set to go.
	I have never seen anything like this.
	And I worked for President Reagan and been around my share of people like this.
	But wow, I just think he's amazing when it comes to this.
	But it's also very helpful because otherwise they're going to try and bring him down.
	Yeah, well, I mean, that was an iconic moment.
	I'm sorry to say, I didn't really recognize the gravity of the situation at the time.
	And my initial reaction was to trash talk him a little bit about, you know, I got a little grave wound on the ear sort of thing.
	But he took it very well and gave it back.
	But, no, look, I personally think that the toughness, first of all, it's real.
	But secondly, I think it plays best in our foreign affairs, quite frankly.
	I mean, we've seen it already.
	We've seen it now, you know, backing off publicly of some of our arch enemies.
	And they know that he means business.
	And part of it is the unpredictability.
	They don't know what he's going to do, but they know what he's capable of doing if he decides to.
	In terms of sort of payback, look, I hope that doesn't dominate the agenda.
	I think, though, he learned a great lesson over these last four years and the four years of his administration.
	Remember, they tried to sideline him with this phony Mueller so-called investigation that really, you know, it wasn't fair to the country.
	It handcuffed the country, and then we got COVID.
	And so now he gets to start anew.
	Listen, he made the decision, conscious decision, the beginning of his last administration, not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, despite the evidence of what she did with her computer, you know, and so on.
	Any criminal defense lawyer has had clients who were indicted for a lot less in terms of obstruction of justice and evidence tampering and that sort of thing.
	But he made that decision.
	I don't know if he would make that same decision today.
	And he was, believe me, he got a lot of pressure.
	All of that lock her up, lock her up.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I remember my share of rallies where I would hear that in 2016.
	It was pretty amazing.
	Well, I guess, and one of the other things that I think sort of comes from this as well is that he's become a role model for foreign leaders.
	And, you know, Trumpism, as you might call it, is surging in places like, you know, Europe and France and South America and all of this kind of thing, which I find very interesting.
	You know, it's democracy, but you have to have a strong leader.
	And I think that they've really responded.
	I don't think there's any accident that he was invited to France just as president-elect for the anniversary or the celebration of the redoing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
	And President Matron went out of his way to treat him as if he were already the sitting president.
	I think that's pretty amazing right there.
	Oh, you make very important points with this, I think.
	And we're seeing it, you know, kind of across the board.
	And the flip side of it is, in each of these situations, the media, and I say the media, if that's reflected in the New York Times, the Washington Post, plays out these doomsday scenarios.
	World leaders hate him.
	World leaders don't hate him.
	First of all, they love the guy on many levels, but they respect him.
	They fear him in some ways, and they want to be like him.
	They want to be that kind of leader for many of them.
	But we see these doomsday reports.
	If he were to move the Israeli of the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, it would be Armageddon.
	Well, he did it because it was the right thing to do.
	It's the thing the law requires him to do.
	And he wanted to do it.
	And it turned out to be the perfect decision.
	The Abraham Accords then arose from that.
	Now, we were told those would be impossible.
	We could never make peace with these countries, never have dialogue with them.
	But he went out and did it.
	Now, you remember, when the Biden administration came in, there was apparently a ban on using the term Abraham Accords credit for any of these things, which they said he couldn't do, and he did them all.
	So I'm hoping to see a lot more positive things along those lines with this administration.
	And it comes through strength, as you say.
	Yes, it does.
	You know, I can give you an anecdote from my Reagan days.
	In August of 1981, the federal air traffic controllers threatened to go on strike, which was against the law.
	And the whole Washington press corps was, well, you know, you can't do anything about this.
	And Reagan came out and said, if you do this, I will fire you.
	Well, they didn't believe him.
	He did it.
	He fired him.
	And lo and behold, we later found out that who paid real close attention to this?
	The Soviet Union.
	Yep.
	So, well, thank you very much, David.
	This has been a great conversation.
	I think the next four years are going to be remarkable.
	And I'm looking forward to your involvement with it.
	And the American people will be well served if you are there.
	This is Jeffrey Lord sitting in for Sean Hannity.
	And our call-in number is 800-941-7326.
	All right.
	This is Jeffrey Lord sitting in for our friend Sean Hannity.
	And our number here is 800-941-7326.
	We invite you to call in.
	We have just about a minute here before we get into our hard break.
	And I just thought I'd use that, even though we are a few days past Christmas.
	I did go through for the American Spectator before Christmas a list of conservative books for Christmas.
	And even though Christmas may be over, you could buy for somebody's New Year's gift or what have you.
	So I'll probably mention this a little bit later in the show here.
	But we have some great books out there, new books in 2024, and also some old books that are the classics, like from Bill Buckley.
	Okay, so that is great.
	And we will be back in a few minutes.
	This is Jeffrey Lord filling in for Sean Hannity.

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