Brad and Dan discuss the details, reactions, and takeaways to the Trump indictment by Jack Smith.
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Welcome to Straight Right American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today on a Slow News Week.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And right, Brad, Slow News Week.
We're sitting around all week.
We're getting ready for this.
Like, God, I don't know what we're going to talk about.
Nothing significant has happened.
Trump and DeSantis haven't done things.
Judicial processes aren't moving forward.
Yeah, but we've stretched.
We've dug deep and think we might find some stuff to fill an hour or so.
There's a lot to talk about, friends, as you know, with the Trump indictment.
And I know some of you might be thinking, this is just normal now.
He gets indicted every six weeks.
But this one feels different for reasons we'll get into.
It feels momentous because it's tied to January 6, something that if you look back on our archives, Dan, we've been talking about for a long time and wanting January 6 to be adjudicated in our public square in order to safeguard our democracy.
I want to start though, Dan, with a controversial opinion.
It's going to cause us to lose most of our UK audience.
Promise I'm going somewhere with this.
So just hang with me now.
I'm not really someone who enjoys spy movies or like international sprawling, um, espionage films.
I don't know.
It's not my jam.
Okay.
That was a problem when I lived in the UK because all those years in the UK, I didn't like James Bond.
I still don't like it.
And I have no interest in it.
I think James Bond should have retired.
Like when the Bourne movies came out.
Okay.
That's my opinion.
Um, so here's the thing.
I don't really like all the espionage stuff.
I know there's a series with Jim from The Office, Jack Ryan.
I've never watched it.
I know there's a bunch of these like series and franchises and I know very little.
I am usually on the couch reading a French detective novel or 19th century French novel or Asian American novel or something else.
Okay.
Why am I talking about this?
I'm talking about it.
Cause when I see Jack Smith, the special prosecutor at the podium, he looks like somebody who would be in one of those like real life espionage movies, Dan.
Like when you see Merrick Garland, you're like, Oh, Hey Merrick Garland.
Kind of looks like my colleague, political science professor down the hall or like the Dean, you know, like, uh, what's up Dean Garland.
How are you?
When you see Jack Smith, you're like, man.
That guy probably just flew in from Kosovo.
Like, was he in the Balkans in the 90s?
What did that guy do?
Was, what did he, where was he when the Berlin Wall came down?
Uh, you know, what did he say to Boris Yeltsin?
I don't know.
Um, he's also, like, named Jack Smith.
Like, you know.
That's what you would name an American.
If you were going to create the American James Bond, his name would be Jack Smith.
So anyway, everyone in the UK has now turned this off.
They are very unhappy.
They're writing emails.
It's going to be an onslaught in the inbox later.
I have accepted that, but just needed to get that off my chest.
I think Jack Smith arrives in Washington in a one-person submersible and does that thing where he walks off the beach and unzips the wetsuit and the suit is underneath.
And I will also say the name Jack Smith is the kind of thing that if you were writing one of these screenplays or novels you're talking about, the editor would be like, you need a better name.
That's a little too nondescript.
It's a little obvious that this person isn't really named Jack Smith, whatever, but there he is.
Action hero.
At least I guess in the legal sense, Jack Smith.
I feel like he only drinks espresso or whiskey or vodka.
You know what I mean?
Like if you offer him a glass of water or kombucha, he just looks at you.
Or the fear of his enemies.
He just drinks deeply from the fear of his enemies who, as you've noted, are all over the world.
Okay.
This has gotten weird very quickly.
To those in the UK, we apologize and we look forward to your emails.
We love you.
Lots of friends, loved ones in the UK.
So we're thinking about you, even though you're probably steaming mad at the moment.
All right, Dan, let's get into it.
Donald Trump was indicted this week on charges of conspiracy against the United States and to stop basically a free and fair election.
I'm going to read a little bit of the indictment.
I think you're going to run us down the charges here in a sec.
We'll look at some of the reactions and then we'll get into some of the takeaways.
There's more to talk about than we can get to today.
Uh, there's just no way to, we're drinking from a fire hose, but, um, so the indictment is 45 pages.
I saw a fan of the show, Ed Bryant, wondering if the 45 pages were on purpose because Trump is the 45th president, so on and so forth.
I don't know if that's true, but Ed, I appreciate that.
Uh, let me read the very beginnings of this indictment, Dan.
The defendant, Donald J. Trump, was the 45th president.
of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.
The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.
Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power.
So for more than two months following Election Day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there has been an outcome of determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.
These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.
But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway, to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.
The next part, Dan, I think is really important, and it's something we're going to focus on today.
The defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been an outcome determinant of fraud during the election and that he had won.
He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.
Indeed, in many cases, the defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results.
His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.
So I just, I feel like Jack Smith is bodying Trump.
Like he first says he lost the election and then he says, Hey, look, you're totally allowed to do this, pal.
You did do it.
You were unsuccessful every last time.
All right.
Let me read a little bit more here.
Shortly after election day, the defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes.
So let's just be clear, and I know you're going to run this down for us, Dan, so let's just be clear.
He's totally allowed, under free speech, to falsely claim there had been fraud.
However, that is not the issue here.
Okay?
That is not the issue.
The issue is the unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.
He's charged with perpetuating three criminal conspiracies, a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit, to impair, obstruct and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified, A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6th Congressional proceeding.
A conspiracy against the right to vote and have one's vote counted in violation of Code 18 U.S.C.
paragraph 241.
Dan, that's the opening.
I'll leave it to you.
Take us through the charges and kind of, you know, what they mean and what's in here.
Yeah.
So to get into that, it's worth sort of backing up a bit.
Something else we've talked about, everybody's talked about, but as we've also talked, right?
These things move slowly.
It's easy to lose sight.
And I think it's also important to have the background.
For why he's being charged and for what he's being charged, because we're gonna get into this, but the response from the right is really, really different, and it's a lot of smoke and mirrors and everything else.
But everybody can remember the fake elector scheme, that after, you know, as they were demanding recounts, as Smith notes, perfectly legitimate to do that.
Undertaking valid legal means to slow things down and we've talked about some of the other legal things that were going on and lawyers had been censured and so forth for basically making stuff up and so forth, but the legitimate use of the courts and all of that after all that failed.
They had this plan to prevent the lawful certification of the election and everybody remember years ago when people didn't know what the Electoral College is most of us do now.
Presidential elections aren't won by the popular votes, but typically a state votes and whatever their popular vote is their electors.
are assigned to then vote for that candidate, right, in the Electoral College.
Trump and his people hashed this scheme out to certify fake electors or to put different electors in than those who were chosen so that they could try to disrupt this.
And they stated in a number of places, I think they did this in seven states or tried to That they were duly elected and qualified.
And things I've read, I was reading a good analysis by NBC Today and it pointed out, I know you'll talk more about this as we go, that the Trump team knew this wasn't going to keep him in the White House, but they're trying to create the image of a contested election, slow things down, keep Pence from certifying the election.
That's what's going to bring us to J6.
That's what was happening on January 6th, is Pence certifying the election and so forth.
And we know how J6 unfolded and so on.
What does all that mean?
It brings us to the charges.
As you say, that he used, quote, unlawful means.
Again, this isn't saying that he wasn't allowed to say that he felt the election was stolen or to put out whatever truth social statements or tweets or whatever he wanted.
He could do all of that.
But the charges, as you said, they are conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy, as you said, against the right to vote and have one's vote counted, as well as, I think, a charge of obstruction just for sort of blocking the whole thing and trying to prevent the inquiries and all of that.
Here's why he's charged with those.
The idea is that Trump's fake elector scheme, it essentially sought to disenfranchise voters.
People voted.
There's a system in place.
To make sure that those votes are counted.
It's weird and the electoral college thing is odd and whatever, but it's supposed to reflect the vote of the people.
It's basically saying he tried to disenfranchise voters.
It's the argument that efforts to prevent the J6 certification were efforts to obstruct official proceedings.
And that's what brings us to January 6th and the insurrection and all of that sort of stuff.
And that all together these efforts were an attempt to obstruct the lawful functions of the federal government.
Here's what I want folks to think about.
That sounds really boring.
And that's good, because here's what Trump wasn't charged with.
He wasn't charged with inciting violence.
He wasn't charged with Telling people to go in and attack the Capitol or something like that.
And why do I think that's important?
I think it's important because that was all an outcome of this real effort to stop the certification of the election as part of a broader effort To delegitimize the election, to stay in power, so on and so forth.
I think it's also important because you'll hear the right, we're going to talk about this, talk about how he's being railroaded and accused of this and that and free speech.
He's not accused of any of that.
It's very pretty technical stuff, but it's about the bigger picture of what he was trying to do and the fact that there actually are, as it turns out, lots of U.S.
laws requiring that you, you know, let people vote, that you certify elections legally as outlined in various state constitutions, federal constitution practice and so forth.
I think that that's really, really important because I think it's A number of things will happen here, we'll talk about this, but one is, as much as we talk about January 6th, I think it's really important to remember, January 6th is the culmination of this, of these broader things, these broader policies and very, very intentional plans that were in place by Trump and Team Trump.
That's the real underlying issue.
That, for me, is the bigger threat to democracy.
I know January 6th was obviously the big sort of flashpoint, but without all this other stuff, you don't get to J6.
It's this deeper kind of rot in the system that they're going after.
I think all of that's really, really significant.
Last point that I'll make is just that prosecutors have said they want a speedy trial on this.
There have been polls before this indictment showing that people on the left and the right wanted a fast trial, that they want Trump's charges.
This was more with the secret documents case.
They wanted that to be adjudicated and settled before the 2024 election.
Team Trump, of course, is arguing against that.
They're arguing that it's the defendant's right to a speedy trial, not the state's right, and that it's a rush and so forth.
The obvious aim here, I think, is to try to drag it into the election cycle, and should Trump win the election, by another four years of essential immunity.
So that's just some of the nuts and bolts of it.
Throw your way for some of the reactions to it, other thoughts you have on the charges or anything I just said.
Well, I want to get into the timing that you just mentioned.
We're on a tight timeline now, but we'll save that till later.
I want to talk about something else that's in this indictment that numerous commentators have noticed, and it's speaking to something, Dan, I think that we've discussed on the show at length.
Let me read here a bit from the indictment.
On the afternoon of January 3, co-conspirator 4, who is Jeffrey Clark, we'll talk about in a minute, was going to be acting Attorney General, spoke with Deputy White House Counsel.
The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the defendant, Donald Trump, that there's no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House on January 20th.
So this Deputy White House Counsel, Dan, is basically like, you're leaving January 20th.
There's just, there's no option in which you do not leave the White House.
So if I'm reading that correctly, the Deputy White House Counsel is saying that there's just no world where you don't get out of here on January 20th.
Your lease is up.
We should just point out, that's not like a Biden plant.
This isn't like a deep, this is the White House Counsel.
This is the attorney that works for and at the White House on behalf of the executive.
It's another thing we're going to hear is that this is all a left-wing conspiracy.
This isn't some left-wing Biden lawyer saying this.
Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of acting Attorney General.
The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome determinative fraud in the election, and that if the defendant remained in office, nonetheless, there would be, quote, riots in every major city in the United States.
So, Dan, here's this lawyer telling Co-Conspirator 4, Jeffrey Clark, there has been no fraud there.
It has not happened.
I'm sorry.
And so if Trump doesn't leave, there's going to be riots in every city because people are going to feel as if their votes have been disenfranchised, that everybody who voted in California and Massachusetts and Georgia, no less, you know, wherever, all the swing states, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, all those places Biden barely won.
They will feel like their votes didn't count because this guy's still in office.
So there will be, I mean, there would have been, Dan, you can imagine if Trump had just stayed, we would have all been in the streets marching, protesting, rallying.
I mean, it would have been an overwhelming uprising of protest.
And here's what Co-Conspirator 4 responds with.
Well, Deputy White House Counsel, that's why there's an insurrection act.
So if you're like, well, okay, what is that?
Here's Carolyn Orbueno who's just a great commentator on these things and she says this.
Trump and his inner circle had plans to incite riots in every major city in order to lay the groundwork to invoke the Insurrection Act and institute a militarized crackdown.
These plans involved extremist groups as well.
So, Dan, one of the things that extends from all the way down, you know, the rot you laid out, to Election Day, to January 6th, it goes a step further.
And it's like January 20th.
Trump isn't leaving.
There's riots everywhere.
And he says, well, I'm going to use the Insurrection Act.
Military crackdown in every city.
And I might even call in militia groups or extremist groups.
Here's Talking Point's memo.
Yeah, Talking Point's memo.
Here's how they put it.
The 1807 law, the Insurrection Act, gives the President the power to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
For Trump's allies allegedly urged him to use the law to reverse his loss, but the apparent mention of the Insurrection Act by Trump's main DOJ crony suggested another use of the law.
Putting down protests if Trump stayed in the White House past January 20.
And it raises new questions about how deeply the previous administration may have considered using force to stay in power.
As I've said down, the indictment identifies the person who made the remark as co-conspirator 4, and the description closely matches that of Jeffrey Clark.
The Talking Points memo continues.
Per the indictment, the conversation in which the Insurrection Act was referenced took place on January 3rd, three days before the January 6th assault on the Capitol building.
All right, Dan, so I'll just say that we can imagine all of the worst scenarios, and it's not just imagining them.
We have thought about this on this show for so long, but we now have proof that this was on the minds of the administration.
Here's how it goes.
Here's what they're thinking.
We create chaos before the election.
We get Pence to kind of either stall the certification of the election or use the fake electors to certify the election for Trump.
Trump doesn't leave.
Come January 20, there's chaos.
Who's president?
Who's president?
Who's not president?
It's going to go to the courts.
Well, in the meantime, before it can go to the courts, guess what?
There's riots and uprisings.
There's protests.
There's rallies in every corner of the United States.
And here comes the military.
And now we're just like off and running in something that feels like an authoritarian state and something that feels like, you know, we are really in a, you know, like Cold War, uh, Soviet Union or something like that.
The military's in the streets cracking down on American citizens who are protesting the fact that their election has not been fair and the person they've voted for is not going to be president.
Okay.
So I want to throw this back to you, but let me just say this really plainly for everybody out there.
There's a lot of noise this week.
There's a ton of news.
You may be having a hard time getting your head around it.
You might be doing the dishes right now or driving.
You may be thinking, I want to go on vacation in August and not think about this stuff.
Whatever.
I get it.
Let me just say something really, really plainly.
This indictment makes it clear Donald Trump was trying to disenfranchise the votes of millions of people and conspire against the United States.
And he had people in his cabinet telling him that they should be willing to use military violence and American domestic spaces to stay in power.
That same man is leading the polls right now in the Republican primary.
He could very well be president in a year and a couple of months.
I'm going to leave that here.
That is where we're at, Dan.
That's where we're at.
All right, back to you and then we'll take a break.
If all of that sounds extreme, this whole notion about the Insurrection Act, frame it this way because we all know how this works, right?
I was an older brother.
I got two younger brothers.
And one of the things, Brad, you're a younger brother, maybe you'll have this experience from that.
No, I'm the oldest.
Oh, you're the oldest too?
I thought you were the younger.
All right, so older siblings sometimes have some authority over younger siblings and one of the strategies that younger siblings will sometimes do is to sort of poke at you or say certain things until what?
Until you yell at them or you shove them or something like that and then what do they do?
They start screaming for mom and mom comes in and they're sitting down and they're crying and because they can flop like an NBA specialist and You get in trouble.
That's exactly what this is, right?
You provoke a response, and then when the response is given, right?
In other words, stay in power, gum up the works, refuse to leave, and then when people respond, you use that response as a legitimation for exactly what it was that you were already trying to do, right?
So, it's a strategy that's not outlandish.
It's not hard to understand.
It's not as crazy as it sounds, because again, Any of us with siblings probably experienced something like this.
Or maybe it's the kid in school who would do this in the school classroom.
They'd talk or something and then you'd tell them to be quiet and the teacher would catch you instead of them.
It's the same strategy.
It's there.
It's real.
It's really chilling.
The last piece of this to throw out is that even with the judicial part of it, the hope was also to go to a SCOTUS, newly stacked with ultra-conservative justices, Whom Trump views as owing him, right?
As party loyalists.
Now, we've seen since they were appointed that, and judges up and down the docket ahead of, below SCOTUS, it's not that straightforward.
And most of them do not, a lot of them don't appear to sort of simply view themselves as beholden to Trump.
But that was the hope as well, is that they had this giant ace in the hole that if all of this propels it to the Supreme Court, Well, he's got the justices in his pocket and they will rule in his favor.
So a really, in some ways, really straightforward strategy with a lot of pieces.
I think what makes it unbelievable is that it would have felt unthinkable not that long ago in our own country's past.
All right, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about the reactions to this and the ways that the GOP is deploying a uniform strategy to explain this away and what no less than Mike Pence had to say about it.
We'll be right back.
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Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
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All right, Dan, let's get to some of the reactions.
I want to just do one and then I'll throw it to you.
I know you've got a whole bunch, but let me just do one and then we'll throw it to you.
So let's get to Mike Pence.
So there's a scene in Friends, Dan, and I'm just full of references today.
I am really amped up here.
There's a scene in Friends where Chandler sort of gets aggressive and very protective for some reason.
I can't remember exactly why.
He like sort of stands up and gets, you know, real protective of Monica or someone else.
And it's kind of out of character for Chandler.
You know, he's usually like the funny guy and not the kind of confrontational type and that kind of stuff.
And Phoebe says, Whoa, where's this Chandler been?
Right?
You know, like she's sort of, you know, like, Whoa, this Chandler, if he'd been here all along, I might've been a little bit more interested in Chandler.
And it's a funny line and whatever else, but this week Mike Pence got on TV and said, It wasn't that they asked for a pause.
The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers to literally reject votes, which would have resulted in the issue being turned over to the House of Representatives and literally chaos would have ensued.
So Pence gets on TV and he says something with no spin.
He's completely honest.
He makes all of us who've been talking about this for, you know, years, feel like we're not insane.
It wasn't that they, you know, that Trump and his lawyers, it wasn't like they wanted a delay or something.
And in fact, you know, last night, Dan, One of Trump's lawyers, John Laurel, got on TV and told Laura Ingraham that all he wanted was for Pence to call a 10-day recess for state legislators to reconsider the election results.
I mean, he got on TV and he did what Jack Smith is basically accusing them of.
We're just asking for a 10-day recess.
We just wanted to send it back to the states one more time.
10 days?
Yeah, go count it again.
Maybe there's been dozens of lawsuits at this point.
How many recounts?
No shenanigans, but let's count them again, guys.
10 days.
Hey, Wisconsin or Arizona or Georgia?
Maybe you can find some votes?
I don't know.
And here's what Pence says.
They didn't ask for a pause.
The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers to literally reject votes, which would have resulted in the issue being turned over to the House, and literally chaos would have ensued.
Pence is honest here, right?
Like, for once, there's no spin.
There's no weird, constipated-like tone.
He's at the center of this indictment, and he's basically saying, they wanted me to stop the election.
They wanted me to create electoral chaos in our country.
And who knows what would have happened at the moment because there was a mob outside the Capitol.
There was military.
We now know Trump and his people were ready to call on the military and do whatever.
So on and so on and so on.
All right.
I'll throw it to you.
Reactions from other people than Pence in the wake of this.
Oh, yeah.
Let me do one more.
Hold on.
Hold on.
I want to give you one more.
I'm sorry.
Let me do it real quick.
I don't want to focus on this.
I'm not going to talk about it for 20 minutes.
I promise.
I just need to tell you what Marjorie Taylor Greene said.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said conservatives should, quote, put their full faith and hope in God and disregard anything that we see happening in the news following the latest indictment.
Dan, this woman showed nudes of Hunter Biden, like last week.
And now, uh, you know, she wants us to pay attention to Hunter Biden's genitalia, but not the news about Donald Trump.
Okay.
It's absurd, Dan.
We've entered absurdist theater in the United States Congress.
There's no other way to put it.
If you read that in a history book, that this woman last week showed the president's son in public nude, and then said, when the former president is indicted on conspiracy charges, put your faith in God.
You want me to look at Hunter Biden's penis, but you don't want me to look when the 45th president's indicted on conspiracy charges.
All right.
Okay.
I'm done, Dan.
I'm sorry.
You do it.
I got to calm down.
There's veins like popping out of my head.
My heart's racing.
It's off to you.
Go ahead.
It would be fun to chase the theology of that, but I won't.
I'll say that the reactions from the right, so first of all, something you alluded to, something I think everybody sees is, God, imagine that Pence had said that on, you know, January 7th, or the people like that had.
People who actually, people on the right who actually voted to impeach Trump, people like Liz Cheney and others have been, you know, much more affirmative of this.
But the current names that we all know in the GOP leadership have taken the line we would expect.
Kevin McCarthy has said lots of things, but he was asked by local media in California what he thought about this.
And he said, and this is one of like, you know, if we're going to have sort of takeaways of what are the rhetorical strategies of the Trump lawyers and others, one that you just alluded to is we were just asking for a pause, trying to make it into a we were still working within legitimate channels, right?
I don't actually know that the whole 10-day recess thing was a legitimate channel.
I don't think there's any provision for that or reason for that or whatever, but, you know, you wouldn't have had a group of people storming the Capitol.
But McCarthy said that the Americans are entitled to raise questions about election results.
Hey, it's free speech.
Guess who else said that?
You just told us.
Jack Smith said that, right?
That's why it's so significant that Trump is not being charged with statements that he made.
He's being charged with actions that were undertaken that broke the law, like not just stuff that he was saying publicly or whatever, right?
But here's what McCarthy said, and this is a second piece of the strategy.
Stop using government to go after people who politically disagree with you.
That is wrong, and that should stop now.
And he also said it feels like there are two forms of justice or tracks of justice.
This is the playbook.
We saw it with Hillary Clinton.
We see it now with Hunter Biden.
But the, what about Hunter Biden?
They're after Trump, but they're not doing anything about Hunter Biden.
There's two systems of justice, one for Trump and one for, you know, that's the other line, right?
Is that somehow this is a weaponized system against Trump.
And, like, if the indictment had not come down this week, we might be spending the weekly roundup talking about how the star witness that Jim Jordan and Comer and all the others in the House committees were calling to supposedly prove that Hunter Biden had talked to Joe Biden and that they used all this information and Joe Biden was well aware and Biden crime fouling me millions of dollars.
The star witness was like, yeah, I talked to Joe Biden, but we never talked business.
We never had any agreement.
There was nothing.
It was a nothing burger.
So even if they want to claim this like two tiers of justice thing, this two systems of justice, it actually turns out that if you go read the other news from this week, there's a big nothing burger and there's no story there.
Okay.
Just a reminder that there was other news this week, right?
Which is easy to lose sight of.
Some other responses, the ex-account, the former Twitter account, the whole different Twitter name thing, of the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee posted simply, election interference, echoing the statement of the Trump campaign, right?
That this is now election interference aimed at 2024, that's another piece of this.
Jim Jordan said, when you drain the swamp, the swamp fights back.
President Trump did nothing wrong.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, aside from citing God, and Matt Goetz called to cut off all funding to the investigation.
That's the strategy they've had.
DeSantis, somebody you would think, this is a whole other thing, we've talked about this, is the people who are actually running for office against Trump, refusing to criticize Trump.
DeSantis said, one of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law.
No more excuses.
I will end the weaponization of the federal government.
Tim Scott, another presidential candidate, said that he was, quote, concerned about the weaponization of Biden's DOJ and its immense power used against political opponents.
And he referenced, quote, different tracks of justice.
So a few things here.
Number one is the appeal to free speech.
They also Trump's lawyers have also said this since the indictment came out, that he was free to say what he thought and to state whatever he wanted and so forth.
Right.
People shouldn't be misled by that.
That's not what he's charged with.
You read it.
I'll note it again.
Jackson says that at the beginning of the indictment, that he could do that.
The other one is the, but Hillary's emails version, but put Hunter Biden in there, that there are somehow two tracks of justice here.
What I want to look at or think about or just kind of throw out there for consideration are a couple things that I think are really significant.
One is all that language about the weaponization of the Justice Department and so forth.
Republicans talk as if Trump has already been convicted, right?
Civics 101, an indictment just means that there's sort of more or less probable cause against you to have a trial, right?
Trump still gets to have a trial.
That still gets to happen.
I think it's telling in many ways that the GOP is making this noise because my thought is they don't think there's a chance in the world that they can win in a trial.
Co-conspirators, Brad, I'm interested to see what their lawyers are saying to the Justice Department to try to get their co-conspirators' charges lessened if they testify against Trump.
If I'm Trump, I'm terrified of that.
The other thing that we know about Trump is he says all the quiet parts out loud, right?
We have all of these social media posts and other things where Trump has said these things.
It's not as if they were secret or privileged information or things like that.
You have the J6 investigations that Uncovered so much of this and made it a part of the public record.
So I think that that's significant that for them they talk as if he has already been convicted of this.
The other thing that I think is telling is that we don't hear them taking the standard line of, you know, my client is innocent and looks forward to proving it in his day, you know, his day in court or whatever.
This is all about PR.
This is about riling the Trump base.
For Trump, this is just about trying to win an election in 2024 and not have to face the music of this.
It's why they're arguing for a delayed trial.
I think all the rhetoric and all of that is important.
I'll just bring it back by saying I think that's why it's important to cut through and look at what he was actually charged with.
I'm glad that you started with reading the indictment and that statement that he is entitled to speak whatever it is that he wants to speak.
And I think the not being misled by the two tracks of justice.
Here's another piece of it.
Let's imagine that there was, you know, some radically inequitable response.
This is a bigger deal.
This is a bigger deal than Georgia, which we're still waiting to hear from.
This is a bigger deal than keeping the secret documents.
It's certainly a bigger deal than complex financial dealings and sort of slush funds and things like that.
This is a really big deal.
So, more to say about different responses, whether we talk about Fox or GOP voters, but throw it back to you for more of your thoughts.
I'm going to get philosophical for a minute.
So Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis are talking about weaponization.
And weaponization is a way we often say that somebody is misusing their power.
Somebody's misusing their office.
Somebody's misusing their authority.
And so you can't weaponize blank, right?
You're not supposed to do that.
And I think one response in this case, at least, is that the Department of Justice is a weapon for justice.
Like, let me just be clear.
Why do we have a Department of Justice?
It's a weapon of the government to fight injustice.
What do weapons do?
Well, you use them to combat or stave off or protect yourself from threats.
In the case of the Department of Justice, it's a weapon against injustice, Dan.
We have a situation where many of us have concluded, where we've seen, and we haven't just concluded this on like beliefs and gut feelings and intuition or whatever.
We've concluded on evidence, and we can go all the way back to everything that January 6th Select Committee showed us, that there's a man who used to be president and his co-conspirators and many others who were with him, and they were attacking the country, trying to disenfranchise votes, trying to obstruct an election, trying to prevent the certification of a free and fair election, the peaceful transfer of power.
So like you can say, don't weaponize it, right?
And if you're saying, don't weaponize against people you disagree with or whatever, I just want to remind everyone, the Department of Justice is a weapon against injustice.
And it seems to many of us, injustice has taken place.
So the Department of Justice is doing what it should have done actually, probably a year ago.
Sticking on that theme, as long as we're being sort of quasi-philosophical here.
The other piece of this is this line, right?
There's a difference between using mechanisms of law or government to target one's political opponents because they're your political opponents, right?
That's what they're being accused of.
It's another thing to say that you can't use legal and judicial means against somebody because they are your political opponent.
And that's the argument, that's the logic of this.
Because Trump is a political opponent of Joe Biden and everybody, you know, the entire Democratic Party, that somehow this gives him immunity for actions that he undertakes against them or anybody along with it.
Those are two really, really different things.
And it may sound like the kind of distinction I'd make in a junior level class that would put everybody there to sleep, but it's a really important distinction because that's the logic at work.
The difference between targeting somebody because they're my political enemy and saying they're your political enemy so you can't Well, like, they're trying to say that he's categorically unable to be prosecuted because he's now running for president.
things.
And I think that that's easy to lose and intentionally in the rhetoric on the right.
Well, like they're trying to say that he's categorically unable to be prosecuted because he's now running for president.
It's like he has immunity because he's, quote unquote, the political opponent.
And, you know, and he's not even the president.
Yeah, and not because he is president, right?
That was the argument.
Can you indict a sitting president?
So if it's now backed up to you're running for president, before he even formally ran, it was the he's probably going to run for president.
How far back do you take that?
To say that, you know, okay, let's imagine he wins and in 2028 they renew the trial or something.
Are we going to say, well, you can't indict him because he's a former president or the logic just becomes more and more expansive.
So he's functionally immune because he's Donald Trump.
But Dan, this is what happens when you exist in a situation where you don't have political opponents who disagree with you.
It's what happens when you frame this all as we're all political enemies and you are an enemy of the Republic who's demon-possessed.
And that's how the GOP is looking at this.
Like there's no way you can be doing good and acting on good faith because nobody acts on good faith.
It's just the will to power.
Good versus evil, one or the other.
There's no way that you're doing this because there's evidence he conspired.
You're doing it, why?
Because he's your political enemy.
And it's just who can win?
Us or you, right?
Now on that point, here's what Trump said.
Here's the reaction.
You know, I want to bring this up and I'll throw it back to you, but here's Trump on Truth Social.
I'm now going to Washington, D.C.
to be arrested for having challenged a corrupt, rigged, and stolen election.
It's a great honor because I'm being arrested for you.
Make America Great Again.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wrote the book Strongman, and is a scholar of these things, says this.
This is a propaganda ploy to keep his followers tied to him, making him the martyr and the savior.
It's not original.
Silvio Berlusconi, who had dozens of indictments against him, described himself as the Jesus Christ of Italian politics for the same reason.
So there's a clear play here on the part of strongmen and wannabe autocrats to basically make yourself into the martyred savior who is being martyred and persecuted for the people.
And, you know, they're doing this to me.
And you hear this all the time, right, Dan?
You know, you heard this of the first of Trump.
And, well, if they'll do this to Trump and they'll do this to me, they'll do this to you, too.
You know, Jordan Klepper, the guy who's always out there talking to Trump supporters, is like, you know, you're saying that they would do this to you.
And the Trump supporter's like, yeah.
And Klepper's like, so you, you know, talk to me about your life.
You've been in a situation where you slept with a porn star and then paid her off from your fund and your campaign funds in order to get elected.
And the person's like, well, but you can see the logic that gets in people's heads, right?
They're thinking, if they'll do this to Trump, then they'll do this to me.
And it's like, really?
Have you conspired against the government?
But that's what Trump wants you to think.
He wants you to think he's being crucified for you, the people.
That's the play.
So just picking on that theme, I know I talk about populism and nationalism and things all the time, but that's also the logic of populism, that the populist leader is the embodiment of the people, the kind of incarnation of the people.
And that's what he's playing on.
What happens to me happens to you.
There's an interesting incarnational logic we could toy around with there of, you know, the same kind of Christian idea, but it's this idea that if Trump suffers, people who support Trump suffer.
He's suffering for them, as you say, right?
I think the other piece of this that it brings in is the response of Trump supporters, which is obviously not to flee from Trump in droves.
There have already been lots of polls that show after other indictments that Trump is not losing support.
He's fundraising off of this.
There was some stuff I read this week that said that signs of that kind of peters off.
There's a loss, you know, law of diminishing returns.
There's no sign that hardcore Trump supporters are going to leave Trump.
Why?
We talked about this before.
That's another piece of it.
It's the conspiratorial thinking here.
The fact that Trump has been indicted is evidence of his innocence.
For his followers.
It's the evidence of the rightness of what he does.
It's basically what Jim Jordan says.
The fact that the Department of Justice has leveled indictments against him, hey, that shows, as he said, as Jim Jordan said, President Trump did nothing wrong.
If he had, I don't know how we would know, but if the Department of Justice charges him, it means that it's because he's a threat to Biden and didn't do anything wrong.
There's no logicing your way out or around that line of thought.
It's just pure conspiracism.
If he wasn't charged, it'd be because he didn't do anything wrong.
But Brad, now that he has been charged, it's evidence that guess what?
He did nothing wrong.
There's no way around that, and that's what we hear from his supporters over and over and over.
All right.
So I want to say this because I think it leads us into some of the takeaways and what's going to happen next.
But Dan, do you want to quickly talk us through what Fox News has been saying just in one minute?
Can you give us the one minute rundown so people don't have to watch Fox News and figure it out?
Yeah.
So here are some quotes from various people.
It's been all over Fox, every figure, every show.
This is not your country anymore.
It's a political war crime.
It's a junk indictment.
It's the shredding of the Constitution.
We have gone full Banana Republic.
I don't know how many times the phrase Banana Republic has shown up in Fox in the last few days.
And further misdirection, right?
Trump had, quote, every right to ask questions, to speak out, etc.
Every right to think the election is rigged.
All of which is true.
He can think that.
He can say that.
That's not what he's indicted for.
Those are some quick hits of what we hear from Fox News.
I like this going full Banana Republic.
What I want is someone to say we're going full Banana Republic and then just dress like Jared Kushner, who looks like his whole wardrobe is from Banana Republic.
All right.
I got jokes today.
Let's take a break.
We'll be back.
All right, here's some takeaways, Dan, before we go.
Ankush Kadhari, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, writes for Political Magazine, Republicans and Trump supporters on Capitol Hill and in the conservative media have certainly spent much of the last year laying the groundwork for the tendentious narrative of a weaponized DOJ, literally going back to the day that Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI.
But the notion that Biden or Garland was somehow determined to prosecute Trump relies on a serious distortion of the public record.
Indeed, that that record vexed some observers, including me, who repeatedly expressed frustration over how the two men seem to be going out of their way for the most, uh, going out of the way, uh, have been going out of the way for two years or the first two years of the administration to avoid investigating and potentially prosecuting Trump.
The best explanation at the moment is that the work of the January 6th Select Committee spurred the Justice Department to action.
So I think that one takeaway from today, Dan, is that this happened not because Merrick Garland and Joe Biden were determined to prosecute Trump.
It actually seems, if you go back to the archives of this show, and I don't know how many times since January 6th we've said this, I wrote a whole book in which like the last chapter Uh, the, the final words are basically like, unless we take January 6th seriously, uh, and prosecute the people who are responsible, AKA the former president, that this will haunt us.
And it may ruin our democracy.
I mean, I wrote, I wrote a whole book called preparing for war that talks about all this, but what Qadari is saying is that something we've been arguing for years, which is Garland is a centrist.
He's an institutionalist.
And so is Biden.
They actually didn't want to do it, but you know what happened?
The January 6th select committee.
Like they created in the national consciousness the need to investigate this further.
Chris Hayes said this last night on MSNBC and others are going down this road.
So I think it's something that needs to be taken seriously.
Qardari is pointing out that this is not a natural outcome of Garland and Biden and their personas.
He also writes that this case is different than the cases with Stormy Daniels or the Mar-a-Lago case.
Why?
It's because this case, Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team are tracking the work of the J6 Committee, and they have a criminal conspiracy that constitutes the most serious affront to the democratic process in our lifetimes.
Again, this is worse than Watergate, Dan.
If somebody wants to talk about Watergate and, you know, Watergate was about stealing materials from political opponents.
This is about stopping an election.
This is about stopping a free and fair election and then threatening to use the military to stay in power.
Don't get me wrong.
Like, I think what happened with Stormy Daniels, not okay.
What happened with Mar-a-Lago?
Documents, storing them in a pool closet, not okay.
What we're going to see in Georgia, maybe as early as this month.
You know, calling the Georgia state office and saying, please find me 11,000 votes.
Not okay.
But Qardari's right.
Like this supersedes all of them.
It's an affront to the democratic process.
Period.
Like, like this goes to the beating heart of democracy.
And I know in a world full of elevated rhetoric, we get tired of hearing stuff like that, but it's true.
Here's Peter Baker at the New York Times.
At the core of the United States of America versus Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed during that summer in Philadelphia.
Speaking about when the founding fathers constructed the Constitution.
Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence?
The question would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but the Trump case raises the kind of specter more familiar in countries with histories of coups and juntas and dictators.
So I think one takeaway is that if you're tired of Trump indictments and you're like wondering, you know, what's next?
This case is about the very heart of democracy, period.
Are we going to have elections?
We're the person with the most votes.
And according to this awful, weird electoral college system, the most electoral college votes actually wins.
If you lose, are you allowed to stay in power and incite riots?
Threaten to use the military?
Cook up fake electors to do it?
Because if Trump is acquitted, it seems to many of us like the answer is yes.
And we're in a lot of trouble as a country.
All right, let me give you one more, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you for your final thoughts today.
Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, talks about it this way.
The prosecution of former President Trump for trying to destroy those institutions and principles, including our right to consent to the government under which we live, a right the founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence, should deter others from trying to do the same.
Moreover, it will defend the rights of victims, those who gave their lives, as well as those of us whose votes were attacked, by establishing the truth in place of lies.
So I think a second takeaway for me, Dan, is that this matters.
It matters because it will deter others from trying to do the same.
I've argued for two years now, January 6th in the minds of many in this country was a beginning.
It was the first battle.
I wrote that in my book.
And I have said over and over, unless we adjudicate it, unless we're willing to put Donald Trump on trial, then we will have more of this, whether it's Donald Trump or someone else.
I think Heather Cox Richardson is right.
This will deter others from trying to do the same, and it defends the right of victims.
People lost their lives on January 6th, Dan.
Like police officers and others, they lost their lives.
We rely, we, we, as a democracy, we rely on the idea that if we vote, the person with the most votes is the one who gets to take office.
So this is about protecting those sacred values and honoring those who fought to protect them on that day.
All right, let me just give you one more.
I'll shut up.
One more.
And that's a final thought is this.
This should have happened a year ago.
I'll go back to what Kardaria said.
Merrick Garland didn't want to do this.
And he should have.
He should have done it sooner.
We said that on the show.
You can go look at our website.
You can search our search function on our episodes for Merrick Garland.
And we have talked about Merrick Garland and the fact that this should have been done a year ago or even before.
The J6 Select Committee laid it all out and they basically forced his hand.
But you know what's an issue now?
We have a short timeline.
Like this, is this trial going to be when?
Is it December?
Is it October?
Is it January?
When is this going to happen?
Because this time next year, August, we are barreling into an election season and we are probably in a place where we know that it's going to be Trump versus Biden or whoever.
So we have a short timeline.
And it didn't have to be that way, Dan.
Garland didn't want to do it.
I don't think Biden did either, if I'm honest.
And that's a problem.
And it may be a real problem, like a big problem in a year when all of this comes to fruition.
We'll see what happens.
Just quickly, again, that point about Garland, Democrats have said the same thing this week.
That's one of things they've been saying, right, is criticizing Garland for sitting on this for way too long and not taking action.
So I think that that's really notable that at the same time the GOP is talking about the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the Democrats are decrying Garland.
For what he did.
I think the other piece of this that's worth tying, this notion of deterrence, I think is really important.
We talk about Trump going the legal route.
I've been talking about it, and we've looked at it in prior weeks, but we've also seen this kind of parallel track where Lawyers who went way across the line of anything legitimate are being disbarred.
They're receiving censure, right?
Whether they broke laws or sort of, you know, legal ethical codes within their guild and so forth.
I think that's another piece of the deterrence.
I've talked about it.
There's been a sense in America for a really long time that you can have a lawyer, especially a high paid one, you can kind of do anything.
You can get away with anything.
And I think that these are parallel tracks.
On both of those aspects, that just because you're elected to office doesn't mean you get to do anything and everything that you want to do, but also that there are standards for even the kinds of ways that you try to use the legal system as an attorney.
That passing the bar doesn't mean that you have carte blanche to say whatever you want, to do whatever you want.
I think that's an important piece too, because I think that without lawyers, Trump could never have done any of this.
I think that's another deterrence piece that I think, I hope, is going to give people in the legal profession kind of a wake-up call to think twice before they mount some of these arguments or jump on board some of these movements.
All right, let's do it.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
I got two and I'm not going to lie.
I kind of think we should do another hour on these because they're actually really good news, but here we go.
The Tennessee two were reelected in their special elections.
The two Justins were reelected and that's good news.
If you follow that story, we did basically a whole episode on it when it happened.
This is amazing.
I think there will be more from the two Justins going forward in terms of their political careers, but this is a good thing for Tennessee.
The other one, Dan, is in Wisconsin.
There's a lawsuit that was filed basically to overturn the gerrymandered districts in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin is a place that is so gerrymandered that many would say it's not a representative democracy.
And so there's finally a lawsuit to change that.
And with the Supreme Court having been tipped to a kind of liberal majority, it looks like there's really a chance for that to happen.
So we will see.
All right.
What do you got?
We've talked about the GOP, you know, hardline Trump supporters not moving because of this.
There is data that shows that undecided voters, unaffiliated voters, a lot of voters in swing states, purple states, are put off by the indictments, and I take a lot of hope in that.
There's some good reporting this week about, you know, GOP state-level party machines kind of in trouble in some of these states.
And it appears the GOP is taking it out of the ball.
There are lots of analysts who look at this and say, yeah, Trump's got his core supporters.
He's always going to have his core supporters.
But that this might move the needle on some of those purple states and undecided voters.
Put it together with the abortion stuff and things like that.
I think that's good news for keeping Trump out of office in 2024.
Yeah.
All right.
First, let me say, rest in peace, Paul Rubens.
We'll be back next week with the Weekly Roundup, with a great interview, with It's in the Code.
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