All the President’s Tools

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Oddly enough, the episode today is about levers of power and coercion from the government and how they use their power to manipulate and to get what they want and to force people into the authoritarian tendencies. And it's hard to even focus on it with, I mean, every day now is a new. There was another Epstein. Dropbox, you know, the, your, your iPhone bringing up memories of us. Like there's another, it's them. It's Epstein and Trump at a wedding. Now there's all these photos. It's them dancing. There's, you know, video of them getting matching tattoos and eating spaghetti, like lady in the tramp, like their relationship, the, the fucking weirdness of it all. And God, thank God. Social media wasn't around in those times we'd be, we'd be watching on a loop on CNN and MSNBC, the, the Tik Toks that Epstein and Trump make in Cabo with beauty pageant contestants. Like they very clearly dug each other in a deep Starsky and Hutch kind of a way until whatever happened. And all his attempts at, you know, as each new video and photo drop comes out, he gets more unhinged. There should be firing squads for NPR hosts. You know, he's just losing his fucking mind. And there's nothing that can distract from any of this unless Hunter Biden decides to go out and drop a three hour mixtape of his nuttiness, which is what he did. The gift that, that keeps on giving, which he goes, Oh my God. Dad had a bad debate, but he was on ambient. And I'm like, that doesn't make it better, dude. Like it calls into question the decision-making of the whole team. Dad, you got the most important night of your life. You got to be sharp. Here's a couple of quaaludes to take the edge off so that you're ready to really rock that fucking thing. And he goes, what was the thing he said? He said something crazy. He goes, Oh, he was, uh, he was talking about. Uh, the deportations and how angry he is about him. He goes, if I, if I'm president and two or three or whatever years, I'm going to call them up and go, I'm invading you unless you give those people back. And I'm just like, Hunter. Dig the hypothetical, but I don't think it's going to be a worry for you. That's the thing that happened. So, uh, but, but the main thing is still the main thing. I mean, uh, Donald Trump using every arm of the federal government. To intimidate and bully and, and push things in his direction and the general compliance that appears to be, uh, at the root of all of his power. This, this fight against him through all legal and ethical means has to be, has to be turned up as they would say on spinal tap to 11, all of these institutions have to fight back to get to that conversation. Actually, I think our, our guests today are going to be incredibly apropos, uh, to discuss what, uh, uh, that sort of coercion looked like in the past, how it has changed, what are the various things. So let's, let's get to them now. First of all, I'm delighted to welcome our guests for the program today. Preet Bhar, who is the former U.S. attorney, uh, for the Southern District of New York, a podcast host. Stay tuned with Preet. He was appointed by Obama in 2009. He was fired. He was fired by, uh, one Donald Trump in 2017. And we've got Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of Pod Save America. Uh, he's an author. He's got Message Box, which is a newsletter about political strategy. And he was a senior advisor, uh, to Obama, uh, for strategy and communications 2013 to 2015. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here. Thanks for having us. I am excited to talk about, I feel like the two of you, uh, represent good insight into this podcast. I'm excited to talk about, uh, the world of political retribution, how presidents use the leverage of their office and the, uh, varieties of, let's call them for the time being independent agencies that exist or formerly independent agencies that exist within the executive. Uh, how do, how is that discussed? Dan, I think you've probably got a really good sense of how that's discussed behind the scenes. Preet. I think you've got a, a, probably a really good sense of how those wishes are executed and what are the guardrails that exist, uh, around there. So I guess I want to start with, uh, Dan, you've been in these meetings in the Oval Office. How explicit are presidents about their wishes to, I don't want to use the word punish, but exert influence on the institutions? Institutions that may think, uh, they don't care for whether it be the press or, uh, conservative or liberal institutions. What are those conversations like? Well, I mean, you're very careful, right? And you, because there's, prior to Trump, there was a real set of guardrails that even if you had the worst instincts, if you wanted to exert influence, you want to exert retribution, there were a set of things that would prevent you from doing that, right? One is just a general good faith, uh, belief in democracy and the rule of law. Does that ever, does that ever come up in the office to people going, hey, man, I don't know if this is good for democracy. We've got a good faith respect. Well, I think it's just, it was for a long time, naturally assumed, no more. And so, but then the other thing is the agencies really were independent. Like, I just can't emphasize this enough that they take the Department of Justice, where Preet knows a lot about, is as a person who had a political portfolio in the White House, I was never allowed to be in communication with anyone. Like, I just can't emphasize this enough that they take the Department of Justice, where Preet knows a lot about, is as a person who had a political portfolio in the White House. Sure. these guidelines that Dan is talking about came into existence because of Nixon's overreach and because of Nixon's unlawful activities and the unlawful activities of the people around him. There were serious guidelines with respect to what a Justice Department official could or could not take in terms of a call from a political official. Those are not there anymore. They're gone. Another thing that we may get to just to put a point on it is, as you mentioned, I was the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District for a long time, hired a lot of people there. One of the people I hired into that office was a very, very able lawyer, exemplary assistant U.S. Attorney named Maureen Comey. She shares a last name with the former FBI director, someone who the President of the United States despises with a white hot passion. I believe that her firing was unlawful and remains unlawful because she has civil service. Unlawful because the executive is not allowed to exercise hiring and firing. Over the district attorney's offices? Why unlawful? The President of the United States has absolute ability, as he did in my case, to fire me, to fire cabinet officials, to fire political appointees. We have civil service protections and you can like them or not like them, but they've existed for a long time. The Trump folks like to call that the deep state. They have their own deep state. And you could repeal those laws if you want. But the interesting thing about the firing of Maureen Comey, which I believe, happened because her last name is Comey. Sure. And not because of some dereliction of duty with respect to Jeffrey Epstein or anyone else. The only justification they gave was Article Two. Article Two is the article that relates to the presidential. Well, that's the justification for everything. For everything. Article Two. That means you can do anything you want, no matter what. I hope that she takes legal action. But the idea that you can reach into, you know, far-flung bureaucracies and pinpoint individuals. Yeah. notwithstanding legal protections and process that's accorded to them, because you don't like their name or because you don't like their father, or because you got pressure from the right, the hard right folks who say, fire this person, is not right. Well, so when you got fired, Preet, when you got fired. That was perfectly legitimate. You're in the same office and. Yeah, but I was a political appointee confirmed by the Senate. I was totally subject to being fired at will. So political appointees are at will. Totally. And service employees have to follow certain procedures. And if those procedures aren't followed, then that is unlawful. Yeah. Believe me, there's some people I may have wanted to fire when I was a U.S. attorney. But I observed what the legal parameters were, and you can't do that without process. But this gets us into this weird cycle. And this is the thing that I want to talk about. So, Dan, you're in the office, and the President of the United States decides, I'm not crazy about the way this one federal prosecutor's office is running things. I would like to get. Get rid of these two particular federal prosecutors. They are not political appointees, but I would like to do that. Isn't there a process where they say, great, let me talk to our counsel, see if they can draw up justifications? Another, isn't this a bit of an Ouroboros that we're talking about? You know, we all want to talk about where the guardrails exist here, but isn't the United States bureaucracy complex enough that you can basically justify loopholes in almost any process to do whatever it is that you want to do? And isn't that how presidents often accomplish that? Is that your experience, Dan? Well, I think it goes to motivation matters a lot here, right? So, what is the reason why you're doing this? Like, the way this conversation would go in the White House, if when I was there, at least, is the White House counsel would be sitting on the couch in the Oval Office, two seats over from me, and they would say, you can't do that. Talk about the couch, pillows on the couch. What do we. Is it tastefully appointed? Are there feet up on the ottoman? What do we deal with? Now, I think the couch is on the couch. I think the couch may be fully gold in the White House, but it was a nice stripe when I worked there. Do we have dishes with M&Ms and nuts that are sitting on the table? Does J.D. Vance have access to that couch now? Settle down. Very on brand for Obama. It was a bowl of apples in the Oval Office. Ah, okay. All right. I don't think Michelle Obama was letting us put M&Ms in the. All right, all right. Get American movie. But the White House counsel would say, you can't do that, and here's why. And the president could theoretically, like, I was never part of any conversation where he wanted to fire random prosecutors in the middle offices. That wasn't a thing you worried about. He would say, well, what about this? And then the lawyer would push back and say, and even if you could justify, you could find a way to justify some sort of reason, you could create some cause for said fire and whatever else, there would be concern about blowback for doing it, right? But that's political. Political or legal blowback? Both. Both, right? So you could, like, the test in any, the president has all this power until a court says you don't have it anymore. And so are you going to do this? You're going to try to fire these two people. You're going to take all this political blowback from the senators from said, you know, who are from that district where these prosecutors are from, and then is a court going to stop you? So you took the blowback for firing them, but then a court says they have to go back to work on Monday, and so you have gotten all the downside and none of the upside. So it's a cost-benefit analysis. Yeah. Look, folks, I don't know where you're getting your comfort during these difficult times, but I'm telling you, man, the good comfort is this, cuddling up on the couch with your cat. Now, I don't have a cat, but it does sound pretty nice right now. I have had cats, and they will, contrary to their reputation, cuddle you pretty hard. It's a pretty swell afternoon respite. 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I had their litter box in the closet where I had cats. I kept my clothes. I'm not smart. What are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve. For a limited time only, because you are a weekly show listener, you get 60% off your first Smalls order, plus free shipping when you head to Smalls.com backslash TWS. That's 60% off when you head to Smalls.com backslash TWS, plus free shipping. Again, Smalls.com backslash TWS. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. Isn't there something that's a bit akin to doctor shopping for pills with lawyer shopping? And I'll use the example of the election in 2020. The White House counsel sits with President Trump and says, Yeah, you lost, and you're not allowed to go through and get that. And then he says, Is there another lawyer that can get me a justification for why we can challenge? Isn't that a process that they all go through to lawyer shop to finally get to somebody who will say, Actually, the vice president can just deny the certification and throw this whole thing into the House of Representatives? Yeah, look, I'm going back to that guy Nixon again. Right. He kept trying to get somebody to do the dirty deed of firing a top official. You're talking about John Mitchell when he was going in? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And they either do it or they got fired. Now, that was sufficient blowback. Politically and legally, he was undone, and he had to leave office. And we established all these guardrails in place of that. Companies do it too. You want to do a thing, it's on the line, or maybe it's over the line, and you just want someone to justify it for you. It's not a new thing in American law or American politics or American business, but there are degrees. There are degrees of business. Right, right. So we're talking about degrees of this. I think so. And look, I'll give you another example of something, just going back to my expertise. In the last couple of days, not everyone may be following this, there was a woman, a personal lawyer to Donald Trump, who I believe completely and utterly unqualified. You're talking about Emile Bove. Well, I'm actually talking about Alina Haba. We can talk about Emile Bove in a moment. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm sorry. It's a long list. There are a lot of them. All right. Tell me about this one. Not Judge Jean Pinier Piro, right? Yes. Yes. No. Oh my goodness. This is a three-hour show. The list goes on. Right. Alina Haba was appointed to be the U.S. Attorney in an interim basis in the District of New Jersey. Significant district. Very important. I live here. Clean the whole place up. We're very lawful now. You should be careful. She could come after you. Yeah, yeah. By operation of law, by statute, this is not a norm. By statute, her term ended at 120 days, which depending on how you count was either yesterday or it will be the coming Friday. And under the statute, the judges in the district can decide to appoint her or appoint someone else. And they didn't appoint her for, I think, clear reasons. And instead appointed her. her hand-picked deputy, her number two. And you're like, okay, well now we have a legitimate district that's led by a legitimate person. You know what happened? They fired her. Pam Bondi, they fired the deputy who was handpicked by Alina Haba. So I don't know who becomes the United States attorney there. So that's not a norm. That's a law. And a similar thing happened in the Northern District of New York. The lead prosecutor in a very significant district, the judges didn't approve that person. So they designate under the law. So they have a runaround. They have a backend plan. And they appointed him, I think something like special counsel to the attorney general. And they don't have an actual US attorney in the Northern District of New York. They have this guy who's the functional US attorney in the Northern District of New York. So it's a pattern of behavior to put his own people anywhere, no matter what the norms are. And more importantly, no matter what the laws and statutes say, no matter what the judges say. So maybe the norm is partisan, but competent. And this new norm is ideological and slightly insane. But Dan, I want to get to. So like when we bring up, because I want to use the examples that we have in front of us with President Obama a little bit before we really move into Trump, because I think there's a tendency here to think this is a brand new, like you say, it's not a matter of degrees. This is brand new. So Dan, they want to do a seemingly extrajudicial drone strike against somebody who is there. Or here's, you know what? Maybe this is a better example, Dan. The IRS scandal that occurred during the Obama administration. So you have a situation where the IRS is allowing progressive people with, you know, words like progressive or democratic, their organizations to pass through with a tax exempt status in a way that they are not allowing anything with the word Tea Party or conservative to pass through. So, and clearly to a point where it's not random. This is something that is occurring with purpose. How do you explain that? Is that a rogue bureaucrat within the IRS? Is that something that is discussed on a political level? How does that occur? Sure. So in this situation, there's two important facts here. The first is this was a field office in Cincinnati with career bureaucrats that had never. Deep state. I believe we call it deep state. The deep state, yes. And all the investigations show there had never been contact between that office and anyone of any kind. And there was no consequence in the Obama administration. So this was rogue. This really was rogue. And then the second part is when you actually did the full investigation, there was a whole host of progressive terms. They were also flagging. And so it turned out to actually not be the scandal that people thought it actually was. Didn't that. I was, if I remember correctly, and I probably don't because I'm old. It has been 11 years now, I think, yes. Didn't they. But they paid millions of dollars in penalties. There was some loss. The rich paid millions of dollars. There were lawsuits about it that were settled. I don't remember all the details of it because we said it was a decade ago. But the initial view that they were only doing Tea Party turned out to not actually be true. They actually had a much wider thing. But either way, the fear that someone could do that is a very real fear. We get back to Nixon again. This is how you politicize the IRS. You have them audit your political opponents. This individual case was truly people no one had ever heard of working for. in an office in Cincinnati. And so that is like, it's not, that is like, that's the fear. Are those things discussed, Dan, in the office? Like, does someone ever say like, look, Nick, Trump is very clearly targeting tax exempt status for his enemy institutions. He's threatened it with Harvard. He's threatened their accreditation. He's threatened tax exempt status for a wide variety of organizations that might oppose him. Is that ever something that is, what are the levers of coercion that are discussed in the Oval Office? And I don't mean, I mean the Oval Office metaphorically. Yeah. Those sorts of things never discussed, right? That is a bright red Watergate style red line. In a pre-Trump era, if you were thinking about the things that could end your presidency, it would be using the IRS to, look at, to go audit, regulate, go after your political opponents. Like never once discussed, never thought of. If you brought it up in a meeting, you would never be invited to a meeting back again. You probably would be walking out of the White House holding all of your possessions later that day. But they do use, I mean, they do go through, you know, Obama used the, I think it was the 1917 Espionage Act, where they would go after, you know, they prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act. This is, this is a great example of the, uh, problem. This is a great example of the independence of the Department of Justice, right? Great. These were a bunch of Bush era investigations. Most of them weren't Bush era investigations, not entirely. They were then continued. Nothing drove Barack Obama more insane than having to take all the blowback for these investigations. Like drove him insane. But he could not. When, when he got the records from the AP. Well, he never saw them, right? Like they never, they never made it to the White House. And he never requested those records. No, never, never. And nobody in the Oval Office, ever said, No. there is a leak here, and we need to investigate this leak. No, no. There was never, and it would have, uh, and I promise you, if you had polled the president's top advisors, they all would have just wanted these investigations to stop. Because we're all the ones take, like, they, in my office, when I was the White House Communications Director, every reporter could walk into my office without, uh, just walk right in. And the amount of people who came in, they're very upset, rightfully upset about these investigations. The way, it did tremendous damage to the president's relationship with the Congress, to the use of him as a president who wanted to, uh, you know, protect the press, be transparent. But this was, these were decisions made by career prosecutors in the Department of Justice without any contact with anyone in the White House. Dan, I, I may be naive. Maybe, we'll see. It, it strikes me as, as, that seems hard to believe that political blowback is swirling around the executive about, uh, espionage prosecutions on someone like James Rosen. And they're getting records from AP. And the White House is just sitting passively saying, "Dear God, there's just nothing I can do here, other than just suck it up." I am, I would say, I didn't sit in national security meetings. I can imagine that there is great concern within parts of the national security community, the intelligence community, about the leaks of highly sensitive intelligence. I don't know what those conversations were like, but I can promise you from a political perspective, uh, and from President Obama's perspective, that, I don't know what those conversations were like, but I can promise you from a political perspective, uh, and from President Obama's perspective, that, I don't know what those conversations were like, but I can promise you from a political perspective, uh, and from President Obama's perspective, that, I don't know what those conversations were like, but I can promise you from a political perspective, that, , I don't know what those conversations were like, but I can promise you from a political perspective, that, , And so at the one end of the spectrum that's totally legitimate, totally lawful, and I think no one would dispute, if crime rates are rising and the papers are reporting we have a crime wave in these various cities, President of the United States, whether it's Barack Obama, George Bush, or Donald Trump, can call his attorney general and say, what are you doing? Can we surge prosecutors? Can we do some stuff? Can we change policies? Can we enhance penalties? All of that is totally fair game and clear on the one end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, the President of the United States calls up his attorney general, or worse, calls up the head of public corruption at the Southern District of New York and says, you know, I really hate Bill de Blasio. And I know you do too. That MF's got to go. So can you help a brother out? And by the way, I'm the commander in chief and under article two, I can fire you. That's like probably the worst thing at the other end, worse than the IRS, right? And in between. You have a lot of stuff, right? So if something is spiraling out of control and it can be, I think, assessed to be properly a policy issue, like what's the policy of the department on subpoenaing journalists? Right. I think that's more legit. But if you call up and you say, listen. Well, that's why it's hard to believe that it's not at their behest. Only subpoena the Wall Street Journal, but don't subpoena the New York Times, then it's more like the other category I'm talking about. So it's a judgment call, part of which is police, not by. By statute or by judges, but by this other thing, blowback, which seems to be a little bit of a thing in the past, because blowback doesn't seem to matter to some people, including Donald Trump, so long as his MAGA base is in tow. But I guess. Yeah, go ahead, Dan. I was going to say, the thing I'd say about this is, in hindsight, given everything we've learned in the decades since, would there have been so much blowback if the president, if Barack Obama had called Eric Holder and said, this is. This is not worth it, you cannot subpoena journalists, stop these investigations? Would there have been huge blowback for that? Probably. I don't know, probably not. So clearly not, Trump has gone much closer to the end of the spectrum. But the question is, like, here's where, like, and this is where lawyers are. are very cautious when they're advising presidents is there's a slippery slope there. So one day it's don't subpoena James Rosen. The next day it's don't subpoena this Democratic donor who's under investigation or this Democratic politician who's under investigation, or even worse than that, go subpoena this political opponent of ours. And so they're like, the lawyers are very careful about this slippery slope. If you care about these things. But it's hard to believe that the president himself wouldn't say these espionage investigations are unfairly targeting journalists, but I'm not going to call to find out because that's a pretty slippery slope for me. And, you know, I hate Bill de Blasio and I'm just like, I'm going to use like in hindsight, should he accept that position? I guess here's where I'm like, it's hard for me to believe that someone with the strength of. Uh, conviction that Barack Obama had that he would sit back passively and watch something spiral. I'll give you like just a stupid example. During the Obamacare rollout, my show, uh, did it like a little skit. We had Kathleen Sebelius. I remember this quite well. I was in the, but yes. Yeah. Okay. So you remember, uh, I have no recollection of it. Pre God bless you. You should. It's a tiny, it is a blip. In history, not just of this country, but in the humankind, uh, Kathleen Sebelius came on and my first question, I took out two laptops and I gave her a laptop and I had a laptop and I said, uh, we're going to try two things. Uh, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to try and download on LimeWire every movie and song that has ever been written. And on your computer, you're going to try and log onto the Obamacare website. We're going to see who gets there. First dumb bit, but anyway, that's sort of spiraled into kind of a long, uh, uh, interview with Sebelius about if you believe that the government has the opportunity to improve people's lives, isn't job one kind of a technical competence. I mean, for God's sakes, your, your fundraising emails are 22nd century technology and yet this thing. So anyway, I get a call. I can't remember how much later, but it wasn't much later. The president would like to talk to you in person. And I have to go down to Washington because you, the president of the United States calls you and says, Hey man, let's talk. And it was, I don't want to say terrifying because I didn't have the sense of Obama that, you know, that I would have with Trump, but it was intimidating and you're standing in a room wearing a suit. During the day, which for me is a standup comic is hive inducing and you're, you know, you're in front of the Teddy Roosevelt picture in front of the Coolidge desk in front and you're surrounded by history and you go into the oval office and the president of the United States gives you shit. And I'm not saying it's the same thing, obviously in terms of, but it is, I can't look at it any other way. It's a form of intimidation or coercion. Now to his credit, we got past it and like we had a much longer conversation that I thought was, was fruitful. But Dan, isn't the point of that in some respect to get me to shut the fuck up? Well, I remember the reason I remember that, even though it was 12 years ago now is I don't know how the president, I don't know. I mean, he was a big fan of yours. I don't remember him watching the daily show. And basically, it was a tremendously hot show. It was us and The Apprentice, I don't know what happened to that guy. That was a different era of television. You just turned it on. There it is. Right? The Apprentice, The Daily Show. Good old days. Sure. And he, he had two questions for me. One was how did Kathleen Sebelius end up on your show? And two, what was your phone number? So I can answer the second one. The first one was a much harder question to get to the bottom of. All right, folks. We're done. We're done. We're done. We're done. All right, folks. It's summertime, clearly. And, and look, you want to have fun. You know what I'm talking about? You need, you need a little bit of the cabbage to do that. You don't want to get burned by wireless bills. You can beach trip, barbecues, three-day weekends, four-day weekends. In my case, I think it's like five or six-day weekends, quite frankly. I really do have quite a bit of time off. But the wireless bill, it's gotta be the last thing holding you back. That's why a lot of people are switching to Mint Mobile. 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All right, we're back. Dan. There's certainly no norm or historical precedent of a president not calling a member of the media to talk to them. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This all comes down to the question is, like, I feel like we're sort of wrapped around the axle of these journalists' investigations. They're like incredibly serious. And in hindsight, in the real time, they were bad. They were wrong. The government should not do that. It should not have happened. Is there more the president could have done to stop them? I don't know. I know that there was, we took the idea that you don't tell the Department of Justice how to wish, how to conduct investigations. Like, there is this idea, as serious as these are, that the president of the United States, in any investigation, telling them what to, telling the career prosecutors whom they should subpoena or not subpoena in an investigation is a very, very bad precedent. Right? Could he maybe have said, like, a public statement? Like, no journalist should be subpoenaed, which would have the same effect as the private phone call, but would it be maybe more transparent? I don't know. Maybe. What's your, Preet, what's your understanding of the reality of this? Yeah, look, I think every president wants good press. Every president wants things to go his way. But again, there are degrees of this. Look, to stick up for Barack Obama for a moment, in one regard. This is not. I'm only making the point. Look, Lyndon, look, I was picking on Nixon. Lyndon Johnson was the master of putting the arm on people, personally and otherwise. As intimidating as it must have been to go to see Barack Obama, probably you're happy it wasn't LBJ. But all the US attorneys were gathered early on in the Obama administration, the first term. And we had a photo op with the president. And we all went to the White House, we went to the, one of the big rooms and waited there. And, you know, it sounds quaint. Did he ask you guys for my phone number when you guys were in there? Oh, he had it. And he said a simple thing, right? And Patrick Fitzgerald was still the, you know, one of the US attorneys at the time. And he says, you know, I hired all of you, but you don't work for me. You work for the American people and you act independently. And that seemed quaint, whatever, until Trump shows up. Trump from the White House podium, from the Oval Office on a regular basis. Yeah, right. So, you know, Trump from the White House podium, from the Oval Office on a regular basis, pronounces the guilt of political adversaries every fricking day. Sure. And he gets away with it. But here's the thing. So now I think their view is, and this gets us now to this new administration, their view is there is no independence in the executive branch from the executive. But that is an opinion that is lawyer shopped. Yeah. That gets us back to Goldsmith and you and the unitary executive. Yeah. The unitary executive. And this idea that the executive is based on solely the whims of one man. And the Supreme Court has amplified that by granting immunity to the executive. So Preet, when we talk about these guardrails, haven't they been removed not just by Trump, but by the Department of Justice itself? Yeah. And the Supreme Court. No, I think you have a very good argument in favor of that position. You know, the only thing I guess we can be thankful for at least, and I mean this semi-ironically, is that they feel the need to at least paper a legal justification for it. Right. It's one of those things where you're like, "No, I've got a Xanax prescription. Sure. Hold on. Let me just scribble it real quick." It's a tiny. So for example, right? Right. In the case of the deportation of Mr. Obrego Garcia to El Salvador, everyone was talking about constitutional crisis. And the Supreme Court and other courts said, "Facilitate his return." And they like bullshitted around about what facilitate means. We don't know what that means. We'll get him a plane ticket if he shows up in an Uber. Uber. But at the end of the day, they did bring him back. Now, they filed criminal charges against him, but they brought him back. And I don't mean to put too much store on these fine distinctions, but maybe I'm overly lawyering it. They still do feel the need to have some justification for it. I disagree with the justification, but there are scholars who think it's true. There are members of the Supreme Court who think that's a viable theory. I think both as a matter of law and also as a matter of. Do you want to live in a country, put aside the constitution and. Do you want to live in a country where the executive of the country, the president of the United States, can pick and choose which individuals in different states should be prosecuted and investigated by the federal government? You don't want to live in a country like that. But that's pretty. Unfortunately, that's a political question. And what we're seeing is there are an awful lot of people who want to live in that country, as long as the people he's picking. Are the other guys. Are the other guys. Exactly. And Dan, to that point, politically, when you watch it happen now, I mean, he faces no political blowback. You talked about the political blowback in the thing. And you see it when he's in trouble with Epstein. What's the first thing he does? Arrest Barack Obama, strip the accreditation. As long as he's attacking the people his base hates, they're fine with it. And so when you see him doing what he's doing, at Harvard, what recourse do they have then to comply? What else can they do to an executive like that? Well, I mean, they can fight back, right? They can fight in court and have one in court. Obviously, Trump has the courts on his side. He has a Supreme Court that is in his favor, but the courts have. Or they'll throw it to some guy in Texas that'll just be like, sure. Yeah, they'll forum shop. Or whatever else. But a lot of the things they have done have been stopped by the courts, right? Held up by the courts. And so there are limits here. What I think has become clear, like Matt Iglesias, the center left writer, has once said that democracy is just a bunch of norms in a trench coat, which is something that Trump has really exploited, is that a lot of the things. I think it's flashing us in a subway right now. That's exactly right. That trench coat is long gone. His exploit is that a lot of things that prevented you from doing certain things were not law. They were just ways in which everyone had done things before. And this belief that there would be political blowback from not just the other party, but your party, from the public, and in particular from the media, if you did those things. The world has changed so much. The Republican Party is so loyal to Trump. The Republicans are loyal to Trump. In 2018, he lost the White House and the Senate in 2020. Oh, they've got a strategy for that too, Dan. I don't know if you've heard. They've just decided to go in and be like, what if we gave ourselves five more seats in Texas? Right. Which gets to a question for Democrats about how you use power in this environment, but how they respond to that. Boy, that's a great one. Preet, for you, as you watch, so is it the taking away of funding for things that he disagrees with? Is it the threatening of tax-exempt status? Is it the threatening. Is it the threatening of prosecution? Is it. What, for you, is the most egregious, then, un-guardrailed action that the Trump administration takes that, in your mind, you just go, I can't even go back to Nixon on this one. This is just, you know. So you know what it is? Yeah. It's actually not in my wheelhouse. It's the pro-measles policy of this administration. Oh, that's interesting. The, I mean, when I think about my. So I care about democracy. This is what I talk about. I'm a member of the legal profession. I was a United States attorney. I'm a rule of law guy. And I fight those battles. And maybe it's because I don't understand medicine. But when I think about my kids and my family members and other people, what bothers me the most is the ruination of health care and the, you know, the false debunking of what vaccines can and cannot do. And when I see these. The thing that freaks me out the most, as an American, are the measles numbers. Now, on the other side of the coin, I'm worried, I'm worried about all of it. Right. The weird thing about the legal strategy of these guys is they lose a lot. Right. And they will be losing a lot from a personal perspective. Well, is that because, you know, look, you can go on cable news and you can say anything. Yeah. And you can talk, and you're seeing that now in their conspiracy theory stuff, is it all false? You know, where's Ray Epps? You know, remember before they got in there, Ray Epps was the Fed that made the J6ers storm the Capitol. Well, now you're the Feds, you're the FBI, you're all those guys. Why isn't that guy being prosecuted? Because he didn't. Because it was all bullshit. But is it because courts force you, and this is what I think the press should be doing more of, to litigate, courts at their best, litigate the parameters of our shared reality? Yeah. And is that why they fail so much in there? I think they fail because sometimes they take over-reaching positions. So, for example, in my personal experience, I work at a law firm. My law firm, WilmerHale, is one of the four law firms that decided not to bend the knee and fought. The law firms who fought back on these executive orders are four for four in D.C. courts, and it's going to go up for appeal in scathing- What was the purpose? Explain to me a little bit, because I've heard about- Yeah. What is the justification? And Dan, I don't know if there were law firms when you were there with Obama in this situation, but what's the justification of going after a law firm that represented people that you don't like? Well, I think as the courts found, there isn't one. Right. There isn't one. Oh, okay. In the same way that it makes no logical, legal, or pragmatic sense to cut off science research funding at Harvard because of anti-Semitism. It's going after your nemesis. In my firm's case, we had the temerity to have employed Bob Mueller, former FBI director and special counsel, who was gone from the firm in the case of- Wait, is that why they went? And do they say specifically? They make a reference directly to the employment of Robert Mueller in the executive order and another person who still remains at the firm. What? Right. And what is the penalty for employing someone like that? Well, apparently, the intended penalty is a business death penalty. Because the point I was going to make was, even though they lose a lot, they still accomplish a lot. Because they have a chilling effect on other people and on other firms, some of whom are not- Not as strong, but some of whom are just making proper businesses. Look, when they argue falsely that the Constitution says something different about birthright citizenship, they know that lots of people are not going to rely on that provision of the Constitution when they come to the United States anymore. When they do things like question FBI agents and have them fill out a questionnaire and say, "Did you have anything to do with January 6th?" Maybe that's lawful, maybe it's not, maybe it's proper, maybe it's not. But what it does is, it tells every other FBI agent going forward for all time during this administration, "Hey, I got this order to follow this lead or to subpoena this witness or to talk to this guy." I now have to think, is that in any way related to Donald Trump or to Melania or to Donald Trump? Because my life or my livelihood could be affected by that. It's a process by which it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, so much as having the chilling effect that they want to have, that's not a great thing. And I don't know how much there is to be able to do about it. It's the tentacles, though. Dan, is that your feeling as well? It's the tentacles and the effect of their action, much more so than the. It's almost the collateral damage that their. Yeah, that's exactly right. that their actions. Dan, you thinking that too? Yeah, I agree with that. It creates a chilling effect, right? I'm sure we're all in media, and I'm sure everyone has gotten a very aggressive defamation training about how. Because now they're suing everyone for everything. I don't recall that. Well, I'd call your lawyer then, but it's like. And the sense is that if someone is watching you and they are going to make. And even if they can't win the case, they can get your case either to discovery, they can just make you pay a bunch of money and lawyer fees. And for media, it's like, this is Trump suing Ann Selzer for a poll, an incorrect poll in an election he won, right? Right. That's the Iowa pollster who said that he was doing worse than he was actually doing. But still winning. But still winning. And that could have bankrupted the newspaper there if they eventually dropped that suit. And that affects everyone. Every company now has to make a decision. We have just been through this with media companies. Is it worth. Should you just settle and maybe pay a price for it over the course of your business or not? You have talked about this a lot. And it does. Some people will stand up. WilmerHill stood up. Folks in the media have stood up. But not everyone stands up, right? And you have to do that. And then now. And that's everyone in society is doing that cost-benefit analysis of is this worth the potential blowback that i am going to get if i become targeted and it's by the way it's not just about the people that are on the air and we saw that abc paid 15 cbs we just saw paid 15 for nothing just to get that merger through and by the way the fcc chairman getting back to our guardrails shit posts uh like colbert and cba like the fcc chair the guy who's responsible for this is just out there like yeah motherfucker how's my ass taste like it's like i missed that one that one i missed i'm obviously paraphrasing it's but not by that much honestly but i will say this and i don't know if it occurs this way in the legal profession but to the media profession right there's the effect of the people that are on the air now but i can tell you this and by the way it predates trump ron desantis suing disney i've been in those meetings where with executives who have said to me like look man we don't want to get on their radar so there are a lot of things that will never be made that you will never know about that were uh you know killed in the bed before they had a chance because of this chilling effect so the irony is as donald trump famously said i've brought back free speech he's done the opposite and i don't know if that's something that does your law firm now pre are there pre-discussions about clients that won't get protection not even the clients that you have now or have had in the past or people there are there people who won't get hired yeah look i think there are people who both in businesses and and law firms and um i think it's okay to say this you know what donald trump does is he exposes people who have courage and fight in them and integrity and character from the people who don't sometimes over a lot of money sometimes over a little bit of money sometimes over about over employment sometimes about ambitions that they want to achieve within the government or outside the government yeah no it's a big problem but but the way to get get to get after it with respect to these law firms who have these executive orders imposed on them which are just complete legal garbage i mean of all the things we've been talking about among the most garbage documents we've seen are the are the law firm documents as you know you're a lay person and you immediately understood that to be true is to win and win and win and win and win in the supreme court which i think would send a signal that there are some things that are so egregious and so crazy and so nuts and so unlawful that even this supreme court will say the same i don't know if that's going to be true about other things as well and and the lesson of all this is or one of the lessons of all this is um if a president chooses to exercise all of his discretionary authority and power in the in a maximal way and congress doesn't give a shit and and also endorses the unitary executive theory in part that helps the 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or more restrictions apply see site for details kroger fresh for everyone pre do you think we're in this moment then in some respects so he's getting the legal justifications that he needs or he's getting the halo effect uh or the the poison cloud from his actions that are deterring people from taking uh action but are we in an unusual time because of the fact that we're in a time where we're in a time where we're in a time where we're of the abdication he has the house he has the senate and because he has such control over the base yeah is this really are we moving into a new phase of the country or or in your mind are we in just sort of this weird eye that you know won't occur again a hundred year storm or something that depends on whether trumpism or whatever trumpism is survives donald trump like the weird quandary is just further what i was saying a second ago there was this opinion by the supreme court on birthright citizenship which wasn't actually about birthright citizenship it was about this technical issue of nationwide injunctions yeah right and amy coney barrett um declared correctly a principle of law right which is contrary to how we think about checks and balances and and co-equal branches of government separation of powers she said the judiciary does not have a general oversight role of the executive that's true but the problem is and then she said you know the solution to an imperial presidency is not an imperial judiciary well that's all nice and wonderful in in in the uh on the supreme court right in the abstract in the after tower her position like it's not like you got you elected that crazy guy right not our problem call congress like she said the solution to an imperial presidency is class action lawsuit that i can i can give you relief for an individual but i can't uh you know uh this guy uh i can let eat at the segregated counter but i can't let everybody i can't let everybody do it uh who you know dan you didn't have you guys had a united congress uh obama's first two years yes you had the house we did is the temptation there when you're in that position to to to do what what trump has done to some extent or were the was democratic congress not as complete as it was in the first two years of obama's first two years they were so far from compliant it was a very different democratic party i mean you sort of think about no that sounds about right right that does i mean that's part of that's the nature of democrats part of it's just what the democratic party looked like in 2009 like we had two senators from montana we had a senator from alaska two senators from arkansas right who had very different constituencies i mean it was a democratic joe mansion you had joe mansion i mean joe mansion was uh he was one of our two senators from west virginia at one point yeah he and the joe mansion actually of the way we think about joe mansion today there were like 15 joe mansions people to the right of joe mansion on issues who were the democratic party and there was also the the senate and congress itself viewed itself differently back then it was a much more of an institutional actor you know it was the democratic chairman of the finance committee who would not let tom daschle become the secretary of health and human services because of a tax problem yeah that's right how quaint is that they'd like it's insane to now it was like a actually frankly he didn't pay withholding taxes to a green card holder how dare you sir he get you cannot be in government um and so it was just you could not have gotten away with that like there was you would face blowback from your own party for doing things like that like the parties have changed particularly the republican party is obviously much more ideological ideologically coherent than it was back then um and certainly the democratic party was back then but we that was not even if we had wanted to do any of the things trump just talked about our party would rebel some some large portion of our party would rebel in two seconds so let's talk about that trump is in some ways a white hat or i shouldn't say white hat but a black hat hacker where he goes in and he's exposing these strange holes in our democracy one of which is emergency powers you know you go in if you if you look through our 250 years you can find an emergency power that allows you to do almost anything through the executive as long as you uh can with understand i guess the political pressure um he's using now tax exempt status he's using funding He's using the legal system. Isn't there a reverse engineering that can be done? And aren't Republicans in any way concerned that he is handing a blueprint? Look, do you think the federal government only spends on liberal issues? Is there no fear that a Democrat gets in there and goes, oh, no more block grants for Medicaid to red states that are going to buy volleyball stadiums in Mississippi? Like, I'm pulling that. Oh, tax exemption for that? Do we really think that Fox News or the Federalist Society or any of these other places don't get some benefit from the federal government or wouldn't face some peril from the federal government? Isn't he handing a pretty devastating playbook to the other side at some level? How are they going to fight that? I think he's met Democrats, so he's relatively confident that they're not going to do the same things. So try to think about the example. Like, imagine, so what would it, how would it, like, let's say the Democrat wanted to follow that playbook. Sure. So like, so on day one, Fox is kicked out of the White House press pool, like not involved in it anymore. They invite Pod Save America and they, you know, whoever else is now in there. Forget about that. How about they threaten? Their licenses, right? Well, that's the next thing, right? Right. They threaten the license. The, you know, at some point, you know, Fox is going to want to sell, may want to sell its TV business because of this probate case. Is it, how is a Democratic, would a Democratic FCC handle that? He would shitpost them. Right, right. Like, but I sometimes, I struggle to like, I have, I have a very conflicted set of emotions here because on one hand, I think one of the reasons why Democrats are in this position is we have too often believed power is simply a means to a policy. And Republicans believe power, particularly under Trump is an Indian of itself, right? And then when you have it, you should look to nurture it, grow it, use it because you believe passionately in your policy goals and you can only execute them if you have power and the Democrats should be much more aggressive, by the way. I mean, it's not just power for power sake. They're executing enormous changes, but they view those decisions as helping them maintain power too, right? It's not there. I don't know, man. I don't see how. Like removing NIH funding from cancer research somehow helps them maintain power. Yeah, that's a fair point. But all the, the targeting of all these institutions, like weakening institutional opponents, you know, making the cow, making the media bend a knee to Trump, right? All those things. But at the same time, like if a Democrat comes in and does all those things, are we just on a downward spiral where we are just a, where we become Russia, right? Where it's just like. Where we are a, like we, we sort of live in an oligarchy, like there is a real danger in that. And so as a Democrat, how do you think if you care about democracy and you care about the rule of law, how do you view your responsibility when you come in to, you know, you don't want to like naively cling to norms as the, as you're headed towards the iceberg, right? But like, what is the way in which you can more aggressively utilize power? One thing I think Democrats could do if they had power would be to take some of these norms that Trump has run over. And turn them into laws, right? If we had to try to actually like reinstate some of the guardrails that existed only through voluntary compliance and make and give them legal teeth. I'm not even sure that he complies with, with legalty. I don't think Trump complies with, with legalty. Preet, do you think that would be an effective counter? I don't. It depends on what the thing is. And some things you can, some norms you can't legislate. So for example, some you can, and even those, by the way, that I was thinking of just a second ago. Are at risk. So the norm was for almost two centuries in this country that a president would serve two terms, right? That's better for the country. It's better for democracy. It's better for the rule of law and everything else. Washington set the precedent. Then, then FDR comes along. He's like, fuck it. I'm running four times. Right. And he runs four times. And then, you know what we did? We changed the law. And even that, like, you know, solid black and white print in the constitution. Can't run again. He's got lawyers. Lawyers making arguments like they are with birthright citizenship. You know, there's a loophole. He can serve a third term. So, you know, the law is a blunt instrument and, and, and if you have somebody who is completely amoral, power hungry, forum shopping, who has all executive power and a weak judiciary and a weak legislature, and is sometimes bending the knee press. It's hard for the law to curtail the worst instincts of that person, which I know sounds very pessimistic, but I think it's true. I think it sounds very realistic. I mean, I think that, and, and look, we're five, six months in man. Yeah. Like he went from, I'm going to deport the worst of the worst to like, who's that valedictorian at that high school? Like that, like it's, it's all eroding really quickly. I'm a naturalized citizen and I'm like, oh, you know, we're not, we're not that far away from, you know, 24 months in. And I don't think this is an overstatement. Depending on how things go, we're a naturalized citizen in this country has to be worried about saying something that they will say invokes an emergency power to denaturalize that person and go back to some other country. What are the things Democrats can do? Because the Republicans right now are basically solidifying structural advantages that are given by the constitution that sort of empowers rural states in a way that's infuses them with more power. Then they might. Now, if he, you know, you get two senators in Wyoming, same as in New York. So it's population wise, you know, there are already structural advantages to right now, the Republican party, there's more red states than there are blue states. There may not be the people may be around the same, but aren't there things that Democrats could do? Let's say it's not punitive in terms of we're going to take away the tax exempt status from this university, or we're going to do the, and by the way, like all this shit about the liberal universities, and they're just pumping out liberals. And you're like everybody on the Supreme court. That's like a hardline conservative went to Yale or Harvard. Like what the fuck are they even talking about? But aren't there things pre that are structural that Democrats can, can do in the same way that look in North Carolina, what do they do? As soon as the Democrat, as soon as the governor is a Democrat, they're like, Oh, the governor, the governor doesn't have power anymore. That's it. That's too bad. Look, you have to have the votes. So I think the most important thing is to get one or you have to have an executive. Do you need the votes or do you need an executive? Well, that depends on what the answer that the new answer to the question is of the first lady in whose white house Dan served. And that is when they go low, we go, what? Dan, go, what do we go? Is there a new answer to that? Yeah, I, this is a general life practice that served me well as I don't contradict Michelle Obama, but does she have to say, would she have the same answer? I don't think I don't, I I'll let her speak for herself, but it's like, I think there were, if we had units, if Democrats had the house, the Senate and the white house, like what are some things you could do that would expand power and, and sort of help rebalance the scales or that would insulate, insulate them from the coercion and expansion of power on the other side on democratically. Yeah. Like I'm not even talking about like, well, let's just jam. 30 liberals on the Supreme court. I'm talking about ways to combat what we're seeing now. Right. But there's a paradigm. The problem is even if Democrats are not going to be as extreme in asserting executive power as Trump, they like executive power when they have the executive and it would seem weirdly self-defeating to finally get the white house and now, you know, think charitably about the future against immediate self-interest and do things that are good for the country so that. Not only the next president, but that president who finally has power as a Democrat after Trump would curtail his own powers. I don't see how that's sort of possible in the laws of the political, um, universe that we live in. Right. Dan, does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, like it is like where Trump is the, the current end state of a sort of inexorable rise in executive power, right. That's been going with every previous president, every president has had more than the last in part because Congress has sort of abdicated all of their responsibilities. for oversight. The entire idea of impeachment is now mathematically impossible, right? So if you do not care- Impeachment, by the way, I think that's one of the things that Trump did. That was always held out as kind of the nuclear weapon, if you will, of accountability for an executive. By Trump being impeached twice, what it showed itself to be is just another paper-thin political process that really had no- Oh, he was impeached twice. It almost felt like he got a speeding ticket. It seems that impeachment is now even no longer a guardrail of accountability within the executive. I remember a conversation with the White House staff and President Obama during the middle of the debt ceiling crisis when we were about to- The United States is going to be able to pay this bill. We default on our bills. It'll be a huge crisis. One of the options, as ridiculous as clear it worth a trillion dollars. And I remember the op-ed by Krugman. Yes. And the, you know, so it's all there. And what would happen? And one of the views is what would happen if you did it? And the idea is that the Republican Congress would impeach President Obama. And you'd say, well, the Senate is not going to get half the Democratic senators to vote to convict him, but he would forever have that black mark. And the view is that would cripple his presidency going forward. Right. And, but clearly that's not the case. In fact, Trump's numbers went up during the course of his impeachment proceeding the first time. Well, Bill Clinton too. I mean, when they, when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton, I think Clinton was the first one where you saw impeachment as, oh, this is a bit of a, uh, a kind of a pomp and circumstance process that doesn't really have teeth and mean anything. It happened a second time, right? Donald Trump's political fortunes were on the wane, as I understand it, until one inflection point, his indictment by the Manhattan DA. That's when his fortune started rising again. And so not only did he have two impeachments that he got through, four indictments, um, and, and one set of convictions on 34 counts. So, right. You know, talking, you know, we talked about in some ways and not to bring it back to the measles, but it did immunize him to some extent, if you've been impeached twice and you've been convicted of felonies and you're still walking around, well, now you have, uh, a certain herd immunity with, with MAGA that allows you to act with impunity on almost look, even this Epstein thing, he's out there. My ratings are up four or five points. This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. The math doesn't actually show that, but I mean, still, I'm not suggesting that that's true. I'm just suggesting that that's the way he goes. So, so would you guys advocate at least though, a, a, a close reading for the Democrats of what this type of executive manipulation could mean to at least protecting in some ways, minority rights in this country or any of those other things that need, uh, that, that need protecting. Yeah. I think hardball should be, that should be in the, um, in the playbook for Democrats in a way that it hasn't been before not to break the law, not to do egregious things, not to be cruel, not to, you know, um, take away people's rights, but, but we have seen at least, you know, a version of a blueprint of asserting very significant executive power to get your own agenda done. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't advocate, um, and I would repudiate efforts to, to mimic, uh, his overreach in the, in the many of the ways that he's done so, but there's a lot of distance between what Democrats seem to be doing now and have done in the past and what Trump is doing. And somewhere in between that, I think is a, um, you know, it isn't, isn't ethical, but hardball approach to politics. But of course I'm not the political expert Dan is, but yeah, I, I a hundred percent agree with that. Right. Like we, like there, Trump has set a model that we can follow about just an incredibly aggressive, the levels of coercion, the levels of power that you can use. I think the question like here, I think the test case for the democratic president starting in 2029 is like, like you can do all these things like, Oh, I, I wanted Dan's optimism. Did I write? Well, I'm just like, I mean, we gotta, we gotta live with some, we gotta live with some hope here. Uh, you say 30, 29. Yeah. 20, some, some century 29. I think we're good. Um, like we should obviously be incredibly aggressive. If there is an agency that's not doing what it should be doing, we should feel, we should try to reshape it in the way Trump has. We should use power to build back aggressively. The things that Trump has taken apart, like USA ID, right? Like just aggressively, do that, push forward, uh, be willing to lose in court. If you can get a, if you can legitimately believe that there is a, a, a ground from which you should do it. Like the thing Trump really did because he's lost a lot is he got caught trying on a lot of things by his supporters, right? Even if he didn't succeed in them, it looked like he was trying to do things and it's, you'd much rather be seen doing stuff than not doing stuff. Yes, we can. I think is their motto. Isn't that Trump's motto? Somebody's motto. It's definitely not, it's definitely not C.C. Puente, but yes. Isn't there a reason that Rahm Emanuel is gaining some traction because he's a, he's a little bit of a, of a bellicose Democrat. I don't know in this step. I mean, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's probably very early for anybody to have a rush. I think where I put a little bit of faith and it's probably misplaced is that, uh, as these, as, as the actions that he's taken kind of accumulate in their audacity, I do think there's going to come a moment as we get closer to a possible change in power that some Republican institutions, law firms pre that you might know that might go, Hey, you know, they might do this shit to us. And maybe we need to be allied in some ways with those that have been, you know, you, maybe you have Claremont college or, or Liberty university going, you know what? I w I'm seeing how they're going to destroy Harvard. And we're close enough to a shift in power that I might want to throw my hat in allyship. That's the question for Democrats is Trump is, is aggressively going after all the institutional opponents to conservatism, right? The media universities, law firms, right? Would Democrats do that to the institutional opponents to progressives, right? Conservative media, like would a democratic FCC chairman, I would think at this point you have to, that has to be on the table because what about, what about Liberty university? Right? Like, no, that's what I'm saying. So wouldn't they stand up and go, Oh, they're going to turn this shit on us. Why wouldn't they? Dan's earlier answer is Dan's earlier answer was, which was because they've met Democrats. Well, I mean the question, like, like they don't believe it. They don't, they don't believe that they don't believe we will do that. You don't think Democrats could elect a vindictive Dix. I don't know. I mean, really? I already, I already mentioned Rahm Emanuel. That's why I mentioned him. And you, you poo pooed it one minute ago. I mentioned Rahm Emanuel and you're like, yeah, I would never poo poo for God's sake. The kind of worry is that the emulation of Trump is not going to be sort of the pragmatic and, um, you know, Nietzschean, uh, grab for power, but the trolling. You know, I don't know what people think of Gavin Newsom. He's sort of trolling as opposed to, you know, but I'm saying you can learn, uh, he has left a roadmap for coercion and levers of power that, you know, is not going to go away. Yeah. Republicans have not read that portion of the, of article two of the constitution that says, that says what goes around comes around. Right. That was, I believe that was Madison when they would make fun of his height. Right. But it's a different thing. Uh, guys, I can't thank you enough. Very, very interesting conversation. Preet Bharat, former U.S. attorney, SDNY podcast. Stay tuned with Preet, uh, Dan Fiverr co, uh, host of Pod Save America and author, uh, about political strategy. Guys, thank you very much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Bye guys. So I, I guess, I, I guess what it comes down to that the takeaway from the whole thing is the Democrats need a vindictive deck. I love the, the fact that Preet is like, uh, I don't know, Rahm Emanuel's kind of a vindictive deck. I think he could do it. Yeah. He had that name real quick. Right. It was right, right, right at the top. Just off the top of my head. Uh, but it, it did still struck me. Like we're running through all the ways that he is coercing every like liberal progressive or things that he deems liberal progressive. And then you're like, so Democrats could do this. Like, I don't know, man, that seems like, I don't know, like, wouldn't people be mad? It's just like, what? Or have, you met a Democrat? I liked that line. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The Republicans are so unafraid of us turning any of the shit on them, but imagine if they do, the Republicans will be shocked beyond belief, right? No, it will be. How dare you at long last have, you know, decency they will take to, I mean, there is no moral center. Remember Mike Johnson just said we all have to get to the, uh, uh, the root of this. Epstein conspiracy. There has to be full transparency a day later. I'm very, I'm okay with the meanwhile, the DOJ is saying, oh yeah, we're going to, we're going to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell who in their right mind doesn't think that they're just going to go to Ghislaine Maxwell and go, here's what we need you to do to get a pardon. Or here's you like steak. You like lobster. You want to eat it every night. We can't pardon you right now. Cause it would look too fucked up, but we need you to come out and go, they don't even know. They don't even know each other. Yeah. I mean, for Mike Johnson, morality and transparency is telling your son what porn you're watching. It starts there and ends there. Ghislaine's spirit sounds like you could be the vindictive dick we're looking for. Yeah. They never said it couldn't be a she. And that is the democratic twist. They'll never see it coming from a she, a lady vindictive dick. magnificent uh well it was it was i thought it very fun conversation. Brittany, what are the kids, what are the listeners thinking for us this week? All righty. John. I'm sure they were, yes. John. They always start with John. Do they actually use my name in them? John? Sometimes, yes. Oh, all right. This one they did. Mr. S? Senior Stewart? Oh my God. Why do you think Trump isn't suing Elon for tweeting that Trump is in the Epstein files? I cannot for the life of me think why Trump wouldn't sue Elon for Trump is in the Epstein files. Trump is so clearly all over the Epstein files that, I mean- He's trying to get back at him in other ways too, like trying to get a different contractor for their Golden Dome. No, they went in and they were like, we're going to get rid of all those SpaceX contracts. And they went in there like, actually, we can't. There's no one else. No one else that can launch a satellite that, we can't use NASA because we cut their funding to the point where they are a non-functioning organization. We're gutting the very government that would give us options. That's a good point. Right. And who led that charge in some respect? It's almost like the guy that we have to give all our money to. You just blew my mind, young lady. Although Elon has not like, you know, he knows that those contracts are up. Like they, I do think they have a little bit of a China-U.S., like mutually assured destruction. Like I think they know enough about each other. Yeah. But he's been awfully quiet lately. Don't you think? No question. I think. Yeah. But he's still, he's still got his lovely social media platform, which is Mecca-Hitlering all over. People's timelines. So it's, it's still a very positive, net positive for humanity. Really exciting stuff. What else, what else they got? Not starting with John this time. Nice. Given the current state of politics, could a book like Profiles in Courage even be written today? First of all, it could absolutely be written. I think the problem with books is not if they can be written, it's if anybody's going to read them. And I have no idea what Profiles, yeah. I mean, and by the way, I don't know if you've read it. I don't know if you've read it. And to think that Profiles in Courage written by, we have a tendency to lionize and with glossy haze, look back and John F. Kennedy wrote that book. That was not cynical at all. His father had no designs on making the PT captain, the president, like it's all a little, little bit of cynical craftsmanship, all those fucking, those books that people, you know, that's, that's one of the first steps to launching the campaign is the hagiography of all kinds of other, uh, so yeah, it could definitely be written. Let anyone read it. And perhaps turned into a, a hot, uh, prestige series on Hulu. Yeah. All right. Uh, well, this is all, this is all lovely. I, I, I gotta tell you this, this episode has lifted my spirits in ways that this has been a unpleasant week. And, uh, yeah, I really appreciated those silver linings as thin as they were that they offered. No, it, it, it was nice because you do realize with all the power that they have, like we fight, we curse, we laugh, but they still are just like, yeah, I think we're gonna, we're going to pressure them enough to take these people off the air and that person, or we're going to pressure them enough that that person won't ever get a chance to get on air. Like that shit's real. And, and I mean, pre silver lining was like, at least they still feel like they need to have a justification. It's nice to read the memo. Sometimes the, what I've been telling myself is it doesn't come from a place of strength. Oh, I kind of liked that Lauren, by the way, that is true. Yeah. You know, every, uh, dictatorship, those, those movements are not based on how powerful they think they are. It's how fragile they are, you know? Uh, and ultimately they are look, the thing about the United States and that whole rule of law thing is it has a stability to it that allows, uh, our economic progress. And our political progress and our power in the world. And if you erode that stability, you really actually erode the secret sauce of why this country has done so well over all this time. And that's the, the irony of his entire operation. He's, he's making us vulnerable, not great. Um, but a fine, fine episode as always lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mamedovic, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher in a associate producer, Jillian Speer, executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Gray. I can't thank you guys enough. You rocked it. See you next week. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions. 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