Trump and the DOJ

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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, keeping the seat warm for Brian today. Shanah Tovah to all of our Jewish listeners. To our Mets fans out there listening today, you got to believe. Watch out, Phillies, the Amazin's are coming for you.

Coming up on today's Show, Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez will join us. He’ll talk about the work his office is doing on wrongful convictions and public safety in the borough where shootings have fallen to some of the lowest levels in recent history. Later in the show, one of my guests will be journalist Sarah Smarsh. We'll talk about her new collection of essays called Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

We'll wrap todays show with your stories of canvassing or door-knocking for a political campaign. Are you planning to head to Pennsylvania or another battleground district or state this weekend,or have you already done it recently? We want to hear your experiences. That’s going to be at about 11:40 this morning, so get ready to call in with those stories.

First, as we creep closer to election day, there’s been an increasing focus on what a second administration of former President Donald Trump might look like. He has said openly that he plans to seek a retribution against individuals he feels have wronged him. On Truth Social just last month, he wrote, "When I win, those people that cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences." What could he really do?

Emily Bazelon surveyed 50 legal experts and offers an expansive look at their concerns. It's in an article in this Sunday's New York Times magazine headlined Why Legal Experts Are Worried About a Second Trump Presidency. Joining me now to discuss that piece is Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School, and more. Emily, welcome back to the show. Always great to hear from you.

Emily Bazelon: Thanks so much for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Emily. We've really heard an escalation in the rhetoric from Trump in this campaign when it comes to using the tools of the Justice Department against rivals. He's threatened to prosecute President Biden and his family, Vice President Kamala Harris over border policy, Nancy Pelosi for her husband's stock trades. The list goes on. Based on your incredibly extensive reporting, it seems like you think those threats should be taken pretty seriously, right?

Emily Bazelon: Yes. When we started working on this piece, which I wrote with my colleague Mattathias Schwartz, we decided that the people who knew best how seriously to take Trump's threats of criminal prosecutions for politically motivated reasons, that the people who knew best would be people who had worked in the Justice Department, worked in the White House counsel's office. We were also interested in former judges, retired judges.

We designed a short survey, and we spent the summer buttonholing people to take the survey. Important people don't really want to take a survey [chuckles], so we had to call a lot of them. We really wanted a bipartisan array of people. We worked hard to get Democrats and Republicans equally represented.

What we found was, like, most people are pretty freaked out by these threats. They see Trump as really determined to undermine the independence of the Justice Department and really change how the country has viewed the rule of law and the power of the president with regard to political prosecutions that we've had since Watergate. President Nixon got in a lot of trouble for meddling in FBI investigations. Since then, presidents have taken pains to distance themselves from that issue, except for former President Trump.

Brigid Bergin: You wrote in the piece that there's this tension in our system, which Trump is forcing the country to confront, in part because the Justice Department sits inside the executive branch. Can you talk about, as you started to there, what some of the norms are that have held that system in check dating back to President Nixon and Watergate?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, sure. We've had the Justice Department since 1870, and the idea is that there's going to be federal law enforcement branch that's going to be very powerful, the FBI, all of the US attorneys around the country, this big office called Main Justice in Washington. All those people, in the end, answer to the president because they sit in the executive branch.

That's the tension. How do you have even-handed enforcement of criminal laws and also accountability since we elect the president,and at the same time protect law enforcement from political meddling by someone who wanted to use the power of the FBI, for example, to go after his or her enemies.

After Nixon really breaks this understanding, the Justice Department comes up with these internal rules. The rules put a lot of safeguards around communication between the White House and the staff of the president and lawyers in the Justice Department. There are only particular people at a high level who are allowed to talk to each other. The idea is that those rules are going to prevent the president from issuing orders to any sympathetic US attorney who wants to do his bidding. do some, like, partisan political prosecution.

Because presidents have really, I think, been pretty painstaking in how they have thought about these rules and wanting to be really careful, to be hands off, we've had a pretty good tradition since Watergate of a separation here. Except, again, as I was saying, for former President Trump, who in his first term gave some orders to prosecute people, was somewhat thwarted because people like his White House counsel at the time, Don McGahn, refused to go along. Then the question is, okay, if Trump is reelected, given all these threats he's making, very explicitly about prosecuting all kinds of people, will those same safeguards hold again?

Brigid Bergin: To some people, it's probably fairly clear, but it's important, I think, to make this distinction. We know that Trump is under multiple state and federal investigations, all of which he considers politically motivated. I list off there in the beginning, and you write about in the piece the types of cases, the types of prosecutions that he has threatened to pursue. What's the difference between these cases that are currently being prosecuted against him and the types of prosecutions he's said he'll pursue?

Emily Bazelon: I'm so glad you raised that. It's something we tried to address high up in our article because it's really important. Trump says this all the time, that he is the one who is the victim of a witch hunt, of what he calls politicized persecution because the Biden administration's Justice Department has indeed brought criminal charges against him.

Now, the distinction that I think is important to make here is that President Biden has tried very hard to distance himself. He says he has played no role in these prosecutions of Trump. As far as we know, that's true. No evidence has emerged that Biden has gotten into the middle of this.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who is, of course, a Biden appointee, he also has tried to distance himself. He chose Jack Smith as the special counsel to investigate former President Trump and made it really clear that he was giving Smith authority over all the day-to-day decisions that Smith was going to make and that Garland was going to stay out of it.

I think another thing that's important here is that Merrick Garland also appointed special prosecutors to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, and to investigate Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents. I think Garland has tried to demonstrate that he is being apolitical and even-handed in how he appoints special prosecutors.

I will tell you, from lots of feedback I got when this piece published yesterday, that many Trump supporters just don't believe it. They just don't think there is a distinction here. One point I wanted to make in the piece is that I think you can argue that maybe the most damaging thing that Trump has done to the rule of law and the public confidence in the Justice Department is to take acts that appeared so reckless to the prosecutors that they had to indict him, even though it really does create this appearance problem that has really undermined his supporters' confidence in the Justice Department.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we want to bring you into this conversation. What are some of your questions or concerns about a second Trump term and how he might use the power of the FBI and the Justice Department, or do you have questions about how he would go about doing it and what it might mean for the current cases against him for my guest, Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can call or text at that number.

Emily, for our listeners who have not seen the piece yet, I just want to stress that the reporting here is really expansive. The number of people you reached out to, you started talking about the types of people, but can you talk a little bit more about how many people you reached out to the importance of making that outreach bipartisan, and then we'll talk about some of the findings?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, sure. Matt and I started out the summer, we made a list of all the living attorneys general and White House counsels. We reached out to all of them. This goes back to Ronald Reagan's presidency. We heard from some of them, but not like a huge number. Then we started reaching out to all the deputy attorneys general or as many of them as we could find, and the assistant attorneys general. Again, we got some response. We went down the list. We started sending emails out to lots and lots of former US attorneys. Luckily for us, there are 93 US attorneys at any moment. That's a longer list.

Brigid Bergin: [crosstalk]

Emily Bazelon: Exactly. We found a few people to help us and vouch for us along the way. Matt sent notes or called most of the former Trump US attorneys. We were thinking particularly about former Trump officials. It was word of mouth. As we started to get people on the phone or get people to do the survey, they would recommend other people. In that way, we spread out our queries. In the end, we decided we probably got in touch with around 160 people.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Emily Bazelon: Then we decided we wanted a few former judges and a few nonpartisan career attorneys from the Justice Department to just give us a sense of whether the political appointees would have views that lined up with people in the judiciary and then the career prosecutors.

Brigid Bergin: Ultimately, you had 50 people who actually completed this survey. As you said already, the overall findings suggest that these legal experts across both parties are pretty freaked out. One of the top findings that stood out, 42 of the 50 former officials said it was very likely or likely a second Trump term would pose a significant threat to the norm of keeping criminal enforcement free of White House influence. You've talked a little bit about, the history of that, but what was your impression of that finding and how many people were concerned about it?

Emily Bazelon: I have to say, I was surprised. I just didn't know what to think, honestly. You go into reporting like this and you talk to people on the phone and some people say, "Oh, my God, this is really a dire threat. All I'm doing is taking Trump at his word and looking at his first-term record. This is serious." Then other people say, like, "Oh, you know what? It's all going to be fine. Nothing to see here."

Then when you start having a survey and, 50 people and you see that really almost everyone is on the side of being quite alarmed, it just creates a different impression. I was really interested that that 42 out of 50 figure included so many Republicans.

We didn't ask people to put their names on the survey. There were people we asked for permission to quote by name in the piece. Most people who took the survey did it anonymously. It was interesting to me to see if people can just tell you what they think behind closed doors. How many Republicans, and frankly, some people, not everyone by any means, but some people who worked in the Trump Justice Department, they're quite concerned.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring some of our callers in. Let's go to Frank in East Islip, New York. Frank, thanks for calling.

Frank: Hi. My concern about the second Trump administration, if it happens, is that he no longer sees himself as just like a steward of the executive branch. He sees himself as basically the be-all and end-all of every agency within the branch. I mean, you're talking about the Justice Department, but he also said things about the EPA and the Defense Department, everything that is under the executive branch. I was just curious to know what your guest thought of the increased power of the presidency over the entire executive branch, as if he would just be an expert on almost everything by a dictum. I just was curious about what your guests had to say about that.

Brigid Bergin: Frank, thanks so much for that call. Emily, any reaction to Frank's question?

Emily Bazelon: Frank, I know exactly what you mean. I think that Trump has been presenting himself this way. There is a theory in the conservative legal movement called unitary executive theory that supports this notion that everything goes back to the president, that the framers with Article One set up the president, and the executive branch reports to him and flows through him.

He's like, I don't know what to say, the supreme leader in a way that's different from how the current executive branch, the modern 20th and 21st-century federal agencies operate, where you have all these experts who are making rules and deciding how regulations are going to work after Congress passes laws. I think you're right.

One of the things we talked about when we started working on this piece is, was the Justice Department the right place to focus. We decided it was. We wanted to drill down on something relatively specific. As I mentioned in the piece, other parts of policy world have been trying to define what a Trump presidency would look like more broadly. The Brennan Center for Justice, which is at NYU, ran tabletop exercises over the country with 175 experts. They posed broader kinds of scenarios, like what would happen if Trump used the military and ordered troops into the streets, those kinds of things that more broadly telescope out into other parts to the federal government.

Brigid Bergin: Whew. Well, I'm going to bring in another caller who has a question specific to Trump's power over the Department of Justice, which you cover extensively in this piece. Amy from Manhattan, welcome to WNYC. I know you have a question for Emily about the president's power over the Department of Justice.

Amy: Yes, or any department in the cabinet I don't think I'd ever heard before about a president ordering a department or, the head of the department to do anything specific to investigate or bring charges against someone. Is that a power granted in the constitution, or has it been done before?

Brigid Bergin: Amy, thanks for your call. Emily, I think basically it boils down to, can he actually do that?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, he can actually do it. It's one of those things where it sounds unheard of, and it has been unheard of since Nixon. That doesn't mean the president doesn't formally have the power to do it. You might remember that in addition to meddling with the FBI investigation of the burglary into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, Nixon also talked about sticking the IRS on people, on his enemies as a way of taking revenge on them. If you go back far enough, there are those historical precedents.

Because the attorney general works for the president, the president can hire and fire that person, and the attorney general commands the Justice Department, it's really about the self-restraint of the president that we don't have these politically ordered prosecutions. The president has to decide to be his or her own check. No other part of the system can really enforce that. Congress can impeach someone, but that is not a remedy that happens as something is occurring. It's afterward.

The Supreme Court, over the summer, issued this very broad decision granting presidents immunity, former presidents, for their official acts in office. That matters because the court very explicitly said that the president has control and can order the Justice Department to do things. The court also told the Jack Smith prosecution, you have to take out of your indictment of Trump, these acts you've alleged where Trump was trying to ask the Justice Department to investigate the election results in 2020.

The Supreme Court said it doesn't matter why Trump was doing that. It doesn't matter if he had the bad motive of trying to subvert the democracy and remain in office by using the Justice Department to do that. He cannot be criminally prosecuted for having abused his authority in that way in office. Even if those allegations are true, you have to take them out of the indictment. That's like an explicit affirmation of this president that this power the president has. It all just goes back to the basic idea that it really matters who holds that office.

Brigid Bergin: I just want to note that before we let you go, we're going to get to the latest brief that Special Counsel Jack Smith that was unsealed this week in some of what he's suggesting and the tension with that very Supreme Court ruling. I want to get back to your survey for a bit.

One point to underscore the question that Amy just asked in terms of could Trump order the justice department to do an investigation, you found in your survey, 39 of the 50 people surveyed said it was likely or very likely that Trump, if elected, would order the Justice Department to investigate a political adversary, which is a very large number and is quite damning. I want to note that you also acknowledge that not everyone you surveyed was really on board with this approach. Can you talk about some of the pushback you got?

Emily Bazelon: Yes. I would say a handful of people said to us, this survey is totally biased. You are really focusing here on the threat that Trump poses to the Justice Department. That's unfair because, in their view, his record in his first term is actually better than the Biden administration's record because these people are arguing that the prosecutions of Trump are really a problem.

Very few people who took the survey said that the attorney general, Merrick Garland, should not have appointed a special prosecutor investigate. Almost everyone was on board for that move, but they had a lot of issues, this minority of respondents, with how that prosecution has been conducted. People said to us, Jack Smith was rushing this case. He was trying to get the courts to decide it in time for Trump to go to trial before the election. That, in itself, is a problem because it's trying to affect the election results with a criminal prosecution.

Other people said Jack Smith should not have charged Trump with this very broad theory that hasn't been used before in this particular setting, in the way that the government was using it for the January 6 rioting and violence at the Capitol and Trump's role. That was a perspective that was important to us to include that some people felt that our very assumptions with our survey were biased against former President Trump.

Brigid Bergin: We need to take a short break. When we come back, more on how a second Trump term might carry out some of these cases, and your calls with my guest Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast. Stick around.

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Brigid Bergin: Good morning again. This is the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Brigid Bergin, filling in for Brian today. My guest is Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. We're talking about her recent article headlined Why Legal Experts Are Worried About a Second Trump Presidency.

Emily, we've talked about how experts are concerned about these, this potential for politically motivated prosecutions, but your piece also lays out how you see it unfolding. I should note, again, for listeners who haven't seen it yet, not only is there this expansive magazine article, but there's this great digital component that also takes you through the six steps that would allow a President Trump administration to pursue these political prosecutions. Let's talk about those steps, Emily. It starts with appointing loyalists. Are there certain names that you're watching at this point?

Emily Bazelon: Yes. Some of the architects of Project 2025, which is the blueprint for the next Republican administration that the Heritage Organization has led, some of those folks have been putting themselves forward as potential appointees. Kash Patel is someone who was in the first Trump administration who's in this category. Jeffrey Clark, who was in the Justice Department, and Russ Vought, who was the head of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget for the first Trump administration, they are people whose names have come up in this context.

I think one key point here is that former President Trump has been very clear that he was disappointed and very frustrated by officials who thwarted him, who stood in his way when he was trying to do things like order prosecutions. He has called them traitors and snakes. That suggests that he will have different kinds of people around him the second time through.

Brigid Bergin: The next step in this process is to open investigations or to influence them. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Emily Bazelon: Yes. The president can order someone, the attorney general, to investigate. That attorney general could hand-pick a special task force of lawyers and FBI agents to actually do this job. The person in charge of the investigation could be a special prosecutor. We were talking about Jack Smith. This is like a pretty normal thing. It's standard to have a task force with a special prosecutor or someone high up in the criminal division at the Justice Department or a US attorney who would be in charge. What's not standard is to do it for politically motivated reasons.

Presumably, you would start with a set of allegations where there might be, there's like a little bit of smoke and there might be some fire, and then the task force would proceed from there. There are a bunch of examples from the first Trump term of those kinds of investigations that seemed like there might be something there, and then there was an order, something influenced, high up in the Justice Department that made those investigations go forward in a way that was very damaging for the targets.

Brigid Bergin: The next step in how you lay it out is to route cases to favorable judges. Before I have you talk about that, Emily, I want to bring in a caller, Duane, in Whippany, New Jersey. Duane, thanks for calling. I think this goes to the point that you wanted to talk about in terms of your concerns about the next administration.

Duane: Yes. Thank you for that marvelous segue. It seems to me that what's being discussed right now, we are seeing it already playing out. Eileen Cannon and Florida federal judge talk about a loyalist, or at least that's certainly how it feels, doesn't it? She has dismissed the Mar-a-Lago secure secret documents case based on what really seems like a pretty blatant, unilateral decision that special counsels are illegal, they're against the law.

We've been using them certainly since Watergate. I don't know what the history on it is, but we are already witnessing this, this influence, the sense of loyalty, but it's already playing out. What a shame, because there are federal judges who have already publicly pronounced that she can't do that. She's wrong, but here we are. What's going on with this case?

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much for that call, Duane. Emily, he builds on the point that you have right in the piece. Any reaction to that?

Emily Bazelon: Yes. We did take note of Judge Cannon's ruling. Your caller was talking about how in the case about how Trump mishandled classified documents by taking them to Mar-a-Lago and refusing to return them, Judge Cannon found that the appointment of Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, was unconstitutional.

Your caller's right. We've had special prosecutors for a long time. They actually go back to the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, I learned in working on this piece. Over the decades, many courts have said that this is constitutional, including the Supreme Court in the case involving Nixon and special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. It was quite surprising that Judge Cannon made the finding she did. We'll have to see if she is reversed by the federal appeals court that now has that part of the case before it.

We did want to acknowledge that there's some funky things going on among at least a few of the Trump appointees. If they were in charge of one of these cases, that could affect the outcome of the case.

Brigid Bergin: That moves to the next step in this process. You lay out, which is appealing adverse rulings eventually to the Supreme Court. That is a court that we have seen Trump appointees rule in favor of Trump positions in the past. How concerning is that to you?

Emily Bazelon: This is so hard for me. I went to law school [chuckles], was trained to see the judiciary as an independent check on the power of the other branches of government. I want to believe in its independence. I think that the vast majority of federal judges do their very best to not decide cases based on partisan political considerations. I really believe that. However, it doesn't take very many exceptions to change the whole picture, especially if you're talking about the Supreme Court.

The immunity decision we were discussing earlier that the court issued in July was really surprising, I think, to most observers of the Supreme Court. It seemed, going into that case that, of course, the former president couldn't have absolute immunity for all or most of his or her official acts in office because that would just be really bad for the democracy to have a president who is above the law in what he or she does in office. Yet that was essentially the conclusion that the court came to.

That has changed my thinking, at least about what to expect from the court. There obviously have been other decisions in the past, like Bush versus Gore, that seem to have partisan overtones. This immunity decision, because it projects forward in a way that creates a lot of uncertainty and potential instability, has really, I think, affected the democracy into the future.

Brigid Bergin: The final step in this process that you lay out deploying the pardon power, something we saw former President Trump do in his first term already with Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, that is also a huge use of executive power and could have real implications on some of the ongoing cases that are being prosecuted at this time related to January 6 and other things. Is that right?

Emily Bazelon: Absolutely. On the campaign trail this year, Trump has talked about pardoning perhaps everyone who has been prosecuted for participating in the violence of the Capitol on January 6. That would be an enormous change from the law enforcement efforts that we've seen thus far.

I think it's also important, again, to go back to the Supreme Court decision because the court granted the president absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, and that includes issuing pardons. That means that if Trump was seen as having misused his pardon power, the only remedy would be for Congress to impeach and convict the president. That's it.

Again, this is just a shift in the assumptions that have gone into all of our thinking about the power of the presidency. It creates this, again, risk of the president viewing himself as above the rule of law.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to Cedric in Quinton, Maryland. Cedric, thanks for listening. Thanks for calling.

Cedric: Yes, I have just a quick question. If President Trump was reelected, would he have the ability to order the CIA to conduct surveillance over people that he deemed a threat to his administration?

Emily Bazelon: I think the answer is yes now, which [chuckles] I don't like giving that answer. One would still hope there would be norms in place that would allow the CIA director and CIA agents to figure out how to swart or stonewall or in some way block an order like that. In her dissent from the immunity ruling in July, Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a bunch of hypotheticals that are along these lines.

The majority, by opinion, by Chief Justice John Roberts, they did not come back and say, like, oh, no, you're wrong. Don't worry about any of this. She was talking about things like ordering the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political rival. I think there is a way in which, formally speaking, it does seem like the president has that kind of power because the CIA is a good example of the power that is in the zone of exclusive presidential authority, not something that Congress really gets to legislate about.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to Dana in Montclair, who has a question about, I think, some of the guardrails that could potentially be applied to this.

Dana: Yes. Thank you. That is the thing that I am most concerned about, is that you mentioned norms. What we've learned over the last eight years is that essentially the president is being kept at bay from going to these extremes by norms that are, that apparently our constitution, our laws don't prevent him or her from going to these extremes. We're most concerned right now about Trump because he has clearly stated that he is willing to do this. What do we do in general about the fact that our president has these unlimited executive powers?

Brigid Bergin: Dana, thanks for that question. Emily, maybe I'll build on it just to say, is this an issue that candidates in down-ballot issue races should be raising? Are there checks that Congress could try and implement to rein in some of this executive authority?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, that's a great question. Congress could try to pass legislation that would put into statute the kinds of rules that we were talking about earlier that limit communication between the White House and the Justice Department. I'm not sure the Supreme Court would say that Congress has that power, frankly, and it would be up to the Supreme Court to adjudicate if someone challenged it. I don't want to be overly confident about that route, but it's possible. Congress could try and that could, again, shift things.

Sometimes when Congress pushes back, even if they lose in court, it just changes how the other branches are responding, like Congress is asserting itself. I think the other thing that's important to say here is when we surveyed our former officials about this, this question of whether the norms would hold, whether career prosecutors and FBI agents would succeed in resisting a clearly abusive order, people were more split on that. We got 27 of 50 saying it was very likely or likely that prosecutors would follow orders and pursue the case. 13 said it was possible. Nine said it was unlikely or very unlikely. There was more dissent on this question.

I think there were some people we interviewed who've had very high-up positions in the government who said, look, these norms, there's such a strong sense of ethics within the department. People would figure out a way to not participate even if they had to resign or they would leak to the media or they would blow the whistle to Congress.

I can argue this either way because I think that's a hard thing to ask of people who are, lower level, like you're going to resist orders from your superior. I think it's also possible I can see a plausible path to that. It's all just like a matter of conjecture about what would happen in the future.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring in one more caller. Excuse me. Let's go to David in Englewood, New Jersey, who I think has a different take on the political nature of some of the current prosecutions. David, thanks for calling WNYC.

David: Yes, I just want to say that thank you for having me on because I'm sorry, but I think our guest, even though she's a lawyer, I think she's living in the liberal bubble. I just want to make three quick points. First, Jack Smith is running a political agenda. There is no reason he could not have filed these new charges after November 5th. He wants to try to persuade voters not to vote against Trump and it's very clear.

You talk about the judge in Florida throwing out the case. Well, what about all the times that Biden-- You never talk about the Democrats having stretched the law. Biden has been thrown out of court, I mean, ruled illegally with the student loan forgiveness. It's not really forgiveness because the rest of us taxpayers would have to pay for it again and again and again. Yet you never bring that up.

Justice Jackson refused to define what a woman was. You say nothing about that. She's not partisan. She's selling her book. You look at where she's gone to promote her book. It's been nothing but super far-left places.

Brigid Bergin: David, thank you. You have a very strong perspective. Emily, I obviously want to give you a chance to respond to that.

Emily Bazelon: Well, I'm glad that you took that call because that is a perspective I hear a lot. I think it's important to air it and think about it in all of the different points your caller is making and to consider why the Jack Smith prosecutions might be different than Trump threatening to order prosecutions himself, and about these questions of timing, like, what do we think about that?

Jack Smith's in this position where he gets this adverse ruling from the Supreme Court in July. He has to go in and rewrite his indictment. Should he wait until after election day to refile the indictment? That's a legitimate question. I'm not sure that his refiling this indictment actually hurts President Trump with voters. Trump supporters see him as persecuted. There's a way in which this case can also play in Trump's favor with his supporters. I'm just not really sure if it has that effect. I understand why someone would feel like it has potential consequences for the election.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we're going to have to leave it there for today. My guest has been Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest. Emily, thank you so much for joining me today.

Emily Bazelon: Thanks so much for having me.

 

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