How Trump Dismantled the Department of Justice with Carol Leonnig

24:14I hope that's the right word. Because they were dealing with Donald Trump on a daily basis. Remember, three days before January 6th, Donald Trump tried to fire his attorney general and replace him with somebody who was going to block the certification of the election by sending a note to Georgia. That was, you know, this attempted coup on a Sunday night. I'm going to get rid of the new replacement for Bill Barr, Jeff Rosen. I'm going to put in this guy, Jeff Clark. And that Sunday night, half dozen DOJ officials at the highest levels of that department came to the White House to try to beg Donald Trump not to do it.

24:54They succeeded in convincing him. But imagine, like, how do you lead your protest planning when you've just survived that?

25:02Kara Swisher:Right, right. So people who were brave, the officials of the National Archives were sort of unsung heroes in your book, another example of stubborn bravery. They flagged the fake electors' documents as potential election interference even before January 6th, and they kept flagging them despite getting blown off again and again. Why were they dismissed, and who should have been following up on this? This is also a new revelatory detail that's never been reported before, and I am, you know, really glad you noticed it. So Waleska McClellan and her team are investigators at the National Archives. And a lawyer who's an expert in the elector certificates, because the National Archives is responsible for storing these when they come in every four years for presidential election, says to them, hey, I've got like five, now six, now seven certificates that are completely bogus.

25:55They're signed by Republican Party officials, but they claim that Donald Trump is the president. We know that wasn't the result. What's going on? So Waleska McClellan, this investigator for the archives, doesn't usually investigate electoral politics, goes to the Department of Justice prosecutors that she has met and knows in D.C. and says, hey, guys, anybody interested in this? It looks coordinated. All these certificates look the same. There's this funny boilerplate. It's like a kid found them with some sort of app and reproduced them. Yeah, probably they did. Prosecutors on January 8th turn her down and say, we don't know what the crime is here.

26:41Maybe have some states look into it. Have those swing states look into it. And again, it's sort of a little bit like that January 3rd, January 6th moment. Those prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office all of a sudden have a thousand potential rioters in a violent bloodbath on the Capitol to investigate. We can't get to that. That's the least of our worst. They're not looking into some documents that look funny.

27:05Kara Swisher:Yeah. But then President Biden takes office and you make it clear there were prosecutors in the DOJ who wanted to look at potential coordination between Trump's and O 'Circle and the January 6th protesters from the get-go. But there were others who refused to expand their investigations. They're still scared of Trump, despite the fact that he was at the lowest point of his political career. Who was pushing for investigation and who was against that? And what's the crux of both arguments? Like, move along or he can't hurt us again? What's the diff or what? Yeah. Well, in the stubborn bravery category, I'd put a prosecutor in D.C., federal prosecutor named J.P.

27:41Cooney. He used to work in the public integrity section in Maine Justice, and now he's a supervisor over in the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office. By the way, I should say then he was a supervisor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. He was fired by Trump about, I don't know, two weeks in to Trump's second presidency. So Cooney, you know, knows how to investigate, and he sees what everybody sees and what The Post is reporting at the time and that The New York Times is reporting at the time, all this forensic imagery of Roger Stone at the Willard and hanging out with Proud Boys, same with some Ali Alexander Stop the Steal protest organizers.

28:25And what he wants to do and what he proposes to the FBI team that he works with all the time is, let's investigate these people that, yes, they're in Trump's orbit, but they seem to have a link to this violent attack. Were they engaged in starting it? Were they engaged in financing it? And let's figure that out. That would be a normal thing to do. Totally normal. And follow the money also, So, like, classic Assistant U.S. Attorney 101. But it makes the interim team, before Merrick Garland is confirmed, uncomfortable. And it makes the FBI's field office chief in D.C. very uncomfortable. He flags DOJ higher levels and says, I don't like this.

29:10My lieutenants don't like this. It looks like we're going after Trump's campaign. That's political free speech. And, of course, you know what happens. They kill that plan by Cooney. And when Garland is in office and Lisa Monaco is the deputy attorney general, the U.S. attorney's office tries to bring it up again and also gets batted back. Like, that's not the course. By the FBI. Well, by main justice. By Merrick Garland himself.

29:38Kara Swisher:By his team, yes. By his team, including Lisa Monaco. Yes. Because we don't want to stir the pot or what's done is done. He won't be back. Same idea that he won't be back, right? You know, Monaco and Garland haven't told us personally why they weren't into this idea other than over and over again, the people they confided in told us Garland wanted to turn the page. Turn the page. That's right. Yeah. Of course, now Lisa Monaco is getting attacked by Trump. What a surprise. Biden tapped Garland to renew faith in the Department of Justice as independent, as you said, from the executive branch. But it seems like he was almost a deadweight in these.

30:17Kara Swisher:I was reading it and someone said, well, who's the villain? I go, kind of Merrick Garland, you know. But he seemed like almost deadweight in these investigations. You described him as being very methodical, wanting everything to be reviewed and rewritten multiple times. You also were glacial, by all means, move at a glacial pace when it came to investigating Trump. Overall, do you think he helped or hurt the DOJ's image as independent? Does he deserve any of the blame for Donald Trump being in office now? Because it feels like you have focused on him quite a bit in this book as the real problem.

30:50I feel really torn about this as a reporter as opposed to as a human. I used to cover this federal court where he was on the bench and the court below him. He has enormous broad respect among Republicans and Democrats, among a pantheon of judges. I respect his work. I think he was a stunningly good judge down the middle, thought about what he was going to do every time, methodical. What I have heard over and over again from the people who worked for him is that they adored him as a human being. He's a gentle and a very smart person, a gentleman and a very smart person. But they have also said that they do not think he was the right person for this moment.

31:34I wonder who was the right person for the moment, Cara. I really wonder. Because I would not, as a journalist, recommend we bust up precedent. I've covered enough federal prosecutors to know that that's not the route. But the method here made it impossible. We will never know what could have happened. But this made it impossible to get close.

31:57Kara Swisher:Right, right. I mean, I think they probably thought again that he was gone. I thought that's my impression is they thought he was done. And I was like, no, Serratu is getting up again. Like that kind of thing. I kept thinking like, hey, don't like you don't have to say that. I'm saying that. But what was interesting is when you go back to the House Select Committee's investigation of January 6th, the DOJ was dragging his feet. The lawmakers put on a show and the committee's investigation was six months ahead of the DOJ. Usually these House committees are relying on investigations of the DOJ and of the FBI, not the other way around.

32:30Kara Swisher:Talk about how unprecedented this was that Liz Cheney was sort of running the show here and what it said about the state of the DOJ at this point, because they were running circles around. That was a show. That's the kind of thing you were expecting after an attack on the Capitol like that, presumably. Dead on. I mean, I don't like to say villain, but if we're going to say heroes, the investigative team that worked on this, dang, they definitely get that label because they dug in. And I think you know, congressional investigations are often a joke. I mean, they're often like— They can be. Not always.

33:08Yeah, not always. But they often can be a joke where it's not very thorough. It's for political theater. A particular party wants a particular outcome. And in this case, a former U.S. attorney comes in as Liz Cheney and Benny Thompson's investigator, Tim Haifey, from Charlottesville originally. And he brings in a crop of former prosecutors, some corporate lawyers, but mostly just amazing investigators. A little like the Watergate investigation. Yeah, yeah.

33:37Kara Swisher:Like that gang, including Hillary Clinton was in that crew. That's right. Lots of people. That might be the closest comparison, actually. Yeah, that crew was full of people who later either joined the Supreme Court or became great big lawyers, etc., etc. And this investigative team got right to the point. I mean, within days, they were on the fake electors issue, right? And there's one guy who gets hired to lead the team to look at potential interference by Trump and his campaign in the election. and within about five days, he has decided that the fake electors is part of the coordinated plan.

34:12It's part of the conspiracy. And that team ends up, you know, embarrassing the Department of Justice. Nobody at Justice wants to admit that. Nobody in Garland's office, you know, wants to say, oh, we were embarrassed. But we learned that specific things the investigative team for the House did prompted instantaneous action by the Department of Justice. And happy to go into those if you want me to.

34:35Kara Swisher:Yeah, please do. I mean, now they're trying to bring it back, right? They're trying to pretend it didn't happen at this point. Like the rewrite of history, right? Well, the televised hearings is one thing. But in terms of the investigation, January 2022, let's go back there for a second. This committee begins putting together the fake elector plot and figuring out that Rudy Giuliani was kind of arm-twisting Republicans in different swing states to sign on to this. And this news leaks out in January. January 11th, there are a spate of news stories about what this committee is finding. They were a leaky little boat in terms of news things coming out, but whatever.

35:13I think that was primarily not their fault. But anyway, January 2022, on the 14th, Thomas Wyndham, who's the lone prosecutor that the Justice Department has chosen in November of 2021 to start looking around the edges of Trump's world and how they might be connected to the riot. Thomas Wyndham reaches out to that National Archives investigator, Wileska McClellan, and says, hey, I think we're actually going to investigate this. Can we get together and chat? Because at that point, Cara, the FBI is still resisting investigating Trump's campaign and its role in election interference. So Thomas Wyndham only has one investigator to turn to, you know, a little known office in the National Archives.

36:02Right.

36:03Kara Swisher:Now, in the classified documents case, it was, again, the National Archives officials who flagged Trump had taken the boxes with him to Mar-a-Lago and who ultimately made the referral to investigate him. Meanwhile, there's a huge dispute, as you said, between the DOJ and FBI over the raid. They were fearful of being made a scapegoat or they didn't want to get in trouble the way previous, like Andrew McCabe and others were. And from your reporting and others, it seems they were almost an obstruction to the process. you know the archives keeps doing the right thing and doing all the correct referrals hey you might want to go get these boxes the doj drags its feet and the fbi is like yeah well let's hope the chinese spies don't get down to under the pool anytime soon right i mean that's pretty much it right like if i'm the chinese i'm like thrilled with this entire situation and whatever reasons trump had keeping them you can say all kinds of things i think he just wanted to have them that's That would be my guess if I had to pick of all the different things.

37:02Kara Swisher:Right. What is his famous line? These are my documents. These are mine. Like, I can see it. Like, they're mine and I'm going to write a book or whatever the heck. I'm going to make a museum someday or whatever. Right. Theme park. Like when the investigators from the Department of Justice learned that he's waving them around at a table in Bedminster saying. He wants to show them all. Right. Hey, I've got the proof that Mark Milley proposed bombing Iran. Oh, I can't declassify these documents now, but they're really secret. Right. Right. So what is the dynamic here with the archives seeming to be the heroes and the others either feckless or sinister almost?

37:38There were two things that were painful to watch in real time as we're reporting and writing these, I guess, better excavated descriptions of what happened at the time. One of the things that's going on is the classified documents investigators at the Department of Justice think this is a big freaking deal. The FBI agents keep referring to it in the Washington field office as we're not the records police. They think this is about presidential records, right? And the Department of Justice says, no, we think he's still got more classified records. That is the worry. The FBI says you don't have any proof of that.

38:21Well, that all changes on May 18th. The FBI goes down with the Department of Justice lead prosecutor on the case to interview a woman named Molly Michael. And she had been a Trump insider. You know, one of the many very attractive women that work just outside the Oval Office in his first presidency. And in this case, she had gone on to work for him in his post-presidential office at Mar-a-Lago. While they're sitting there in this freezing rented legal office in Lake Worth talking to her, you know, she's loyal to Trump. She's shivering in the air-conditioned cold. But she is not going to lie for him.

38:59And she says, look, there are a lot more boxes of documents, same boxes that we use to pack his stuff. There's a lot more. And then she's got the picture that's worth a thousand words, a picture of 80 to 90 boxes, which tells the FBI and the Justice Department he has so many more records than 15. This still does not persuade the FBI, however. That Washington field office chief, Steve D 'Antuano, is like, we don't know what's in them. Like, why do we have to do this? And to his credit, to his credit, Merrick Garland keeps pushing for a search. Here is a place where he's very firm that there is a reason to be concerned about national security information out in the wind.

39:43Anyway, eventually they get Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, and his deputies to overrule this Washington field office leader and force him to do the search.

39:55Kara Swisher:This field office leader just didn't want what? What's his name again? Steve D 'Antuano. Where is he now? He's retired. And his view is not cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You know, initially, it wasn't crazy to say, how do we know there are classified records? And indeed, you know, there was worry early on. Maybe he has a lot of records, but it's a bunch of junk. The only problem was the National Archives knew things were still missing, right? They knew things were still missing. Well, the Archives knows that. He's like every FBI director that gets run over by Bruce Willis in a movie and is wrong. like profoundly wrong and then loses his access to the jet.

40:38Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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43:26Kara Swisher:When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GEICO app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to Geico. So after all of Garland's fastidiousness to ensure the investigation didn't appear to be political, which he was very fastidious to do, he ended up putting one man, Jack Smith, in charge of special counsel for both investigations.

44:09Kara Swisher:Even people in the department said it made it look like an anti-Trump investigation. Analysts like Ellie Honig said Smith didn't have a chance because he didn't have enough time. Should there have been two special counsels? And I just talked to Ellie about that. What impact did that have, for better or worse, on the investigations? You know, I have never seen a prosecutor on a complex drug case bring an indictment as fast as Jack Smith did. So I don't know that appointing two would have changed that. I think he was up against a horrendous clock when he's beginning to look at these, you know, a fledgling election interference case, which Merrick Garland froze for two months before the election in a way that kind of disturbed a few prosecutors because Donald Trump wasn't on the ballot.

45:04But Merrick Garland wanted to be very conservative and recognize that he was leading Republican. So he froze the investigation right before the midterm elections. So Jack Smith, what does he have? He has a very early premature election interference case, and he has a pretty well-baked classified documents case in terms of evidence when he takes over in November of 2022. It's a sprint, though, because what is he doing? He's got six months, seven months, eight months to bring a case, and there are already primary battles that are being formed. There is a very active election campaign going on in the middle of all this, and that helps enable and propel Trump because it fits beautifully into his narrative, which is they're prosecuting me now intentionally to hurt my campaign.

45:56Right.

45:57Kara Swisher:So Smith led to two indictments of Donald Trump, but he also flubbed key decisions. This one I read this was just, of course, it was obvious, but when he decided to bring the classified documents case to Florida, where he got Trump appointed Judge Eileen Cannon. Now, it was sort of a luck of the draw kind of thing. And they thought we can't possibly get her, but they did. And they thought it was a real miscalculation not to bring the case in D.C., correct? What was the thinking? Like, if there's any chance of getting her, like the doormat of all judges for Trump, why even take that very slim chance?

46:33So Smith's team had a legal analysis done of where is it the fairest and the most appropriate to bring the case. And their conclusion was simply Florida, because some of the withholding classified records evidence was the strongest and the case was stronger in Florida. But that doesn't mean you couldn't bring it in D.C. And it's easy in hindsight for us all to say, why didn't you bring it in D.C.? But I'm saying it. It's easy to do, and I'm saying it because I didn't know until we began reporting this book that two critical things happened. One, his team had some dissension about this. You know, a prosecutor with a ton of national security experience from the Southern District of New York basically said, you all are effing insane to go to Florida.

47:22That's an existential threat to the case, just as you have outlined, Kara. An existential threat, if you get canon, it's over. D.C. judges, no classified records cases. We have a— I mean, say nothing of her doormat. She seems incompetent, but go ahead. Right. So there's that dissension, which we didn't know about. Nobody knew about until we began this reporting. And then the second thing we didn't know about was Smith's office had done a calculation. There's a thing called the wheel in every courthouse. Who are you going to get on the wheel, the judge's wheel? And on the wheel, they had figured out that it was a one in six chance of getting Cannon.

47:58A little later, after they've already pretty much made the decision, but not begun presenting evidence to the grand jury in Florida, they find out it's a one in three chance. Well, that's pretty existential because you know where Cannon is coming from. She handled the original grand jury search issues and she leaned heavy for Trump and against all case law.

48:24Kara Swisher:Yep. I mean, you know, honestly, and a lucky son of a bitch like Donald Trump, who seems to get every turn his way. I would. But was there any way to stop? That was Jack Smith's decision, correct? Fatal. And that's why he is where he is now. Jack Smith's decision, he presented it to Merrick Garland, who wanted to vet that, wanted that checked out. But they both concluded, okay, if you think that's where the law favors it, that's fine. He wasn't going to tell Jack Smith, you can't do that, because the legal analysis suggested it. I remember a couple people telling us that in the presentation, when asked, like, what about Cannon, David Newman, who was a national security prosecutor for the Department of Justice, and in the meeting where Jack Smith's making his presentation for how we're going to indict him, where we're going to do it, and Newman says, your biggest risk is Cannon.

49:16You get her and the case is over. What about that? And Smith's response was, I'm not worried about Florida. You know, like the facts are on my side. Once again, a Justice Department institutionalist saying, you know, this is the way it works and we're going to be okay. Right.

49:32Kara Swisher:Now he knows. Of course, the last straw was on the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity in response to the election interference case. The judges overturned decades of precedent. Supreme Court had been dragging its feet and Justice Roberts signaled the way the wind was blowing. Was there anything that Smith could have done differently knowing that immunity ruling was a real possibility? I can't see another path. The only thing that could have helped Jack Smith is if he had been able to start sooner. You know, I think it's important to underline here. It's possible the immunity decision would have forestalled ever bringing that election interference case in our lifetimes.

50:10times. No matter if Merrick Garland had authorized it on day one in March when he was confirmed, or his interim had confirmed it on January 21st, there's no way to know. But the classified documents case was a slam dunk. And that's where he didn't have the same kind of presidential immunity claim.

50:29Kara Swisher:So here we are back in gutter politics, even before President Trump returned to the White House, he had vowed to go after his political enemies. He's using the Department of Justice via Pam Bondi to do that. Obviously, there were recent indictments of James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton. But all year, there's been a purge going on at the DOJ. Hundreds of employees have been fired, including all the prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases. Many others have quit in protest. And Bondi has said the DOJ works at the directive of Donald Trump. She's not even pretending. These are just a few touch points of all the things Trump has done at the DOJ, the internal pressure campaigns, attacking his enemies.

51:04Kara Swisher:Every week, something happens and letting his friends off the hook. What do you think is the most lasting damage on the DOJ? Like, what's the impact over the long term? A two-part answer. As a reporter, not as a person, this makes me really sad. I have covered prosecutors, court cases, congressional investigations that stemmed from DOJ work since I was 30 years old. I don't know how this institution is going to recover. And the people who work there and are trying to hold it together, even though they're disgusted by what's happening around them, they tell me the damage is hard to recover from in a generation or two.

51:53Not only have you taken away centuries worth of expertise by getting rid of the entire public integrity section, by getting rid of some of the most senior representatives at the Department of Justice for fighting counterterror. In one fell swoop, Donald Trump and his deputies got rid of everyone at the leadership level of the FBI who know how to oversee complex conspiracies, who understand how to investigate a mass casualty event, who are leaders who've grown up for 20 plus years, that that's like impossible to replace. The second part is, and you hinted at it, Cara, when Pam Bondi's gone and there's a Democratic president and a Democratic appointee, how are they now supposed to operate?

52:43They're not going to take the Merrick Garland playbook, but what are they supposed to do to affirm trust in this, you know, very noble institution? Are they supposed to have a purge of Republicans who've been appointed? And when will Americans believe, again, regardless of what side you're on, right, politically, ideologically, when will Americans again believe that criminal charges are justified, not the bidding of the president, right? Right, right. Because he's already, as you said, they're not even embarrassed about it. Donald Trump told Pam Bondi who to indict. Yeah.

53:22Kara Swisher:So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, my name is Jonathan Cantor. I was assistant attorney general for antitrust at the DOJ from 2021 to 2024. We can all agree that Donald Trump has obliterated the norms that stood as the foundation for the Justice Department since the Watergate era. My question is about what happens next? If and when the country decides that it's ready to rebuild the DOJ, how does it do it? Does it go back to the norms that seemed fit for a purpose in the Watergate era? Or do we reimagine the Justice Department for a new era, post-Donald Trump, and a new political environment where the Justice Department needs to move more quickly, more decisively, and with greater independence?

54:05Kara Swisher:There's the perfect question. And include the FBI in that. The only thing I can envision, and I've talked to a lot of people who are DOJ and FBI alums about this, they are envisioning something the same, is that there's going to be a post-Watergate-like moment and a post-Trump moment in which people realize that the trust is so important in this institution, that it's so critical to the principles of the founders about fair and equal justice, and that we need to trust that, that there's going to be some incredible, impermeable line in between the White House and the department and the FBI. You know, in the end of the first Trump presidency, we had sources telling us that Chris Wray had been warned over and over again by Bill Barr, I am protecting you from Donald Trump firing you.

54:56He wants to fire you because you haven't indicted, investigated, swooped up this person. And Chris Wray was in a little bit of a defensive crouch, right? There's got to be a world in which the FBI director and the attorney general can be impervious from a president who's willing to break the founder's promise.

55:20Kara Swisher:So speaking of that, in a recent op-ed, you explain all the things that happen in the country without a real Justice Department. At the end, you write, finally, without a real Justice Department, a president holding the reins of a corrupted institution can remain president permanently, free to manipulate election results with no real threat of being dethroned. You're using, obviously, a King reference. Is that where you think it's heading? I'm not trying to be suspenseful, but there's some really active reporting on this that I don't want to get into. Well, you're being suspenseful then, but go ahead.

55:52I think that there are reasons that people are quite worried about a permanent non-dethroning. And I think I should stop there.

56:03Kara Swisher:Meaning, and he's mentioned it himself, people want me to stay. And obviously Bannon has mentioned it. There's lots of people who... Sure. There are people mentioning it, but what's important? It's important how it could be possible. And I think the how it could be possible is where I have my eye. Okay. And can you give an idea that it is possible, then therefore it is possible if you're looking at it? I mean, it's possible to indict a ham sandwich. We never expected we would be indicting, you know, Letitia James for mortgage fraud based on documents that show she repeatedly said, this is not my primary residence.

56:42We never expected somebody who would be indicted for that. except for a president demanded it, fired everybody who resisted it, installed somebody who would do it. And we never expect that an election can be rigged or manipulated. We never expect that machine... Well, I expected that one, but go ahead. That one I expected. It's the how, Kara. It's the how. And I promise when we know the how and what the details are, we'll be back with you.

57:11Kara Swisher:Will they continue with these ridiculous prosecutions? Because in this case, it's a joke. I mean, he thinks himself his prosecutions were a joke, but these are an actual joke. You know, as you said, with those documents, would Hillary Clinton be in his sights? Would others that he's talked about? Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, the list goes on and on. You know, I have seen internal documents about meetings that involve these subjects and where they want to go with these investigations. There have been discussions about Chris Wray and his deputies and his other leaders for allegedly withholding documents or destroying them.

57:50No evidence to back that up. there are a lot of people on Donald Trump's target list.

57:56Kara Swisher:Very last question. When you look at all this, I mean, you've been covering institutions forever, right? When you look at all this, when you started covering this, did you ever imagine this much shift? Because I think one of the things that goes through this book is, you know, every time Donald Trump does someone, I have some liberal go, can you believe it? I'm like, yes, yes, he's done it 10 times if I can believe it. And they're like, can you believe it? I'm like, yes, again. Can you believe it as a reporter watching this happen? We put down the pen on this book, Injustice, in mid-April, first couple weeks of April of this year.

58:36And I would never have imagined some of the things that have happened. I'll tell you, the sources we talked to warned us that it was possible. They were definitely in your camp. They They were like, it's coming. You just wait. I remember sitting with a source high up in the Justice Department who said, this place is going to get shredded. And I thought it was scary sounding, close to possible. But it's all happening months after we put the pen down in such horrific fashion. And the idea that U.S. attorneys' offices are being ordered to indict specific people without a public interest and without facts, I'll just quote John Keller, former head of the public integrity section, who said when I called him, and by the way, he never talks to the press, but now he was forced out after he refused to get rid of New York Mayor Eric Adams' bribery case, refused to dismiss it.

59:45miss it, because he knew the evidence was very strong, wasn't going to do that political errand. And he said, charging people without factual basis, based on a politician's wish, this is the hallmark, you know, of a dictatorship. And he's totally right. And I never would have thought that I was quoting someone as saying that when we put the pen down to injustice. We were warned by our sources that this was coming. But even some of them, I don't think they knew it would be this bad. Yeah, that's absolutely true. But thank you. Thank you for such a thoughtful conversation, Cara.

1:00:43Kara Swisher:Kwan and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you are stubbornly brave. If not, you get Judge Eileen Cannon and good luck with that incompetent jurist. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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