Trump Loses At Supreme Court Again

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1:20We begin, though, with the Supreme Court, because that's more than what the government is saying or what the DOJ is struggling with. This is real action, and it is another loss for Trump. The court today declined for the second time to even hear Trump's bid to try to overturn his losing verdict, which determined that he was civilly liable for sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll. He owes$5 million. The court had rejected Trump's attempt back in June. You might recall, this all sounds a little familiar, and Trump has had to pay the$5 million verdict plus interest. So he is losing, losing money, losing cred, and losing something that bothers him a lot, which is the ability to bend this often conservative court to his will.

2:05So that is an example of the system going forward and working on a matter that we know Trump cares about. Then there is his new Attorney General Blanche. He has been saying that he will kind of try to be a solid, credible Attorney General. He's certainly offered words of affirmation, if you will, about aspects of the job, but then couldn't even say how independent he would be from this Trump White House. That is, of course, a basic minimum job requirement of being Attorney General. Can you pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House? Well, there's a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case and act independently of the White House.

2:51No, I'm not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. Fact check, false. Most attorneys general have pledged that repeatedly, certainly in confirmation battles where... Of course, we are used to people saying certain things just to try to get the job. But as I've noted, and I will repeat something that is important, it's become quite common or popular to say that Donald Trump, at least among certain liberal Democrats, they say is the worst thing ever of all time forevermore. But there is actually nuance here. In Trump's first term, his first attorney general actually was so independent that he famously appointed Bob Mueller.

3:32And we all remember how that went. So even in the Trump era, let alone a traditional Republican or Democratic administration, DOJ independence has at times held up. So point one, false when Blanche says that. Point two, when he says no one should ever pledge that, he is doing what people call gaslighting or trying to just sort of overdo it. Instead of acting like he's on defense, he's using a rhetorical position of, and this is very lawyerly, of, oh, who would even say that? Well, Mr. Blanche, everyone who's ever held your job except apparently for you. Now, we are talking about, of course, the fulcrum of Donald Trump's efforts to corrupt the government, because the DOJ is sort of the first line of the rule of law.

4:13And we saw that in the fight over their efforts to abuse the court system, the settlement system, and the DOJ to give Trump an immunity that no president has ever had from, say, tax review and past audits, as well as take your taxpayer money and give it to convicts. Now, Blanche had to stipulate that that fund for that money is not moving forward. That was one of the conditions to him even getting Republican votes. But now this is how he sounds. Can you guarantee that under your Department of Justice, anyone who attacked the Capitol on January 6th will not receive one dime of taxpayer money if they file a claim against the federal government?

4:57Well, anybody can file a claim against the federal government, not just anybody associated with January 6th. Beyond that, I'm not going to comment about hypotheticals of what will happen in any of those cases. So potentially they could get paid under another stream of government funding, but not the anti-organization fund. When you say they could get paid, what is their claim? Is it somebody who pled guilty? The Justice Department's judgment fund. No, no, no. Right, but when you say they could get paid, anybody who shoes the federal government could get paid.

5:30this is the sound of a government official trying not to offend his boss who we know still wants to give out that money while having also had to compromise and surrender to political reality so that's what it sounds like it sounds sort of vaguely you know like he's in his own deposition if you've ever seen one of those and someone won't answer any questions straight up the discomfort you can kind of read in his body language is that he is caught, I would argue, between those positions and that in a very real way, the Senate and the rule of law won, at least for now, in getting him to commit in writing to not misusing the money that way.

6:07And yet there he is still with Donald Trump. And this is so strange, extreme, lawless that it bears repeating. Donald Trump still wants to have employees who are willing to give out money to convicts as long as they agree with MAGO will do anti-democracy crimes. It sounds like a criticism, but it's not a criticism in the sense of opinion. It is just the facts that we are dealing with. The New York Times, meanwhile, reporting on a probe into a fundraising firm that was basically co-owned by an individual tied to the judge in that Trump case in New York, where Trump was found guilty of those felonies, although he was not ever adjudicated for anything involving a jail sentence.

6:47And that all came in the strange position where he was a defendant and a candidate and ultimately, of course, won that election. According to a grand jury subpoena reviewed by the Times, the DOJ wants this firm to basically turn over its communication with clients, including what they argue are or they believe to be communications with Harris, Biden, Hochul, Jeffries, the DNC. Now, to be clear, that could just be what is sometimes called a phishing expedition. They might just believe communications to exist or because we are talking about the federal government and a lot of power here, they may have already determined somehow they think that stuff does exist.

7:22Now, whether that is a fair review or an extension of the retribution campaign can only be answered in context. The fact that those people are Democrats or critics of the president doesn't mean they can't ever be reviewed and investigated under the rule of law, to be clear. But when you look at the list of targets on your screen, you see the melting credibility of A.G. Blanche from the DOJ, And that is one where judges have already started to be more skeptical of these kind of investigative requests, because look on the left at all of the aborted failed attempts to go after critics. Those are the green stamps.

7:58And on the right, cases that are continuing, some still going to trial, where we know the DOJ has clearly statistically targeted opponents rather than just pursuing evidence wherever it may lead. Now we have an attorney general who is a long ways from, as I mentioned, the first term or Jeff Sessions, and who won't even say on record that they won't do the thing that he wrote down they wouldn't do, which is hand out your money to criminals, among other problems. I want to bring in Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel who worked on the aforementioned Mueller probe, of course, and an MSNOW legal analyst for us.

8:34Andrew, I wonder if you want to put these two stories together. Either the Supreme Court doing what, of course, you should just do under law, but what angers Trump so much, Trump appointees and Republican appointees not apparently shredding the rules to give him special treatment in that case. And then this new AG. Well, let's start with the new AG. Todd Blanche's performance on Meet the Press, to use pejorative adjectives, is somewhere between smarmy and deceitful. The idea that he would say that the president of the United States has never asked and would never ask for a particular person to be investigated or prosecuted.

9:17Well, we've seen it in black and white that he has done that. So the idea that he's saying, oh, it's fanciful and it's some left wing conspiracy is false. You have pointed out other things that you said that are just false. the idea that the Department of Justice shouldn't be independent. Now, if he had said when it comes to policy matters, the Department of Justice is not independent, that the president can weigh in on that. But that's not what he said. And he knows darn well that the point of Kristen's question was, is it appropriate for the president to be weighing in on who should be prosecuted and who should not be prosecuted?

9:59And let's just think back to do a little bit of whataboutism. Well, I'll let you finish, but we pulled, our team pulled that moment. So in the spirit of Exhibit A, you're drawing us to, let's watch, and then you'll walk us through it. Yeah. If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it? The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will. There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, Todd, go prosecute X or Y. He does not do that.

10:35He has never done that. He will never do that.

10:40Of course, we saw him do that specifically with Pam Bondi and the idea that the president wouldn't do that. And we also know, let's just get back to Trump 1.0, that he famously said to James Comey, the FBI director, you know, why can't you sort of Michael Flynn go? Why do you have to prosecute him? In other words, he has no problem crossing that traditional line that no Republican or Democratic president has crossed, which is you do not weigh in on who gets prosecuted and who does not. What I was going to say is just to do a little whataboutism, do you remember when President Obama got in so much hot water for just saying that Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State, would never try to obstruct an investigation, meaning that he didn't think that she was doing the email, you know, fiasco and scandal was not within a bad purpose.

11:35And people were sort of rightly upset because they were saying the president should not weigh in on that. That is an independent decision for the Justice Department. That is all gone. That norm is gone. And the idea that Todd Blanche is sort of bobbing and weaving and can't just answer directly to Christian's questions in a truthful and forthright manner tells you not just about him, but it tells you what's going on with the justice system in our country right now. Yeah, really clearly put. And, you know, I'm torn. You know, Andrew, I try to keep it real in this job. You know that about me. And so to be real, watching him do the Sunday show, it's like it's surreal because I see that he still wants to be accepted in the normal.

12:31Mode, he would aspire to be treated like any other respected attorney general worthy of the job because he doesn't have to go do meet the press. He could, for example, he could do only super right wing podcasts or he could not do media. So there's some thing going on is what I perceive because there's an interplay in government law, as you well know, having served at the top of it, between the law where you just do the work, go to court and go home and some level of presentation of you're one of the three branches, etc. And so I see him like wanting that now that he's been confirmed. And I don't know where that comes from.

13:06It's not my job to get inside his head, but something there is important to him. And yet the hand he's playing, as you walked us through, is deceitful, is lawless. And if these evidence, if the evidence in these cases goes forward, as I showed on that chart, in many cases is provably corrupt. I wonder if you want to speak to that dynamic. So, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but, you know, this, you know, people have talked about the president being all in, that there is no superego, that, you know, he's sort of like what we we all want to be like that in some way, like and not have all of the constraints of being in a society.

13:46and wouldn't it be great to not have to worry about that? But what you're seeing with Todd Blanche is you can tell there is a super ego there, that there's some, he knows that there is a problem with what he is saying. But this is a guy who, leaving the psychology aside, that this is, power corrupts. And you see somebody who knows better because his background and my background and the background of thousands of people who've been trained within the Department of Justice is that he knows to his core how much what he is saying violates the norms. And I just want to make sure people understand it's not just a Department of Justice.

14:34It is about the rule of law that protects every single American in this country. And it's what separates us from so many other countries around the world. And it's what we all sort of, you know, have traditionally taken for granted in this country and has been an envy of the world that we're a country where, you know, when we have a scandal where somebody is a judge or somebody is bribed or a witness is bribed, it's a big deal because it so goes to the undermining of a norm that everyone respects here. But in other countries, that is, you know, it's sort of like contracts go to the highest briber.

15:15The person who wins a court case is the one who has the judge in their pocket. And that is what we are becoming. And when you see Todd Blanche's performance, and I don't mean to pick on him, but it is sort of personal because I was at the department for so long and you see somebody who's violating so many core rules. And as you noted, I mean, even Bill Barr or to take Judge Sessions, he was fired by Donald Trump in the first term precisely because he understood that the Department of Justice needed to be independent of the White House in deciding who to prosecute and who not to. Yes. And when you mentioned that awkwardness, which I think people can see, and I'm going to show one more clip from Blanche in a moment where, again, you see that it speaks to what you described.

16:13We don't often get a legal Freudian analysis of the depth you provided, Andrew, but the ego being he wants the power. and as you said the superego in the freudian construct being some external authority force which sometimes we're told as the parent in this case it would be the notion of the doj because there was a mr blanche before trump uh and he did work there like you did and he does somewhere in there feel that and yet because he's only delivering and this is the point i want to be clear with to the audience whether you like uh freudian uh you know allegories or not But he knows better. I mean, that's the real point.

16:51He knows better. And all he wants to do is give people the PR, the propaganda version of that, saying those words while doing the bidding. I want to show you where Trump is losing on this elections bit. So, Andrew, stay with me. We're back in 90 seconds. There are moments that define who you are and who you're becoming. And when those moments arrive, what you drive should rise to meet them. The Range Rover Sport commands attention from the very first glance. Every line, every detail, engineered for impact. Inside, refinement takes over with sculpted 22-way heated seating with available massage and a 13.1-inch touchscreen that puts everything within easy reach.

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19:10We're back with Andrew Weissman on the new attorney general's interview. Andrew, I want to show first a quick headline context. They keep trying to get state voter rolls. That's not allowed under law. Typically, it's suspicious. And they keep trying and losing, as you can see here. 0 for 23 is extraordinary. Here's that key exchange from the new interview. So you're going to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, do you anticipate? We'll see. We'll see what happens. We're trying to work it out with states. Of course. Yes, absolutely. It's a possibility. Election integrity is something that President Trump ran on and the American people elected him.

19:46It's something that every American should care about. And so the idea that the Department of Justice is trying to investigate issues around elections to make sure they're fair and make sure they're conducted the right way is not something that we should be running away from. That's something we should be running right towards. There's scant precedent or logic in the feds randomly wanting these voter rolls early. That's where the judges have come down. Can you walk us through how this matters and whether these judicial rulings give more optimism for having a fair midterms? Sure. Well, first, with respect to what Todd said, just so people understand, And the Department of Justice has dismantled the group that investigates election fraud.

20:31The FBI has eradicated the group that does that. CISA, the group at DHS that investigates independently and assures that we're not the target of foreign election interference, dismantled. So the idea that you have to listen to the Attorney General of the United States, that they take this seriously, should raise an enormous red flag. Now, the courts have uniformly rejected this Department of Justice seeking voter rolls and saying, no, you know what? The federal government has no role in doing that. It's for the states. And this is one that's really easy for people to understand. And this actually came up in the Trump immunity decision, because remember, in that case, it was all about in that election.

21:22It was about Donald Trump trying to find out what was going on and interfere with the Georgia election. Those are the allegations. Well, the Supreme Court, in alluding to this, and actually I'll refer to Amy Coney Barrett in her decision, said, you know what? The president of the United States as a candidate for office has no role. Why? Because you cannot be a candidate and the decider. You cannot be the judge in your own case. And so this is saying, Department of Justice, back off. You do not have that role. The states are perfectly capable of holding elections and monitoring. And so far, we have been waiting for years and years to see the rampant election fraud that Donald Trump has claimed but has never proved and never offered any evidence of.

22:15And there's no judge who has found it. So to me, this is all setting up a ruse for what we're all going to be experiencing in a very short time in the midterms. And you have people like Todd Blanche and the head of civil rights division, you know, teeing this up to say we're going to take action. But the courts are really going to be the bulwark for our democracy when this comes up. Yeah, really clearly put. We did the ego and the super ego. And Andrew, the next time we have you back, we'll get into the id. Game on. Game on. Thank you, Andrew. I kid, but only partly. But by the end of the hour, I'll tell folks our thanks to Andrew.

23:06We will take a deeper look at that MAGA bubble we've been covering in the AI debt. And new signs that the economy is going to be a midterm problem. Plus this. He promised to lower prices on day one. You remember that? And I want I want the president's remaining supporters to hear this because it was all a lie.

23:34Michelle Goldberg from The Times joins us next.

24:03spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world's most famous pedophile while the crook president and his crook family raked in bilious.

24:15Democrats on offense, that's what it can sound like. That's, of course, Georgia's John Ossoff going into the midterms, while the polling shows Republicans do have the very economic problem he's hammering. One survey says voters say they are now definitely worse off financially under Trump. The drag also affecting the base. Republican voters increasingly souring on Trump. One in five of what they call the base Republican voters are not at risk of going Democrat or woke or whatever you want to call it. No, the reporting is they're at the risk of staying home this November. That's a Financial Times study or survey there.

24:51We are joined by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, an MSNOW analyst. Welcome back. What do you think of both the substance and the style, what you might call the aggressiveness of some of the midterm message there? Well, I mean, for one thing, you can see why so many people desperately want John Ossoff to run for president, because he's been so effective at tying this attack on Trumpian corruption to people's, you know, kind of personal economic pain. And it's that sort of combination that has worked in dislodging authoritarianism in other countries. And I look, I think as time goes on, you know, the ceasefire of the ceasefire, quote unquote, with Iran is about to expire with no end in sight.

25:38And I think it's really important. I mean, in a strange way, it's almost fallen out of the headlines. But there's sort of not even, you know, Donald Trump at this point is not pretending that there's going to be any relief for the problems caused by the closure of this trade of Hormuz, right? Instead, his message seems to basically be suck it up. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that the ceasefire officially had this deadline of today that they're blowing through and hoping that, oh, it's August, people may not notice. And the exact particulars of the failed ceasefire timeline may not be noticed. But everything you just referred to and the economic problems are noticed every day that they don't get better.