Clinton, Epstein and Trump's dire polling

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0:32This is a Global Player original podcast. OK, I know this is News Agents USA, but I want to talk to you about William Shakespeare, about his play Julius Caesar and the Ides of March. The 15th of March was the date that was predicted when Julius Caesar would cop it. Well, March 2024 is shaping up to be quite a 31 days for Donald Trump, because on the 5th of March, it is Super Tuesday when all those states go to vote. But on the 4th of March is the day that he goes on trial in Washington, D.C. for conspiracy against the United States of America and witness tampering and a number of charges as well.

1:18And if that wasn't enough, later on in March, he goes on trial in New York In the case of Stormy Daniels and that payment of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to a porn star that wasn't declared just before the 2016 presidential election. It is going to be quite an election campaign. Welcome to News Agents USA. This is the News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sobel. It's me in News Agents HQ and hopefully Emily will be back next week. But we've got to start with Donald Trump's extraordinary fundraising this weekend with one photograph. The photo, of course, of him at Fulton County Jailhouse, the mugshot.

2:12The picture of him glowering into the camera, his head tilted down, his eyes looking up, his lips pursed. An angry, defiant Donald Trump. But of course, there is legal jeopardy wherever he looks. And that shouldn't be forgotten, even if he is using it as a fundraising opportunity. And boy, does he need to use it as a fundraising opportunity because he is spending millions, tens of millions, literally in legal fees alone, just to keep him out of prison, frankly, with these four indictments and 91 charges that he faces. and nowhere has that legal jeopardy been played out more powerfully in Washington over the course of the past 24 hours where Donald Trump went to court or his lawyers went to court to argue that his trial over the January the 6th attempted insurrection shouldn't happen until wait for it 2026 so two and a half years from now when presumably he would be in office in his second term and he could then instruct the Attorney General, actually, we don't really need a legal case here.

3:20Why don't we just forget all about it? And the charges just disappear. The judge absolutely flatly rejected that and said, nope, you're going to be in court next March 2024. Yes, and it may be the middle of a presidential election campaign, but the wheels of justice are turning and they are turning in a way that are slightly relentless, remorseless and dangerous for Donald Trump. Let us speak now to Olivier Knox. He is the national political correspondent for the Washington Post and joins us on the line now. And Olivier, I guess sometimes you must think you'd have been better off as a legal affairs correspondent.

4:01Well, you know, I got my proper reporting assignment was covering Congress in 1998, which of course meant that I had to get up to speed on impeachment and all the legal and political ramifications of that. So it feels really like a return to my origins. Does any of this help Donald Trump in the sense that we have seen his poll rating go up, go up, go up with each indictment that comes? On the day before Super Tuesday for him appearing in court in Washington, can that be weaponized and used by him? I think the novelty of an indictment helping a candidate is driving a lot of the coverage here, But I think it's a little hasty.

4:41What we've seen is that his poll numbers among Republicans tend to solidify when he's indicted. But there's still about a quarter of the party that will not vote for him, that says it will not vote for him. And of course, American elections are won by winning over the independents or the middle folks. And the indictments don't help him there. So the narrow argument that it helps him reach the Republican nomination, I think, is probably right. But when it comes to the general election, these are not helping him. And look, there are so many court cases that need unpacking. I want to kind of jump from the one in Washington to the one in Georgia, where it's a very interesting case where it sort of says that it's a racketeering charges.

5:21The laws that are being used, the laws that are used against the mafia normally, these sort of so-called RICO charges. And you've got 18 defendants aside from Donald Trump. Now, are they all aligned or do you see people going off in different directions? Well, historically, when you see a prosecution under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, when you see a large number of people charged, there is an incentive for players to turn against each other. They will each have legal representation. They may follow one another's example. So, for example, the former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, is trying to get the case against him moved to federal court out of Georgia state court.

6:01If he's successful, you would expect a number of other folks to follow the same roadmap. But there are a lot of incentives for people to flip. And one of the things that we've seen in some of the January 6th prosecutions to date, the thousands of folks who've been prosecuted to date, is that a lot of them are saying, I did this because I thought Donald Trump told me to. You're going to see some of that, I think, in Georgia as well. And that does not help the former president, that kind of argument. So you are going to see people following each other's legal strategy if successful, but there is a big incentive for people to flip, as is the case with prosecutions of organized crime.

6:36You could see some of the lower level players turning around and agreeing to cooperate. And where is Mark Meadows? Is Mark Meadows standing shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump? I mean, after all, he was the former chief of staff, the last chief of staff to Donald Trump when he was at the White House. Or is Mark Meadows looking after Mark Meadows? Right now, it's a little bit difficult to say, at least from his testimony on Monday. He's making the argument that every single thing he did, he did as White House Chief of Staff under color of his federal job. And that's his main argument. This is another interesting law.

7:12There are a bunch of laws that are called removal laws, and they were designed after the U.S. Civil War to protect federal workers from being harassed by state and local officials. And that's why that's the law he's invoking to get this move from state court to federal court. He basically saying, look, everything I did, I did as White House chief of staff. And therefore, this doesn't belong in state court. It belongs in federal court. In terms of his actual argument about Donald Trump, it's a little hard to see. He certainly has not turned on Donald Trump, but it's not completely clear to me as of yet how aligned they are.

7:42And of course, a lot of his text messages and notes have become part of the prosecution's record in the federal case on January 6th. I feel we're doing a review of endless legal cases. So I'm going to take you now to the Florida case and what happened about these confidential documents that Donald Trump had squirreled away at the country estate of Mar-a-Lago. Isn't there one of the defendants now having changed his lawyer and changed his argument, saying that he was pressured to delete closed circuit camera footage of documents being moved around at the behest of Donald Trump? Right. So one of the questions in that case, and this is actually fairly important, Donald Trump has been paying the legal fees for a number of defendants in a number of different cases.

8:27In fact, it's siphoned off tens of millions of dollars from his campaign. But one of the things that that does is it puts those people, it raises a question whether those people are being represented to defend themselves or if their lawyers are actually acting to protect Donald Trump. What we saw in this case was that this low-level employee had an attorney who was being paid for by Donald Trump, and then he chose to be represented by a different attorney. And the minute he got the new representation, he recanted his previous testimony and came out and said, yes, I was told to delete closed-circuit footage pertaining to the documents.

9:01And that's the kind of flip that I think prosecutors dream about to help them make the case against the former president. And what are the other legal manoeuvres? Because there are so many things that are happening. Where do you think this leaves Donald Trump? You know, we saw the almost pleasure he took in publicising the mugshot after he appeared in court in Fulton County. Right. He actually one of the fundraising emails that he sent out in the aftermath of that was offering an authenticated mugshot for a donation. So an autographed mugshot is now worth a lot of money, is it? Well, I don't know whether it's worth a lot of money, but he's certainly trying to monetize it.

9:44I mean, remember, he spent an absolute fortune of campaign funds on his legal defenses, on his and others legal defenses. And so every little bit counts. I don't know where it leaves him yet, because one of the challenges when you have so many co-indictees, he's one of 19 in Georgia case, is that they're all going to take a different legal path. or they all could take a different legal path. Some could flip, some could go quiet. I mean, so we don't know yet where this leaves him, except of course, he faces four indictments related to January 6th, related to his months-long campaign to overthrow the results of the election.

10:21He's got indictments related to hush money payments made to an adult film actress with whom he was allegedly having an affair. So he's fighting a war on at least four fronts. He's trying to keep his people on side so that no other people decide to flip. It's enormous peril. It's unprecedented legally or politically in the United States to see something like this. He's in trouble, just to put it mildly. The classified documents case, when I talk to lawyers in Washington, D.C., that's the one they think is the most open and shut. And that's the one that's going to be a much bigger challenge for him, particularly if you've got these lower level folks who turn around and say, oh, yes, I was told to do these bad things.

10:59That is really interesting what you say, Olivier, about the fact that these documents is seen as the most open and shut case. Olivier, one of the joys of covering the US is there's never any shortage of polling evidence. I mean, I just wonder what you've seen over the weekend that might have caught your eye. Yeah, there was a there was a poll out that asked Americans to rate both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, since that appears to be the rematch that no one wanted, but everyone's going to get asking about perceptions of their ethics, essentially. And one of the things that's very notable here is that the month long Republican campaign to convince the public that Biden is corrupt, while it has not unearthed any evidence for that argument, it has affected the public standing, Joe Biden's public standing.

11:40So what we're seeing is large swaths of the public, very importantly, large numbers of independent voters say that Biden is only slightly less corrupt than Donald Trump, which is a really remarkable development. And it is, again, it is a political success for a PR campaign that has been relentlessly waged by House Republicans. Yeah. And of course, there is no evidence that has been presented yet, which says there is a line that goes from Joe Biden when he was vice president to Hunter Biden in terms of corrupt activity. Right. They keep making these explosive claims and not producing evidence for them.

12:17But it turns out that repetition is pretty effective. And so they are seeing political dividends from this. I mean, we're heading into a place now where the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California, is talking about launching an impeachment inquiry. Now, that's not the same as an impeachment trial yet, but it's basically a stepped-up House investigation into Joe Biden. Remember that McCarthy, back in the day, made the case that the Benghazi investigation into Hillary Clinton had damaged her poll standing. Well, it looks like past his prologue in this case, and the Republicans are going to use this, use investigations into Joe Biden to really bring down his poll numbers.

12:52OK, Olivier, look, it's great to have you with us. Thank you so much for taking us through the indictments that we know and love. Great to have you. Olivier Knox from The Washington Post. I've got to say that there is a poll that I saw over the past few days, which is from the Associated Press and another organisation, which essentially the headline is sort of unsurprising, but sort of captures, I think, the 2024 presidential election. and I'll read it to you. It says President Joe Biden is old and confused and former President Donald Trump is corrupt and dishonest. Those are among the top terms American use when they're asked to describe the Democrat in the White House and the Republican best position to face him in next year's election.

13:37And you just got to wonder, what is it going to take to stop either Biden or Trump from being the candidate in 2024, even though it would seem no one wants either of them? We'll be back in a moment and talking Jacksonville and the terrible racist murders that took place there and what it says about America 60 years on from Martin Luther King's march on Washington. This is the News Agents USA.

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15:13You're listening to the News Agents USA. Welcome back. There is always seems to be that uncanny ability in the US to see two events collide that are entirely different in character, but which sort of have a relationship to each other. It is the 60th anniversary of the march on Washington by Martin Luther King and his supporters calling for civil rights. and the famous quote of I have a dream. At the same time, you have a shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, where a racist heavily armed goes into a Dollar General store and kills three people simply because they are black. And of course, the reverberations of one to the other and how far has America really come have come alive again.

16:06And to discuss this, I'm joined by our old friend on the podcast, Ron Christie, former Republican advisor. I should say, if you don't know Ron, that he is black himself. He has worked for George W. Bush in the White House, an academic, pundit, all-round good egg. Ron, how are you? It's always good to see you, my friend. I'm doing well. Hope you are the same. Yeah, no, I'm the same. And when you hear about another, you know, what happened in this shooting over the weekend do you just despair i do i i mean i so much progress has been made in the united states and it seems like you take two steps forward and then you take two steps back i'm a direct descendant of slavery my family still owns the plantation where my great-great-great-great-grandparents were enslaved.

17:02And you look at what happened in Jacksonville, and you say to yourself, we've had the civil rights movement, we've had so much progress in this country, and you see something like that, and it's a gut punch, John. Yeah, and not surprisingly, it plays into today's politics and the presidential election, because Jacksonville is in Florida. The governor of Florida is Ron DeSantis. And he went along to a vigil and didn't get the biggest welcome. Don't worry about it. We've already been looking to identify funds to be able to help. One, make sure the benefit security for Edwin Waters College. We are not going to allow the people to do the work in our people.

17:49And we'll watch the government. Your policies! Just know that the state of Florida stands with the community. Help is on the way. God bless you all. He didn't. You know, he did what he had to do. I mean, for being a governor of a state, I think you have a solemn obligation to represent your constituents, regardless of their skin color, regardless of their ideology, and to offer compassion at a severe moment like this when lies were senselessly taken. So yes, I completely understand why he went. I just wish that the folks who were booing him recognized he was showing up as a governor and not as a presidential contender.

18:33And I suppose that the atmosphere becomes so politically charged in the US that people find it very hard to distinguish between the two. I think that's right. And it's most unfortunate, to be perfectly honest with you. We have got to, in this country, move away from, is it black or is it white? Or is it brown or is it white? We're Americans. What is our motto in the United States? E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. The one thing that we are is Americans. And the more that we try to distinguish ourselves based on race or ideology or ethnicity, I think it's going to be harder for us to pull together as a country, particularly in these troubling times.

19:18Yeah, I mean, I wonder what you thought of what Vivek Ramaswamy was saying. I think we can listen to a clip of him now, because, of course, he is as well going for the Republican nomination. Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War. It is a historical fact, Don. Just study it. Only after their Second Amendment rights were secured. They were not secured their freedoms after the Civil War. You are discounting Reconstruction. You're discounting a whole host of things that happened after the Civil War when it comes to African Americans, including the whole reason that the Civil Rights Movement happened.

19:49It's because black people did not secure their freedoms after the Civil War and that things turned around. People tried to change the freedoms that were supposed to happen after the Civil War. And you know how they got it? They got their Second Amendment rights, and they actually got the NRA played a big role in that. But today, down the final... The NRA did not play a big role in that. Absolutely, they trained black Americans how to use firearms. That's a lie. That's not. The NRA did not play a big role in that. This is just historical fact. It's not a historical fact. The part that I find...

20:11Just because you say it's a historical fact... The part that I find insulting is when you say today black Americans don't have those rights after we have gone through civil rights revolution in this country. You are sitting here telling an African American about the rights and what you find insulting, about the way I live, the skin I live in every day. Here's where you and I have a different point of view. that black and white, that black people don't have in this country and that black people do have. Well, here's where you and I have a different point of view. I think we should be able to express our views regardless of the color of our skin.

20:36We should have this debate. I'm not saying you shouldn't express your views, but I think it's insulting that you're sitting here. But me regarding you as a fellow citizen. That's what I think we should see. Whatever ethnicity you are explaining to me about what it's like to be black in America. Whatever ethnicity I am, I'll tell you what I am. I'm an Indian American, I'm proud of it, but I think we should have this debate. Black, white, doesn't matter. I think we should have this debate. But I think if you're gonna do it, but you should do it in an honest way. Wow. I mean, I wish that Vivek Ramaswamy could enroll in my American presidency class because he might learn something interesting, that with the election of Rutherford B.

21:11Hayes, Reconstruction ended in 1877 in the United States. What did that usher in, John? It took the blacks who were elected at the state and the local and the national level, and they threw them out. And what did that usher in? It ushered in extraordinarily harsh segregation and overt discrimination against people of color, which, by the way, it wasn't the Civil Rights Act of 64. It wasn't the Voting Rights Act of 65. This was going on when my parents were growing up and well into the 1960s. I was born in 1969. This was still going on down in the South. So the notion that the Second Amendment or the NRA had anything to do with this is preposterous.

22:05It does seem to me that Vivek Ramaswamy, who is very telegenic, who is very kind of ballsy and out there, could do with a bit of a history lesson on the restoration amendments and the role that they played. And also on foreign policy as well, if one is to be unkind, because he seems to travel light on detail. He does. And look, again, it's the badge of slavery amendments, right? The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to our Bill of Rights, to our Constitution. I would encourage him to actually read them. You cannot discriminate against people based on the color of their skin. You cannot hold people back from voting based on the color of their skin.

22:48And then you get to the 14th Amendment through the fifth that enforces the Bill of Rights on the states. for a presidential candidate to come up there and say what he said on that network. I don't even know the words that I have for this, John, other than it's just ignorant. Do you think it is just pure ignorance or do you think he is making political calculation and that actually the ignorance can be rather helpful? And this isn't just applying to Vivek Ramaswamy. you just come out with easy soundbites on Ukraine or on race or whatever it happens to be, because you think that panders to the kind of people who may be voting for you?

23:28I think so. I think he is trying to be the Trumpiest person on the debate stage who isn't Donald Trump. And whether we like to admit it or not, I think that the comments that he made the other day resonate with certain people who look at America, look at the composition of Americans and look at people of color and have different thoughts than you and I might have. And so, yeah, it could be a dog whistle in a certain regard that maybe he's trying to signal to people who might want to support him based on the comments that he made. Does it make the language that Martin Luther King used back in Washington in 1963 seem irrelevant now.

24:22It's just kind of not a metric by which we can judge modern day America. No, and I'll tell you why. I, as a proud black American, look at what he said. He had a dream that his four children could be judged based on the content of their character and not in the color of their skin. I have a dream today.

24:51I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, One day right now in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. And I, every single day, John, go out into the world and I hope people judge me on, does Christy have something to say? Is he a good educator? Is he a good person rather than, oh, he's black? And so that is a dream that I hold very, very firmly to. And I hope that someday in our lifetime that we could try to achieve the dream and the ideals that Dr.

25:49King has set forth. But we have a long way to go. And let me just say one last thing. My father, when he went to West Virginia University in the 1960s, he and the namesake, I'm named after Ron, would go at night and they would take a crowbar and they would take the signs off the walls. And I'm looking at it right now. And it says restrooms. And the other bottom portion says white. And the other bottom part says colored. And this is in the middle part of the 1960s. This is after Dr. King gave his momentous speech that you still had white and colored facilities. So yes, I try to live up to this ideal, John, because I know as a country we're better than this.

26:44Have you got that there? Have you got that in front of you? Fantastic. It says it was made in Tennessee, June 17th, 1929. And I keep this on my desk for the simple reason that, I mean, I was about four years before I was born. but these things were still up on the wall in West Virginia. It's just, I mean, it's just mind boggling. But why do I have this sign? And why do I keep this on my desk? Because it's a reminder that there are still people who are racist in America and that we need to do everything that we can to eradicate said racism in our country. Ron Christie, thank you so much. And thank you so much for sharing that bit of family history as well with us.