Trump puts his enemies on the stand

0:02Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast. Look, he's a coward. He says a lot of things to the camera. He likes to pretend to be a tough guy. Come and get me. Come and get me.

0:13Emily Maitlis:Governor, are you concerned, though, with what we've seen happen with James Comey that, you know, in the past he's made threats about, quote unquote, locking people up. But now we're actually seeing him getting rid of prosecutors who won't bring charges.

0:24Jon Sopel:Sure. And what kind of a country are we living in where the president of the United States is targeting his political opponents? I mean, that is the world that we're living in now, where he is calling out. He said he was going to jail Gavin Newsom. He says he's going to jail me. He says he's going to jail the mayor of the city of Chicago.

0:43Andrew Weissmann:That's J.B. Pritzker. He's the governor of Illinois. We're going to be discussing why he's taking the fight to Donald Trump a little bit later. But we start with that first question. What is going on with Donald Trump's political enemies? Why is he trying to prosecute the former head of the FBI?

1:04Jon Sopel:It was an extraordinary picture to see James Comey taking the stand under oath on trial for crimes that he almost certainly hasn't committed. Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Emily. And the history of the relationship between James Comey and Donald Trump is long and it is fraught. Arguably, James Comey handed Donald Trump his election victory in 2016, when days before polling, he reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. After the election, he makes Donald Trump aware of this dossier that alleges that Donald Trump was compromised by Russians and that there was an investigation by the security services looking at Russian interference in the election, which led to the Mueller report, which Donald Trump absolutely hated.

2:06Jon Sopel:then when Donald Trump becomes president he says to Comey I want you to pledge your loyalty to me and James Comey says no I pledge my loyalty to the US constitution not you and now spool forward to today and James Comey is on the stand as a criminal defendant for breaching kind of classified information. And it looks like an utterly, excuse the metaphor, trumped up child.

2:36Andrew Weissmann:A highly politicised accusation. Now, James Comey wrote in his memoirs in 2018 that Trump was morally unfit to be president. Again, big black mark against Comey by Donald Trump. I don't think he ever imagined a world in which Trump would get re-elected. Comey also told me that he lay awake at night thinking about Trump going after his political enemies. And sure enough, that has come to be. But until last week, no prosecutor, including Trump's second attorney general in his first term, believed that they would actually get to the point of pursuing an indictment. They just thought this was Trump going off on one.

3:18Andrew Weissmann:We know Trump, you know, takes it out on his enemies, perceived, imagined and real. Nobody actually thought there would be a prosecution based on the evidence at the time. But in the last few weeks, Trump replaced a federal prosecutor who said the case was too weak and put in his own stooge of personal loyalist, Lindsay Halligan. Lindsay Halligan was willing to override professional judgment and call Comey to the stand. And we should just explain the context of this. The statute of limitations for the perceived crime would have run out just days before that indictment came. In other words, this was a last chance saloon.

4:03Andrew Weissmann:Trump has hated Comey. He wants to see him embarrassed, up on the stand, facing accusations of perjury, of whether or not he leaked a document. And that is how the prosecution is now unfolding. We're going to talk about this with somebody who knows the FBI really well and James Comey really well, Andrew Weissman, who was the general counsel, i.e. the top lawyer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

4:36Jon Sopel:Well, we're talking about Comey and the way that so much has been politicised. And we're joined now by Andrew Weissman, who was the general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. so the lead lawyer the kind of advisor on what can and cannot happen at the FBI and has done all sorts of distinguished things since then including as deputy to Robert Mueller over the Russia investigation right I headed up one of the teams there yep exactly so let's start with James Comey and the indictment and is this the wheels of justice turning or is this a political stitch up.

5:16Emily Maitlis:You know, when you said wheels of justice turning, I was thinking you were going to say wheels of justice falling off the wagon. This is the most remarkable thing for anybody who is a lawyer in the United States. So start with your bringing a case against the former director of the FBI. Now, if he has done something wrong, there's no reason he shouldn't be prosecuted. There's no reason a former president shouldn't be prosecuted if they've done something wrong. But that is a grave, serious step. And you would think that you would have all of your ducks in a row and you'd have a very strong case.

5:53Emily Maitlis:The procedural irregularities, which is a charitable way of phrasing it in terms of how the case was brought, I think tell you volumes about what is going on in the United States. So it is widely reported that the career people in the United States Attorney's Office, that's the federal prosecutor's office, all said, no, this case should not be brought. It is too thin. But there's more than that. The United States Attorney, who was appointed by the president, said this is Donald Trump's person, who is in that office, also said no. So you now have the career people and the political appointees saying no.

6:39Emily Maitlis:And what happened to the loyalist? He says he resigned. The president says I fired him. Doesn't really matter which it is. He's pushed out. And somebody who is a White House aide who specializes in insurance law, who has not done criminal cases, shows up as the interim U.S. attorney. And within, I'm an inveterate New Yorker, so I'll say within a New York minute, has the case in the grand jury to indict.

7:10Andrew Weissmann:And they had to have it very quickly because the statute of limitations was about to run out on this whole case, right?

7:16Emily Maitlis:Exactly. So the statute of limitations is the amount of time that you have between the time of the crime or alleged crime. And in this case, it has to be done within five years. And you cannot be charged in the United States unless the grand jury votes an indictment. And so that's the process. So they had to go to the grand jury. The grand jury are just everyday citizens. That's 23 people. In order to have an indictment, you need to have 12 of the 23, so the bare majority. And the standard is very low. It is probable cause, which is, there's no set percentage, but think of it as about 20%. They proposed three charges to the grand jury.

8:02Emily Maitlis:One was rejected. I want to make sure people understand. I tell people this in the United States as well. That just doesn't happen. You don't go to the grand jury unless you think you have proof and you can establish the case at trial, which is beyond a reasonable doubt. You wouldn't ever go with just probable cause, because what's the point? You're just going to lose later. And so just having that one charge not voted is a big deal. And then the other two charges were voted, but the count was 14 to 9. So what does it tell you that you couldn't get a unanimous grand jury at this low-level standard of probable cause, but the case at trial, when it goes to a jury, has to be proved unanimously beyond a reasonable doubt.

8:53Andrew Weissmann:So there's a chance this will never even get to trial.

8:55Emily Maitlis:There are both legal reasons and there are reasons that a judge would not, after he hears the government's case, would say, I'm not letting it go to the jury because no reasonable jury could find proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

9:10Jon Sopel:Andrew, explain this to me because this seems, if it ever got to trial, if it ever got before a jury, they are going to acquit. they're going to find James Comey not guilty, in which case doesn't Donald Trump look like a bit of a chump for having gone on and said he's a bad cop, he needs to be put in prison, he's a wrong and all the rest of it?

9:31Emily Maitlis:You would think so. And what I would say is in the rational world, that is absolutely correct, that this is something that could be a spectacular sort of belly flop, where you have the judge saying that this is an improper case, whether legally or a jury saying this is a case that there's insufficient proof. And I think unless they come up with something that's a real rabbit out of a hat, this is going to end up in some form of acquittal or dismissal. But when that happens, we know from history with Donald Trump that he will just say it's either a corrupt judge or it's a corrupt jury. And he will just blame them in the same way that when he was convicted in the Manhattan District Attorney's office case, he said, well, you know, you shouldn't trust.

10:20Emily Maitlis:They got it wrong. The judge is biased against me. The jurors are biased against me. So that kind of distrust of the process will be his answer to that question.

10:30Andrew Weissmann:I mean, Comey has a very strong case for saying this is a vindictive prosecution because Trump has said out loud what he thinks of Comey. He's called him corrupt. He's called him wrong, criminal, all the rest of it. In other words, he said this all out loud. But I guess the question under consideration right now, specifically to this charge, is whether Comey perjured himself by saying that he did not leak information that he may have done. Now, is there a question? I mean, is there a question that he did leak information and he did lie about it?

11:08Emily Maitlis:So if the government was able to prove that, as somebody who was a defense lawyer for 10 years, a prosecutor for 20 years, if the former FBI director did that, I would be the first person to say that somebody in that position should be held to a higher standard, and this is an appropriate thing to be doing. And so it's a question of proof. Do they have the proof? And we've already talked about reasons why it looks like they don't, because you wouldn't have all these career people saying, I'm not going to go forward. I should add, by the way, that the case is actually going to be tried by prosecutors who are from another office because nobody, none of the career people that's been reported are willing to do the case.

11:50Andrew Weissmann:Because they think it lacks all credibility.

11:53Emily Maitlis:Right. I mean, I wouldn't do it based on what we know. And so the issue is, the charge here is that in 2020, when James Comey, during the pandemic, was at home, but was testifying remotely from his home to Congress, was asked the question about whether he had authorized, essentially a cutout, he had authorized someone to leak information to the press. to make sure people understand, the FBI, the director of the FBI, is authorized to give information to the press. I mean, it's not really fair to call it a leak because he can do that unless it was classified information or grand jury information that it was protected in some other way.

12:43Emily Maitlis:You have that authority. But be that as it may, that might go to motive. Like, why would he need to lie about this when he's authorized to do it? But he was asked that question. And in 2017, he had said, no, I didn't. But the statute of limitations ran on that 2017 testimony. So he is apparently re-asked that question in 2020. and James Comey says, by Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz from Texas, and he is asked about that. And James Comey says, I stand by my testimony. Now, just to be clear, and this is going to be, I'm going to be a little nerdy here. That is technically true. The statement, I stand by my testimony, could mean, I am not changing my testimony.

13:40Emily Maitlis:What is not before any trial jury is the 2017 statement. It's just, I stand by it. Well, how is that ever going to be false? I mean, technically, I don't know how that is a false statement to just say, I stand by it. If he had actually said, and this will have to be the government's argument, no, I did not authorize it and actually repeated it. They're going to have to say that's what that is. But that tells you just.

14:09Andrew Weissmann:Comey is a good prosecutor himself, right? He's a lawyer. He knows what he's doing.

14:13Emily Maitlis:Absolutely. And now the other piece, just getting to the merits, because this is more of a technical point. The reporting is this relates to somebody named Dan Richman, who is a friend of James Comey, a professor at Columbia University School of Law, and was also somebody who had a special employee position at the FBI when James Comey was the FBI director. And the reporting is that he has told to the Eastern District of Virginia prosecutors, the office that has the case, that he was not asked by James Comey to ever leak information or give information to the media when James Comey was the FBI director.

15:00Emily Maitlis:If that is your star witness, having your star witness saying it's not true is they have they legally have to have something more.

15:09Jon Sopel:So, Andrew, can we just zoom out a tiny bit? Because, you know, you've talked about the utter frailties of this case and the weakness and feebleness in some cases of the case against Comey. Where does it leave this whole debate about whether the Justice Department is being weaponized by a president? We've got a very different system in the UK where there is far less politics in the way criminal cases are brought than in the US. Are we seeing a step change, something completely different that we've not seen before in America under the Trump presidency? Or is this just a continuation of always a degree of politicization in terms of maybe you go after your enemies or not?

15:52Emily Maitlis:We are seeing a complete change. And I have had to talk to a lot of people who have a cynical view about government and they think, oh, don't they all do it? Isn't this just tit for tat? There was weaponization under Democrats. Now there's weaponization under Republicans. And isn't that what's going on? So I have worked for Democratic and Republican administrations at the Department of Justice, including on very high profile matters. Not a single time was there ever any interference from the White House, period, full stop. including I worked on the Enron case, a huge financial scandal that was under a Republican administration.

16:35Emily Maitlis:And it would have been unheard of to have the White House call to say what should happen. And that is the norm post Watergate, where Richard Nixon famously was trying to interfere and was trying to weaponize and have them do investigations, including tax investigations. It's like what happened under FBI Director Hoover, where you weaponize law enforcement. This is now out in the open. It makes what Nixon did look like child's play, where you have the President of the United States in a DM to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, saying, this is what you need to do. And you need to do it now because he was aware that the statute of limitations was running.

17:22Emily Maitlis:That is complete weaponization and turning the Department of Justice into a loaded weapon that he is going to use again, is now using against his enemies.

17:33Andrew Weissmann:Can I ask you one other question related to your former role? When you were working with Robert Mueller on the Russia investigation, which we know Trump absolutely hated, the report ended without having found conclusive evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia. After so many people have been so badly hurt, after not looking at the other side, where a lot of bad things happened, a lot of horrible things happened, a lot of very bad things happened

18:10Jon Sopel:for our country. It was just announced there was no collusion with Russia, the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. There was no collusion with Russia. It was a complete and total exoneration. It's a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it's a shame that your

18:35Andrew Weissmann:president has had to go through this. But immediately, the headline became a totally different one. I think it was Bill Barr, William Barr, the attorney general at the time, came forward and said, this is vindication. There was no obstruction. There was no collusion. And that's the line that everyone remembers. How did that gap between what your report said and what we were told get so blurred so quickly?

19:03Emily Maitlis:I'm going to add to that a little bit because there were sort of two parts to the investigation. And one part should have been completely apolitical, which is, did Russia interfere in the election? And then the second part of the investigation was, and if so, did they have help from anybody in the Trump campaign? The first part of that has been proven over and over and over again. And not just by the Mueller team, There was also a bipartisan Senate report.

19:34Andrew Weissmann:So we are absolutely safe to say, yes, Russia was involved in the 2016 election period.

19:43Emily Maitlis:And you could add, although this is now me saying you can add that for 2020 and 2024. And, you know, Europe knows that as well, looking at European elections. I mean, this is a strategy of using the Internet and other means to interfere with democratic processes. So that was sort of step one. And that piece has also gotten blurred as, oh, the whole thing is a hoax.