Don Lemon Forgot About This Piece of Evidence Which Could Send Him to Jail | Harmeet Dhillon

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1:09That's wildalaskan.com slash Rubin for$35 off your first order. We strongly believe that all of the nine people who've been indicted so far by the grand jury had both violations. They all went inside. They all obstructed, harassed, intimidated, frightened. People were actually injured in this melee. And on top of that, they all planned to do it. They met outside and Don Lemon helpfully provided us with live stream video of planning, of him bringing donuts and coffee to the co-conspirators, of using the royal we repeatedly when he was talking about what we were going to go inside and what we were going to do.

1:48He even turned off his microphone at one point to conceal what the co-conspirators were talking about doing.

2:05I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, my old friend and Twitter colleague, Harmeet Dillon. Harmeet, it's nice to see you. Nice to see you too, Dave. You know, although I've never hired you as a lawyer, I consider you my lawyer. Is that strange? You're basically the one person I call if I've got a legal question. And you do it for free. I just want people to know that. Like, you really care about all of this stuff. So I'm just saying some nice things about you up top. Well, I do it for free for you, Dave. Let's not invite all your viewers to call me with their legal aid questions.

2:44Fair, fair. All right. Well, it is great to see again. Obviously, there is a lot to talk about here. I suppose we should first dive in with some of this Don Lemon stuff indicted by a grand jury in Minnesota, does not go to jail, at least yet. Some of this will be fought over. Can you talk a little bit about the SAFE Act, why it was passed, how it pertains, how this case involving Don pertains not only to the worshippers' civil rights, the protesters' civil rights, and in this case, Don, who says he's a journalist. And I just don't even know if that's a special protection anymore in an age where everybody holds cell phones.

3:29Yeah, well, so first of all, I don't even think of this as the Don Levin case. I think of this as the Church Cities case, and Don is one of many indicted individuals and many who are yet to be indicted who violated federal law in a couple of different ways. So the FACE Act was passed in 1994, and it was— Oh, I'm sorry. I think I said SAFE Act. That's the other thing going on with election integrity. It's the FACE Act. That's right. That's also a good law. That's a good law, by the way, and I support it, but in my individual capacity. But the FACE Act in 1994 was mainly passed to protect abortion clinics from being obstructed by pro-life protesters.

4:14OK. And the terms are defined broadly. So it also includes crisis pregnancy centers have come under that. But this law wouldn't have passed without bipartisan support. And so to get that bipartisan support, Congress added in a provision giving the same protections to houses of worship. And there it laid dormant for over 30 years until my department in the DOJ under Pam Bondi brought the first DOJ FACE Act case regarding an attack on a synagogue in West Orange, New Jersey, last year. This is the second of our cases that we are bringing, the first criminal case that we are bringing. And I have, I won't say how many, but numerous other cases under investigation, mainly involving attacks on synagogues.

5:01Now, what the Biden DOJ pioneered, so a violation of the FACE Act is, first violation is a misdemeanor, and then if you do more of them, it escalates to a felony. The Biden DOJ prosecuted many, many pro-life protesters who prayed silently outside an abortion clinic. Not what we're talking about here. They didn't go in, live stream while an abortion is happening, put their mic in the face of the doctor performing the abortion or providing counseling to a pregnant woman. Just by standing outside, you're seen as obstructing or intimidating or what have you. And then they use the Klan Act, which is a much older, it's probably the oldest of the federal civil rights laws that I administer short of the Bill of Rights, that makes it a crime to intimidate and violate somebody's civil rights or conspire to do that, where two or more people conspire to violate somebody's civil rights.

5:54And this dates back to the Reconstruction era in our country after the Civil War, where actually it was local and state law enforcement that was conspiring to prevent newly freed slaves from enjoying their full civil rights. So that's how important and old that law is. We call it the Klan Act, the Ku Klux Klan Act. That's the shorthand for it. So when you violate the Klan Act and you conspire to violate the rights that are protected by the FACE Act, you can be held liable for a felony under federal law. And so that's what the Biden DOJ did repeatedly. And I went to court to actually defend one of their prosecutions at the Court of Appeals.

6:33And that's the law of the land now. You can do that. You can apply higher sentencing if appropriate. So to show that, though you have to show somebody was planning and knew about it and had some knowledge of something that was about to happen or took part of it. We strongly believe that all of the nine people who've been indicted so far by the grand jury had both violations. They all went inside. They all obstructed, harassed, intimidated, frightened. People were actually injured in this melee. And on top of that, they all planned to do it. They met outside and Don Lemon helpfully provided us with live stream video of planning, of him bringing donuts and coffee to the co-conspirators, of using the royal we repeatedly when he was talking about what we were going to go inside and what we were going to do.

7:23He even turned off his microphone at one point to conceal what the co-conspirators were talking about doing. We also see in that video an organized two-stage system where they first sent in a wave of, if you would call it decoys, who went and sat in the audience like other parishioners. They were white. Let's call them the white allies of this BLM protest, if you will. And then when the people who kind of were the primary movers of catalyzing this protest came in, then everyone jumped up. Frightened the hell out of people who came there to pray, over 400 people. People were rushing for the exits.

8:07Ladies fell and slipped on the ice. People were prevented from getting their children from the Sunday school upstairs because they were blocked by these protesters. Everyone's seen the calm demeanor of Pastor Jonathan Parnell. And you can even see Don Lemon blocking someone from leaving while sticking a mic in his face. These are all violations, clear violations of the law. And we're going to prove that by pointing to the numerous prosecutions that have been done by prior departments of justice in these similar cases. So, okay. So legally, you feel you have a tight case. Now, what would you say to the people that would say, and you're hearing this across mainstream media right now and plenty of it at the Grammys, but Don Lemon is a journalist.

8:52And as a journalist, he was just on the ride with them. He was just reporting on what was happening and he should have, in essence, some special protections. Well, Don Lemon might have gone to the Leering School of Journalism, where they did not teach the distinctions in the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not a license to violate other people's First Amendment rights. He said, oh, well, this is the First Amendment. When the pastor said, this is shameful, it is shameful that you came in here into this house of God, and you brought your political things into this church. And Don Lemon says, this is the First Amendment.

9:30Well, no. The First Amendment, as you know, Dave, as we've discussed, has specific time, place, and manner restrictions. You don't get to do your protest in a federal courthouse or in the post office obstructing people from getting their mail or in the White House or even on certain sidewalks. You have to get a permit if you're going to do things that obstruct and you have to give notice. They didn't do any of that. They treated this private property as a public park to conduct their protest. And they did it to the exclusion of the intended purpose of that space, namely to worship God in the way that the followers of that church, City's church, are used to doing.

10:15I mean, Pastor Parnell himself has eight children, and many of them were in that church that day. He's terrified for his wife and his kids. We see video of them pulling out at the end. They're holding each other. They're crying. Let me say to the devil's advocate people who say, but he's a journalist. Do we want to see this type of a scene with neo-Nazis doing a protest in a synagogue or people who dislike Islam doing a protest in a mosque? not everyone is going to be as peaceful and a mild servant of God as Jonathan Parnell. There will be violence. There will be anarchy. There will be a retreat from houses of worship because people will be afraid to go there.

11:06That is why we have a zero tolerance policy for this. That includes anybody who calls themselves a journalist, but is obstructing, intimidating, threatening, and otherwise violating the FACE Act. Right. I mean, the irony of the very same people who for years have been telling us they need safe spaces now not allowing for protected spaces for people to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech is rather extraordinary. Let me ask you for a moment to take your lawyer hat off and your government hat off and just talk about this from an optics perspective, because one thing that I am sympathetic to is that perhaps now the government is just giving Lemon what he wants, which is his chance at martyrdom.

11:50So this is separate than the legal issue. This is more of an optics and narrative issue. Does that jive with you in any way? Well, it could, but now I'm going to give you another logical ploy, which is the slippery slope argument. Now, several of the people arrested, Don Lemon happens to have his, you know, weirdo following. That's fine, whatever. Like, I respect the First Amendment. As you know, I've represented numerous journalists, including people who disagree with me, and I'm a former, you know, free speech lawyer in private practice. Several of those people call themselves journalists. What if they all call themselves journalists?

12:27What if all of the people who want to disrupt an abortion clinic, a mosque, a synagogue, a church, a Gurdwara, a Hindu Mandir? What if they want to go in there and say, hey, we're all journalists. Let's put a little journalism badge, you know, just like all these phonies put a service animal jacket on their dogs and just say, hey, I'm a journalist today. I get a free pass to violate your First Amendment rights in the place you go for sanctuary. That's where this argument will extend to. I don't care if he's a journalist. I'm not disputing that. He was once employed by CNN. Some people tune in to see what he has to say.

13:04Okay, that's not relevant to whether he broke the law. And let me point you to the examples of numerous examples by the prior administration of prosecuting people who call themselves journalists. The Obama administration prosecuted people who are indisputably journalists, including, or I should say, prosecuted, but investigated, Cheryl Atkinson and James Rosen. The last DOJ did not prosecute, but raided, harassed, and caused to spend possibly millions of dollars in attorney's fees, Project Veritas, for the thought crime of not publishing Ashley Biden's diary. Okay. So those are, I didn't make the rules, but the rules are, and the Congress made these rules.

13:52There's no get out of jail free card. This is not monopoly for podcasters. Yeah. And by the way, when no one's a journalist, everyone's a journalist. And when everyone's a journalist, no one's a journalist. And I don't think Don Lemon is any more of a journalist than you're right, than any of these other people that could have walked in there with the phone. Let me ask you something broadly on the state of protests in the country, because it seems to me that whether it's BLM one day or Hamas stuff the next day or anti-ice stuff or whatever it is, that we've just accepted that on any given moment in any usually blue city, people can just take over the streets.

14:31You mentioned that there are places that you can't protest or you have to get, you know, dispensation from the government or you have to get a, you know, some sort of allowance in essence. But it seems to me that doesn't really matter. I mean, I I understand that that's the law in a lot of places, but, you know, you can just walk down Fifth Avenue with thousands of people holding up Palestinian flags and just stop commerce, stop ambulances from going through and everything else. Do you feel that that that the ship has just sailed on that, that these people just have free reign now to do whatever they want?

14:59Well, you know, it's a very good question. It's a one way ratchet. OK. And over the years, I have advised numerous I participated in protests myself. I've done that from childhood, actually. There are things I believe strongly about. My people around me may have, or in college or what have you, you go out there and you protest legally and you follow orders and you then leave. But here's what it is. BLM had a 100 ,000-person protest march in Los Angeles during COVID. There was no permit for 100 ,000 people to shut down traffic in Los Angeles. At the same time, I went to court to litigate Gavin Newsom's denial of a permit to protest on the lawn of California's Capitol for a congressional candidate sought that.

15:48And someone protesting the state's refusal to issue gun licenses, federal firearms licenses. Sorry, not federal firearms licenses, but gun training permits during that time period. And they were denied. And you know what they did? They honored that denial and they went to court to challenge it. But the other side of the street, I guess COVID did not matter if it's a BLM protest. There's a magic shield, just like if you're Don Lemon, you claim you're a journalist. That's a magic shield from liability. So it is unfortunate that we have one-sided enforcement of our laws. When young conservatives wanted to have certain speakers at UC Berkeley, they applied for permission.

16:31There was going to be a protest over the denial. They went and tried to get a permit. And the other side just comes with bats and knives and nunchucks and starts a melee. And somehow, because liberal cities have been trained by the DOJ Civil Rights Division over the years, that if you enforce the law, you're going to get in trouble as a cop or as a city. And so I don't blame them in a way. But when this lawlessness occurs, they've been trained to stand down. I mean, I saw it myself in a 2016 rally for then-candidate Trump. I was in San Jose. I did the Pledge of Allegiance. I met the future president backstage.

17:12Everyone is exiting peacefully, and suddenly a riot comes along. There are 200 riot police standing there. And by the way, I love the police. These people are risking their lives for us. I don't think they went into policing to stand there and watch taxpayers get beaten by a mob. But when I sued the city, that is what I learned. I learned that their crowd control practices are such that if that kind of thing happens, and it only happens on one side for the most part, they just stand there and watch while citizens get beaten. And nothing happens. No one gets arrested. That's the state of the law in some of our blue cities in the United States, many of them, in fact.

17:47It is a dirty secret. And people need to be aware that when you're going into these types of situations where a protest could break out, you're on your own. Everyone make an exit plan for how they're going to get their family safely out of there. And my goodness, are we going to start saying that about going to church now? that everyone should have a ice-free, I mean, not the ice with the uniforms, but literally the ice that people slipped on when they were running out in Minnesota to try to get away. Should everyone have a safety plan or an exit strategy in case a journalist brings a protest into your worship service?

18:22That is just not sustainable in this country that was founded on the principles of freedom of religion. So if the blue cities and states are not going to do anything about that, And if the previous DOJ told them, you know, you can just kind of told the police don't do much or get away with whatever you want or let the governors do nothing or whatever it might be. I mean, you're involved now. We have a much better DOJ now. To me, it's almost as if they want you guys to overreact so that they can say, ah, see, Trump is that crazy authoritarian. But if you guys don't do anything, we just leave the cities to the jackals.

19:01Well, that's true. And so, you know, what's happening on the immigration enforcement side, that's not my lane. And I think the people, I mean, I met Tom Holman last week in Minneapolis with the attorney general and others and Chris Rea, the number two co-deputy at the FBI. These are tremendous professionals. I highly respect them. You know, sometimes mistakes are made that the DOJ does investigate. And so, you know, normally law enforcement looks at that. But I will tell you that what we what we are seeing here is there is a shift and we're getting attacked for it. So it's just damned if you do, damned if you don't.

19:36I don't think, and I don't really care. As you know, Dave, I'm not here for a popularity contest. I'm very plain spoken. I do what I think is right and damn the torpedoes. And that is really the attitude, I think, of this president as well. So yes, someone may get their 15 minutes of fame. They may get off on being arrested, whatever. That's fine. But what we can't tolerate is a repeat of what we saw. That is why we acted so swiftly. I am a person of faith. I think everyone should be able to go to their temple, church, synagogue, and feel safe there for a couple of hours, every how long you're there.

20:12Send your kids to Sunday school there. We can't tolerate any of this protest coming into our houses of worship. If we do, we will have lost the ability to worship peacefully in this country, because I guarantee you that every provocateur is going to be live streaming their nonsense from a place with a captive audience of God-fearing people who won't fight back. Of course they won't fight back in front of an altar. That's just not done. We all have our instincts. It was a hostage situation, really. Right. It also strikes me that we've already ceded so much ground to them. We know that they can just take over malls whenever they want.

20:49As I said, they can take over Fifth Avenue whenever they want. So if we just concede this last thing, that's the irony, watching the women of The View defending this. And as you pointed out, it's like, man, if a couple of people in MAGA hats showed up at a mosque, you guys would be screaming your heads off. It's quite absurd. Rightfully. Right. Of course. Of course. Absolutely. Let me ask you just more broadly speaking, now that you're a year or so into this new gig, everyone talks about the swamp and draining the swamp and all of these things. What have been the challenges for you outside of the obvious legal cases, but just kind of reforming a Justice Department that I think we would both agree, certainly, that was a little out of whack, let's say, for the last four years.

21:35Oh, totally out of whack. And not for the last four years. I'm going to tell you it's been out of whack for 40 years. And no matter who was the president of the United States, it didn't matter. Literally, the same people were borrowed in here, totally like the very epitome of the deep state.

21:52things in the corners that you never want to talk about, you know, of this building. And so when I came in here, it was like, you know, cleaning the Aegean stables. You know, we just basically said, look, these are the president's priorities and we're going to enforce all of the federal civil rights laws, but with these priorities. That caused more than half the people working here to head for the exits, including some who've been here for four decades. And I I think, not even five decades. And that's not a bad thing. But the challenge is you still have to enforce the law. And then you have to find new people to come in and do that.

22:28And you have to find new good people who want to come to D.C. and do a job. And typically for a lawyer, it's a pay cut to come to D.C. and do this job. It's a very prestigious job. It's a very important job. I find it a very rewarding job. But it is a challenge to staff in that circumstance. I think today, I may have had half a dozen hit pieces by the national news media across my inbox. They harass our employees. They reach out to us, our lawyers. They make up lies. The former lawyers who quit and now are having FOMO because we have done so much exciting work and in the headlines, they make up lies.

23:07They breach their ethical duties and reveal attorney-client communications. So these are some of the disappointing things I've seen. One of the others is when I started as a lawyer over three decades ago, you could count on no matter who appointed the judge. You're going to get some baseline consistency and adherence to the laws. Okay. Okay. I practiced law in San Francisco for 25 years, one of the most left-wing places, but I honestly got a fair shake from most of those judges most of the time. I did not feel like, oh my gosh, I should just pack up my tent and leave because of who appointed these judges.

23:45That was not the case. Today, what we saw during the last administration is some really radical judges joined the bench, and to the point where they get slapped down on the same issue again and again and again by the Court of Appeals. They don't respect the Court of appeals. They don't respect Supreme Court precedent. They write tone poems instead of opinions. There are some nutty opinions that have come out. And so it's really hard because the law is supposed to be something where it's like a machine. You should be able to predict what the outcome is going to be based on clearly established norms.

24:19It's not like a machine. It's more like a slot machine now where you plug it in and you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, you could hit the jackpot or you could just go home broke. That is the current situation now. That is frustrating. It doesn't have to be that way. We're not going to accept it being that way. We kind of need to get some more of the judges confirmed and on the bench so that we can have kind of a back to a normal judiciary that isn't biased against one side or the other. Is that is the only way to fix it through just getting more of Trump's judges confirmed? And I guess what's the holdup on that?

24:53But also, is there anything you really can't do anything with a true activist judge, right? I mean, once they're sworn in, there's virtually nothing that can happen to stop them, right? I mean, they can keep just giving terrible rulings and it is what it is. For the most part, I mean, I don't really want to stray into the other branches of the government. But, of course, there are tools that Congress has to deal with people who are truly violating their oath. You want to be careful with that and judicious about it because you don't want that being abused either. But I think others have spoken to the slow pace of confirmations.

25:27And I think that that issue is well known what the problem is. So I'll just leave it at that. Fair enough. What else are you focused on right now? I mean, I think most people see the lemon thing seems to be the thing, as annoying as it is. Obviously, there's all sorts of protest related stuff, things of that nature. What are the other places that you're kind of looking at? Anything sort of surprise you in this year? Well, you know, the church protest issue is really just—I shouldn't even call it a protest. Church obstruction issue is—last couple of weeks, really, we have seen a significant increase on attacks on houses of worship and anti-Semitism in our country.