What an incredible, absolutely incredible job Nicolle Wallace did today. She was a warrior for truth, justice, and democracy today!!
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The chyron read, "Donald Trump continues his attacks on daughter of hush money trial judge [Judge Juan Marchan]."
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Donald Trump, the defendant, retweeted images of President Joe Biden tied up. She discussed this with Lisa Rubin, Andrew Weissmann, and former Senator Claire McCaskill and they agreed that the gag order needed to be expanded and if Donald Trump violated the new gag order, then he needs to be held in contempt of court and locked up because anybody else would have been imprisoned long ago if they had acted in the same way that Donald Trump has acted.
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Perhaps there were a few people on the left who may have done something similar, but it is so much more prevalent on the right. And these are the people who are against law enforcement as their cult leader, Donald Trump, is against law enforcement as these law enforcement officers recognized when Trump's insurrectionists assaulted the Capitol in the first attack on the Capitol since 1814 , threatened Dana Nessel, tried to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer assaulted Paul Pelosi, tried to force a Biden Harris bus off the road in my hometown and even after settling didn't learn a damn thing, and Donald Trump engaged in stochastic terrorism by doxxing anyone who opposed him for any reason or who may oppose him, using these violent supporters as a threat and a weapon.
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"I knew that my driving was risky, but I wanted to express my opposition to their campaign and send them a message to leave my community,” Kruger added in his apology. “While I regret now participating in such risky activity, and apologize to the occupants of the bus for my part in the actions that day, at the time I and other Trump Train participants were happy that, after our actions, the Biden campaign canceled the rest of the bus tour.”
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Nicolle Wallace: Timothy Heaphy I want to start with you. Was the committee able to establish or just detail the ways in which the committee was able to establish a tie between Trump's language and violent acts?
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Timothy Heaphy: Absolutely Nicolle. There is a call and response that goes back and forth between the former president rhetoric and real life consequence on the ground. It goes back a long time but we talked to a lot of Proud (little) boys who interpreted that "stand back and stand by" comment at the debate as a reason for them to join the organization and organize on January sixth when he talked about specific election workers individuals, they got death threats, they had people outside of their house. There is no question that the committee's work established that this is not simply rhetorical, this is not simply anecdotal hypothetical political rhetoric. When he talks about violence even if he intends it rhetorically, it is taken seriously by his followers and that has real consequences.
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Nicolle Wallace: Trump's behavior seems totally immune and outside of all of the levers and tools available to criminal justice systems. So out what you are seeing in real time from this criminal defendant in relation or in context to what else you have seen in your career.
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Andrew Weissmann, former general counsel to the FBI, : You know when I look at this, it's not a reflection of Donald Trump. I mean we know what he is . He has engaged in this behavior. It will increasingly be over the top as he gets closer and closer to and is on criminal trial.
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This is about our institutions and how they are incapable of actually handling the situation for a whole variety of reasons. In normal case when I have handled organized crime cases, violent criminals, there is a process where they are held to standards and if they were to engage in this kind of conduct, they are usually given the sort of one bite at the apple. They are given one warning and then there are consequences which can include and does include jail. Just think about not that long ago, Paul Manafort. He committed obstruction of justice by coaching two witness to lie and he was remanded by the federal judge who oversaw his case. So, I really think this is a situation where you have so many people bending over backwards giving the former president the benefit of the doubt, over and over again and I think that is sort of the road to Hell !
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By not having sort of held these trials already, by not having investigated in a timely way, by not holding him to the exact same standard that we would hold anyone else to, we're both violating our oaths of office, we're violating what it means to have a justice system that holds everyone to the same standard. And it really I know a lot of times that it is born out of trying to be ultra fair, but it is leading really to beyond two systems of justice, it's a unique system of justice for Donald Trump which is not consistent (I corrected a mistake - constant (sic) ) with what it means to have a democracy and we may find ourselves without a democracy if we don't sort of wise up and hold him to the same standard that we do everyone else who has ever been treated that way in all the criminal cases I have ever done in my entire life.
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Nicolle Wallace: I mean this is the most, the farthest I have heard you go Andrew Weissmann! And you're describing ultra fair and I appreciate that you went farther than to say a singular standard. He now exists in a status only available to him ! It wasn't available to Jeffrey Epstein, it wasn't available to mob bosses. I mean it exists only for him and I wonder if at some point we stop with all of this.
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Former Senator Claire McCaskill: I was just going to say if in fact that is correct under NY law, the trial can't be delayed, then what I would say is just Judge Merchan knows he is trying to delay the trial and he ought to do exactly what he has available to him, tighten bail restrictions, further the gag order, and absolutely detain him if he refuses to comply with the rule of law. Either you do that or you throw up your hands and say, 'You know, I'm going to have to admit out loud we have a two tiered system of justice, one for everybody in America except Donald Trump.
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Andrew Weissmann said, "You have three former prosecutors here, if you asked any of us, 'Have you ever had a defendant like this whose name was not Donald Trump, would any of us say that the judge would not have hauled that person in at the very least, read them the riot act about what they can and cannot do. That would have happened the moment of the post being made with respect to the current president. Remember this has nothing to do with a gag order. It is simply a crime to threaten the president of the United States, but it is also something that can lead to having a much much stricter gag order. All of that would have happened by now and the idea can say that he is being treated unfairly is so laughable because I think anybody on this panel would say that he is being treated with kid gloves by the system.
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Nicolle Wallace: There is breaking news on that front. The The Manhattan DA'S Office has just issued a new filing delineating a lot of the weekend's attacks. Lisa Rubin, what's in here?
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Lisa Rubin: There is a lot of really really strong language, Nicolle. And I think a sort of concession from the DA'S Office about something you and I discussed before which is that the gag order as it presently exists maybe doesn't cover family members of the court or of the DA'S Office but if it doesn't, they are saying now is the time to expand it and also as l asked Friday to warn Donald Trump that one more violation and the consequences will include criminal contempt under New York law. Now, criminal contempt statutes that they cite here allow for the imprisonment of a person who violates willfully a court order for up to 30 days. Now, we have had many conversations about is the law sufficient in a situation like this. You have the DA saying it is if you only have the will to impose it.
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Nicolle Wallace: What does that mean?
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Lisa Rubin: I mean they are basically saying to Merchan the choice is yours, right? This is a major collective action problem in some respects nationwide because every judge who has had this man before them has dealt with a situation not unlike this.
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Chyron: Breaking News Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper:"I'm definitely not voting for Trump"
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Nicolle Wallace: So I would love to do this with both of you as often as we can, but Sarah tell me tell me, you have the data and you have the creative and you sort of have your own sort of institutional muscle memory, what message works for bringing along not just Mark Esper the man, but all the Mark Espers out there in the country?
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Sarah Longwell: Well, look I think there's two different kinds of sort of Never Trump audiences and surrogates. So, one is these sort of high level people like Mark Esper, like Jim Mattis, people who worked for Donald Trump, saw him up close and saw the kind of threat that he is and their voices are unique and have real persuasion power for some of these college educated, suburban voters who have never liked Trump but can sometimes forget the depth of the threat that he represents and so hearing it from people who worked for him, who had his best interests at heart and the country's interests at heart who are institutional Republicans, they matter to those voters and I've seen someone like General Kelly quoted before suggesting that perhaps it wouldn't matter to voters if he spoke out and that is wrong. I think that is something that happens during the primary where whenever these establishment Republicans criticize Trump it tends to rally people to Trump even more, that's true with the base. It is not true with these swing voters and so people like Esper speaking out is extremely important.
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It's also important that they go further than just saying that they're against Trump. If you say that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy then you also have to say that you are willing to vote for the one person that keeps Donald Trump from sitting in the Oval office again. And so, that message from those messengers is critically important. Now, there's another set of messengers that we're focused on which is sort of real Republicans who aren't going to vote for Trump. That speaks to sort of the same audience but those messengers have different powers and different elements of persuasion but I just think it's critically important that we hear from these high level officials who saw Donald Trump up close.
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It should be a much bigger story that the vice president who served Donald Trump is refusing to endorse him. For some reason everybody was kind of, 'Okay. Yeah, that makes sense, Donald Trump had his people storm the Capitol and threaten Mike Pence's life , so I get why he wouldn't endorse him.' This is an enormous thing historically and it speaks to the depths of Donald Trump's dangers and we cut that ad because that's funny how people haven't even internalized how significant it is that Mike Pence is refusing to endorse Donald Trump.
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[Saying that it is because Donald Trump tried to have him killed only specified a cause but doesn't remove the power and the significance from the fact that Mike Pence won't endorse Donald Trump].
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Nicolle Wallace: And see I led the five o'clock hour with it when it happened, Pence sort of undersold it when he mentioned it in a Fox News interview. We came on and led the hour with it and I had the same reaction. I was like why isn't this, you know, breaking and rolling breaking news, it has never happened in our history that someone's vice president hasn't endorsed them. I wanna follow up with you quickly on the generals. This is a conversation Donny and I started here at the table as well. I mean what I think some of them would say is generals shouldn't be telling people who to vote for.
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It is also true though the American people were told after September 11th, 'If you see something, say something ' and you know who saw a whole lot of somethings? The generals. And there has been an extraordinary body of reporting on what happened in those (unintelligible) briefings a lot of reporting has come out about John Kelly taking messages and directions from Trump to be more like the Nazis, more like Hitler's generals, more like German generals.
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And I think we get lost in the cloud of Trump's ignorance, you know some of the reporting suggested that he didn't know which German generals, which war, but the point is the generals saw first hand exactly what Trump is promising to do if he goes back in a second term which is to politicize the US military and if they care about the men and women who serve, I think that they have a duty not to tell people who to vote for but to tell people who they're going to vote for, no?
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Sarah Longwell: I completely agree with this. Look these are people who have either sent people to die for democracy or themselves have been willing to die on the batte for democracy and the idea that now you see well because I, you know, was a general or I wore the uniform, it is not right for me to speak out, you server in Donald Trump's administration. You understand the importance of democracy. You understand the threat that he represents and I think the obligation is total for these people, especially the generals. They would make such a difference.
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And the permission structure, you know I live in and die by permission structure and courage is contagious. Cowardice is contagious too, but courage can be contagious. When they speak up , the gravitas that they bring, I think that makes an enormous amount of difference. There's always this collective action problem right where just sort of one person comes out and speaks out and sort of everybody attacks them. There's power in numbers. There's safety in numbers and that's why you have to build a community and come out and say with one voice, all of these people, if they genuinely care about democracy and I will say that I believe that they do.
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And I will actually add one more point: I mean we're running this campaign with all of these regular Republican voters who come out and make these testimonials, these little videos, explaining why they as Republicans , they as Trump voters refuse to vote for him again and they put themselves on the line for ridicule or you know people coming after them in their communities, if they can do that, these generals and these people who served with Donald Trump, they can do that, they can have that courage.
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Nicolle Wallace: You know I talk a lot about permission structures too
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Donnie Deutsch : Yeah, you know I've been watching your show since the beginning of today what you covered in was an image of Joe Biden tied up in a truck, judges, children being threatened, election officials being threatened, this is what is in front of us. It's clear. I would ask anybody to look up project 2025 in their Google and Charlie Kirk and the Heritage Foundation, this is what they want to do to the executive branch and have the FTC and the FEC and pull up the insurrection acts and so the military sicced on its on people, dismantle the FBI , take apart the Justice Department, these institutions have to start behaving differently now, starting with the generals.
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By the way, I came on the show a couple of months ago and said give four of those generals, get Mattis, McMaster, Milley, and Kelly to camera talking, if you want the military to stay as it is , independent of the president's whims, you have to speak up. If you're a CEO and you don't want your company at the beck and call of Trump to say you're gone, you're gone, you're gone, you stay, you go, you need to speak up. If you're in the media and you want to continue to have a free media and not have Donald Trump call up Comcast, I don't like MSNBC and they are going to go off the air, I'm dismantling your company, these people have always been on the sidelines, corporate America, the military, the Justice Department have got to start to speak up.
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We are under siege . If you can't see it, it's happening in slow motion. If you live this country, the irony is Trump preaches about patriotism and love of country, yet he wants to blow up everything that's great about it. So, if you love this country, any of those people I mentioned if you believe in the people who died for us 250 years ago, died for us 50 years ago, 100 years ago , this is the time we all have to start behaving differently. This is a different kind of enemy, an enemy from within. I called you 'troubled all the time ' . We're in Def-Con 3. And the institutions of they want to hold, have to start acting differently now or they won't be in existence as we know them after.
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A quick note: Donald Trump, the guy who appointed David Weiss, had foreign aid approved by Congress for Ukraine withheld in order to pressure Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into doing him a personal and political favor and announce an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden even though it wasn't true. Therefore, was there more than sufficient reason to remove that political appointee? Of course there was. Yet President Biden left David Weiss in place to overcharge his son, Hunter. This shows the enormous amount of character and integrity that President Biden has. That along with President Biden's entire public career shows us that President Biden is not a threat to democracy; rather, he is a defender. So, if you're a Republican who has acknowledged that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, since you know President Biden is not, then your unwillingness to endorse and vote for President Biden in the 2024 presidential election indicates that you believe that the marginal tax rates for those earning $400,000 is as important as retaining our democracy. That is indefensibly stupid.
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Donald Trump attempted a coup. Let me repeat that. Donald Trump attempted a coup. The evidence of that fact is insurmountable, it is of high quality, and enough of it is in the public record that the only rational conclusion is that Donald Trump must be charged. Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 presidential election which President Joe Biden won. Donald Trump tried to steal the election which President Biden won and there was more than sufficient quality evidence in the public record that President Biden knew this fact. I am of the view that Merrick Garland is, by far, the worst appointment by President Biden. Attorney General Merrick Garland didn't appoint Special Counsel Jack Smith until 2023.
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President Biden could have decided by January 20th of 2022 that Attorney General Merrick Garland had been given more than sufficient time to indict Donald Trump or to appoint a special counsel and told him to clear out his desk. But firing Attorney General Merrick Garland for not prosecuting someone is not any better legally or morally than directly telling the attorney general who to investigate and prosecute and who not to. It would mean that you will be fired if you as the attorney general don't investigate and prosecute the people I, the president, think you should. That ends the independence of the Department of Justice, the time of law, and our democracy. At that point, the Department of Justice is simply a tool to protect your friends and family and harm your enemies. The president is no longer equal under the law. President Biden has so much respect for the rule of law and our democracy that he would not do this.
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From No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: President Biden is now tied or slightly ahead in eight polls and is ahead of tied in the three states that will decide this election, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
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I actually don't expect the polls to really change in our favor until October. Some people are still trying to convince themselves that the nominees of our two major political parties will not be Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
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Donald Trump has established that his national popular vote ceiling in the general election is 47%. His high water mark is 46.8% in 2020. And he has yet to face the voters over any of the following eight events, any one of which would destroy the hopes of winning for any other nominee of a major political party for president:
1. What non MAGA saw on TV: the insurrection
2. Corrupt organization trying to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into altering the election results in Georgia Indictment
3. Campaign Finance Violation Election Interference Indictment
4. Willful Retention of Classified Documents, Espionage Act Violation Indictment
5. January sixth federal Indictment
6. Ruled by court to have sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll and a federal judge ruled that everywhere outside of NY Penal Law this is identified as rape
7. Corruptly ran business so that can't run business in NY for 3 years, have to pay disgorgement for $455 Million
8. Dobbs - Trump said, "I killed Roe!"
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President Biden simply has to give voters permission to vote for him by being very visible publicly to show he is fine and more than up to serving as president again. If he does this, he will win the 2024 presidential election.
