Is this all about pre-spinning likely GOP losses and driving up doubts about the results? What's really going on here? What's at play?

It's a very good question.

I think part of it is, yes, pre-spinning the potential losses.

I think this is, though, attempted election interference if you really want to get down to brass tacks.

Now, it may not work, right, because a lot of these cases are frivolous.

You say it may not work.

Could this work? It shouldn't work.

What what worries you that the DOJ may still try to do in these waning days? We're barely a week that we're less than a week to go.

What's their standing? States run their own elections.

Yeah, I don't think they have a legal claim here, literally.

Now, when you bring a complaint in court, you have to have two things.

A legal claim, which is the actual technical vehicle for your claim.

So it could be a statute that says you have a right to be free of employment discrimination or housing discrimination, right? Then you have facts that are supposed to feed into that claim.

Now in this case, the Justice Department has said its claim is based on prefatory language in the National Voter Registration Act that says that the law was passed to protect the integrity of elections.

does not provide the Justice Department with the cause of action under any circumstances, much less circumstances like this one.

So then is this, from your perspective, just about creating a narrative that the midterms and the elections cannot be trusted so that you are preemptively setting that tone to get people to either not vote or not trust the results? Why else would you be doing this if you don't have a really strong legal claim?

Why do these people and by these people, I mean the government, continue to get away with these shenanigans?

So I think in this case, three big reasons I would zero in on.

One is that the lawyer handling this, Stan Woodward, the associate attorney general, third ranking, should never have been confirmed.

He has the job because he represented a bunch of January 6th defendants.

He represented Peter Navarro.

He's never worked at the DOJ before this.

Is he a real lawyer? He's a real lawyer, but you know, who put him in there? The Republicans in the Senate put him there.

No,

Don't make no sense.

It's one among many reasons.

The preliminary injunction process is designed to reach an expedited resolution when there are real exigent circumstances in play.

Now, in this case, you had really quite fulsome briefing and argument and everything.

So I share your instinct that this was likely to end the same way.

Now, what, of course, can happen in the course of the litigation over the long term on a regular timeline is there can be discovery, right? Your lawyers can ask to try to depose some witnesses, right? And to build the case that this was pretextual, that it was retaliatory and all that to make the evidence even better.

But of course, now there's sort of this is on two tracks now because you just said there's an appeal.

That's true.

What happens there on what I think is the real issue about the sort of viewpoint discrimination?

you're exactly right about what the real issue is, which is not just the press accessible spaces, but these so-called private spaces that the DC circuit sort of devised or created in the context of the AP litigation.

Now that was an interim ruling.

It's not a final decision on the merits, but I think that panel will go there.

I think, and I think the judge who's handling the case involving your network and the other outlets is probably going to end up reaching a similar conclusion.

We'll find out.

That means I think that we're going to have to see this get teed up on appeal, right? It may be the case that depending on how the judge issues his ruling, that there may be cross appeals.

The reason this matters, just to put on my journalist White House correspondent hat for a second, is because if the president gets to decide who's invited into those rooms, who gets to ask the questions in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or less who does, but who doesn't, then he does get to determine basically what the coverage of him is because no one gets to push the president unless they're flattering the president with their questions.

What do you think? Well,

first of all, well, you know, welcome to the club of everyone who's ever dealt with the American legal system, who's mad at why it doesn't move more quickly.

Yeah.

Our courts do not move quickly enough.

So they're just that.

But Luke, I think the point you made is a very important one about the AP resolution here, because I mean, as I'm observing this, I'm less concerned about the time than I am with the fact that Judge Kelly does not seem prepared to go further.

The AP case.

He might have a file on you.

Who's going to enforce the law? So if Congress can't do anything or is not doing anything, does somebody else have to sue? Does anybody else have standing to sue to stop these ads? Give us the legal situation.

Yeah, well, look, I feel like we've had this conversation since like January 21st, 2025, which is where is Congress? Right.

Ordinarily, if something like this happened, you would expect Congress to raise hell, do something about it and use their own tools.

But it's a Republican majority.

They're not going to do that.

You know, I know that there are, you know, the usual organizations evaluating whether they have any public citizen.

Yeah.

Well, look, OK.

And so what did you make of the way that the AG weighed in here?

This was a remarkably embarrassing and unprofessional performance for Todd Blanche.

He clearly wanted to start some sort of contentious thing with Martha Raddatz.

I don't know Martha Raddatz, but she's about the last person in the Washington press corps who you could get in some sort of on-air fight with.

So that was dumb.

But look, this was the world's most obvious question in a context like this.

One example, just one example of inaccurate reporting.

How long do you actually think this case stretches on for?

What is your take on their argument and how you think this is ultimately going to be settled in court? And also, why, having seen the Trump administration file an appeal?

Okay, that's a bunch of questions, all good.

They might file an appeal at some point, particularly when there is a resolution of the preliminary injunction motion.

So right now, we just resolved the temporary restraining order stage, the quickest way to get relief from a court after a case has been filed.

And there's a longer, I think it's two weeks, a briefing period for a preliminary injunction, which would convert the temporary restraining order into something more significant.

And that would be more readily appealable.

by the administration.

How concerned are you that he could do this? He could declare

What non-lawyers, I'll let you finish it, what non-lawyers call a purge.

Right.

Right.

But because we're at within a 90-day window of the midterms, a separate federal law prevents the states from undertaking programs and to purge their voter rolls.

So if the states are obeying that law, they should only be able to use the tool at this point for individualized queries, right? So that is going to minimize the effect of making this tool available to the states in the run-up to this election.

But, you know, we can, we, [laughs] we ought to think about the next election as well, right? So this may be back, uh, on our radar, uh, in a more serious way in a, just a matter of, of months.

But, um, to my mind, you know, the significance of the ruling is, is n- not just because it affect, will affect and potentially disenfranchise, uh, even a single voter, that's a bad outcome.

Where do you come down on that?

But let's start with that first part.

Yeah.

So there is actually a fairly robust now body of law around Trump's efforts to kick members of the media out of the White House.

So I think the judge is going to be focused on a few things.

So first, due process issues that have been raised by the networks.

There was no notice.

There are no standards.

So when if there's a conflict, he's already trained his people to believe the government and not the press.

First off, the, the Supreme Court didn't actually weigh in on the legality of the ballroom, right? What does this decision mean?

Well, I think, um, as a practical matter, what I'm hoping it means is that Justice Roberts simply wanted to maintain what is currently the status quo until the entire court has the opportunity to weigh in and review the papers.

The responsive papers were just filed by the trust on Tuesday, and it is August, and the Supreme Court's justices, like members of Congress, are quite militant about their vacations.

[laughs] So they may be scattered, not able to move as quickly as usual.

I think it's gonna be very important to see what happens next week to see if there's action from the full court and if they decide to hear, uh, this case, how quickly the briefing might occur.

So I think for now we can consider a stopgap.

I understand why people regard this as a bad sign.

How much of a challenge do you think the Department of Justice would have investigating and policing this kind of activity?

We did talk about this way too

early.

There was an organization called the Council on Criminal Justice, which issued a report documenting the drop in crime.

The administration has cited them.

And so has some members of Congress.

When Todd Blanch was up for confirmation, that group came out and said, we're not saying that this drop in crime had anything to do with the Justice Department.

We're still looking at this.

Right.

So let me just throw it to you and talk everybody through not only what you're seeing in this litigation, but why you decided to label it appropriately, in my view, blackmail.

Yeah.

So, OK, so on Friday, the Trump administration through the Justice Department filed this application with the Supreme Court asking them essentially to just fully clear the way for the construction of Trump's ballroom.

He had been losing in the courts below.

The district court judge entered a preliminary injunction.

And that critically for our purposes, that preliminary injunction included some significant carve outs.

It allowed the administration to continue construction below ground and also above ground to the extent any construction above ground was necessary for security purposes.

was promptly forgotten, which highlights the frivolity of these claims in the first instance.

So let me just throw it to you and, and talk everybody through not only what you're seeing in this litigation, but why you decided to label it, appropriately in my view, blackmail.

Yeah.

So, okay, so on Friday, um, the Trump administration through the Justice Department filed this application with the Supreme Court asking them essentially to just fully clear the way for the construction of Trump's ballroom.

He had been losing in the courts below.

The district court judge entered a preliminary injunction, and that critically for our purposes, that preliminary injunction included some significant carve-outs.

It allowed the administration to continue construction below ground and also above ground to the extent any construction above ground was necessary for security purposes.

The administration then appealed that.

But anyway, so, so let me throw it back to you.

Okay.

This was a particularly inane version of a position he has expressed before.

Simone is exactly right.

He's been saying this for a long time.

He even said it under oath at his confirmation hearing that essentially that he is obligated, he feels obligated to take the president's instructions because he's the head of the executive branch.

Now, when Kristen Welker asked him about acting independently, he seems to have wholly misinterpreted the question as if she asked him, will you always say no to the president? And he says, well, what are you asking me? I'm going to always say no to the president.

Like, no, that's not what she said.

He's right.

Yeah.

It's bad lawyering, just to be very clear.

But he constructs hypotheticals that make no sense, right? So of course, what people are actually want from the attorney general sort of historically is, you know, the president should be able to direct policy and where, you know, how they, d- department prioritizes resources.

But there's historically been a line at the president's ability to direct particular criminal prosecutions, to target particular people, and to weigh in on particular investigations.

Because of course, the pre- anything the president says is going to have an extraordinary amount of influence on the attorney general.

So Blanche can't even construct a hypothetical that makes, uh, defensible sense of their own position.

I just want to be very clear about that.

Yeah

So as, as a matter of law, how strong or not is the president's argument that he should be able to build the ballroom? Because it seems like almost like the administration's now trying to argue that this is primarily a national security project to protect him and future presidents.

Yeah, and I don't think that's an accident.

I mean, remember, this started out as sort of a, a vanity project of sorts.

Trump wanted it to, so that he could entertain foreign dignitaries, and I think what's happened is, as a result of building that out, they had to build in very s- you know, s- serious security sorts of, uh, protections.

And they're now using those protections to claim that that's what the whole thing is about, and that if you stop it or make any attempt to sort of insert some sort of a, a process into the, into the, uh, project, that then it's gonna put the president's life in danger.

Um, it's not the first time that this administration has gone to the Supreme Court with very aggressive claims that aren't entirely backed up by the evidence.

Does that undermine at all the argument that, that it's first and foremost about national security? Or does the, the kind of the decoration of it not matter at all?

No, I think it does matter.

So, you

know, Trump's true social feed provides a lot of market-moving information, naturally.

Things that the president says can shift markets instantaneously, whether it has to do with the war and potentially the price of oil or a particular business.

So the decision to give that information to people who are paying for it ahead of time means that they can trade ahead of other people and potentially lock in financial gains that will not be available to them.

the people who aren't paying for that access, and actually will come at the expense, just to be clear, of the people who are not paying for that access, given the nature of how markets work, right? So the lawsuit names Trump not just in his personal capacity, we were just literally looking at this at a moment ago, but also some of his aides.

I couldn't tell you what the exact strategy is concerning which defendants they decided to name.

That's often something that the litigators think about very carefully.

And I think it was in the regime change book that said that people joked that anyone that gets close to 250 feet of the White House was probably going to get some kind of nice little letter from pardon from the president.

Okay.

Right? So when they issued their ruling, they said, "Well, at a minimum, you need to give her notice and an opportunity to respond to the allegations." This is the most basic concept in like kind of legal due process.

So, um, you know, I thought perhaps, because the court, when the court issued its decision, Trump had already managed to clear the, the deck and get Warsh confirmed.

Right

... it's a, it is a baseless case.

It is a case or a set of allegations that could equally apply to plenty of other people who are not out of favor with the president, but of course they're not doing anything about that.

Um, you know, it's another instance of the administration sort of picking the sort of blunt-est instrument that it kind of has available.

And it's not always an intelligent way of going about things.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

[Instrumental music]

How far can those lawyers go in giving in to that? Do they themselves face potential consequences for doing that in court?

They do.

So, I mean, the legal standard for charging a criminal case, federal criminal case, is probable cause.

Doesn't mean more likely than not.

It's a relatively low standard.

There are then ethical rules that lawyers have to follow.

You cannot falsely represent a fact to a judge.

Is that fund still dead from what you've seen?

Given that this is a president who's very comfortable applying public pressure to the Justice Department, you mention that, that pressure and the, the buckling that some lawyers may feel pressure to do, how far can those lawyers go in giving into that? Do they themselves face potential consequences for doing that in court?

They do.

So I mean, let's ...

The legal standard for, uh, charging a criminal case, federal criminal case, is probable cause.

Doesn't mean more likely than not.

It's a relatively low standard.

There are then ethical rules that lawyers have to follow.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, the floor is yours.

Ari, I don't even know where to begin.

I, I mean, humiliating doesn't even begin to describe it.

Um, you know, the piece today was about, you know, the sort of seemingly endless bungling at the Justice Department, in addition to all of the things that I'm guessing you and I both object to, the abuses of authority, the improper objectives that they're pursuing, and it is, uh, very rare, I have to say, for someone to write a piece and then the same day get more evidence for the thesis.

I mean, this is...

I, I, I, I can't even begin to tell you how many things must have gone wrong.

The investigation had to go wrong.

Uh, New York Times says Trump to appeal it, um, a sign that the president, uh, is doubling down on his fight for the deal that brings him personal benefits, even though they have, quote, "jeopardized the confirmation of Attorney General Blanche." I have about a minute left for you on, on that and the, and the Blanche vote derailed this week

me who did mergers and acquisitions suddenly becoming the attorney general of the United States.

Yeah, I mean, well, here's the thing I would point out about him, though, because when people, you know, when he was up for the U.S. attorney, the theory was like, oh, he's going to be a more competent, reliable, stand-up guy.

Well, okay.

So he gets in office, and just a couple weeks ago, it's his office's prosecutors who went and subpoenaed the New York Times reporters.

And it is his office's prosecutors who made absolute fools of themselves in front of a judge last week because they couldn't even cross their T's and dot their I's correctly and do the most basic things correct.

So he was not competent to have the job he'd Currently has.

And he's not doing a good job at that one either.

more to go.