Um, your thoughts on what the country's in for?

Well, I think, uh, what's interesting about it is let's go back to the weaponization fund question, which is interesting.

Donald Trump has not gotten the memo [laughs] or the two memos that, uh, Blanche signed.

Actually, he only signed one of them.

Uh, g- which were critical in getting him the two votes on the Senate Judiciary Committee, uh, to even get to a floor vote.

So Trump keeps reviving this issue of the anti-weaponization fund.

Todd Blanche has said it's dead, dead, dead, wrote that, wrote that, uh, i- in his memos.

It's not a settlement if you are on both sides of it.

[laughs]

Nothing wrong with ties.

Um, but nothing that he is talking about is normal.

This doesn't happen.

This has only started to happen now.

It is not normal for the President of the United States to get involved in a case involving a US attorney.

It is not normal for the President of the United States to summon a US attorney to the White House to, to decide whether or not they're gonna get fired or not.

How is all of this gonna sit with the President? Who, who's the last one in his ear?

[laughs]

... that I started.

My first gig in Washington was covering Congress.

And, you know, i- i- one is never, uh, y- a- any time you ever expect senators to act in a, y- y- you know, to act in a way that they will stand up to a power greater than their own, you are always, you know, disappointed.

That's a bad bet.

But if you kinda look at Cornyn, uh, Cornyn's statements during Todd Blanche's confirmation hearing, he made one very broad statement about Blanche, how difficult it would be for Blanche as pr- the president's personal lawyer, and remember, Blanche had that slip-up right around that time where he said, "I am the president's lawyer," and then he corrected himself, "I'm the former president's lawyer." Uh, uh, Cornyn widened out the lens quite a bit and said, "Uh, I have concerns," essentially, about Blanche's independence.

Well, none of those concerns were articulated after the hearing.

Mm-hmm

Mm

... for me in order to prove that you're, you're loyal to me?" Again, it is, let me just emphasize, I, and I think Carol made this point, too.

Like, how little, how very, very little Todd Blan- uh, uh, John Cornyn is asking for here.

He's not asking for this IRS deal, which is extraordinary, which was negotiated inside a circle of lawyers who all know each other and represent Donald Trump.

Plaintiff and defense side were operating generally in the same interest according to the judge that was adjudicating the case, right? Um, and all, all that John Cornyn wants [laughs] is something in writing to cover two points.

The first point is that the IRS tax immunity thing is only retrospective, and that the second point is that it not extend to a wider group of people than previously thought.

It's not like he's looking to get rid of the deal, which even, even most Republicans have already told Blanche they think is entirely inappropriate and self-dealing.

Just give them a copy of your newspaper

But of people you've talked to, is there a sort of strategy behind this? Is Blanche and the DOJ and, frankly, the president, they're just willing to go along with the acting in order to preserve the possibility of that fund and those IRS protections? Did you say

strategy? You're right.

Sorry, my bad.

I mean, like, look, Todd Blanch got this job in the first place because he was willing to execute what Donald Trump wanted him to do.

So, you know, this is like, this is a bit of a Faustian bargain, I think critics of Blanch would say, that in order to get the nomination, he went along with what Donald Trump wanted.

The problem is, in order to actually secure the confirmation, he would have to buck Trump, and he's showing no signs of doing that.

Donald Trump... is proving once again a point that doesn't need to be proven anymore, which is everybody who works for him, from the attorney general on down to the person who serves him his Diet Cokes, they are his employees.

Glenn, real quick, what is the difference, the fact that we're putting this pledge in writing versus just vowing it? What is the enforcement mechanism here for Congress's point of view?

Why is Blanche not willing, or at least not yet, to give Cornyn what he wants?

Because the, the White House and the Department of Justice don't care about the Senate [laughs].

I mean-

[laughs]

...

this is a group of people who'll put ...

They don't, they couldn't give a damn one way or the other.

Come on, guys, let's be real here.

Am

I wrong? What would give you that impression? We are dealing with the most titanium spine.

Right.

Aggregation of humans known to man.

No, look, I think Tillis is really interesting because Tillis is kind of like a freelance dissenter at this point in time.

He seems to be out there on a lot of stuff.

So he could do a bit of strategic retreat on this and still have some cred pushing Trump, for instance, like on blocking the SAVE Act, for instance.

So, again, is any of this going to actually hurt him when it comes to his nomination? And also, do you think that separate from that, is there enough pressure that he actually mounts some kind of investigation?

Hmm.

He runs the day-to-day operations of the department, and he's particularly powerful because his boss is so weak.

Pam Bondi is a second choice attorney general.

She was the former AG in Florida, and she's just not prepared for the job.

And Blanche winds up having even more power than most deputy attorney generals have.

And from the very beginning, he and his right-hand man, Emil Bove, begin enacting key elements of Trump's plan.

[upbeat music] First and foremost, it involves demoting, marginalizing, and flat out firing career staff that they consider to have been part of the Jack Smith investigations and other things that flagged employees as being anti-Trump.

Beyond cleaning house at the Department of Justice, how is Blanche advising the president as he's starting to test the bounds of the law in those first weeks and months of the second term?

[laughs] It's perfect.

Do the pr- I would l- I wanna do the prayer hands emojis to my bosses on that one.

Um, but, you know, I mean, the, it, it illustrates essentially the catalytic, the catalytic, uh, event that really, uh, prompted Todd Blanche to take control of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Working Group inside, uh, the Justice Department.

It wasn't necessarily Blanche's, uh, firm belief in any one of these principles, right? He is broadly motivated by a desire to execute Trump's, Trump's, uh, wishes.

It's not like Todd Blanche doesn't think, um, doesn't agree with Donald Trump that the Justice Department had been mobilized against him and, and some of his supporters.

It's tr- it-it's Blanche has a general sense of wanting to control it.

I th- I think what, what these emails, and it's three hundred and ninety-two pages, and it was provided to me from, uh, by American Oversight, a watchdog group.

What about the incompetence argument against having him serve in the big boy role as permanent a-attorney general?

Give us, give us your reporting on that, Glenn.

Well, Blanche, his, uh, his confirmation hearings are at 9:00 AM tomorrow morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Uh, a- a- and Blanche has some real challenges.

You know, a, a few months ago, really six months ago, a, a justice nominee could go before the committee and not really have much of a problem.

But the atmosphere is changing.

The gravitational pull, the midterms is hitting, and there's just been so many, uh, prosecutions that have floundered.

Most recently is this, the, the seashells prosecution against James Comey.

It happened in 2016 as well, as Donald Trump was saying, "You gotta watch carefully what's going on in Philly, watch carefully what's going on in Detroit." Is that a fair link to make, Glenn?

Uh, Glenn Thrush, take us through your reporting on this story.

So basically, what we know i- is what the governor, uh, uh, uh, has, has told us.

Um, uh, the investigation, as far as we can tell, the reporting that we have done so far, and this is very preliminary, we just learned about this today, um, mostly focuses on the governor's wife and, and the not-for-profit that she, uh, runs.

Um, she's a docu- documentarian.

She's written about gender discrimination.

Um, there have been, over the years, critics, uh, uh, uh, who have scrutinized and criticized, uh, some of the donations they have, they have taken.

So this is apparently a tax investigation run out of Sacramento.

I mean, it, it is such a cataclysmic political moment in terms of waking up Minneapolis and Minnesota and the resistance in the country, and the reporting suggests that some people inside the West Wing saw it for what it was.

It's weird

...

he kind of flippantly said he would take it under, under advisement.

Uh, look, this thing has been weird from jump.

Myself and my colleagues, uh, last week put together a, a, a pretty exhaustive, uh, we call them TikToks, of the decision-making process in this.

And, and, and what's amazing about the slush fund or whatever you wanna call it, I don't wanna call it a slush fund, it is technically the Anti-Weaponization Compensation Fund, uh, even though Republicans are also calling it a slush fund.

It was essentially the best of all... was essentially, believe it or not, the best of all possible worlds for the Justice Department and Todd Blanch.

Yes

I mean, Glenn, I can think of dozens of people that you have covered over the last 18 months who are gonna be watching this case very, very closely.

Yeah, I mean, like, i- i- in the Trump, in the Trump, I should call it the Trump Justice Department, um, it- it's become a verb.

You get Article II'd.These are the letters and emails that dozens and dozens of employees at, at, at the Justice Department and at the FBI have gotten.

The one thing I wanna say is wh- you know, when I tweet some of these cases out, and, and a, and a bunch of them have been FBI agents who are by no means liberals, okay? These are not deep, deep state people.

These are people who hate talking to reporters but were forced out because of their perceived work on, 'cause of their work on the Jack Smith case or for any other reason that Kash Patel or, or Dan Bongino, his former deputy, wanted.

Um, and people res- people out there, seriously, uh, i- in the world out there think that, that this is entirely appropriate and normal and that the Democrats did it, uh, when they were in power, right? And that this is business as usual.

It is really important for people to understand out there who are not, who are not privy to these procedures, who are not particularly partisan, to know that this is extremely unusual, and it has resulted in the gutting of competence in all of these agencies.

How has it done that, Glenn?

So what exactly are they looking into?

So we're not exactly clear, but there's an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who is the, the woman who won two civil lawsuits against President Trump, who was deemed to have credibly accused him of sexual assault several decades ago, uh, during an interview.

And th- this is somebody the president and his team have sought both to discredit legally and personally.

She won a settlement, uh, for defamation against the president.

And what seems to have occurred, and it's still very much up in the air, is that officials in the Justice Department, political appointees of the president, appear to have initiated an investigation into her based on testimony she gave about the source of her funding for her, her legal fund.

It gets very complicated, but the gist of it is that she said she hadn't received, uh, any money from particular people and that she had, had lied about it.

Um, that is a very peripheral, tangential investigation, uh, for the Justice Department to undertake under normal circumstances, much less in a situation in which, essentially, Trump has ordered up investigations against his enemies.

Also, uh, raises the question of why she would lie, lie about the funding for her case.

Just talk about Todd Blanch as a political liability for Donald Trump today.

Well, I mean, you know, one of the things that's interesting is this differentiation that Tillis and others attempt to make between Donald Trump and the people who are advising him, as if Donald Trump is taking anyone's advice to take these maximalist positions.

And the same thing holds true for Todd Blanche.

Todd Blanche is doing what Donald Trump wants him to do.

I think if given his druthers, Blanche would be a relatively vanilla, if somewhat MAGA-flavored... attorney general, but Trump is demanding these things of Todd Blanch.

And if you want to have any evidence of that, every time Trump mentions Blanch's name, he says acting attorney general Todd Blanch.

But you're absolutely right.

I mean, how would you quantify the hollowing out of the Justice Department prosecutors in terms of just volume and then in terms of brain drain?

Hmm

... 'cause just look at his ...

I mean, he looks miserable.

He, like, wears his agony on his face.

Uh, and he's just being, uh, he's just, uh, reaping, uh, what he has sown as somebody who refuses to say no to Donald Trump.

He has simply not turned down a- any request.

And this, uh, as we're reporting and figuring out how this all came down, it seems that this, this huge thing that he has sort of blown up the Senate and created this enormous rift in his party was an expedient so that they could get out of having to actually pay Donald Trump money, which Blanche and, and folks at the White House actually believed would've been a bridge too far.

Yeah.

[laughs]

... uh, we reported that, um, the US attorney in Philadelphia drop kicked the Brennan investigation out of his jurisdiction, um, to Florida.

Now, now for those viewers who are uninitiated, this investigation is being run by a guy named Jason Redding Quinones, who is a Trump diehard.

And, and our reporting and other people's reporting, um, have shown that Quinones has been up in DC, uh, quite a bit over the past few months.

So this is in coordination with the knowledge of acting Attorney General, uh, Todd Blanche, who is very, very much trying to check off boxes, uh, so that he can take the acting away from his, uh, title.

And I should just tell you, Blanche, uh, and Patel got a shout-out at a Trump event, uh, last night, and it was very noteworthy that Trump referred to him not as Attorney [laughs] General Todd Blanche, but as acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as a way of just saying, "Hey, dude, the jury's still out." Um, and the, and the grand jury is very much still out on this, uh, on, on the Brennan case.

Um, as you, I think, exhaustively and appropriately, uh, documented, this material has been gone over many, many times, and, you know, they might, as they were able to do in the Comey seashells case, um, obtain an indictment.

I mean, are they part of the conspiracy or did they miss something?

[laughs]

... is just, uh, pretty remarkable.

Um, uh, look, I think what we're dealing with here is, uh, we had a, a, an attorney general in Pam Bondi who was on extremely thin ice, uh, nonexistent ice, boiling water more like it, and you have her, her successor, um, Todd Blanche, who has to prove to the president in very quick fashion, uh, that he, that he's tougher than Pam Bondi.

[coughs] So in order to do this, he has got to show Trump, he's gotta demonstrate that he is willing to go after some of the peopleuh, that Trump most wants to target, some of the, the real ancient enemies, and there's no one more ancient in this particular fight, uh, than Brennan.

And, and we're told this is, again, a bifurcated process.

You've got the lying to Congress bit, which is always kind of the lowest-hanging fruit in these criminal investigations taking place out of, uh, I believe, Janine Pirro's o- office in Washington on one track.

And then you have this grand conspiracy thing which no one can really figure out, uh, quite what is going on, uh, the, in Florida with Jason Quinones and this tremendous fiasco in which the lead prosecutor in this case was like, "Later, I don't want anything to do with this." And who did you put in, in place? Joe diGenova, one of the oldest Trump cronies.

But as you said, Nicole, Donald Trump, and I covered him for a long time-

Yep

...

the, the existing from news cycle to news cycle.

I mean, we used to...

So, you know, when, when I covered him in New York City, the, the, the joke about him, and this was a joke people used to make about Ed Koch, the, uh, famous former mayor, was that, uh, he was unavoidable for comment.

So Trump is, is guided by his mouth.

He, he, he is somebody who believes that he can, uh, uh, that, that he can sort of define the terms of any debate if he can just keep talking.

Talk a little bit about what's changing there and why.

Mm-hmm

... at some point in time, uh, a- and, and I'm talking to you, United States Congress, um, some of these, these, uh, s- senators and representatives who very well know, A, that such a law would be unconstitutional, never vote on it, uh, and B, don't appreciate this kind of talk because in, in so many instances, the federal judiciary has been ruling in Trump's favor.

Um, uh, they don't like this, but you're, but you know, Trump is able to speak as if there is only one branch of government and only one article in the Constitution because the, because the ju- the legislative branch principally has not pushed back on that.

You see a little bit of this happening.

Uh, Senator Kennedy is somebody who's spoken out against this.

Senator Tillis is another one, principally because he's not running for re-election.

But until the tonal register of Republicans rises to rival what Trump's tonal register is, this is just gonna keep happening.

Your sense, Glenn, based on your reporting on, on where we are in the escalation ladder when it comes to this DOJ being willing to target those who the President identifies as his political enemies?

Um, what is newly under investigation or are there simply new investigators?

It, it's not clear.

Um, I should say we haven't, uh, w- we haven't confirmed the latest, uh, uh, Axios report, but it's very consistent with what we've heard in the past and what we've reported in the past, which is the issuance of a dozen subpoenas with regard to the, uh, with regard to the investigation into that intelligence assessment.

Um, the principal target of this is John Brennan, uh, who is a, a former, uh, administration official.

Um, and the, the saga of this is quite remarkable in and of its- in and of itself.

Um, the initial investigation was tasked to the US, Trump-appointed US attorney in Eastern Pennsylvania.

As we have reported, it appears he wanted nothing to do with this.

Where, what happens next?

Let me be the one to cast aspersion.

It's very har- L- look, it...

We are locked in...

Th- this has been the frustration of covering Trump from jump, right? We are locked in a very conventional mindset about the way that we do coverage.

We are bound by certain, by certain fundamental rules of fairness, uh, uh, and taking somebody who sits behind the great seal of the United States with the seriousness that a president demands.

So, so Trump has always, uh, played around with that duality of operating outside the frame of what a, what a, a president, how, how a president would act while still having the vestments and the structure of the presidency to protect him.

We have to behave in a very conventional way.

... feels like our greatest danger right now.

I mean, the people that worked on the cases into Donald Trump in a lot of instances were the people most experienced in national security and counter-terror issues.

Absolutely.

A- and look, I, I think there is, there was a pool of talent at the top of the bureau and at the Department of Justice that really was from the September 11th generation, and also, uh, many of these people either served or worked in an intelligence capacity or, or investigative capacity in Afghanistan, a- and Iraq, a real well of talent who'd been winnowed away.

These were the most senior people in both agencies.

Uh, and, and as such, they were those who were in supervisory positions, and oftentimes they were the people who could afford to leave because they were senior enough to get decent outside jobs.

But i-i-in general, what we're seeing here, uh, i-in the, uh, Justice Department is a total 8% reduction in headcount, um, which is ...

Doesn't sound like a tremendous amount, but we're talking about roughly 2 to 3,000 potentially, uh, support workers and prosecutors.

Yeah

Glenn Thrush, tell us what you're reporting.

Well, uh, th- I should say that these firings may not be at an end.

We're hearing rumors that there might be, uh, more of them coming, perhaps as early as today.

Um, th- they really...

A- again, uh, correlation is not necessarily causation, but we, we had some unflattering reporting about Kash Patel's schedule at the Milan Olympics about 24 hours before this broke.

There was also, um, a report out of, uh, Senator Durbin's office about a whistleblower who was also questioning Kash Patel's lavish travel and security expenses.

Uh, and, and I should just say, in the past, we have seen this cycle, where firings have taken place subsequent to these unflattering stories about Kash Patel.

Mm.

Help me understand, um, the excuse that DOJ is using, and whether or not it would cover the millions of files that they still have not released.

I think that the simple answer to that is we don't even know the excuse that DOJ is using.

They have had so many missteps, not only in the Epstein fiasco, but in every single other controversy that they have been involved in.

I would just remind everybody out there, um, we've just had in the last 10 days, several instances in which the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security have been caught d- uh, dissembling, making things up in significant law enforcement actions.

Uh, and i- in the course of covering this department over the past year, over and over, they've made assertions in court, uh, never mind assertions to the press, that have turned out to be patently untrue.

So I would just like to start off from the top and say, even this assertion, I, I don't even know what they're talking about in terms of the deliberative process.

The other thing I wanna point out is, is Pam Bondi's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last week was a catastrophe.

Mm-hmm.