Oh, right

... to reassign, um, Katie Zachariaia, chiefly because, uh, in this second term, though we've seen a number of, of high-profile departures from the cabinet and, and related agencies at this point, uh, most of them women, as The New York Times pointed out recently.

Uh, in general, the president does not like, especially in 2.0, to deliver scalps to the opposition, and I thought that he would, uh, give Katie Zachariaia a chance both to, uh, overcome the, uh, rocky start that she had in her first briefing, uh, and a chance also to move beyond these questions about her, her, her past work as a lawyer or her, uh, her claims to be an attorney and so forth.

Uh, and the only conclusion I can reach, and this is pure speculation labeled as such, um, is that in some measure, the president felt perhaps personally betrayed because that is the kind of, uh, the kind of factor that, that I think would motivate him to, to deliver a, a scalp to the opposition.

We are, gosh, as we speak, just about, what? 19 days away from election day.

Uh, and the idea that, uh, there was this kind of dysfunction at high levels of the White House involving the public face of the administration, uh, one of the most prominent spokesperson for anything in the world, um, that, that a decision like that could go, uh, haywire the way this one did after just five days, um, is, is not good for the White House.

It's not good for the Republicans out there campaigning.

Not, you know, we know what it l- what it entails to stand at the podium, right? But [laughs] what goes on before you get to the podium?

Matthew Broderick, yeah

... performed The Beatles' rendition of Twist and Shout.

Thanks to all that, on this day in 1986, Twist and Shout by The Beatles reentered the top 10, I believe.

Uh, and that at that time marked the longest such gap for a song appearing, uh, in the, in the top charts.

Yes.

Before you go, sir, uh, I just wanna note, yesterday the White House barred CNN from fulfilling our pool assignment on behalf of the five major television networks.

As you know, we all pool coverage.

Uh, and all of our affiliates and subscribers, and I would just ask if you could please convey to President Trump to let CNN back in the pool.

Wow

... uh, all the way to my parents' phone line on Staten Island at the time.

Uh, which was perhaps the greatest incursion into civil liberties.

And ultimately, the, the Attorney General of the United States at that time, Eric Holder, acknowledged that he had signed off on this novel designation of me that appeared in the application for the search warrant, in which an FBI agent named Reginald Reyes swore that I was to be considered a criminal co-conspirator-

Yeah.

7,000 pages of classified documents about the Vietnam War.

Uh, so this was a first in American history.

All of this was revealed, uh, in 2013.

Here's James.

On the afternoon of April 30, 1975, Scalia got a call from the Ford White House saying, we need your opinion within the next three hours as to whether it would be lawful under the War Powers Act for the U.S. military to land its helicopters on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and evacuate our personnel from the embassy that way.

And of course, we've all seen those famous photographs of helicopters evacuating personnel from a the roof of the American embassy on April 30, 1975, amid the catastrophic fall of Saigon.

Scalia gave the opinion that, yes, it was lawful.

But he said, and this is quoted in this book for the first time, what if I hadn't given my approval? Would they have called off this evacuation operation on advice of counsel? What is the world coming to? After his work in the Ford administration, Scalia accepted a scholar's role with the American Enterprise Institute, and he taught law at the University of Chicago Law School.

This was 1977 to 1982.

During that time, Scalia appeared on television a number of times in these debates that would be staged by AEI and on PBS and other programs.

Let's pick up where we last left off.

Here's James.

Antonin Scalia was confirmed to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Italian-American who would sit on the Supreme Court.

on September 17, 1986, very fittingly, Constitution Day.

It was an extraordinary moment because Scalia was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 98 to nothing to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Italian-American to sit on the Supreme Court.

And from the perspective of the small number of White House aides and Justice Department officials who were managing the Scalia confirmation process, they were obviously ecstatic at a 98-0 vote, all the more so because Scalia's nomination was actually part of a pair of Supreme Court nominations.

Joined to his nomination was the elevation of the Associate Justice William Rehnquist to Chief Justice of the United States.

And that did not go so smoothly.

Let's pick up with James where we last left off.

Do you feel like Trump is taking this too personally, or do you feel like the media and people like Kristen Welker are trying to downplay his accomplishments?

I think it's incontestable that the president has a very good, though not perfect, record of endorsements in in congressional races in just about every cycle.

And I think what this will mean most immediately in the near term for Kristen Welker is that she'll get another interview with the president because he seems not to be able to stay away from the people about whom he complains the loudest, such as Kristen Welker or Caitlin Collins.

And most recently he did that interview with Kristen Welker out in the Midwest.

where there was a rainstorm and they had to wait a little while because the pitter-patter on the corrugated roof of the sort of industrial setting where they were became too loud.

And then, you know, she got a good hour plus with the man and probably pushed her luck a little too far.

I know Kristen.

Right.

Yeah.

Uh, and, and it's sort of like a, uh, once again, a kind of Mamdanian, uh, phenomenon, in which you have, uh, uh, an attractive candidate who, who is sort of built for the social media era.

One way to look at these things is, you know, you can talk about how much money has flown in from this, uh, donor or that set of donors.

Uh, but, uh, I think that El, uh, Sayed, um, has something like 100,000, um, followers on Instagram compared to about-

I think it's absolutely apropos.

Uh, so I, uh, I would say that, um, uh, the, the most damning evidence arrayed, um, against Dr. Fauci to date, um, is to be found outside of the confines of his diary, um, as unattractive or unappealing as some of the entries, uh, were to behold.

Rather, the evidence that Chairman Paul, uh, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, and the chair of the-

Mm-hmm.

And I quoted in the article from an exchange at a, at a State Department press briefing where the briefer at that time was Victoria Nuland.

This was the Obama era.

They had just slapped sanctions on Syria's foreign minister for crack- the bloody crackdowns, uh, in the streets of Syria.

Uh, and, uh, she was asked if this would impinge on the Syrian foreign minister's ability to attend UNGA, the UN General Assembly in New York.

And Ms. Nuland, again, speaking for the Obama administration at that time, said, "No, we have a host country agreement in place, and, uh, that's the same reason why, uh, someone, for example, such as the Iranian president at that time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-

Okay.

Uh, who would have the authority to issue the invitations and likewise to withhold them.

It will be hard to forget.

I did not know about the earlier instance when there was an advocate mixing up the names of the lawyers and Justice Scalia said to this individual in April of 1996, I'm Scalia, because that is precisely the line that brings down the House some four years later, almost five years later, in the Bush v. Gore case, which is extensively treated in my book.

So I realize now my failing in not enlisting Howard Mortman as a research assistant for this book.

And believe me, it will not be repeated, that mistake, in volume three.

But, you know, I interviewed Joe Clock, who's the lawyer at the center of this.

You know, what we need to understand in the way we played the clips, really it was only within a matter of a minute that he got wrong the names of two different justices, and then that Scalia... unloaded that brilliant line of, Mr. Clark, I'm Scalia, right? Now, in the previous literature of Scalia, there were two biographies of him published before my first volume, and both were published while he was alive.

And in one of them, he cooperated extensively, the other, not at all.

Circuit bench and now not this configuration, but when Justice O'Connor was with us, I was sitting next to Justice Scalia, he could say something that was so outrageous or so funny that I had to pinch myself so I wouldn't laugh out loud in the courtroom.

I, I love, I love it, I love it.

So, so, uh, you know, i- it was a hive of activity, and quite in contrast to our office, and people were coming and going.

And there were a number of occasions where I suddenly found that I was all alone in the Howard Stern office, you know, sitting on the couch.

And in front of me there was a three-drawer massive black filing cabinet.

Yeah

... and deservedly so.

And I think that that's unmistakably true.

At the end of the day, though, w- why would J.D. Vance, why would Vice President Vance be, be talking about Richard Nixon at all? We have to pause to remark how, uh, extraordinary it is that a sitting vice president of the United States has chosen publicly to align himself to and-

Can you just explain how significant this case was and why it is so important people know about it today?

Sure.

Well, and thank you for having me on.

Uh, the article you're mentioning, uh, ran on February eight in The New York Times, and, um, it was about six thousand words long.

So when you get to read it, and you can find it through my X feed, @JamesRosenTV, uh, just bring a very big cup of java with you and settle in.

Watergate was so important.

I, I call Watergate the birth of the modern Uh, because all of the things we see when, uh, presidencies run into trouble in, in the modern age were first glimpsed in Watergate, where you have a kind of an unholy alliance between the news media doing saturation coverage, um, a special prosecutor, a whole task force of, of lawyers buttressed by the investigative agencies and zeal of the FBI.

Why do you think that those seven pages from that testimony were withheld for 50 years? Why would they not come out in 2011?

Pourquoi est-ce que James Rosen est intéressé par Antonin Scalia ?

Cela revient aux années de l'école de James Rosen.

J'ai eu une vie normale, je vous assure.

J'ai joué à Little League, j'ai fait des dates, j'ai conduit une voiture, etc.

En tant qu'étudiant de l'école, j'ai été fasciné par Antonin Scalia.

Je l'ai vu sur un de ces programmes de PBS appelé « La Constitution, ce balance délicat ».

Ce sont des affaires dans lesquelles il y avait un stade de théâtre en ronde, un stade de son qui était circulaire, entouré de l'audience de tous les côtés.

Avec le Bacaraf, je me souviens de leur

Oh, man

... and, uh, and the streets of Washington in mid-August.

And Freedom 250 is organizing what they're calling the Great American State Fair.

This is going to be a long series of booths and exhibits and entertainment that's going to, uh, uh, descend on the National Mall from June 24 to July 10 as part of our celebration.

In, in a, in a suit without a helmet.

But, you know, when you see people in focus groups saying, "I would...

I think Candace Owens would make a great president," you wonder if they are aware that this is someone, in Candace Owens, who believes, quote, "We are all ruled by pedophiles working for Israel."...

whose, whose coinage for the state of Israel is the synagogue of Satan.

Yeah

...

Todd Blanche, and the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Janine Pirro, uh, on the grounds that, A, they were both in the Hilton ballroom that night of the dinner, uh, B, that they have, um, unusually close relationships with the President, uh, and C, based on some comments, uh, public comments that, uh, Ms. Pirro has already made.

The judge did not rule on that motion today.

Instead, he set deadlines for the government to respond to the motion, and then for the defense, uh, counsel to respond to the government's response, and then set a status hearing, uh, with the counsel from both sides in that courtroom for June 29th.

Here it is.

I wanna first express my gratitude and admiration for the work you do, and for everyone involved in our armed forces, and also for the accomplishments of Operation Epic, uh, Fury, which I think are too often, uh, uh, dismissed too lightly.

Uh, but those accomplishments don't obscure, I think, a central default that has occurred here, and I would like you both to address it.

Yeah.

And that this is going to be a drag on, on Republican candidates across the country, both for House and Senate.

Um, and you, you, you factor in, uh, the anxiety just over being at war, put together with the partif- the particular impacts of this conflict, which, which, uh, weigh heavily on energy prices.

Mm-hmm

...

Union forces led by General Ulysses S.

Grant were pursuing Confederate forces to seize control of a garrison in Tennessee, and this involved tens of thousands of men.

And finally, when the, the Confederate rebels had, had their backs to the wall, their leader sent, um, a telegram or word to, to the Union forces that they wanted to negotiate the terms of surrender.

I should note, wrong book, that, uh, Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously, uh, embodied what he's talking about, that kind of civility, even though they disagreed ferociously.

That's right.

This is what William F. Buckley Jr. used to call trans-ideological friendships.

And I'm sure they still take place on the Supreme Court, but you take those comments from Justice Sotomayor, she called them hurtful.

She also recognized that, uh, uh, the word she used, they were inappropriate, because she was suggesting that Justice Kavanaugh doesn't have empathy with Latinos.

Uh, and the truth is jud- th- this is the real divide on the court.

It's not between conservatives and liberals.

What do you think?

Wow

... distance ever traveled by human beings.

Uh, and, um, today they'll, they'll add about four thousand miles to the previous record, which was-Uh, set back in 1972, and that was 248,655 miles from the Earth.

So they're gonna bring that to about 252,000 miles.

Uh, really a, a day for all human beings to be proud, but especially those from-

Yes.

So a short time from now.

He spoke briefly at the Easter egg roll, uh, and then again to reporters in a brief gaggle, uh, after his remarks.

Let's talk about the originalism, the truth, so to speak.

So when Scalia came along as a federal judge on the Court of Appeals in 1982 and then was elevated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986, there prevailed in the law in this country a liberal notion called the living constitution.

This is the idea that when judges or justices... interpret the Constitution and its meaning, the meaning of its text, that they should be able to do so quite broadly, even imbuing meanings that weren't there at the time, that it's a living, breathing document, the meaning of which should be allowed to expand in order to account for phenomena that the founding fathers never could have anticipated, such as podcasts or the nuclear weapons or the internet or what have you.

And in order to breathe this expanded meaning into the text, the living constitutionalist judges and justices were bypassing the text altogether to look for the intent behind the law.

And they found that through trawling through legislative history, what was said on the House and Senate floor in their speeches, what was said in committee reports leading up to the vote.

Scalia stood to thwart all of that.

His view was the job of the judge is to interpret the law according to the original meaning that that law or the Constitution enjoyed when it was enacted.

Let's spend our remaining time, if you don't mind, telling me about your insights on Watergate and that as the history was written, as the movies were made, it's a grave distortion of probably the facts as they occurred.

Explain what you mean by that.

So Antonin Scalia was not just, uh, one of the most important Supreme Court justices of recent times.

In my view, he's one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years.

And the reason is because he changed the way the law in this country is drafted, debated, and decided by the courts.

And in turn, that touches every facet of life for every American alive today.

When Scalia came to the federal bench in nineteen eighty-two, he served on the Court of Appeals, uh, one rung below the Supreme Court.

He was appointed by President Reagan, and then in 'eighty-six, President Reagan elevated him to the Supreme Court.

Yeah.

Uh, i- so you would think that this could, uh, be essentially maybe coercive diplomacy if we're to see anything?

I think that's what it's been to date, but, uh, you know, it was Wendy Sherman who was a senior state department official under President Obama, and an architect of the Iran nuclear deal of that era, who testified before the Senate at the time that DNA is, or excuse me, deception is in the Iranians' DNA.

Of course, she was speaking about the regime and not the people of Iran.

But, uh, so there are a lot of folks who have gazed upon President Trump's efforts to, um, to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran with some, uh, perplexity.

Because number one, after the, uh, the strikes of last June, President, uh, Trump himself told us that the Iranian nuclear program had been obliterated, and that's a very strong word with very clear meaning.

It means gone.

Uh, and yet now we have some need for a nuclear deal.

W- why is it now more than ever time to really get to know Scalia, particularly given some of the, uh, some of the edge that the President has with the Supreme Court right now?

So you think that this could be essentially maybe coercive diplomacy if we're to see anything?

I think that's what it's been to date.

But, you know, it was Wendy Sherman, who was a senior State Department official under President Obama and an architect of the Iran nuclear deal of that era, who testified before the Senate at the time that DNA is or excuse me, deception is in the Iranians DNA.

Of course, she was speaking about the regime and not the people of Iran.

But so there are a lot of folks who have gazed upon President Trump's efforts to to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran with some perplexity.

Because number one, after the strikes of last June, President Trump himself told us that the Iranian nuclear program had been obliterated.

And that's a very strong word with very clear meaning.

Why is it now more than ever time to really get to know Scalia, particularly given some of the edge that the president has with the Supreme Court right now?

Was it Henry Ruth who was the, uh, author?

Uh, Henry Ruth was the, uh, the one of the two special prosecutors present in that office on that day.

But the memo to the file that had never been published before was written by his counselor, thirty-year-old Watergate special prosecutor, Peter Krindler, who had previously been a clerk to Justice William O. Douglas.

And so he-- Krindler hands this sealed envelope with seven classified stamped pages back to Scowcroft, who had done the stamping.

And then Scowcroft takes this sealed envelope, sticks it in another envelope labeled White House, seals that, and then scrawls in his own handwriting, "Do not touch.

To be opened only by Brent Scowcroft," and he dated it.

Um, and there it sat for the next thirty-six years.

Jack Anderson, of course.

Uh, and they're actually talking about Nixon wants to charge him with felonies and, and prosecute him, [chuckles] and then the counterargument from Mitchell is, "Well, we can't do that because all the secret operations we've got around the world will come out, and, and we don't wanna do that." I- is that, is that what was the conundrum for President Nixon?

Partly.

Partly, and the o- uh, as well, and Nixon can be heard on the tape saying this, he did not want to...

As much as he wanted to punish the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, for running a spy ring against the National Security Council under Nixon and Kissinger for a year in wartime, where they had this young enlisted man, um, this Navy stenographer, Yeoman Charles Radford, uh, pilfering these documents.

Uh, as much as Nixon wanted to punish all involved, not only did he recognize that it would jeopardize some very sensitive operations around the world, but he...

And including the, the, the attempt to negotiate the end to the Vietnam War, but he also felt that he did not want to contribute to the vilification of the armed forces in a time when, as they were returning from Vietnam, many GIs were jeered as baby killers.

Nixon did not want to contribute to the vilification of the armed forces, and even after Watergate broke and the Republicans on the Senate Watergate committee, Howard Baker, came to him and said, "Mr.

Uh, you agree that the title of this piece should have been The Secret History of the Deep State? Are you a conspiracy theorist? Do you actually think, after your research in this, that there is a deep state?

H- how was he perceived, and how was his philosophy, particularly when he had pretty strong personalities, and Rehnquist is kind of a classic conservative? How was it, uh, how was it, uh, how was it taken?

So when he was on the Court of Appeals, the, the judges ruled on cases in groups of three, and it was very intimate and collegial.

And he could just w- waltz down the hall and kibitz with Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Abner Mikva or any of the, the people who had been appointed by Democrats.

It was all very collegial.

When he got to the Supreme Court, uh, he was made to understand by his robed colleagues that there would be no kibitzing in chambers, that there would be no give and take, no arguments about, um, how they should rule in the conferences.

Rehnquist, as chief justice, um, had, uh, as an associate justice, had labored under and chafed under these long-winded perorations by the Chief Justice Warren Burger.

And Rehnquist was determined when he became chief, "We're gonna run these conferences quick.

[laughs]

How do you find time? What is the inspiration that felt you had to do this and take as much time and energy, not just to do the research and the interviews, but write this book? It's just a beautifully written book.

Thank you on all accounts, Steve, and it's great to be back with you.

You asked about the time.

I steal it from my family.

And, you know, this originally began, this book, as a concise biography of Antonin Scalia.

And as Mrs. Rosen can tell you, I don't do anything concisely.

and I wrote about 170,000 words, and I had just gotten the man to sit down in his chair at the Supreme Court.

So the lawfare against Nixon was exactly what they've done to Trump, sir.