Why don't you tell us about what this so-called document is?

Well, it really is sort of a face-saving exhibition, basically, by both Todd Blanch and Tom Tillis and John Cornyn to claim that this somehow resolves this issue is absurd.

It is the theater of the absurd because it doesn't.

It doesn't resolve it at all.

There are a number of reasons why that's so.

First of all, you have the collusive non-settlement between Trump and this Justice Department that has failed to assert all the defenses that any other case and the other cases like this were received as part of the defense of the taxpayer's money.

But you also have the plain language that Senator John Cornyn specifically pointed to just two weeks ago, which said that this agreement could not be modified unless it was modified by both parties.

And this doesn't even begin to get at the howling of the Department of Justice, which is now a shell of what it once was.

These two senators, Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom have lost their Senate seats because of Trump, they nevertheless showed that they are not profiles in Courage, and they accepted two worthless pieces of paper as assurances that Blanche won't revive the slush fund and the IRS immunity, which he clearly will do because he'll do anything that Trump tells him to do.

Yeah, it really was not a profiling courage.

It would not make the famous book series by JFK or anyone's notion of courage.

It was really I, you know, I was certainly hopeful that they would stand firm, although I feel like my hope was in vain, given their track record.

And just to see on the basis that they folded, as you point out, these are two worthless pieces of paper.

As John Cornyn himself pointed out during the hearing, the agreement, the collusive agreement in the in the view of the court that was struck between Trump and the Justice Department, meaning Trump.

people who are not adversarial, so not a real agreement, not a real settlement, that by its own terms required both parties to sign, to amend it.

I mean, I'm disgusted with all of them, frankly.

What did you make of today's hearings? What did you take away? What were the things that you thought were the most important?

Well, I thought the statements in opposition to Todd Blanch were really strong and really compelling and really on the mark in terms of what's happened here.

One of the things that did not come out as much yesterday is the fact that and i think this is true i don't think this is pam bonnie throwing todd blanche under the bus in fact she claimed that he's amazing but he was in fact orchestrating the release or the response to the epstein transparency act he was in charge the buck stops with him he he's failed in numerous ways and not failed from the standpoint of the act not from his you know, a superior loyalty to Donald Trump at any cost.

But he's he failed.

He failed to release all the documents that are required to be released under the act.

He failed to protect the identities of survivors, like one of the most fundamental obligations, both under the statute and other longstanding statutes to protect the victims of crimes.

He went out of his way to protect Donald Trump and his his agents did as well in terms of trying to keep information pertinent to about Donald Trump out of the public domain and also to redact the name the names of of the men who were corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein about a variety of targeting of people, of women and young girls.

It's over.

And I was surprised no one raised that in

the hearing.

Well, there were questions around that ruling.

I think right before we went on the air, Senator Schiff was questioning him in part about those conflicts.

But it was not at the front of the hearing.

It was not in the first set of questions from the ranking member.

um to blanche and i think that that decision by that federal district court judge is so powerful so well written so accurate that it should have been the through line for all of the questions like a starting point repeating what just happened which was we've never had a federal judge refer the acting attorney general or deputy attorney general for potential sanction by the bar that he is licensed under for his or her conduct in a particular case.

And that's what it is.

Talk about that process, and then what do you think's going to come out of that?

Well, I was proud to sign that letter that was organized by the, uh, Lawyer Connection.

Um, that, um, that letter was signed by, by the Justice Connection, pardon me.

Um, that letter was signed by more than 1,000 alums of the Just- the Justice Department, including people who served under Republican and Democratic presidents at the highest levels of the department.

And together we, um, we've come together for this letter.

Uh, we may not agree on, you know, a, a million other things, but we agree on this.

Todd Blanche is the wrong man to lead the Justice Department.

What?

Tell me more about why you feel that way.

Yeah, so this is a case where the Federal Trade Commission since last March has had only two Republican appointees, two Trump appointees to that commission.

It's supposed to have five.

The president gets a majority.

But for Trump and for Roberts, quite frankly, that wasn't good enough.

They didn't want to just have three Republican appointees and two Democratic appointees.

They wanted to have no Democrat in the room.

What are they thinking?

Now, Honestly, how many people does this affect?

Well, it's a very small number of people, and so it feels particularly like bullying for these state legislatures to be assailing a very small number of young people, really both children and young adults, who I would say, you know, when you think about There's so many people throughout our history and world history who have felt like they were born in the wrong bodies or their gender was not their gender.

And many people suffered enormously under the weight of that over time.

And there's a huge suicide rate of kids who are LGBTQ.

And so in recent years, there's been a recognition that of that reality.

Um, and, and also some people are born, you know, kind of mixed gender in essence, they have both reproductive organs and in the, in the olden days, um, the doctors would just choose basically without your consent.

So, so in reality, what you have are children who have a sense of who they are and their parents are trying to protect their lives and their emotional wellbeing and, um, and support them in, um, in living, uh, as you know, as the gender that they identify with and some of us and some small portion of those individuals then want to be active in sports that they love.

Am I getting that sort of right?

[laughs] So why don't you talk about Humphrey's Executor, and then we'll talk about the background and what this says about the Roberts Court?

Yes.

So, uh, this case today, uh, in the Slaughter case involving the FTC, is a case where the Roberts Court has overruled nearly a century of legal precedent which prohibited presidents from firing, uh, commissioners on specifically the Federal Trade Commission.

The case that you mentioned, Paul, Humphrey's Executor, was specifically about the FTC.

It was about this provision that barred FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from firing who Hoover appointed to that commission because when Congress created the FTC, it set a standard that required that you would have to have cause to fire someone outside of their term.

Um, so, um, the way the FTC is set up, uh, is that it has five commissioners.

By statute, three of those commissioners are appointed by the president, two from the, uh, from the president's party and two are not from the president's party.

... they're-

Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?

Well, it really is a disaster, and I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, um, which, you know, is describing how John Roberts, the chief justice who made an indelible image in people's minds during his confirmation process where he said he was just gonna be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes, but in fact, he's used the judiciary, used his post on the court to advance some of these really fringe theories in the law.

And one of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.

It was invented during the Reagan administration, and we know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary.

He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan's term.

He was then in the White House Counsel's office.

Then he was in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration as the political deputy in the SG's office.

Isn't that the big story? That it's just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the court itself? They're, like, al- allied in this effort, it seems to me.

Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?

Well, it really is a disaster, and I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, um, which, you know, is describing how John Roberts, the chief justice who made an indelible image in people's minds during his confirmation process where he said he was just gonna be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes, but in fact, he's used the judiciary, used his post on the Court to advance some of these really fringe theories in the law.

And one of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.

It was invented during the Reagan administration, and we know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary.

He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan's term.

He was then in the White House Counsel's office.

Then he was in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration as the political deputy in the SG's office.

Isn't that the big story, that it's just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the Court itself? They're, like, al- allied in this effort, it seems to me.

Yeah.

And so when I think of corruption in the broad sense, not necessarily in the legal bribery sense, that is just a manifestly, in my view, morally corrupt act to use the power of the court to alter our Constitution in such a dramatic way in order to give someone uncheckable power to engage in criminal activity through official acts that could be war crimes in terms of what's happening abroad, unauthorized actions targeting civilians on boats, et cetera.

Like, there...

And domestically, what has been unleashed in terms of the sieges of our cities and people being attacked, even the White House for a moment claiming that there's unlimited immunity for people who harm citizens who are protesting ICE in Minneapolis.

This lawlessness, these eruptions of lawlessness that we're seeing have a direct line to John Roberts' use of the judicial office to give Donald Trump powers that no president has ever had, and to, to try to put those powers beyond the reach of the law, of Congress, and the courts.

[upbeat music]

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, Reagan, I used to call it Reagan, Reagan, Bush.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I think, so when I think about that, what was happening then, there was a lot of pressure from beltway type groups who didn't want to pursue that constitutional amendment.

Now the reality is it's very hard to adopt a constitutional amendment, but if you are talking about a principle about something that has to change, you have to build toward that principle.

You can't just be consumed with like a little slice of bread or a crumb.

And so it requires that sort of movement building.

And there were a lot of, you know, allies who just did not could not conceive big enough to deal with the reality of that decision.

That decision has wrecked our election process.

So Lisa, where do we go from here?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I think, so when I think about that, what was happening then, there was a lot of pressure from beltway type groups who didn't want to pursue that constitutional amendment.

Now the reality is it's very hard to adopt a constitutional amendment, but if you are talking about a principle about something that has to change, you have to build toward that principle.

You can't just be consumed with like a little slice of bread or a crumb.

And so it requires that sort of movement building.

And there were a lot of, you know, allies who just did not could not conceive big enough to deal with the reality of that decision.

That decision has wrecked our election process.

So, Lisa, where do we go from here?

But I mean, would this case have helped Hunter Biden?

That's a good question.

It does go to how maybe fickle, how capricious in some ways this particular set of laws has been applied and to whom it's been applied.

In this instance, the Fifth Circuit, which is one of the most right-wing captured appellate courts in the country outside of the US Supreme Court struck down the application of that provision in this case.

Whether they would have done so for Hunter Biden, I doubt it, given how partisan they are.

But the underlying, I think, issue here in part is, again, The opinion is absurd that this is the basis for our rights in 2026, whether Gorsuch and his fellow Republicans can find some way to dispute through looking at what was happening according to newspaper or arrest accounts, from 1791, the late 1700s, whether that somehow should really be the determining factor, which is why the standard that Clarence Thomas asserted and made up in Bruin is ridiculous.

Aside from the point, which I feel like this is not really aside, but the idea that here we are searching for how drunk the founders were in 1791 is the standard for gun rights.

So take it from there.

What happened?

Well, yeah, so this is one of the cases, you know, typically the Supreme Court does hear or at least receive a number of petitions around the death penalty.

In this case, they took the case up and they rolled in favor of the defendant on the use of this method, this sort of new method of executing people.

A lot of those death penalty cases, if it's not about a claim of innocence, but it's about the method of prosecution, they're hard facts cases.

In this case, the person had been convicted of murder.

I personally think that judges should not be able to overrule juries in terms of their recommendation of life in prison versus death, but different states have followed different rules on that.

And some, like Alabama, don't even require, you know, unanimity in that way.

From your world of watching the dynamic between these two groups, what did you pick up?

Yeah.

Yeah, this is it's really extraordinary when you think about where we are now in 2026 compared to 2000.

That was a hyper partisan decision by the Rehnquist court.

That was John Roberts mentor Bill Rehnquist.

And although Souter was on the other side of that vote, it was five Republicans voting to stop the ballots from being counted in Florida.

And they adopted arguments that were made by the Bush team.

And we now know that John Roberts helped advise some of the main lawyers arguing the cases below before the Florida Supreme Court.

How does this happen? And how do they stay in power?

He's the guy that basically does all the bidding and essentially the Justice Department has become the Department of Crime for the Trump family and the Department of Pedophile Protection.

Well, I mean, it just really is extraordinary.

Almost every week there's some new revelation that is more stunning than the last.

Although clearly Blanche's role as a fixer for Donald Trump is quite manifest.

We saw that when he went down and had that sort of staged, taped interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was instrumentally involved in Epstein's activities, his illicit activities, his immoral activities.

And we know from the history of how much Donald Trump partied with Ghislaine, along with Epstein and the like, And yet, you know, after that interview with or that, you know, that Q&A, in essence, with Glenn Maxwell and Todd Blanch, we saw her move from a prison where she was duly sentenced for her very serious crimes of being a sexual predator and a sexual trafficker to a country club, you know, a club fed sort of arrangement where she has all these perks.

So Blanche has already delivered that.

But are the senators going to fall for this, particularly the ones that Trump has stiffed, like Tillis and Cassidy and Texas Senator John Cornyn?

Talk about that.

Sure.

You know, this is, I suppose, a rare area in my life where I'm sad to be right.

This is a situation where when I was the chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee, I tried to stop John Roberts from getting on the D.C.

Circuit because I was deeply concerned he would be another Robert Bork, but with a sort of smile.

And in fact, he was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in which he told the American people what I considered to be a lie then and certainly a lie now, that he was going to be merely an umpire calling balls and strikes.

That's not why he was chosen.

What is their objective in undermining the rule of law?

Yeah.

It, it...

After, after, after it stopped, you know, being able to stop people from voting through poll taxes and literacy tests, then it was, you know, then it was also trying to just rig the map so that it didn't count, so that the Black vote would be meaningless.

And Thurgood Marshall, one of my heroes, famously wrote in a case called, uh, uh, Bolden versus Mobile or Mobile versus Bolden, um, in that case in 1980, that if this sort of thing is allowed, the, they could render the right to vote meaningless.

So you want a right to vote, but then you basically are... have your vote diluted by this white, these white majorities.

Um, so that's what the Roberts Court is doing.

It is, it is bleaching out the Black, Congressional Black Caucus in the South or at least attempting to do so.

Which is crazy.

Please set the scene for us as the court's about to issue decisions.

I think the first thing that people need to know or remember about the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court, is that almost the entire docket of the court is discretionary, and what that means is they are picking and choosing which cases to take, which cases to hear.

There are between 8,000 and 9,000 petitions for the court to hear cases every year, so those are called cert petitions.

And, um, the only cases that the court actually has to take, for example, are when one state sues another state, for example, over, uh, the Colorado River or something, where there's a dispute between the states.

That's the jurisdiction of the court, the mandatory jurisdiction.

All the other cases are cases of choice, and what we've seen the Roberts Court do is use that discretion almost like a legislative calendar.

So instead of ca- taking cases where there's, um, a growing circuit split happening between the different inter- intermediate courts of appeal about how to resolve an issue, for example, on tort law or property law, and it needs clarification from the Supreme Court, we've seen these right-wing groups funded by, um, right-wing billionaires who helped install this majority on the Supreme Court, bringing up litigation, creating circuit splits in order to get a case heard or just teeing up options.

Um, and the underlying issue here, um, involves not only the rules themselves, um, but also the independence of administrative agencies.

And now what happens with that? So tell, tell us your views, Lisa.

Well, um, that was a great introduction also of just the recap of where things are.

As Sean said, just another day in the week of this, um, this criminal president, where we have someone who has been, uh, convicted of crimes, serious crimes, and who, um, was waved back into the White House by John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who invented immunity from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump's so-called official, official acts.

And we can talk a little bit about more, more about that in terms of the pardon power.

Um, that decision by the Roberts Court, this partisan decision by Republican appointees to, uh, to clear a Republican president and clear the way for his return to power, that was an abomination, and it was counter-constitutional and in defiance of our law and our structure.

But it didn't get Donald Trump everything he wanted because it did not immunize him for crimes or other activities that weren't so-called official acts of the president, like the, the conduct of his companies, the multitude of companies and licensing deals and crypto, um, you know, uh, machinations that he and his family are engaged in.

Um, it did not get him off the hook for his liability for the, um, the, the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll and the defamation of her after the, the jury, or, you know, the court found that she'd been sexually abused by Donald Trump.

... what do you think, Lisa?

Permanent until last week.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that...

So that's right.

I mean, so John Roberts, uh, is someone who was handpicked by his mentor, Bill Rehnquist, for a top job at the Justice Department.

He was special assistant to the attorney general.

John Roberts had no experience in voting rights whatsoever except that he clerked for the most anti-voting rights justice on the Supreme Court, Bill Rehnquist, who personally engaged in voter intimidation tactics in Phoenix when, before he came to Washington.

Take it from there, and what do you think it means going forward?

Ugh

... into Black neighborhoods like Bethune in Phoenix to intimidate voters in a project that literally had the code name Operation Eagle Eye.

Um, that's Rehnquist.

That's, uh, that's who Roberts stodged for.

And so this decision, this despicable decision, uh, where John Roberts handed the pen and in essence the dagger to Sam Alito, who gleefully accepted it to try to destroy Section 2, John Roberts knows full well that he lost that battle.

He literally spent hundreds of hours trying to prevent Congress-From amending the Voting Rights Act to ensure that effects were taken into account.

He lost.

Mm-hmm.

How did that happen?

Well, John Eastman is a lawyer who is connected with the Claremont Institute.

He has a very fancy title for this constitutional project that is funded predominantly by billionaires.

Right.

And John Eastman is basically famous or infamous, depending on how you look at it, because he was the person really pushing Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Mm-hmm.

He has embraced fringe theories for a number of years.

Was it worth rolling the dice for all of this?

Did he profit on top secret and classified information and undermine America's nat- national interests, uh, national security, and the lives of people in the military?

Yes, I mean, this is so...

It's extraordinarily serious what the allegations are, and I would encourage everyone to read Representative Jamie Raskin's letter for themselves because it is really compellingly written and it raises very serious concerns, both about the first point you mentioned in terms of the cherry-picking of, of release of some information that Pam Bondi thinks helps, helps him or helps them, uh, and then the denial or the tr- the effort to hide forever other information that is very damaging.

Uh, Politico reviewed the letter, um, you know, s- of the, the underlying, um, sort of some, one of the underlying, uh, documents.

Uh, there's a map of a plane, for example, where the names of the people who were on the plane who received this information, uh, you know, their names are blacked out.

Uh, Rep Raskin has asked for their names to be shared so the American people can know wh-Who they are, who was on that plane where this secret, secret map was revealed.

He's asked for the American people to know, and c- or at least Congress to know, what country was depicted in that map um, and what business did these other people who, who presumably did not actually have top, you know, top secret clearance, let alone letter level clearance, the highest level of clearance, let alone the super highest level of clearance where, um, as you point out, at least one of these documents was only seen or was only allowed to be seen by a handful of, uh, of, of leaders of Congress, if they could see it at all.

[laughs]