What has your reaction been to that?

The thing that I am most surprised about, Katie, is not how the results are coming in.

It's the fact that we got to this point without any effective election interference by this administration.

The Trump administration tried so hard in so many different ways to interfere with the counting of votes and with who was allowed to administer elections.

And they failed at every turn.

That's because the Constitution is very clear that it's the state's authority to administer elections, not the federal government.

But that didn't stop the Justice Department from suing 30 different states to try to get access to state electoral rolls.

What happens if he just starts pardoning people A lot of Americans out there want to see accountability to Miles's point, but if there are all these federal pardons being handed out, what do Democrats resort to? Do they try to do prosecutions on the state level? What are your thoughts on this pardon extravaganza that we might see from Donald Trump?

Liz, what is going on?

Yeah.

I mean, so many things about that clip that you just played, starting with listening to her say, even big balls.

But really, the idea that we're talking about preemptive pardons is so illustrative of the lawlessness of this administration.

This is an administration that is choosing to push the limits of every law on the books because it's they know that Donald Trump will bail them out with pardons.

People in his administration who are violating laws against public corruption, who are brazenly attacking people in the streets as far as ICE agents go.

There are all sorts of potential crimes that are being committed, are being committed because people feel that there will be no accountability because of the possibility of pardons.

What do you think? What goes through your head?

Going against the sanctions bill and doing deals with Vladimir Putin, is that even legal?

Yeah.

So unfortunately, what's happening with Trump is really exposing some gaps in our laws, particularly around public corruption.

These business transactions that Donald Trump and his family members are prioritizing over and above our foreign policy interests, the interests of the American people financially and in terms of our security, they're all incredibly corrupt transactions.

But at the end of the day, the corruption and conflict of interest laws that regulate many government officials do not apply to the president and they don't apply to his family members if they do not have an official government position.

So it's really exposing some gaps in the law.

The sanctions laws are an area where the president, as the chief executive, has a lot of power to grant, you know, to decide whether to enforce them or not.

How how much teeth are in those threats?

After hearing all of that, is that the way this is supposed to work?

Absolutely not.

I mean, pardons, we know, are for sale in this administration because it's been documented, and the price tag used to be around a million dollars to get somebody with connections to Trump to submit a pardon application.

But now Alina Habba appears to have raised the price tag significantly.

Uh, you know, $50 million to get someone a pardon.

It's really staggering.

Pardons are not supposed to be pay for play.

What concerns you, Liz, most about the increasing hyperpoliticization of this pardon process?

What did you make of this reporting?

I mean, Jen, literally everything in this administration is for sale, including the actual people who work for the president.

People like Alina Habba have become influence brokers who facilitate the sale of things that people want from Donald Trump, apparently including presidential pardons.

There has been reporting leading up to this about how much people are paying to access pardon brokers, and the numbers we were reading were in the millions, but single-digit millions.

And now we are reading about double digits, millions of dollars that people are paying to get influence to be able to secure pardons.

And what is so stunning and damaging about a case like this is Mr. Herrera was charged with bribing a government official-

How does this even happen?

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like hiring a lawyer who works for the judge who's deciding your case.

How do you think this is proceeding when the same officials with the same jobs in Trump 1.0 said there's no there there?

It's really stunning, Nicolle.

I mean, if there was not evidence to make a case seven years ago, there is no reason to believe that the evidence has gotten any better.

We're talking about something that happened 25 years ago.

She, she became a citizen 25 years ago.

So to bring criminal charges based on allegations that she fraudulently obtained citizenship, the, the statute of limitations has long passed.

The statute of limitations is 10 years for those charges.

Like, that's understandable from everybody but Trump, who all but called him a terrorist during the mayoral elections

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required.

Intro rate first three months only.

Then full price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra.

See full terms at mintmobile.com.

From what we heard at the hearing last week, where does it seem like the judge is leaning on this?

Well, it seems like the judge is poised to make this block permanent, to make sure that Trump cannot keep these news outlets out of the White House going forward.

Can you share some of that with our viewers?

Yeah.

So the Justice Department has been bleeding lawyers over the last year.

People are leaving in droves, and as you well know, Glenn, this is, like, one of the most elite legal jobs in the country for lawyers is to work at the Justice Department.

And now nobody wants to work there because the institution has become so degraded, and they have been desperately trying to fill jobs, especially in the Civil Rights Division, which has lost seventy-five percent of its lawyers since Donald Trump returned to office and turned the mission of the place upside down, literally.

Um, it-- So, so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to make new hires, and the New York Times ran a piece this week.

They d- did an investigation into 12 of the recently hired lawyers, and what they found was absolutely astounding.

Not just children, not just migrant children, but unaccompanied migrant children.

Can you share some of that with our viewers?

Yeah.

So the Justice Department has been bleeding lawyers over the last year.

People are leaving in droves, and as you well know, Glenn, this is, like, one of the most elite legal jobs in the country for lawyers is to work at the Justice Department.

And now nobody wants to work there because the institution has become so degraded, and they have been desperately trying to fill jobs, especially in the Civil Rights Division, which has lost seventy-five percent of its lawyers since Donald Trump returned to office and turned the mission of the place upside down, literally.

Um, it-- So, so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to make new hires, and the New York Times ran a piece this week.

They d- did an investigation into twelve of the recently hired lawyers, and what they found was absolutely astounding.

I'm calling this conflictpalooza, but give us your take on this new really corrupt scheme to further victimize an already at-risk population, not just children, not just migrant children, but unaccompanied migrant children.

Yeah, I wanna kinda [laughs] speaking of treating people a certain way, can you go into Ghislaine Maxwell's treatment by the DOJ and how that has kinda gone over for her and her connections to Trump?

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is one of the most shocking examples of two-tier justice system in history.

The attorney general, Todd Blanche, when he was deputy attorney general, actually went to Florida where Ghislaine Maxwell was in prison.

She's serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking of minor girls.

And he met with her f- over the course of two days, and she gave sort of exculpatory statements about Donald Trump.

Um, my last question is I wanted to ask about, well, who replaced you, and can you tell me about your replacement at the DOJ?

What do you make of this reporting?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I'm not sure that it's well understood that the Justice Department is made up primarily of career lawyers, so people who serve regardless of who holds the presidency, and it is not normal for a division like the Civil Rights Division to lose 75% of its lawyers when a presidential administration turns over.

That did not happen during Trump's first presidency.

This is unique to his second presidency, and it really reflects how degraded the Justice Department has become.

It used to be one of the most prestigious places in the country to work as a lawyer.

It was a job where you had to have prior experience.

Just talk about what that means in terms of the sort of needle in the haystack, a, a case where DOJ actually does have a bad guy that deserves to be prosecuted and, and held accountable.

other words, the pardon process traditionally has been accessible to a broad cross-section of Americans.

There are really no legal limits on who the president can pardon.

He can pardon anyone he chooses for any reason.

Of course, there are ethical considerations around all of that, as well as a lot of norms that would say that the president should not use the power in that way.

But legally, he is permitted to exercise total discretion over the clemency power.

One of the things that has historically characterized the pardon process is the secrecy surrounding it.

People in the public don't necessarily understand how the pardon process works.

If Trump supporters act to subvert future elections, including even to break the law to benefit Trump and his supporters, Trump will use the full power of the presidency to protect them from consequences.

Yeah

... and if Trump loses the election, the only thing that they can do to make him happy will be to change the facts.

So the question is, how are they going to cast doubt on the validity of the election? How are they gonna try to prove that the facts aren't the facts? And we have seen them starting to do this.

There was an absolutely terrifying case that was reported this week.

The Deputy Attorney General, the number two official at the Justice Department, announced what he claimed was a major prosecution about election interference from the main Justice Department headquarters, and it turns out that they're prosecuting a mailman-

Right

... who had discarded a bag of ballots, a bag of mail that happened to contain some ballots, and they're holding this guy up as an election saboteur, somebody who was trying to interfere with our elections, when really this is actually a very low-level federal crime in the grand scheme of things.

It had nothing to do with undermining an election, but it's just a sign of the desperation.

And he's pointing to, "Well, Biden did it, so why wouldn't I?"

The prospect of pardons is what's contributing to so much rampant bad behavior by this administration.

Members of his cabinet, people, uh, in ICE out on the streets feel emboldened to act with impunity because they believe that Donald Trump is going to pardon them at the end of the administration.

People like Stephen Miller, people like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel.

And I, I believe even folks in ICE who are taking very aggressive tactics with civilians believe that they don't have anything to worry about in terms of repercussions, because they will be pardoned by Donald Trump at the end of the administration.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden did do some of these preemptive pardons which Donald Trump will use to say there's a precedent for it.

No matter what, yeah.

Right, because of the factors of intoxication and differing versions of events.

Always, yeah

... across the political spectrum all the time.

And the, the, the issue here is not just that this is corrupt.

It's that Donald Trump is regulating industries at the same time he is profiting off of them, which just gives him a fundamental conflict of interest where his own personal interests, his own financial interests always trump the interests of the American people.

Every single time, he sides with his own financial interests, and that's clearer nowhere than in the cryptocurrency industry.

Cryptocurrency is what criminal organizations use to keep their operations alive, and Donald Trump has dismantled the elite task force at the-

Yeah

...

What happens next in their lawsuits, and what is, in your view, the prospect, uh, for them achieving what they're, what they're after, which is justice?

Well, that depends.

I mean, right now, whether you get justice in this country depends on your politics and your connections and your wealth.

We have an administration that has created intentionally a two-tier system of justice where people who are politically aligned with the president get one level of treatment and people who are not are treated like enemies.

And that's what's happening with this particular law that's at issue in Rene Good's lawsuit, in the lawsuit brought on her behalf.

It's called the Federal Tort Claims Act, and it says that the government can be held liable for injuries caused, deaths caused by the actions of federal agents.

But whether those lawsuits are settled, whether they have to be litigated, it depends to a large degree on the d- discretion of the Justice Department.

Yeah.

Tell me, what was your top line takeaway from today's hearing?

I think what was most stunning to me, Alicia, is that the Republicans did not lay a finger on the substance of Jack Smith's findings.

He testified repeatedly that he found overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump was engaged in an effort to overthrow the election, that he illegally stored classified information at his residence in Mar-a-Lago.

I mean, he found that the president committed serious crimes that should have and would have been prosecuted, but for the Supreme Court's immunity decision.

And there is nothing that the Republicans asked him today that cast any doubt on the substance of those findings.

It was all about distracting from those findings.

What they were really focused on was this very niche issue of the fact that the special counsel team was able to subpoena phone records from members of Congress without notifying the members of Congress.

Why do you think Senator Grassley raised this question?

So just talk to us about that because I know you've been talking about it today.

Yeah, there are real questions about whether the arguments that DOJ is making right now are being made in good faith.

As a lawyer, you have an obligation to conduct yourself in good faith in the practice of law.

They're just making stuff up as they go along to try to defend the president's indefensible decisions after the fact.

So in this case, regarding Trump's media ban, he made it very clear in his initial social media posts that he was banning CNN, Politico and MSNOW because he did not like what they were writing about him because they were covering him very critically.

He didn't like that.

And so he called them fake news and he banned them.

And so but before we go, I mean, try to situate yourself in this moment that we have heading to the midterms you know we're here and i don't view this as even as a political thing to me this is a right and a wrong and a competence and all of these things so to talk to us about where you see things this the the state of things right now september 2026.

So just talk to us about that 'cause I know you've been talking about it today.

today.Yeah, there are real questions about whether the arguments that DOJ is making right now are being made in good faith.

As a lawyer, you have an obligation to conduct yourself in good faith in the practice of law.

They're just making stuff up as they go along to try to defend the president's indefensible decisions after the fact.

So in this case, regarding Trump's media ban, he made it very clear in his initial social media posts that he was banning CNN, Politico, and MS now because he did not like what they were writing about him, because they were covering him very critically.

He didn't like that, and so he called them fake news, and he banned them.

Now, he has realized that that is not a legally defensible reason to ban the media from coming into the White House.

So t-talk to us about where you see things, the, the, the state of things right now, September 2026.

Your thoughts?

Well, this is an administration that is terrified of competence, expertise, and independence, and they are rooting out people who display those qualities, which by the way, are exactly the qualities that you want in an FBI agent and in an attorney who works for the Department of Justice.

But the leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI, they are afraid of these qualities because they stand in the way of accomplishing the political objectives of this president, and we've seen this time and time again.

The purges of experienced, competent people actually started on day one of this administration when people were fired from the national security section, which is one of the most specialized sections of the Department of Justice.

That division, which prosecutes national security cases in connection with agents like these FBI agents who were demoted over this incident, is, uh, one of the most elite within the Justice Department.

It has now been reduced by at least 40%, according to reporting about attrition.

The Justice Department just does not prioritize the things that the American people actually need to stay safe.

It's so stunning, um, what you're saying, Liz, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to see no political fallout from within the Republican Party to the dismantling of what has been, um, sort of the envy of the world's counterterrorism assets.

Liz, I want your read of both his argument, the substance of his argument, but also just his posturing in that conversation with Martha.

Yeah, this was stunning to watch.

I mean, he basically just crashed out on national television.

He's like this talking stuffed animal that has been parroting these talking points over and over and over again.

And he suddenly short circuited on air when he was asked to provide an example.

And this is not limited to this context.

Donald Trump is constantly putting the people who work for him in the position of having to prove things that are not true.

Get a quote in minutes at aviva.ca.

Yeah

...

the citizens of the United States.

When I worked at the Justice Department, it was my understanding that I served the American people, my fellow citizens.

That is not how the Justice Department is operating now.

Employees are expected to serve the president personally, and that's one of the reasons why people like Don Jr. have been able to get away with such egregious abuse of the public's trust, abuse of their access to the president, because nobody is cracking down on it.

One thing that I thought was really significant about the letter that Senator Curtis said is that it wasn't limited to the wedding.

Like, what would be the thing you would point them to?

Tell me why.

Yeah, there are a lot of illegal things to choose from, but this one is really pretty clear.

He did something very similar several years ago during his first presidency with the CNN reporter Jim Acosta, where he revoked Acosta's press pass.

A court immediately overturned that, said that it was unconstitutional.

And Interestingly, Donald Trump has drawn the same judge for this case, a judge that he appointed during his first presidency.

And the result is likely to be the same.

The First Amendment says that you don't have to allow the press into every government space.

I mean, to have a government that is constantly arguing against rights established in the Constitution, what does that tell you about the state of our democracy?

It is

... prohibiting it without 30 days notice suggests that there is a real belief that they are capable of doing anything to the Kennedy Center at this point, and that they might do it under cover of night and not notify the court, not seek permission, not follow the traditional channels for approval.

So the court has now ruled that they cannot demolish the Kennedy Center, which is Is significant, I suppose, but it's also pretty wild that we've gotten to the point where it is necessary for a federal court to enter a legal order saying, "You cannot knock down this institution, this cultural institution, that has existed in our country for decades."

Right

... as consumers, people who are trying to get pardons, and one of them is an individual who paid $600,000 to a pardon broker who he believed was going to get him a pardon.

The pardon did not happen, and now he's trying to get his money back, which I think illustrates that to some extent there is a real pay-for-play pardon economy where money can buy you a pardon, and then layered on top of that, there are all of these scammers, people who don't actually have the ability to get you a pardon who are charging exorbitant sums of money to people who believe that they are paying for access to a pardon, and it has just become absolute chaos and totally corrupt to the detriment of the people who are actually deserving of this type of relief, who in the past did not have to pay for it.

You submitted your application through an orderly process, and if your application had merit, you would be considered regardless of political connections or wealth.

But that is no longer the case.

And for the much ballyhooed Manosphere, he's making fools of his own voters by taking from them to enrich not just himself, but his sons.

Yeah, I think one of the places where that's really clear is how he's used the pardon power.

Donald Trump has done some of his biggest acts of corruption through the pardon power.

There was one case in which he pardoned an individual who brokered a $2 billion investment in his cryptocurrency company, in World Liberty Financial, which he and his sons run.

This individual, named Changpeng Zhao, got a UAE-based company to invest essentially $2 billion in Trump's, uh, uh, crypto company, and Trump pardoned him in exchange for that, which is perhaps the most corrupt use of the pardon power in history.

And the reason that Changpeng Zhao had a criminal conviction is because he was running a company that allowed its trading platform to be used to funnel money to foreign terrorist organizations, to rogue states, to countries that have sanctions, like Iran.

So this, this presented a danger to the United States, yet Trump pardoned him anyway to promote his own financial interests.

We have this hotel we want to build.' That's the kind of foreign policy America has now." People seem to be realizing that, that they're there for us doing their hotel deals, their crypto deals, and their generational theft from the American people.