Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Barton Gellman:

Trump is the greatest political assassin we’ve had in this country in many, many years. He has demolished other establishment politicians who were seemingly very good at being candidates and very good at being politicians, and he’s reduced them to rubble and to humiliated figures.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Barton Gellman. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2014, Gellman led a team at the Washington Post that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of US surveillance programs at the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden’s role in revealing that information. His latest article, the Impeachment of Joe Biden, predicts that a Republican controlled House is near certain to impeach President Biden after the new Congress is seated in January. We discuss why Gellman believes Biden’s impeachment is inevitable if the GOP wins, even by a smaller margin than anticipated. We also discuss the competition for leadership within the Republican party and the brewing rivalry between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Now let’s get to your questions.

QUESTION & ANSWER:

So I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my reaction to an event from this past Tuesday night, and it was something that was expected, but until it happened, people weren’t absolutely certain whether it would occur or not. And that is, of course, the announcement of former President Donald Trump that he would once again be a candidate, third time candidate for president in 2024. So I have a couple of reactions. One is I share the view of a lot of people, that it was low energy, it was more scripted than his usual rally type of speeches and the kinds of speeches he gave back in 2015 and 2016. And it’s also interesting that he chose to announce so early and so close in time to somewhat of a debacle for the Republicans in the House when many MAGA candidates lost, and he kind of has egg on his face.

And as far as the category of Republicans who have announced for president, he’s the only one and probably will be the only one for some time, because there’s no rush for other people to get in I don’t think. Also interesting was how the networks covered it. I think whatever you think about Donald Trump, it is significant news when a former president announces his candidacy once again. I surf between the various cable networks as the announcement was being made, MSNBC covered less of it, I think, than the other two networks. Fox News covered a bunch but then broke away because the speech went on and on and on, and CNN also went in and out of the announcement. Now, some people have suggested that the idea of Donald Trump diminished, having come off these losses, presents an implausible figure for winning the presidency one more time, especially after his significant loss, if you believe it, in 2020.

But all I keep thinking when people say it’s unlikely for Donald Trump to achieve this or that or win this or that, is that the most implausible moment that I can remember in Donald Trump’s political life was June 16th, 2015 when he rode down that escalator and announced that he was running for president in 2016. That seemed very implausible, and he won. So let’s take the race seriously, and if you’re with me, do everything you can to make sure that he does not become president one more time. Now, his announcement and his participation in the next race raises a lot of questions. For example, who will take him on and how many people will take him on, and when will those people announce their own candidacy? Will Ron DeSantis get in and win? Mike Pence looks like he’s getting in, but we don’t know when? Will he maintain control of his base or will his base grow tired of him?

How will Fox News treat the campaign of Donald Trump? Some signs suggest that they’re moving away from him. And how will his adversaries decide to debate him if there are in fact debates in 2024? Here’s another question that I’ve gotten with respect to Donald Trump’s announcement. This comes from Twitter user Toby, who asks, can any trial proceed if Trump announces for the presidency? Well, the answer to that question is yes, we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. As I keep saying, I don’t know, nor do you, that Donald Trump is going to be charged by any federal prosecutor’s office or DA’s office, whether in Fulton County or in Manhattan or by the Department of Justice. I think the likelihood has increased that there will be a charge for various reasons with respect to the document handling in Mar-a-Lago, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen and we have to wait and see. But if there’s a charge brought, as a legal matter, there’s nothing that prevents a trial to proceed just because Trump has made an announcement for the presidency.

I think more relevant is the issue of proximity to an election. So we just had one, so there’s not another one for a while, but the primaries will begin for the Republican nomination in the early part of 2024. That’s only about 14 months away. So if you bring charges in the next few months, given how prosecutions unfold and what discovery means and motion practice and everything else, it is possible that a trial for Donald Trump could happen in and around the time that there are primary elections and perhaps even getting close to the election in 2024. I’m sure the department is going to be sensitive to that. But as a matter of practice and policy is the taking of an action in terms of indictment or investigative step that really they want to be careful about having too close to an election. There have been other trials of significant people close in time to an election, including that of Ted Stevens, the Senator from Alaska, who asked for a rapid trial so that it could be resolved before his election.

Here’s a question that comes in an email from Judy who’s asking about Rudy, and the question is, are you surprised that the Southern District of New York has chosen not to prosecute or bring charges against former US attorney Rudy Giuliani? Now I’m a little bit surprised, but I respect the decision and I’m sure it is completely well deliberated upon and the proper decision, given the facts and circumstances, which I am not fully familiar with. I was not in the grand jury, I haven’t reviewed the documents that were seized in various searches of his properties and his electronic devices. That office is in very good hands, I know the people who were working on the investigation are very, very responsible and careful, but also aggressive, and if there was not a case to be brought, there was not a case to be brought.

The only reason I’m a little bit surprised and surprised is maybe not the right word, but just it’s notable that a decision was made to engage in the execution of a search on someone who is the former US attorney from that office and more relevantly and more importantly, the personal lawyer to Donald Trump, former sitting president of the United States. If you undertake an action like that, which is going to become public and which is going to get a lot of scrutiny and which is going to raise expectations on a figure of that importance and notoriety, my sense is you’re going to want to feel that you have a very good chance, not a 100% chance, but a very good chance, based on what you know already and what you anticipate you’re going to find after the search, that a charge is in the offing, that it’ll be appropriate to bring a charge.

That’s not the standard for executing a search, it’s just probable cause to believe that the search will uncover evidence of the crime or fruits of the crime. But when you’re talking about sensitive matters and particular kinds of people, you want to have a higher degree of belief that there will be a charge. So I’m sure they had that, but then they were careful, sifted through the evidence, scrutinized it carefully, and decided that no provable case could be brought. And I respect that and so should you. And anybody out there who tries to spin conspiracy theories about why it might be the case or nefarious reason for them not bringing a case, knock it off.

This question is a personal one, which comes from Twitter user, Via LaCore, who asks, my parents want to know which village in India you’re from, because dad thinks you’re from a village near Jalandhar and mom thinks you’re from a village near Amritsar, and I can’t keep hearing the same conversation every time you’re on TV. I’m glad that there is interest in your family about my personal biography. As I think many people know, I was born in India, came to the United States very young, when my father brought my mom and me to Buffalo, New York, via the UK. So your mom and dad are both wrong, so I was born not in a village, but in a reasonably sized town called Firozpur, that’s in Punjab, in India, about 50 miles from Amritsar and Jalandhar. And I had a nice text exchange with my dad, trying to find out more information about the place of my birth and its distance from these other cities that you mentioned.

One reason why your parents might think that I was born in Amritsar or villages near Amritsar, is that is where my father went to medical college, and I’ve talked about that from time to time. That was his ticket to a great education and a great career and a future in the United States of America. Firozpur, by the way, your parents may know, was the headquarters of the Firozpur division of Indian Railways, where there was a hospital that my dad worked at. My dad used to run that unit. It also, for more trivia, was and I think still is, the headquarters of the Western command of the Indian Army, and it’s a town that was just three miles from the Pakistani border. So I hope this resolves the issue for your family, sorry to cause conflict, and sorry you’ve had to hear the same conversation every time I’m on TV. Maybe you can debate something else next time. We’ll be right back with my conversation with Barton Gellman.

 

THE INTERVIEW:

Barton Gellman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, including for his reporting about 9/11, a series chronicling the unprecedented influence of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and groundbreaking revelations about NSA surveillance programs. In a new piece for The Atlantic, Gellman turns his focus to what he believes to be an inescapable reality and one likely to define the upcoming 118th Congress, the impeachment of Joe Biden. Barton Gellman, welcome to the show.

Barton Gellman:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

But I’m going to call you Bart, as you insisted earlier.

Barton Gellman:

Oh, that’s the way to go.

Preet Bharara:

I should note for the audience, that we are recording this a little bit in advance of the dropping of the episode, it’s November 10th in the late morning, so two days after the election. The House has still not been called, the Senate has still not been called, there’s a runoff in Georgia. By the time you listen to this, one or both chambers may have been called. But to begin with, it’s been now almost 48 hours, what’s your general reaction to the election?

Barton Gellman:

Well, I’m as surprised as everyone else by how well the Democrats did. I am heartened by how smoothly the election ran. We had so many election deniers running for high office and many, I think I could say most of them, at the state level lost. And the ones who lost, conceded their races, we did not have loud claims of election fraud and vote rigging. We did not have violence, we did not have incidents. All the worst things that we worried about in terms of subversion of elections, have not happened yet. Although I will say that as we speak, Nevada and Arizona have very close races with election deniers at the tops of the tickets, so that part remains to be seen. But I think it’s an illustration that the problem with Stop the Steal, the problem with election denial begins with Donald Trump. And if he’s not on the ticket and if he’s not exerting himself to claim election fraud, those allegations just don’t go anywhere.

Preet Bharara:

That’s all sort of interesting. So in a way, are you saying that these people who have emulated Trump and talked about the big lie and made noises about making those same kinds of claims and accusations about this past election, are they just poor imitators of Trump?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah, I think they are. I mean, I think Trump is so [inaudible 00:12:44] generous in some ways and his absolute commitment, you could say sort of psychiatrically diagnosable commitment to denying reality, is unmatched so far in the rest of the party. They all know they have to go along with it. As long as he presses the case that he really won the 2020 election, nearly all Republicans will be afraid to contradict him and many will enthusiastically support him. But on behalf of their own elections, they don’t seem to have the courage of their convictions, their sort of deniers light.

Preet Bharara:

Deniers light. You can coin that. Among the people who are emulators of Trump, is there anyone who comes close?

Barton Gellman:

Well, I would’ve thought Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, would’ve come close, and I haven’t actually seen whether he conceded, but he certainly isn’t fighting it. Pennsylvania’s been called and there’s no great controversy about it. I mean, he lost by double digits, so it would’ve been a hard case to make. But I’m also interested that voters seemed not to like the deniers, there was a penalty for being a denier. Mastriano ran 10 points below Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. So Oz was seen as a relatively normal Republican, even though he got Trump’s endorsement, he certainly didn’t do a lot of talking about it, and he did not do a lot of talking about election denial. Mastriano did, and again, he ran 10 points behind.

J.D. Vance ran, I think it was nine points behind Mike DeWine in Ohio. And you see the same phenomenon in Georgia, where Herschel Walker ran well behind. In New Hampshire, Don Boldus, the election denier ran, I think it’s nearly 20 points behind Sununu. So there were voters who were not just pushing the straight ticket, they were either voting Democrat against those deniers or they were holding their nose and not voting at all.

Preet Bharara:

So all that’s very interesting. There’s an article that you wrote recently in The Atlantic about two weeks ago, that we’re going to talk a good bit about, but in light of what you just said, I want to ask you about a sentence from that article in which you wrote, quote, “Election denial is the core position of the GOP today.” End quote. Do you stand by that?

Barton Gellman:

I do, because what I meant is elections denial on behalf of Trump. Trump has made it a mandatory position. There is not left, that I can think of, anywhere in the national GOP, a Republican who openly dissents from Trump’s position that the 2020 election was rigged. Those people have been driven out of the party. There are some who maintain a meek and mousey silence about the subject, but no one’s denying it, and lots of people are pushing it hard. It is the price of entry for a Republican today, and that is even more true today than it was a year ago.

Preet Bharara:

And if Trump decided not to get in the 2024 race, I mean we think he is, and by the time you listen to this, he may have already announced, but if he went away, would election denial cease to be the core position of the GOP, and if so, what would it be?

Barton Gellman:

Well, the GOP has a long history of false claims about voting fraud. They have used it primarily, not to challenge election results, but to suppress votes in advance. They say they’re for “election integrity,” quote/unquote, or were against voting fraud, and they therefore try to throw out large numbers of ballots that have been lawfully cast. They try to unregister voters in large numbers. They try to make it harder to vote. They have historically sent intimidating people to scare people away from the polls. They worked for something like 20 years under a consent decree in litigation that prohibited them from doing that, but that consent decree expired in 2017. So voter fraud is a big issue for the GOP and it is almost entirely invented. The idea that you would run an election, lose and then challenge the results and simply bald-facedly claim that you won when you lost, that’s largely a Trump innovation. It’s been done but not very effectively before.

Preet Bharara:

So as I said, at the time of our recording, the House has not been called, do you believe the House is going to be called for the Republicans?

Barton Gellman:

Here, I wouldn’t trust my predictions very much because I was as convinced as everyone else that the Democrats were going to have a very bad day. At this point, the Democrats would have to win, not literally all but nearly all of the remaining uncalled races. The Republicans need, I think, only four or five more of the toss up races to go their way. So the odds look good for the Republicans. But there is a scenario right now, based on current data as we speak, that Democrats could hang on with a 218 to 217 majority, which would be amazing.

Preet Bharara:

It would be. But so we are in the dilemma of having to talk about stuff, not knowing what the final result is going to be. So let’s assume, for the sake of this conversation, Bart, that the Republicans take over the House and that might be the reality, or if not, this will be an interesting thought experiment that people can chew over and be happy was avoided. So you wrote this article in The Atlantic, as I mentioned entitled, The Impeachment of Joe Biden, and possibly Kamala Harris and Merrick Garland and Alejandro Mayorkas and Antony Blinken. Are all these people going to be impeached by a Republican House?

Barton Gellman:

If the Republicans take the House, I am convinced that they will in fact attempt to impeach most or all of them. They will begin with Mayorkas because they still see the border issue as their strongest one, and they think they can prove that Mayorkas has simply disregarded laws on border security. That’s their position. But I believe that inevitably they will get to Joe Biden, even though there’s no chance, even if Republicans take the Senate by one vote, there’s no chance that the Senate will convict the president, but the House could very well choose to impeach him. And to understand that, you have to understand the urgency of the Republican base to do something about Biden. There is just a passionate hatred of Biden, and there is a widespread belief, it’s more than two thirds of all Republicans believe that Biden is an illegitimate president, that he was not elected, that Trump in fact was elected.

I mean, that’s an extraordinary number by historical standards. It’s a crazy and kind of a catastrophic number because you have tens of millions of people who believe that the election was illegitimate, and that’s just terrible for democracy. By almost exactly the same proportions, and this is no coincidence, they believe that Biden should be impeached. And there’s a majority of all [inaudible 00:20:05] Republicans who believe that Biden will be impeached and the Republican party in Congress will thwart those expectations at its own peril.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you a little bit about this idea of the hatred of Joe Biden. I think it was the day after the election, I saw a Republican commentator, I forget who it was, it wasn’t Sean Hannity, but someone like that, who suggested that the problem for Republicans is, in fact, that people don’t hate Joe Biden in the same way that they hated Obama and Clinton. There was not as deep seated a hatred or an anti Joe based on hate vote as for the other two. Would you accept that?

Barton Gellman:

That was very interesting. That was on Fox News, one of the commentators. I think it was Jesse Watters, but I’m not sure. But I watched that clip and it was fascinating to see because he was bemoaning the fact.

Preet Bharara:

That they didn’t hate him as much.

Barton Gellman:

That Republicans don’t hate Biden as much as they hated Obama and the Clintons, and he couldn’t quite understand it, and he thought they should do better at hating. I accept that. I mean, look, Biden is not a woman, and Biden is not Black, and there is a lot of racial animus and misogyny among critics of the Democratic party. I’m not saying it defines all of Republicanism, but there are huge strains of it, and those tend to bring more passion. But if you live for a little while in the, I want to say conservative, but that’s really not the right word for the right wing today, but if you live in that right wing ecosystem for a while, you see an enormous amount of contempt and rage and disgust at Biden and a belief that he is a radical left communist, belief that he is a doddering and diminished old man who doesn’t actually run his own staff, there’s plenty of ill feeling for him.

Preet Bharara:

Is there anyone in the Democratic party who could have been elected, who would’ve not had that reaction from the public? It seems to me that in some ways, whoever the Democratic nominee or president is totally fungible because that hatred is going to just persist no matter what. Fair?

Barton Gellman:

I agree with that completely.

Preet Bharara:

So the Democrats simply shouldn’t care about, arguably, or trying to convince or persuade or bring over that base. Is every second spent trying to convince the Trump base, who hates Joe Biden, is that wasted?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah, I hate to give up on anybody. I think of this in parallel with my own work as a journalist. I have always tried to write down the middle. I’ve always tried to write so that any intelligent person of good faith could follow the article and see my evidence. And my hope would be to persuade that person that my perception of the world, the description that I was offering, was accurate, was reality. And I have found that there is a whole kind of class of the country, maybe about a third of the people who reflexively reject anything I write, who believe it’s fake news, and it doesn’t matter how much I cite facts or statistics or evidence, they simply won’t believe it. And I think that’s largely true in terms of listening to a message from politicians as well. I don’t like to think that we live in a country where you have to write off some substantial chunk of the electorate as being unreachable, either by neutral journalism or by a political message, but it seems that that’s the world we’re living in.

Preet Bharara:

To me, what has brought that into the sharpest relief in recent times is all the conspiracy theorizing about the beating of Paul Pelosi with a hammer. I think there’s a subset of the population, I hate to say it, I don’t think it’s the 30%, but there’s a subset of the population to whom you could show a video of exactly everything that happened frame by frame, and people would say, “No, he was the gay lover of Paul Pelosi, and that’s a deep fake video.” They will just believe what they want to believe. Do you agree with that, number one? Number two, is that new or has that always been there?

Barton Gellman:

It’s kind of horrifying, I do believe it, it gets me in the gut. There’s a firefighter that I stay in touch with, a retired firefighter who was a character in one of my stories in The Atlantic. He’s a true MAGA believer. And he wrote to me about something else, and I wrote back and asked, “What do you think of the Pelosi thing?” And he wrote back with a top 10 list of all the conspiracy theories that he completely believed. And nowhere in there was basic humanity enough to say, that’s just awful that an 82 year old man was attacked with hammer by an intruder at his house, or that he has a fractured skull, no matter what the circumstances were. It was entirely deflected into wacky conspiracies. And it’s true, I think that if they released the body camera video from the police officers who responded, that will change nothing of the narrative. And the fact that so many Republicans and right wingers in the right wing media think this is a laugh line, think there’s something to joke about.

Preet Bharara:

Donald Trump Jr. made a joke, put up a picture on Twitter of men’s underwear and a hammer and said, “I have my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume,” that’s the son of the former president of the United States.

Barton Gellman:

And a member of Congress tweeted out that Nancy Pelosi is going to lose her gavel, but at least she’ll have the hammer.

Preet Bharara:

No, lots of people, lots and lots and lots and lots of people. Does it bother you that when people engage in a debate about this phenomenon, some folks on the right who made fun of Paul Pelosi and his predicament or trafficked in conspiracy theories will say, like a journalist might say, someone like you might say, “Look, we just have a healthy skepticism. We’re just asking questions. We’re not saying necessarily that it was a tryst between Pelosi and a male prostitute, but some things don’t add up and we’re just asking questions, and you should ask questions too.” What do you make of that?

Barton Gellman:

Well, look, I think that there are a lot of, I would just have to say victims of this right wing media ecosystem, who that’s their team, they’re on that team, they’re told what to believe and they believe it. My firefighter acquaintance, I have no doubt, deeply believes everything he’s reading on these things and deeply believes that there’s something fishy about Pelosi and he believes the conspiracy theories. But as is often been the case with Trump world, the people who are advancing these theories, the people who are influencers, the people who are elected politicians, by and large do not believe the crap that they’re saying. It is infuriating to watch it happen.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about your article some more. Could you remind folks, because we might be going down this path once again, what does it take to impeach a cabinet secretary or a president? So it begins with an impeachment resolution, who can do that and what’s the vote required?

Barton Gellman:

It begins with an impeachment resolution, and there were many impeachment resolutions against Biden in the first two years of his term, beginning with one on the first full day of the presidency, by Marjorie Taylor Green, and the Democrats ran the House, and so they were simply ignored. The resolution was offered and it died for lack of any action at all. Kevin McCarthy won’t have the ability to ignore an impeachment resolution if he’s the speaker of the House, because it’ll be coming from his own party and from people that he’s beholden to, and so the resolution will be referred to the Judiciary Committee. We expect that Jim Jordan will chair the Judiciary Committee, if this is indeed going to be a Republican House. And the next step would most likely be hearings and investigations, and then the Judiciary Committee would report it out and it would go to debate on the House floor. And it requires, as you know, only a simple majority of the House to impeach any office of the federal government.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s pause on an assumption you made a second ago, on top of an assumption that we’re agreeing to for purposes of this conversation, that is that the Republicans take the House. If they do take the House by whatever margin, small or medium sized, do you think it’s a foregone conclusion that McCarthy is the speaker?

Barton Gellman:

Well, that’s very interesting. It appears that McCarthy has locked up his party. He’s done everything he could to make sure that he does not in any way annoy the extreme right, which is growing in the incoming Congress. There were already two thirds of the Republican caucus on January 6th who voted to overturn the 2020 election. There are now going to be another couple of dozen election deniers coming into the House from the newly elected MAGAs. And the Freedom Caucus, the extreme right Freedom Caucus is growing in size and in influence. Just the other day, preparing to become speaker, Kevin McCarthy had a two hour meeting with Marjorie Taylor Green, who is that powerful a figure now. And he is doing everything he can to make sure that he does not get crosswise with them, because getting crosswise with them was the end of the speakership of Paul Ryan and John Boehner, and because they blocked him from the speakership in his earlier efforts. So he’s going to be a slave to their agenda, whether he likes it or not.

Preet Bharara:

So he’s doing everything he can. But who would be the most significant threat to McCarthy for the speakership, if anyone?

Barton Gellman:

I don’t actually see a threat to him unless … I mean, look, if Marjorie Taylor Green and her cohort decide that he is not promising enough, if he refuses to give them what they want, they can withhold their votes from him. And if the Republicans do take the House, it will be a very slim majority, he won’t be able to afford to lose almost any of them in any vote and he needs 218 to become speaker. I think what you’re going to see, by the way, in the forthcoming Congress is that every right wing Republican will be the new Joe Manchin, because McCarthy can’t afford to lose any of them if he is speaker.

Preet Bharara:

On any vote, right?

Barton Gellman:

Steve Scalise, the number two, could be a threat to him, but there’s no evidence that Scalise is going to make a move on him.

Preet Bharara:

It’s very interesting. We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Barton Gellman after this.

So here’s what I don’t understand, and then we’ll get to the mechanics of impeachment and what order they might go in. The Republicans have been saying for a number of years now, and I appreciate the hypocrisy, nobody seems to care about it anymore, but they’ve been saying for a number of years now that the Special Counsel investigation by Bob Mueller, the January 6th committee, all of these things are side shows, are not only non meritorious, but also not important because what’s important are things like gas prices and inflation and jobs and the economy and everything else. And I think there’s a decent argument that that’s politically better, some debate about that given the results of the election, democracy also matters. But what is the logic with which they will undertake, the Republicans will undertake investigation after investigation and impeachment after impeachment, when they have spent all this time saying that what really the American people want to focus on are kitchen table issues?

Barton Gellman:

So they don’t say, that is to say the mainstream of the Republican caucus in Congress, does not right now say we are going to impeach Biden. That’s several dozen people on the right fringe of the party, I believe that those people are going to win out in the end. But what they do say, everyone says, McCarthy says, is we’re going to have many and aggressive investigations into Biden and the Biden administration, that there’s all kinds of things to investigate with respect to Hunter Biden and his connection to his father, that immigration, that the origins of COVID, that the withdrawal from Afghanistan, there’s a whole set of issues that they’re going to investigate Benghazi style, and for the same reason they did Benghazi, which is to damage the target of their investigations. Sooner or later they’ll find one that they think is sticking and that’s when they’ll take the next step.

Their argument is that there hasn’t been any real oversight of the Biden administration in the first two years because both Houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats and they have to now squeeze four years of oversight into two years, as one of them told me. And that there’s all kinds of wrongdoing that they have to expose, and it’s their duty, they’re duty bound by the Constitution to find out what’s really going on with Hunter Biden’s laptop and to expose it.

Preet Bharara:

What’s a scenario in which that backfires, either in a similar way or in a parallel way to the backfiring of impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton back in the ’90s?

Barton Gellman:

Right. So just to fill out your premise, it helped Clinton politically to be impeached. The scandals around him hurt him, but the American public concluded that impeaching him for lying about sex with Monica Lewinsky, was going too far, was purely political. And Democrats won more seats in the election that followed, and Republicans generally understand that they overreached with the impeachment of Clinton. Some Republicans believed that it helps Trump to be impeached the first time for Ukraine, because it rallied the troops and that the public was unsure about the impeachment. I think it could very easily, I think it very likely would rebound to the disadvantage of the Republicans if they impeach Biden, and I think they simply can’t help themselves.

I think that they’re being driven by a ferocious base and they will be driven by Donald Trump, who we haven’t really talked about in this context yet. I think that if Trump picks up sort of the weapon of impeachment and starts calling for Biden’s impeachment, then the Republican body will be unable to resist. Then it will become a new litmus test, just like election denial is now a litmus test for being a Republican.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that McCarthy, in his heart of hearts, as the phrase goes, wants to preside over the impeachment on some dubious basis of Joe Biden? And the reason I ask that question is I’ve grown up with the premise, having been in the US attorney’s office for a long time, that if you bring an argument to court and you try to argue for the guilt of someone as a prosecutor in the courtroom and you don’t believe it, if it’s not really the sense that you have, first, that’s that’s wrong and unethical, but apart from that, it’s not going to be a convincing performance unless you are a world class actor. I don’t think Kevin McCarthy is a world class actor. So how is that going to play out?

Barton Gellman:

That’s a really interesting question, and I think McCarthy will be conflicted. I don’t think whether he really believes it matters very much, he’s purely performative. He doesn’t really believe the election was stolen either, but he bowed that very soon after January 6th. I think he does believe that there’s too much chance that impeachment would backfire on the Republicans. So I think from the point of view of pure self-interest and the interest in keeping the speakership and the interest in keeping Republican seats in the House, he’s going to be reluctant to go along with impeachment, and I think he will be unable to resist.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but is he going to be a convincing impeachment advocate?

Barton Gellman:

Well, I can’t imagine what would be a convincing case for impeachment, based on what we know right now. I mean, we don’t have any thread that-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but I guess what I’m asking is, and maybe this is not for people like us, but for people with psychology degrees, when Marjorie Taylor Green says Biden should be impeached, even if it’s not a convincing evidentiary argument, I fully believe that she wants him impeached and removed. I fully believe that she wants that result. I fully believe that she’s giving the people, her base, what they want. When Kevin McCarthy goes on the talk shows and has to defend Republican impeachment of Biden, I’m not going to believe him. And if I don’t believe him, then the Marjorie Taylor Green and those folks aren’t going to believe him. And does that put him in a tough spot or not?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah, I mean, look, what they want is obedience. It’s like Trump. I mean, Trump doesn’t think that Kevin McCarthy is reliably on his side, except that he’s forced him to bend the knee. I mean, he has seen McCarthy abase himself to make sure that he doesn’t piss off Trump. He’s seen McCarthy try to strike out some note of independence on January 6th, when he said that Trump bears some blame for what happened. And he’s seen how he could force McCarthy to walk that back and to kiss the ring again. So Trump likes McCarthy because he is tame, and the Marjorie Taylor Green wing of the party will feel the same way. If they get him to go along with their demands, they’ll be perfectly happy. They don’t need him to believe it, and they don’t need him to be especially convincing because they think that’s their job.

Preet Bharara:

So do you think they’re being sort of mathematical in how they’re going about planning for an impeachment of Biden? In other words, low hanging food first, get some experience under your belt, test the system, see how people are reacting to a lot of investigations, and then at some point that is pre-planned, they proceed with Biden, or do you think it’s just a mess at the moment?

Barton Gellman:

I don’t know whether you could describe a tremendous amount of multi move chess planning to that crowd right now. I simply don’t know. I think that the rational actors on the right, like let’s say the Heritage Foundation, which has a report out. Heritage called for the Mayorkas impeachment on grounds of border security, and there will be more support for that in the Republican caucus. There were 31 co-sponsors for an impeachment resolution against him last year, and once the oversight committee gets busy with sort of performative border hearings, that number will increase, and I would guess that he’ll be the first.

Preet Bharara:

And what are the Democrats supposed to do to prepare or [inaudible 00:39:25] for that, in your view, or what are they doing?

Barton Gellman:

There have been lots of meetings in the White House-

Preet Bharara:

Lots of meetings.

Barton Gellman:

The White House has hired a senior counsel whose job is to oversee the defense of all the investigations that are coming. They know they’re going to have to do a lot of defensive work, they’re going to have to produce a lot of documents. They’re going to have to figure out a political message that doesn’t drown out everything else. I mean, Joe Biden is going to try to be president and have an agenda and do what he wants to do as president and not spend his entire time reacting to congressional investigations or impeachments. But the thing about impeachment is they do sort of suck up all the oxygen and it’s hard to do much of anything else while you’re being impeached.

Preet Bharara:

Can we expect the political rhetoric to kind of flip, as often happens in politics, and then it will be the Democrats saying these are witch hunts, these are not fundamental to what’s important to the American people. I, Joe Biden and others are focused on the kitchen table issues, while you go on your little detours and frolics in your retaliatory, fully political, unmeritorious investigations, and we’ll see a flip?

Barton Gellman:

I think you could transcribe what you just said and issue it as a-

Preet Bharara:

They should hire me.

Barton Gellman:

… a White House press release six months from now. Except I don’t think they’re going to use the word witch hunt. I think Trump has tainted that.

Preet Bharara:

He’s taken that.

Barton Gellman:

I don’t think they’re going to be using the word hoax or witch hunt, but I think they will certainly make the case that the allegations are just made up nonsense.

Preet Bharara:

What about the withdrawal from Afghanistan? I see that is something that you mentioned and other people mentioned. Do you think that will get some traction?

Barton Gellman:

What gets traction depends on what the American people believe. It was clearly a poorly executed disorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan. Bad things happened, American troops got killed, Afghani allies got abandoned. It was never going to be an easy task to leave sort of under fire from a resurgent Taliban. So it’s hard to imagine a good way to have done that, but it went bad, and the hearings that focus on that will be embarrassing. Whether that rises to the level of an impeachable offense, I think is far fetched.

Preet Bharara:

Can we now jump ahead to 2024? And I had some of this discussion with Jonathan Swan last week on the podcast. And I wonder if you just have thoughts based on conversations with folks and your coverage over the years, what is that fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump going to look like?

Barton Gellman:

Well, the prior question, and the one that interests me a lot right now is whether there will be a DeSantis, Trump fight.

Preet Bharara:

I put an assumption in my question and I said we shouldn’t do that, but there I went and did it.

Barton Gellman:

Will DeSantis pulled the trigger? He’s at the absolute peak of his political power right now. He won big in Florida. He won constituencies that Republicans have not won before. He is the obvious challenger to Trump. He has support in the kind of early straw polls. And the question is still whether he has the guts to take on Trump. I mean, Trump is the greatest political assassin we’ve had in this country in many, many years. He has demolished other establishment politicians who were seemingly very good at being candidates and very good at being politicians, and he’s reduced them to rubble and to humiliated figures. Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, to take two examples. He just issued a warning to DeSantis and said that it would be very, very bad for him to get into this race and that Trump would have to say some very unflattering things about DeSantis. And he tried out one of his nicknames, Ron DeSanctimonious.

Preet Bharara:

Pretty good. That was pretty good, right?

Barton Gellman:

He made it clear. It’s got a lot of syllables, I don’t know whether he is going to be able to keep on saying that without tripping on it.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, it’s not as good as low energy Jeb.

Barton Gellman:

It’s not as good. Because Trump finds a weakness, he finds something that has some plausibility to it. I mean, Jeb did seem a little-

Preet Bharara:

That’s why he needed the exclamation mark there at the end of his name.

Barton Gellman:

That’s why he needed the exclamation-

Preet Bharara:

Should have had ellipses.

Barton Gellman:

Ellipses would be a new one for a presidential logo.

Preet Bharara:

Can we pause on DeSantis, because I find this question that you just raised actually very interesting, and it’s an interesting experiment because I’m not a Republican and I don’t like Ron DeSantis particularly. I think he’s underestimated by a lot of people on the democratic side, probably less after the election than before the election. But from my amateur view of politics over a number of years, I think it is absolutely, for a guy like him, who has other worldly ambition, it is absolute malpractice for him not to run. Obama was mocked in some circles when he thought about running after only five minutes in the Senate, but that’s when he had the magic. And I don’t think Obama running four years later would’ve worked.

I think that Chris Christie, and tell me if you agree with any of this, this is just my armchair politicking, Chris Christie missed real opportunity not to have run at the height of his popularity because things go south, scandals emerge, other stars come on the scene and on the big stage. This is the height of Ron DeSantis’s political power on the Republican side, the Fox News folks, Rupert Murdoch and others seem to be gravitating towards him and wanting to anoint him. In what universe does he not do it other than some personal apprehensiveness? And there’s been no sign of that in his rise so far.

Barton Gellman:

I agree with all that. I think that if he’s thinking, well, let’s just wait out the old man and run in the next cycle, there’s no reason to believe that he will begin with a position as strong as he’s got right now. Trump is damaged. He is widely blamed among Republicans in these first few days after the election, for promoting candidates who couldn’t win in Pennsylvania and Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere. And the party is sick of him, and there are lots of politicians in the Republican party who would be very happy to say goodbye to Donald Trump, are still afraid of him. The question is is DeSantis afraid of him, and the truth is he should be because there’s nobody better at taking down another politician than Trump is.

Preet Bharara:

No, I like your phrase, I’m going to use it. Greatest political assassin of our time, probably correct. The question is, assassins, both actual and metaphorical, they age and they lose their edge and new gunslingers, to continue the metaphor, come along and is DeSantis that person? We don’t know, to use yet another metaphor, if DeSantis has a glass jaw, do you have any indication whether he does or not?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah. Well that’s interesting because there was no chance for a Democrat to beat him in Florida with the trend lines in the state. Florida’s no longer a purple state, it’s become solid red. And DeSantis apparently has a lot of appeal to those Republican constituencies and to some independents. I mean, we haven’t seen an effective sustained attack on him. We haven’t seen what happens when someone like Trump, who is a killer, comes after him. We haven’t seen what kind of attack line he would use on Trump. So far he has managed to simply duck all the questions about Trump. He has denied that there was any tension between them, which is now no longer deniable. He has certainly not challenged any of the MAGA base, which is still loyal to Trump. And he has to consider whether this ferocious, emotional, angry base of the party, which has been united around Trump, even if he’s losing his grip a little bit, can be won over by him, because they are the constituency for the nominating battle.

Preet Bharara:

I guess we’ll have to see.

Barton Gellman:

I think it’s 50/50 whether he challenges Trump, and I have no idea what would happen if he did.

Preet Bharara:

If you were advising, if you were a die hard DeSantis supporter, as opposed to an observer, would you be advising him to … I would be advising him to run. I would say, “This is your shot. Lots of things happen. The world changes. They forget about you. If you want to do it, you got to do it now.” Would you give the same advice?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah, look, if you’re looking in the mirror, seeing a president, then you’ve got to act presidential, then you’ve got to go for it. You’ve got to have the guts to put everything on the line, but he will be putting everything on the line.

Preet Bharara:

And suppose he is the nominee rather than Trump, and he becomes the next president, is it too much to ask you to speculate about what a DeSantis presidency would look like as compared to a second Trump presidency?

Barton Gellman:

Yeah, that’s hard to look ahead to. I mean-

Preet Bharara:

We’re getting ahead ourselves.

Barton Gellman:

I do think he’s a stronger general election candidate than Trump is. I think if Joe Biden does go through with it and run again, I think he can beat Trump again, I don’t know whether he could beat DeSantis. I think DeSantis is a stronger candidate. He has shown that he’s willing to be quite ruthless in power, in the governor’s office, he’s shown that he’s willing to focus the instruments of the state on his political enemies, what he did to Disney, for example.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to say, is he going to be able to get the nomination without political contributions from Disney?

Barton Gellman:

He’s more than made up for the fact that Mickey Mouse will not be in his corner.

Preet Bharara:

Any final words, Mr. Gellman, three time Pulitzer Prize winner? The floor is yours.

Barton Gellman:

I’m still worried about 2024. I’m worried about election denial. I’m worried about election subversion. It didn’t happen this time because Trump wasn’t on the ticket. He will be on the ticket next time. I’m convinced that he will announce for the nomination, and I’m convinced that he will get the Republican nomination.

Preet Bharara:

You’re convinced that he will?

Barton Gellman:

I think he will. And I think that there are a lot of right wing allies of his around the country, who have been building up the means to subvert the next election. And they did not pull him out and try to use them in the midterms, but I’m convinced that they will in the next presidential election, and I am worried about whether the system can withstand that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, on that optimistic note, Mr. Gellman, I bid you farewell. Thanks for coming on the show.

Barton Gellman:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Barton Gellman continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

 

THE BUTTON:

Hey folks, as you know, last Friday, November 11th, was Veteran’s Day. Every year we take this special day to honor people who have put their lives on the line for our country. So to end the show this week, I wanted to highlight a story about a group of Harvard law students in the Veterans Legal Clinic, who succeeded in protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ veterans families. You see, the VA gives the surviving spouses of service members who died in the line of duty or from a service related injury or illness, tax-free monetary compensation. But there has been a marriage requirement of eight years in order to receive enhanced benefits. This excluded same-sex couples because the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage, was decided in 2015, only seven years ago. So when Lawrence Vilord, the spouse of a deceased Vietnam veteran, tried to claim this benefit in 2020, he was denied because he couldn’t meet the eight year requirement, even though he and his partner had been together for 44 years.

And it wasn’t just Vilord who would be affected by this rule. Upon listening to Vilord’s experience, the clinic filed two separate briefs with the Board of Veteran’s Appeals and Court of Appeals for Veteran Claims. The first, focusing mainly on the specific Vilord case. The second, on the broader policy issue, as reported by Harvard Law today. They argued that the time requirement violated the due process and equal protection rights of LGBTQ+ families. After two years of working on this case, the team of students succeeded in changing the Veteran’s Affairs policy, expanding benefits to thousands of survivors of LGBTQ+ veterans. One of the students who was part of the team, Noah Sissoko, said of their success, quote, “That’s one of the proudest things I can say I’ve done, not only in law school, but in life up to this point. A bunch of 20 somethings came together and we changed policy for veterans who are the most deserving people in our society.” End quote. And so this is another truly inspiring story, showing how young people can come together to achieve extraordinary things, to pursue justice and right the wrongs of our past.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Barton Gellman. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag, ask Preet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669- 24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Technical Director is David Tatasciore. The Senior Producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE Team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azulai, Matt Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Sean Walsh, Namata Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.