From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. Today, we’re flipping the script, Tina Brown joins us as a special guest host to interview me. Tina Brown is an award-winning journalist, editor and author who has recently launched her new Substack, “Fresh Hell,” which gives her weekly take on politics, media, and culture. She was previously editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and founder of The Daily Beast. We discussed my thoughts on this moment in our country’s history, my professional trajectory, and what makes billionaires break bad. Here’s our conversation.

So, hi Preet, how do you feel about flipping the script and sitting in the hot seat?

I’m a little bit nervous.

Okay.

I like to ask the questions in my prior job and in my current job, but I figure that you will be, as prosecutors like to say, tough, but fair.

Well, you’re trapped so it’s too late.

Yeah.

What do you think is the most surprising thing that you’ve learnt about yourself being in this new role, essentially, hosting Stay Tuned? For the last seven years, I couldn’t believe it was seven years, actually.

That’s a great question, for which I did not prepare at all. I guess my capacity to be interested in and learn things outside of my expertise, I guess I’ve always been curious. People listen to the podcast and have been listening for a long time, know that obviously in my wheelhouse are legal issues, some political issues, issues related to politics and the Hill, but I’m almost more excited to interview people who are outside of my wheelhouse. We’ve had astrophysicists on the program, we’ve had philosophers on the program, economists, foreign policy experts… And I’m sure you find it the same way, when you question people about things you know a lot about, that’s one thing, when you question people that you don’t know a lot about and you can ask sort of the fifth grader kinds of questions, I love that.

I love it too. I think it’s-

That doesn’t feel like work, does it?

No, no, it’s what made me a journalist was this great ability to just be utterly uninhibitedly curious and ask all those questions. It’s just been such a wild year though, hasn’t it? And it’s ended in an even wilder way.

Did something unusual happen? Unusual things, Tina, this year? I don’t recall.

We’re all kind of gobsmacked, as we say in the UK, by what we’ve sort of lived through. So, in a sense, we’re back to the future, right? Trump’s coming back, or is back, how much do you relish it? How much do you dread it?

Relish. I don’t relish it in the slightest.

Yeah.

Dread is an interesting word, and I think the issue that people who have a public platform or have a point of view have to deal with is, contrary to all your expectations and contrary to your wishes and hopes, if you’re like me, and half the country is like me, maybe more than half, depending on how you think about the people who didn’t vote, you have to accept the fact that Donald Trump won a second time. And I think you have to reevaluate what is effective and what is persuasive in politics, I think it’s a time for reflection… And by the way, there’s so much discord among the people on the progressive side, some of whom say that you got to reevaluate and you got to pivot and reposition, and others who say, no, we are on the right side of history, the way we’ve talked about issues, the way we’ve addressed issues and proposed solutions for problems, and we can just persist. I get that I’m more in the first category, and I think-

Well, you see, I feel myself that, I guess the democratic parties are now, of course, as you say, it’s a state of reflection is one way of putting it, also self-blame, finger pointing, head scratching… Do you think that the criminal and civil prosecutions of Trump were actually sort of a massive distraction almost- from just beating him in the ballot box? Because

Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

It seems to me that there was a sense that he could be got rid of in legal ways as opposed to simply winning.

Well, so I think there’s a fundamental not great orientation that a lot of anti-Trump people have had. And I’ve tried to be very clear on this, obviously the thing that I have some expertise in and have been talking about is the criminal law, and civil law to some extent as well, and so that’s what I’ve been commenting on for over seven years. But I’ve tried to make the point again and again and again, and I made it right before the election on this podcast as well, that if you care about Trump going away politically, and you care about defeating Trump, no prosecutor is going to do that, no judge is going to do that, no civil or criminal case is going to do that, the way you do that is to definitively beat him at the polls through the political process.

Bob Mueller couldn’t do it, two impeachment inquiries couldn’t do it, multiple criminal prosecutions couldn’t do it, and that’s not how it should be. You bring the impeachment inquiry, and the special counsel inquiry, and the criminal cases because they’re right and legitimate tools to bring about accountability when appropriate, and a jury decides. So, you do those things to hold people accountable, but people who kept wishing like with the 14th Amendment or with the 25th Amendment that something was going to fall from heaven and take this political scourge off the planet or off the ballot box, that wasn’t going to happen.

No, it didn’t.

And it was unfair for people to think that it might, those things don’t go together. If you want to beat a politician, you have to beat them politically, and that just very, very, very decisively didn’t happen.

No, it didn’t. The late Jim Hoagland, very good columnist, he died just quite recently, he used to say that the difference between him and his wife was that he was a historical optimist and she was a hysterical pessimist. So-

That’s not very kind, not very kind.

So, which are you actually on that?

So, it depends on your scope of view, and the term you’re thinking about. And I just can’t be the guy, post-election, who is full of dread and mourning and anguish, also, I can’t be the guy because it’s literally part of my job to tune out, and literally the podcast is called Stay Tuned, so I must stay tuned. And so, you have to think about ways to look in the longer term, and as I discussed with a podcast guest this week, George Packer, there’s a pendulum, and the arc of history is long, as Obama and others have said, and the pendulum always swings. There was a time when if you were conservative in the 1930s and 40s, we talked about the fact that Roosevelt won four terms and then Truman won another term, during which time there were lopsided majorities for the Democrats in the House and in the Senate, and that’s going to happen again.

Now, who’s going to be the right person to bring the right message and be the right person at the right time? Trump was, for whatever the Republican Party has become, that will happen again. And on the important issues, I think, that relate to prosperity, and equal rights, and rule of law, I think that the progressive side, the democratic side is on the right side of history, but they have to contend with the fact that some of the things that Trump has been saying and diagnosing are not incorrect, about the belief in a swamp, about people being left behind, about the system being rigged. I think his solutions are not correct, they’re counterproductive, they’re gaslighting, they’re terrible in many ways, but you got to come up with solutions on the other side of that. And then there are some people who want to talk about the cultural issues, I’m less expert at that.

But going back to your original question, how do you feel about things? I think that the best way to be in the coming years, if you’re not into the Trump program, or the Trump policies and his attitude and his persona, and all of that, is to be a good and rigorous critic without embellishing, without stooping to his level… I know people don’t think that. On this issue with the pardon for Hunter Biden by his father, Joe Biden, there’s some who have resorted, and I get the appeal of this, and I wonder, Tina, what you think, who are like, they’re tired of people on the democratic side who are still trying to obey norms, and laws, and guidelines, and policies that the Trump folks have long discarded, and they think that makes you look like suckers. And I don’t think that’s true, what do you think?

Well, I have a certain frustration with it, but some of that’s to do with the sort of the nature of the messages, if you like. I’d like to see the kind of warrior for the kind of justice you are talking about, of the one who’s going to uphold the norms and do so in a kind of with righteous zeal, they’ve got to do it with sort of flair-

Bolts of lightning.

Yeah, bolts of lightning, flair, irreverence… Who’s doing it is absolutely critical, and we cannot keep having these goody, goody boring sort of old style politicians, I think, on the Democratic left. I would rather go off and audition a thousand podcasters and see who is the most persuasive and then train them to be in politics than I would try to have find some magical politician who doesn’t exist. We’ve only seen it really with Obama had it, because he had a great magical presence, we saw it with Bill Clinton, who was by far the best communicator… We had it with Tony Blair, Britain is going through the same thing. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, is an extremely smart, excellent, thoughtful Labour Party reformer, but he hasn’t got any juice.

But he’s lasted longer than some of the last four or five.

He has-

You go to give him that.

He has. But I think times have changed, we’re an entertainment culture, we are entirely marinated in entertainment values.

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

I don’t know if this cuts in one way or the other on optimism, but to me, and we’ve discussed this on previous episodes, one of the most fascinating dynamics is notwithstanding the fact that I think bright and thoughtful people, hopefully ourselves included, talk about the difference between the left and the right and the politics of this guy or that guy, there is a population of people who don’t find it inconsistent and impossible to vote simultaneously for or support simultaneously Donald Trump and AOC.

Right.

On the spectrum of where you would be on trade, and on domestic policy, and on financial… On every score they’re totally different from each other, but the thing that attracts a certain kind of voter, I’m not saying that I necessarily think either one of them would be a great President of the United States, although I respect a lot about AOC as well, there’s something about just being real, however that’s interpreted and however that is meant, and not being just an anodyne, boring, predictable, say the same thing BS politician is refreshing to people.

Correct.

And when you look at the AOC/Donald Trump Venn diagram, I don’t know, I think that maybe gives you some thought that you need better messengers potentially, or a different kind of attitude in politics, it’s not about the policy.

Well, I think that’s absolutely right, and the question is sort of where to find such people and must they come-

You said podcasts.

Well, I did, and I’m looking at you. Well, you’re a great communicator, and you understand how extremely important it is, and it’s never been more important than right now. I was actually reading today that a great many Americans really we’re all agitated about these appointments. I’m actually, personally, I don’t know who I’m more concerned about, RFK Junior talking about getting rid of the polio vaccine, or Kash Patel basically saying he’s going to go after Trump’s enemies. To me, they’re all horrendous, I mean Kari Lake in charge of Voice of America. But I was reading today that most Americans really don’t care about who these appointments are, and I feel, well, surely they should care, because they can actually wreak havoc, I think. But perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps this is more hysterical pessimism, maybe these people will come and go, they’ll fight with each other, they won’t be any good, they’ll flail and they’ll fall, and we are better off just focusing on the only thing that seems to count, which is, are people going to have more in their wallets?

You said a lot there. I think it’s very difficult for people to draw a line between things, right? To connect the dots. So, the fact that you have a terrible unexperienced person at the helm, at DHS or at the FBI or somewhere else, and showing that that caused some other bad thing to happen, crime to increase, or disease to go up, or anything else, it’s very difficult unless you have a stark example and a control for people to think that person was terrible. Unless, that person comes across as terrible and says stupid things, puts their foot in their mouth, or they engage in some kind of corruption, they take private planes, or they do… Unless you’re on the Supreme Court, then it doesn’t matter apparently.

So, for example, Hurricane Katrina was an example where a public servant, somebody who served in government, the head of FEMA, was rightly roasted for his reaction to a very identifiable, concrete specific crisis, and he was watched and scrutinized during the course of that crisis, where lots and lots of people died, should not have died, and even the average person could make a judgment about how that guy wasn’t right for the job. But I think, Tina, I think that’s rare, because across the course of a congressional term, or a presidential term, who was at the head of the Fed, or who was the treasury secretary, did this happen… People make a big deal about gas prices, every economist I’ve ever talked to says a president has almost no ability to affect gas prices, positive or negative. So, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about and lack of visibility into what causes something to happen or not happen.

Right. So in answer then really, perhaps we are getting too agitated about these appointments.

Well, I don’t know.

I don’t know.

If Kash Patel direct FBI agents to go raid the homes of members of the press, on almost nothing, that’ll be a concrete act that we can judge in real time. But on some other things, it’ll be more difficult, it’ll be more difficult.

Yes. Well, Kash Patel could very much do that, and we will see what happens. That feels like sort of Modi’s India, right? Where he’s sort of turns lawfare against journalists and gradually erodes them. One of the things that is interesting, I think, about this Trump lot, obviously the Mar-a-Lago cabal, there’s so much wealth. I Unbelievable amount of billionaires, and incredibly affluent people are in this Trump circle, and he’s bringing them into government, what’s your view about that? Does it bother you or do you think it doesn’t really matter?

So, I think it depends on the billionaire.

Right.

I’m going to say something that’s maybe controversial to folks on the progressive side, to some at least, I don’t know why we demonize billionaires, I don’t know why that makes sense. In particular, there are billionaires on the democratic side who get excoriated and who get critiqued, there was that scene at the Democratic National Convention where somebody excoriated billionaires, and other people pointed out, well, there was particular democratically elected official who was also a billionaire. It’s not about how much money you have, which is not to minimize the issue of inequality of wealth, and how much that disparity, and everyone should care about that, and hope for policies that lessen the inequality of people at both ends of the spectrum. And workers’ rights are important, and increase minimum wage is important, and you want to bring as many people up to the middle class as possible.

But America is a place where we tell our children, no matter where you come from, no matter where you were born, whatever the circumstances were, you can grow up and become President of the United States. That’s a goal and an aspiration, and obviously only 40 something people have ever done that in the history of the country, of the Republic, but we still say it because it has motivational and inspirational value, and it talks about the possibility of being mobile in America. And the same is true on the other side. This is a democracy, yes, and it’s also a capitalist democracy.

I think most thoughtful people embrace capitalism with some restraints, and some backup plan for people who can’t provide for themselves, or if they fall short, but this is also a place where even if you don’t have a lot of money, you believe in America that you can, because there’s story after story after story of people not who inherited their wealth, and there are plenty of those, and there’s a reason to maybe look somewhat askance at their claims of victory… If you were born on third base and think you hit a triple, as the saying goes. But I think we want to have people be ambitious and think you could be born in the project somewhere, in a rural poor county somewhere, and you could develop a product or develop a business and you can become incredibly wealthy and successful and help people with your product or with your business, in the same way that you can become a senator from your state and become President of the United States.

So, I don’t understand that denigration when you have them on both sides. The way in which I am concerned, going to the question that you asked, and people say, well, why aren’t you saying this? Well, I’m saying it now, is to the extent that people have a deep and wide and broad vested interest in the policies that they’re going to be opining on, and having undue influence on, for their own benefit or their own corporate interests or business interests, well, that I worry about, and that’s a problem. But that’s a very soft thing that people don’t see. So, if you own a widget company and you have the president’s ear on regulation of widgets, maybe it’s good that we should have less regulation of widgets, but it’s also not a great look to have the king of widgets telling the President that widgets shouldn’t be regulated. Right?

No, I think that is what’s uncomfortable, is this sense that there’s a lot of self-interest involved in many of the people that we’re seeing. I’m actually quite fascinated by, you prosecuted nearly 100 Wall Street executives for insider trading and securities fraud, and I’m always fascinated by the moment when you think that people who start out as strivers, and who are simply the kind of people you just talked about, high achievers, came from nothing, worked and worked, et cetera, et cetera, but at the point that they start to lose their moral centers. And I am very interested to know if you have any observations about, is there anything in common with that? Is there a moment you think when people go from being somebody who’s a striver to somebody who has become a disreputable about how they deploy their wealth and their influence and their honesty?

So, that’s a great question, I get it a lot, and I think there’s no one particular formula for how someone goes from bad to good or good to bad, there are people who want to do the right thing and I think are good and moral people. Early in my career on the defense side, I had a client who was an executive at a company, and the economy was booming, and things went sour, and he wanted to make his numbers that quarter, but the quarter was bad. So, he cooked the books, as a good person, thought it was going to recover the next quarter, and it didn’t, and he got deeper and deeper in the hole. So, there’s that kind of a person. Then there’s a person who’s just an utter and total fraud, I think Bernie Madoff is in that category.

Then you have people who we prosecuted, who already had a ton of money, already had more money than you can spend, $100 million in the example of one case that we brought, who I think had, people talk about the Keeping Up with the Joneses, that happens among people with hundreds of millions of dollars too, apparently, as I’ve learned, and somebody wants to get into the billionaire’s club, and they have so much money they can’t spend it all, but there’s some status or cache in getting to that next level that they throw their lives and their careers away.

And I can’t explain it, but it happens all the time, it happens all the time. And people do stupid things sometimes. The initial defense, in my experience, that lawyers will bring on behalf of their clients, who are accused of fraud, particularly very well-to-do, whether they’re powerful or rich, or rich and powerful, is that why on earth would my client do this? Right? Why on earth would he do this bad thing because he has a great life, he has a lot of money, everyone’s watching him? Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but they do it all the freaking time.

Absolutely. This-

All the jails, the lower security jails, if I may say, are full of people who had a good life and have everything going for them, and they did it anyway, so go figure.

They did it anyway. They did it anyway.

They did it anyway.

Yes, and it must be an extraordinary moment when you confront these people because essentially they’re often people who have not had anybody sort of not saying yes to them for a long time, and when they’re finally confronted with, I’m here, and I know this about you.

Well, there’s a huge amount of just denialism, some of the most famous and well-known insider trading defendants that we prosecuted… And by the way, I was the US attorney, but I didn’t do the hard work. I get the credit and the blame, but professional career FBI agents and prosecutors built and brought those cases, I supported them, I promoted them, I oversaw them, I supervised them, and I approved them. But these are not people who had any kind of vendetta, and a couple of them have written books, which they’re utterly, utterly detached from reality, and blame everyone but themselves on their fates. I also find it interesting from time to time when people who had a lot of money and a lot of power and a lot of authority, who were very pro-law enforcement, and couldn’t care less about criminal justice and the fate of people who were held accountable, particularly those in law enforcement, immediately overnight become anti-incarceration. Well, that’s an interesting change of heart you had based on your own experience.

Well, of course now you have changed your career, you were, all of your career until that point, were you a prosecutor, and now you’re at WilmerHale defending clients who face criminal charges. How’s your thinking involved about the criminal justice system being across the other side?

So, I have yet to represent, but I’m prepared to, someone who has been, a company or an individual who’s been charged with a crime, I represent a lot of folks who are in the crosshairs and are being investigated, and the interesting truth is that a number of people are charged, and institutions are charged every year by any given prosecutor’s office, but many, many people aren’t. Not everyone who is investigated and looked at meets the threshold for prosecution. And sometimes it’s the case that good lawyers can help them make their presentation to the prosecutor community and say that justice and fairness requires that you not prosecute.

Or that if there’s going to be a resolution, it’s something that’s consistent with and proportional to the conduct in question. And that’s where I find the sweet spot of engaging these representations, it’s not a practice of trying to get people off for heinous and terrible things that they’ve done, that’s not the nature of everyone’s practice, it’s trying to make sure that, in the best sense, by the way, in a category of work that I do that’s outside of an act of live investigation is to come in, and this is actually very satisfying, to help individuals and companies make sure that they’re doing things the right way so they don’t get in trouble. I always said when I was US attorney that the best way to learn is from someone else’s mistakes. Your mistakes are fine, but even better if you can learn from someone else’s mistakes.

Right. So, you teach them how to be proactive in terms of avoiding-

Yeah. So, there’s a bad actor in the industry, whether it’s a hedge fund or someone else, and you look and see, well, what controls did they not have in place? Why did they hire people who shouldn’t have been hired? What controls did they not have set? And you say, well, let’s make sure that we’re better than that, and we don’t have those problems, and we don’t hire people who are going to break the law, or come close to the line. And so, it’s prophylactic, and it’s preemptive, and I think that’s very powerful too. And look, it’s something that everyone should think about.

Indeed, indeed. So, cast your eye five years from now, okay? So, we know you think the pendulum-

I can’t cast my eye that far, that’s very far.

The pendulum swings, as you said, and it does. They could all be, even in two years, they could lose the house and the Senate or whatever. What is your own prediction of how the country will look at the end of a second Donald Trump term?

So, I’m bad at predictions, I predicted Donald Trump was not going to win, at least at some point in the past. Look, I think that the following will be true, that Donald Trump’s first term was not good, he was widely perceived as not good, he lost decisively the popular vote. To some degree, I don’t mean to disparage everyone’s memories, but there has been some, to coin a phrase that someone else coined, that I’m borrowing, some Trumpnesia. That the absence of Trump, the belief as you alluded to earlier, that he has been maligned in criminal cases and targeted, made him a martyr to his supporters and to people who became his supporters, and there has been a forgetfulness about how we will govern. And even though he won fairly decisively, not a landslide, but decisively, when he comes back into government, I think thoughtful people, including independents and others, will recall and remember again the chaos that he sowed, and the bad policies that he implemented, and the promises that he didn’t keep, even though he keeps claiming to have kept promises.

Mexico will have paid for nothing, and we’ll see how that goes. So, I imagine at the conclusion of four years, there will be a considerable amount of exhaustion, if the country is still in decent shape, and then Donald Trump and his cronies, JD Vance or whoever else wants to take up the mantle, will once again be the victim of that other pendulum, that’s not a liberal conservative pendulum, but the incumbent non-incumbent pendulum. One way to assess the Biden loss, as a lot of people licking their wounds like to say, there’s a powerful anti-incumbency trend and force, not just in America, but around the world, and globally, the incumbents got hammered.

Even Modi, he held on, but it didn’t go so well for him. Well, now if Donald Trump gets another… Obviously he’s getting another term. When Donald Trump finishes his second term, he will have two of the last three terms, and that combined with exhaustion, and what I expect to be, will have been a chaos of policies that probably didn’t do what he set out to do, I think people are going to want to move in a different direction. I don’t know, it’s a long time, a lot can happen. A lot happened since last week.

This is certainly true.

It’s exhausting.

It is exhausting. Absolutely exhausting. So, I hope that we’re all going to go off and sort of rejuvenate and sort of detach and tune out and come back.

Yeah. But then stay tuned.

But then stay tuned. It’s been great to speak to you, Preet, and-

Great speaking to you too. And thanks so much.

Happy, happy holidays. Okay.

Same to you.

Bye

For more analysis of legal and political issues, making the headlines become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial, that’s cafe.com/insider. 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 at @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Threads, 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 deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara, as always, stay tuned.