Preet Bharara:

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

David French:

The way in which MAGA goes after dissenters is very vicious. You’re not allowed to have what you might call normal political disagreement. And so one of my questions that we’ll never know the answer to, against that backdrop, how many people’s conversion from Reagan conservatism to MAGA was genuine.

Preet Bharara:

My guest this week is David French. He’s an opinion columnist for the New York Times and co-host of the Advisory Opinions Podcast. Before that, he spent 21 years as a litigator focusing on First Amendment and religious liberty issues. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Recovering litigator David French shares his thoughts on why he left the legal profession. David French, welcome to the show. So good to have you.

David French:

Well, thanks so much for having me. It’s an honor.

Preet Bharara:

So may I call you a lapsed lawyer or no?

David French:

I prefer the term recovering litigator.

Preet Bharara:

So you left the glorious practice of law.

David French:

After 21 years of litigation, yes.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a long time. That’s a long time to realize you want to do something else. To do this other stuff, which has gone very well for you and enlightens a lot of folks. Not everyone agrees with everything, nor do I. But as I was saying, listeners will know that I quote you from time to time because you say a lot of smart stuff on things that are, I think, very important. Why the switch for you?

David French:

It’s funny. I kind of stumbled into it, to be honest. When I was-

Preet Bharara:

You were fired by the president and then realized you had to do some other thing.

David French:

Not stumbling quite that dramatically, but when I was a commercial litigator with a kind of a pro bono First Amendment hobby. And then over time, I became a public interest lawyer, a first amendment lawyer. And then as I was doing that, I got frustrated by the way the media would cover some of my cases. So I started this habit of when I would file cases, I would also draft op-eds and things like that to sort of set the table publicly for the case that was about to play out in court. And I just started to do that more and more and more to the point by the year 2015, I had a public interest law practice and a kind of journalism hobby. And I decided to lean into the journalism side called Rich Lowry at National Review, where I published a lot of stuff and asked him if he wanted more of my writing.

And he said, “Well, why don’t you come on board full-time?” And I said, “Okay.” And that was May of 2015 where I thought I was entering one kind of conservative movement in the kind of conservative journalistic world. And then one month later, there’s Donald Trump down the escalator and everything changes. It was not the world I thought I was entering.

Preet Bharara:

Did you know it was changing immediately during the escalator ride or did it take you some time or what?

David French:

It took me, I’m going to say four months. So it was July. I mean, June when he comes down, and he wasn’t doing great in the polling right away. It’s not like he came down the escalator and then just became the leader. He came down the escalator. He was kind of middle

Preet Bharara:

Of the path. No, he fought. He had to engage in hand-to-hand combat with 15 other people, right?

David French:

Yeah. And then by, I can’t remember if it was August, September, he then forges into the lead. And then I think it was by October, November, that I was just saying to some of my friends who were like, “Trump’s not a threat. He’s going to disappear. He’s going to fade.” I was saying, “Well, wait a minute. If you look historically, when somebody has been number one in the primary polling for this long, they don’t tend to lose.” And so by October, November of 2015, I was thinking, “This is a real danger here. I mean, this isn’t a joke. This is a real danger.”

Preet Bharara:

You were Republican and a conservative, and there had been eight years of progressive ultra liberal spending, crazy shit done by Barack Hussein Obama. Why not be pleased that you would have somebody who could come in and rescue the Republican Party, David?

David French:

There was nothing about Donald Trump that I liked. So if you go back and you sort of think of what was sort of the identity of the Republican Party, what was the internal policing that would occur in the Republican Party before Trump? It was almost all, and I’m sure you remember this pretty well, it was almost all ideological that if you were not for limited government, if you weren’t for strong national defense, if you weren’t pro- life, then you were a rhino and you would be sort of relentlessly policed out of the ranks. And the Tea Party movement, when it arose, was originally quite libertarian and quite limited government. And so for a while, it seemed as if the whole GOP apparatus was moving in a more and more libertarian direction, then along comes Donald Trump. And Donald Trump was and is essentially a George Wallace figure.

I mean, he is a reactionary populist. And so if you were an ideological conservative, almost from the first moment he comes down the escalator, he’s an anathema. When I was a younger conservative and a Republican, and some of your Democratic listeners will probably say, “Okay, how did he get there on this? ” But bear with me.

Preet Bharara:

We’re going to excavate it totally, David.

David French:

I was a Republican and a conservative ideologically and temperamentally. And here’s what I mean by that. And ideologically, I was a limited government, more libertarian leaning person, and I am. Temperamentally, I put a high degree of importance on the personal character of a leader or a politician. So for me, and in many ways, this was particularly important because I was a limited government conservative, that if you’re going to be wanting sort of civil society to step up and take care of the hurting and the more vulnerable, you’re by necessity going to be putting a high degree of premium on good character, in particular, compassion for people who are struggling. And so my view was that a conservative temperament was more libertarian oriented ideologically and very strongly oriented towards character temperamentally. And so here comes Donald Trump and he blows up both of those. He has zero personal character and ideologically, I’m not sure what I was supposed to like, but he was definitely very much anti the Democratic Party.

He hated Democrats, but I wasn’t never a Republican because I hated Democrats. I have all kinds of Democratic friends. I was a Republican because I believed in a particular ideology, not because I had a particular antipathy towards my Democratic neighbors, and then Trump turned the whole party into essentially just one long festival of antipathy.

Preet Bharara:

So one long festival of antipathy. That would be a good subtitle for your next book.

David French:

It’s true.

Preet Bharara:

I like that very much. What I still don’t understand is what is the difference between people who before 2016 were conservative Republicans for ideological reasons and hue to some of these positions that you cite, small government, including on the one side, you, Bill Crystal, some other founders of the dispatch, and then everyone else, apart from you, few, you happy, few, when you were all sort of banded together before the escalator ride, what’s the difference between you folks and those folks?

David French:

Boy, that’s a tremendous question. I think one of the differences, can I just be completely bluntly honest, is that we were among the first and everybody saw what happened to us. So I think that that is an underappreciated part of this story.

Preet Bharara:

So wait, so David French is saying cowardice.

David French:

Oh, there’s a lot of cowardice here. I mean, there’s just no question. I mean, the bottom line is, if you go back and you look at late 2015, and September 2015 is when I really got, and my family really got in the crosshairs of what we called the alt-right at that time. It’s what we would call the new writer, the Fuentes right now. We got in their crosshairs and it was a brutal experience.

Preet Bharara:

Just described it. It’s been a while and sort of the more recent brutalities are foremost in people’s minds.What are you talking about 10 years ago?

David French:

Well, so I will never forget this. It’s September of 2015, and it’s one of the first of the GOP primary debates. And during the primary debate, Trump was being Trump. And I noticed also Anne Coulter, the famous conservative commentator, was using a lot of language that was just ripped straight from the alt-right, a heavily racialized language regarding immigrants, some of it just overtly racist, not dog whistle-ish at all, just more like a bullhorn. And so I was at National Review at the time and I wrote a short post on our group blog that we called Corner, and where I just basically said, “There’s no room for this. There’s no place for this. This is just way out of bounds.” And do you know how when you make a big purchase online, there’ll be a popup window that will say, “Are you sure you want to spend whatever?” Part of me wishes there’d been a popup that said, “Are you sure you want your life to change forever with this one post?”

Preet Bharara:

What would you have said?

David French:

I’d like to think that I would’ve said, “Yeah, absolutely. Let’s damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.”

Preet Bharara:

Bring it on.

David French:

But I will say I had no idea what was about to come next. So I popped that up and I think it was maybe 15 or 20 minutes after I put that up where I saw online the first picture of my youngest daughter photoshopped into a gas chamber with a Photoshop picture of Donald Trump in an SS uniform pushing the button to kill her. Within minutes, my wife’s blog on Patheos, the comment section was full of the most gross pictures of murdered African Americans, horrible. Our youngest daughter is Black, adopted from Ethiopia, and these races found her in her picture online and they began to Photoshop her into slave pictures or Photoshop her into lynching pictures. And then the death threats sort of explicitly started to come in and this started building in late 2015 and it never really led up through the whole season, the whole election season.

And we had multiple deeply disturbing incidents that occurred. And then in late 2016, before the election, we wrote about all of this. And I wrote about this in National View and the piece just blew up. It just absolutely exploded. And so what happened is, and look, this is not for everybody, but I do think that this is something that occurred. My colleague, Jonah Goldberg was very outfront and he received antisemitic hate like you wouldn’t believe. And this is late 2015, moving into early and mid 2016, the way in which MAGA goes after dissenters is very vicious. And so I honestly think that made it very clear to people that this is not a normal political movement. You’re not allowed to have what you might call normal political disagreement where you might argue intensely about this point or that point or which candidate you prefer, but at the end of the day, you’re going to shake hands.

We’re all Americans. No, no, no, no. This was politics as blood sport, that if you came out against MAGA, you had to be destroyed. And so one of my questions that we’ll never know the answer to, we’ll never know the answer to this is against that backdrop, how many people’s conversion from Reagan conservatism to MAGA was genuine and how many was the conversion just a part of the process of intimidation, tribalism, and group dynamics? And that’s something I can’t peer into any person’s soul, but I definitely know that-

Preet Bharara:

You have a guess. You have a guess, David.

David French:

A lot of it was, look, I know these people before. I knew I was in conversations with them about their ethics, their morals, where their red lines were. And a lot of these people have blown so far through their red lines that they articulated to me years ago. I mean, look, there are people who are never Trumpers like me in 2016 who by 2020 were trying to help him steal the election, which is extraordinary.

Preet Bharara:

Well, two of those people are the Secretary of State and the Vice President of the United States. I’m not saying they weren’t necessarily involved in those things, but they had conversions that were so significant and so total and so persuasive to the audience of one that they have two of the most important jobs in the world.

David French:

Yes. And I think there’s a key insight there in that this audience of one, Donald Trump, he loves nothing more than for somebody to ultimately bend the knee. So he’s going to, in some ways, actually like someone who’s bent the knee.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So there’s the passion of the convert and then Trump sort of has the passion for the convert, right?

David French:

Well, I would put it this way, the zeal for the subject, because I don’t see them as converts so much as I see them as subjects.

Preet Bharara:

The word has gone out by example, two most prominent examples, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, that all is not lost for you if you were against him, that there is still room for you, not only room at the table, but room at the pinnacle. And so it’s not just … So there’s a carrot and a stick, right? The stick against David French, the carrot for the rest. What do you make of that?

David French:

Oh, I think that that’s exactly right. And it’s why I often … There are people who don’t like Trump who say he’s dumb or whatever.

Preet Bharara:

Not dumb.

David French:

The man is very shrewd. He’s very shrewd. And the carrot, if you have the carrot without the stick, that’s sort of more normal politics. If you have the stick without the carrot, you’re not going to create the kind of zeal and love and sort of movement that he’s created. It is the carrot. It is a big fat carrot that is right there in front of you and a really big stick. And so it’s misery or power.

Preet Bharara:

They’re both outsized.

David French:

Right. It’s misery or power. And a lot of people are definitely going to choose power over misery. Now, again, I want to emphasize, I can’t peer into any given person’s heart, but so many of these people, I knew them in the before times. I knew they would share with me their moral views and they would share their views of even Trump himself. And the 180 here is going to raise my eyebrows. I mean, it’s always going to raise my eyebrows.

Preet Bharara:

So because you mentioned the before times, we talk a lot about the before times. I want to talk about the aftertimes for a moment. Yeah.

David French:

Oh, I like that topic.

Preet Bharara:

What are those people who still crave power, who still crave relevance? What are they going to say then, David?

David French:

I think you’re going to see a process occur, which is assuming … Let’s just begin with a giant assumption that may not be warranted. Assuming present trends continue, which is this sort of slow slide in his approval, which accompanied by what we’ve seen so far in this second term is democratic overperformance compared to the polls. So let’s assume that process begins to either continues or accelerates. Watch for this phenomenon. So Trump, every day, every week, he says something or does something so outrageous that he gives you an off-ramp. Look at it as like you’re on an interstate heading out of Chicago and it’s choked with cars, but you pass exit after exit after exit, and a few cars exit each off-ramp. And so what you’re going to see is, particularly if the midterms go poorly, watch for people in the MAGA traffic lane start putting on their blinkers to offering.

And so it’ll be something like this. It will be … I’ve been with him. I’ve been with him for six years, but this, this is too far. This is the final straw.

Preet Bharara:

I love your metaphor of that … So at some point, sometimes on those highways, it says, last exit before the bridge.

David French:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Or last exit before Toll, right? And Toll metaphorically, in your example, can mean something much more severe than 12 bucks for a tunnel or a bridge. How many people are going to stay? I guess the Fuentes wing will?

David French:

The Fuentes wing will probably off-ramp before other wings, but for the worst possible reasons. In other words, but you’re already beginning to see this as sort of Fuentes is like after the attack … Fuentes is sort of taking the attack on Iran as an opportunity to say that he’s departing from Trump. But what Fintez is basically doing here is saying, MAGA isn’t radical enough. The Iran situation is just a pretext. The argument you’re beginning to see from what you might call dark MAGA is that Trump was a necessary transitional figure, that he broke the Overton window, but now he just doesn’t have what it takes to step all the way through, and they do. He’s the guy who broke down the walls of the city, but we’re the ones who are going to loot it and sack it. And that’s what sort of the dark MAGA is.

It’s Trump isn’t racist enough. Trump isn’t committed enough to the master deportations. He just doesn’t have what it takes to see it all the way through. And that’s where you’re going to see some anger maybe over that when Holman came in and the temperature went down a tiny bit in Minnesota. Those are people saying Trump doesn’t have what it takes to go all the way through. So there’s going to be a faction that’s like that. And then there’s going to be a faction that’s going to say, “He went too far. He went too far. I was with tough measures to take on the quote woke left, but he just went too far.” So you’re going to see-

Preet Bharara:

So the coalition of too far and not far enough will be his undoing. Which exit did Marjorie Taylor Green take and why did she take it?

David French:

Marjorie Taylor Green, interestingly enough, and you’re also seeing some of this from Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace when it comes to the Epstein files. Say what you want about them. And I have a ton of disagreements with them, especially on a million different fronts. They’re true believers of what they imagined BAGA to be. And so the way I interpret them is they saw MAGA as something other than just a cult of personality for Donald Trump. They saw MAGA as having a kind of coherent ideology and a coherent worldview that was deeply isolationist and also deeply committed to rooting out corruption and pedophilia and sexual abuse, et cetera, the whole sort of QAnon narrative. And what they’re finding out is that MAGA is actually a cult of personality that sometimes attaches itself to an ideology. And so they were really true believers. They were the ones who really thought that this was an ideological movement and all of the anger and viciousness and vitriol and conspiracy theories, they believe them.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask about you and your brethren and sisteren again for a second. So conservative Republican, Trump is noxious to you for various reasons, including character and not being a conservative. Have you and your colleagues in this camp also become more liberal and progressive over the last 10 years and found some common cause ideologically with folks you disagreed with before? How is all that working out?

David French:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And the answer is that the different ways that sort of the small never Trump cohort have reacted, it’s been remarkably different. There’s a lot of differences. So you might have a Bill Kristol who has become, I would say, pretty progressive overall.

Preet Bharara:

He’s like a lefty.

David French:

Yeah, he’s like a lefty now.

Preet Bharara:

Where did that guy come from?

David French:

Yeah. And then you have my colleague Jonah Goldberg, and I would say Jonah’s Jonah. He’s the same guy he’s always been. And I would put myself, if you’re between the Kristol and the Jonah paradigms, I’m closer to Jonah than I am to Bill. But I will say that I have where I’ve had the most impact, where I’ve had the most sort of ideology shaking moments have been around race. And it’s no coincidence that that’s the case because I saw firsthand the dark racist underbelly of MAGA before a lot of other people did. And I have to say, to then see how that metastasized within the larger conservative movement or what is the decaying husk of what was a conservative movement, but to see that metastasize on the right, I think really gave me a lot more pause about some of the critiques of American systems and sort of underlying American deep-seated American racism than I had perhaps previously credited.

In other words, that a lot of the critics of American society on race, let me put it this way, we were just much less far along than I’d spent my life arguing up until that point. And so I think that for me around race, and in fact, that’s an area where the MAGA right has come after me extremely aggressively is on that very, very issue. And so a lot of these stories that people write like what happened to David French or whatever, will key in and clue in on the race issue and say, “Well, see, he’s just departed from conservatism.” And I’m like, “Guys, you showed your true colors. What amI supposed to do here?”

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with David French after this. So in the before times, on both sides of the aisle, there was crazy hyperbole and overstatement about the flaws and policies of the other folks. So for example, whether you’re talking about the outrage on Fox of President Obama holding a cup of coffee when he saluted, or you’re talking about binders of women, an unfortunate phrase in an otherwise pretty genteel outward performance by Mitt Romney at every public appearance he was at. I’ll speak for the progressive side for a moment. I feel some amount of regret when I think about it, of how vitriolic a lot of people were and I was privately and otherwise, David, in the aftertimes, are we going to be more pleasant about those things and appreciate what we got when Trump is gone or are we going to be jerks again?

David French:

Well, spoiler alert, we’ll be jerks again, but I think it will take some time. So I think what happens is that we had reached a point where we didn’t really know what we had.

Preet Bharara:

We sure didn’t.

David French:

We didn’t know what we had. If you look at that first debate in 2012, and I’ll tell you what really put this in perspective for me, I taught a class, probably the favorite class I’ve ever taught, but I taught a class for undergrads called How American Politics Went Insane. And the reason why I taught that class is because I realized in teaching these sophomores, juniors that I teach every semester, I realized that they didn’t know any politics other than this.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, my kids. True of my kids.

David French:

Yeah. They just have never experienced it. And so I wanted to give them a historical view of American politics in a way that they can understand why we are where that we are and also that we’ve not always been here. This isn’t the norm. And so one of my things I asked some of my students to do was to watch the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama and just give me their thoughts, just watch it. So this is 2012 and I taught the class and-

Preet Bharara:

That’s the one that Obama stunk at.

David French:

That’s the one he was not so great at. Yeah. And it was also, I think, the most sharp and contentious of the three. It was very, because a lot of people, Republicans after got mad at Mitt for not being so aggressive in debates two and three, but it was the sharpest and most contentious of the three. And so I asked them to watch that. And you want to know the first person who reflected on it said to me, “I didn’t know they were friends.” And you and I lived through that race, like the idea that you would say, “Yeah, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, their pals.” No, it was a pretty tough race, but compared, compared. And then the other thing that they said was it was so smart that in other words, Obama and Romney knew their stuff. They knew the policies. They knew they were philosophically fluent. They were economically fluent. They were legally fluent. These were smart people engaging in smart debate and everyone’s running around like with their hair on fire.

Preet Bharara:

And they were surprised and it was shocking to them.

David French:

It was shocking.

Barack Obama:

20 years ago, I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me. And so I just want to wish, sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now, we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.

Mitt Romney:

And congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary. I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine here with me. So I … Congratulations.

David French:

But then when you think about it, for some of these folks, the first debates they ever paid attention to were in 2020. And the 2020 debate between Biden and Trump was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen until the June 2024 debate.

Preet Bharara:

Wow. That was awful for other reasons. People are listening to this, and maybe the people I’m talking about are not likely listening to this. So you have two fairly well off people who have been lawyers, our lawyers, on and off lawyers, fairly affluent in their 50s, talking nostalgically about what we had before. But what we had before is the reason why we got Trump, right? In so far as, just to play devil’s advocate as to ourselves for a moment, it was genteel and it was nice and everyone was not that far apart. And meanwhile, nothing changed. Meanwhile, the system continued to be rigged. Meanwhile, men and women in the middle were forgotten. The working class wasn’t saved. Isn’t there something to that critique?

David French:

No.

Preet Bharara:

No?

David French:

No. No.

Preet Bharara:

No. Okay. Well, I didn’t feel it in my heart when I was saying it.

David French:

Yeah, no, there’s not. I mean, look, I will not for a minute say that the America of 2016 was some sort of perfect utopian place. You had wage stagnation compared to previous eras, but a lot of that wage stagnation has been exaggerated. You do have, in big chunks of the country, affordability issues, for example, that are very tough in certain parts of the country. Now, I was coming from a part of the country where there were not really affordability issues, and it was one of the reasons why my part of the country was really growing. But what you had was a lot of what I would describe as political problems within the normal range. But here’s the thing, we did not have political rhetoric within the normal range, which goes back to your hyperbole point. And so if you remember, maybe one of the most influential essays that’s ever been written in modern American politics was this thing called the Flight 93 election.

And it was put forward by a guy named Michael Anton, although he wrote it anonymously at the time. And he basically was saying, “You got to vote for Trump or if Hillary Clinton, a mainstream Democrat with whom I had many disagreements, but if you vote for Hillary, America will die. It will be destroyed.” And so what you’re doing is you’re whipping people into a frenzy over the state of a political … System that truth be told relative to the rest of the world was actually delivering for its citizens in a way that many citizens of other European countries and Asian countries, et cetera, would have envied. And now again, it doesn’t mean that there weren’t struggles. And what we did is we took the existence of struggles and without putting them in a larger historical context, inflated them to the point of catastrophe. And so the analogy that I use is if it’s a Flight 93 election, imagine that you storm the cockpit, you kill the pilots to save the plane, and then you realize they weren’t hijackers at all.

The plane was just going through normal turbulence. And now you’ve killed your pilots and who’s going to land the plane? And I think that’s one of the things that happened here is we took normal turbulence through our rhetoric, turned it into an existential crisis, and then are now left with the most unstable, unhinged, it’s president, certainly in my lifetime, and arguably in American history who was elected to deal with an existential crisis that we fabricated through our own rhetoric and hysteria and inability to handle the information that comes across on this. And for those not watching, I’m holding up my smartphone and that we took normal turbulence, turned it into an existential threat, and then now here we are.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, some would say because we were complacent and we were complacent because we have, generally speaking, not everyone and there are big gulfs between the rich and the poor, but generally we’re a nation of wealth and people are bored and these are some people’s theories and they want to do battle and they want to have causes because their quotidian lives are not sufficient for them. Do you agree with that?

David French:

Oh, if you look at the demographics, so I think this is really important for the narrative here to understand what actually happened in America. What actually happened in America was not a working class revolt, truly. What actually happened in America is if you look at the data is that the extreme edges of both parties have remarkably similar demographics. They’re disproportionately white, they’re disproportionately wealthy, and they’re disproportionately well-educated. So the edges of both parties tend to be an unrepresentative sample of the winners in American society. You’re actually working class struggling folks or your middle-class folks who are having trouble making ends meet. A lot of those folks are quite frankly, too busy to be on Twitter all day. They’re too busy to be listening to, sadly, I hate to say this, our podcasts.

Preet Bharara:

No, for shame.

David French:

For shame. And so what actually ended up happening was you had a revolutionary vanguard that was of the winners of American society in many ways. And this is where that sort of idea of boredom, you need to have a great cause to animate you, et cetera, began to come into play. And so a lot of America is being taken on this dysfunctional ride in American politics by a cohort of people who are not actually the suffering cohort. They’re not. They’re actually the winners in our lives and the winners in our society who are fighting culture war battles that actually don’t touch most Americans. And that’s why you have this interesting phenomenon of where power switches back and forth with such regularity because you’ve got a big bulk of voters who are like, “I want less inflation. I want order in the streets or controlled border, whatever.” And when they don’t get that, they come out and vote against the incumbent. And then you have the hardcore cohorts on both sides who are in it for a lot more reasons than that. They want to destroy wokeism or they want to whatever. When an administration dives into the desires and concerns of its hardcore activist base, it leaves everybody else behind and this just keeps happening.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote something that I quoted on the show and I found personally to be super compelling given what I do. You wrote in the times not that long ago. There are times when I miss practicing law because right now there are a few more important posts for defending the rule of law and the integrity of the American system of justice than in James Comey’s defense team. And I said that I left the practice of law about five years after Trump fired me and did this podcast and wrote a book and did a few other things, but I missed the practice of law. And now I get to be on Jim Comey’s defense team, but I’m on a couple other people’s defense teams. And it was very inspiring to me what you wrote. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Why is that so important?

David French:

Well, I love what I do. I absolutely love what I do. But also when you are in court and you’re in front of a judge and you’re in front of a jury, you really are on the front line of the defense of the rule of law. And there’s just no substitute for the sort of sense of purpose. I’m not going to compare it exactly. It doesn’t match precisely the sense of purpose I felt when I was on the ground in Iraq and during the surge in 07, 08, because that’s a singular experience. But I will say it’s adjacent. It’s adjacent to it. And it’s the sense that, look, somebody has to stand up there and deliver the argument as best they can and take all the slings and arrows in response and sort of stand in as the shield for your client. And that’s one thing I love about the practice of law.

I love the practice of law. I love the profession. I love what it means. I love how it’s a foundational element of our American constitutional republic. And so when the courtroom becomes as salient, as important as it is now, part of me is sort of like, I feel like I might be a little bit in the peanut gallery here, if that makes sense.

Preet Bharara:

No, I’m glad to be back in the arena. And I thought what you said was very important. When you think about the three branches of government and the fourth estate, the media, do you conclude that it’s still, with some fraying in certain quarters, it’s still the bulwark in favor of democracy and equality and liberty and freedom, more so than the others at this moment?

David French:

Oh, without question.

Preet Bharara:

Without question.

David French:

I don’t even think it’s close.

Preet Bharara:

I hit it out of the park with

David French:

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t even think it’s close. I like my colleague, I have a legal podcast called Advisory Opinions, and the host is my friend and colleague, Sarah Isgur. She has a book coming out called Last Branch Standing, which I love that title because it’s actually what I believe as well, that right now, the executive branch in the hands of, I mean, the most corrupt, easily most corrupt president in my lifetime, maybe the most corrupt president of all of our … In the history of the country, the Congress is just completely prostrate before him. They’re not functioning branches of government. And right now, the federal judiciary, which by the way, I’d love your thoughts on this as well, I don’t think can save us. It can’t save us. It’s more like a rear guard action, a delaying action until the American-

Preet Bharara:

It doesn’t do anything affirmative. It’s almost all defense.

David French:

Yes. I’ve compared it to rear guard action of a retreating army that if you have a really effective rear guard action, you can give the retreating army an opportunity to reconstitute itself, but if the-

Preet Bharara:

Except the only flaw with the analogy is a point that the court itself is very aware of. As our observers, that they have no army, they have no weaponry, they have no police.

David French:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

It’s almost like a rear guard that functions purely rhetorically.

David French:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

David French:

Yelling at the advancing army slow down.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’ve been thinking about why the courts, the federal courts at least, can be and are and can be perceived to be more thoughtful than the other branches. First of all, the other branch is political right off the bat. You have a lot of pandering and thoughtlessness, right? But there are some features. I don’t know if we can apply them elsewhere. Life tenure helps a hell of a lot, and that’s not in all the state systems, but it’s in the federal system. The fact at the trial level of appellate review, you’re not the last word like you might be if you’re a governor of a state or you’re the president of a country. And then most importantly, very, very underappreciated, almost uniquely in our government. Although Congress does a little bit of this, and there’s a little bit of fraying of this with the shadow docket, but courts explain their reasons for what they do. There is a public square authoritative explanation given that everyone can view and agree with and attack and the appeals courts can view an attack and history can view an attack. So you can’t bullshit your way through your job as a judge. Is that fair?

David French:

Oh, I think that’s very fair. You have to explain yourself. You’re then open to counter and critique. There are layers of appeals. There’s just a lot about it that makes it very different. But also I would say this, in the legal profession by its very nature is counter-majoritarian and anti-populist by implication. So it’s counter-majoritarian. And then there’s this other element culturally that I think is really important that politics lacks. Culturally in the legal profession, the way I’ve put it is mom and dad are still in charge, and that’s mom and dad are the judges, the judiciary. In other words, it is a top-down shaped legal culture based around the character and the mores of the federal judiciary. And so far, although we can talk about the Lawrence Van Dyke opinion in Out of the Ninth Circuit, the judiciary is maintaining the rules, the decorum, the approach of the legal profession historically.

It is holding the line on the way in which we interact with each other. And if you’re going to buck that, if you’re going to defy that, you’re going to be defying mom and dad. Whereas in politics, mom and dad left the scene a long time ago. And when I mean mom and dad, I mean the power of parties to say to a Marjorie Taylor Green, for example, we’re not going to let somebody who has fantasized about the death of political opponents and Jewish space lasers and all that to run as a Republican. You can’t do that. Or, you know what? You don’t get to be on the ballot if you have a Nazi tattoo. We’ll keep looking. We’re going to keep looking for other candidates. But what we did is we created a system in which there is sort of no controlling authority in our party system other than the primary voter. And we had this ridiculously idealistic view of what the primary voter is. And the primary voter is not the person that we need to leave American democracy to. Let’s just put it that way.

Preet Bharara:

That’s why we need ranked choice of voting. I want to get to Iran. Is the war in Iran legal and is it just and are those two things separate or related to each other?

David French:

Here’s the way I’ve put it. Under the international law of armed conflict, does America have a cause for war against Iran? Yes. Is the war legal under American constitutional law? No, and it’s not close. So under the American system, we should only go to war when you have just cause under the international law of armed conflict and lawfulness under American constitutional law. You have to have both of them. And so in this circumstance, if you’re going to talk about, does America have just cause to strike Iran to some degree or other, if you look at the 47 years or however long it’s been of Iranian regime hostility to the United States, including direct attacks on American soldiers, direct attacks on American facilities, et cetera, the answer is yes.

However, our constitutional structure is very clear. Unless you’re engaged in some sort of emergency response to say ongoing attacks, et cetera, if you’re going to proactively attack a sovereign country, that is for Congress to decide. Congress declares war, then the commander-in-chief commands the forces in the declared war. Now, I know there’s some gray areas when there are things like responsiveness to immediate attacks or very quick, short military operations that may not rise up to the level of war under international law, et cetera. But that’s not this. This is a war full stop. There’s no credible argument that it’s not. And we launched it. We launched the attack and under that circumstance, there is an absolute necessity to go to Congress. And I think what’s really important for listeners to know, this isn’t some mere technicality. This isn’t like, okay, David. I mean, they didn’t dot the I’s and cross the Ts, but it’s an enemy.

We got to go get them. No, no, no, no. A democracy, let me put it this way, as bluntly as possible. A democracy that has public support behind its military forces is one of the most unbeatable forces in world history. If you look at the awesome power of Western democracy with public support for armed conflict, that is in many ways been the peak of power in the modern world. But if you have a democracy without public support for its actions and there’s no public support for it, it is fragile. It is weak. And so it is directly related to the success of the enterprise to get public support. So if Donald Trump wanted to legitimately rally the American people, that would mean defining an objective, explaining the risks, providing confidence in leadership, all of these things. And I’ve put it this way, I said, “If I’m a senator, there is a case you could make to me about striking Iran that I would vote yes.” I would not vote yes for this case and this team because they can’t say the same thing on any given day as to what their objective is.

When they go with regime change, that the force array against Iran, this is not a regime change kind of war. There’s so many problems here that should have been hashed out beforehand, that if we couldn’t hash them out and resolve for them beforehand, we shouldn’t engage in the armed conflict. And so this is no mere technicality. This is critical to the success or failure of the entire enterprise.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, I should note for listeners, I meant to do this. We’re recording this on Monday, March 16th. Who knows what will happen between now and Thursday when the podcast drops. So if David French doesn’t seem 100% percipient, that’s because other events happen between now and Thursday. But here’s what you said this a couple of days ago. I’m getting August 1914 vibes and I do not like it. For the young people, there’s some things that happened in August in 1914 that led to World War I. What vibes, sir?

David French:

So the problem with August, let’s rewind the clock to August of 1914, and this is when World War I was beginning to unspool. The forces, the dynamics were starting to move inexorably towards this civilizational catastrophe. And the thing that is so heartbreaking about World War I, or one of the many things that’s so heartbreaking about World War I, it’s a world war that is really hard to determine that anyone intended. It’s really hard to determine at which point did they say, “Okay, we’re going to plunge all of Europe and ultimately much of the world into the deadliest armed conflict to that point in world history.” We drifted into that war in many ways. And one of the ways that we drifted into that war is that time and again, when presented with off-ramps, with exit ramps, the great powers blew through them and they kept pushing sort of the maximum use of power until the point where then you began to have the cascading mobilizations.

And once people began to mobilize, the die was cast. And what I’m getting at August 1914 vibes about is this absolute lack of restraint. In other words, Putin wants Ukraine, well, he’s going to invade it full on that the Iranian axis wants to strike Israel, Hamasco’s full gloves off, followed by Hezbollah just showering rockets into Northern Israel. That’s going to trigger a massive conflict. I mean, just massive, just right there. Then now it’s our turn. It’s our turn. We’ve decided, well, this is a golden opportunity because Iran is weakened, that we are going to push and hit them as hard as we can. And that Iran is responding by saying, “Well, we’re not just going to hit America. We’re going to hit everybody in the region.” So you see what’s happening at every stage, it’s push towards war violence, more use of force, more violence.

Now we’re looking at a situation where you have risks to oil supplies and natural gas supplies to China, which is a massively powerful superpower. How long before China says, “Hmm, we’re going to start to exert some of our power to protect our interests and our desires to protect our energy supply.” So you can start to see how when people are constantly pressing the pedal down towards a maximum violence, that things can spiral out of control and you can end up with a conflict that nobody intended. And I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I don’t think we’re likely to see World War III right now, but we’re in the neighborhood. It’s like if I’m on the top of a tall building, I can see it coming. I can see it out there, possibly the clouds building because everyone is pressing forward as fast and as hard as they can towards more violence, more use of force, more direct confrontation.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you about something that I’ve heard other people opine on, but I’ve not gotten any satisfactory explanation. So I call upon you, Mr. French. And that is the disconnect between what I’ve always understood Trump to want to project. And I think in some ways does feel, and we saw that in the debates of 2016 about the Iraq war, Trump doesn’t want to go to war. He doesn’t want to commit American forces for too long. What the hell happened here? Is it all a function of he thought he could do it in a day in a Blitz Creek and then be done, or is there something else going on?

David French:

I think this is a complicated phenomenon because I think part of it is that Trump … I honestly wonder, and again, some of this is asking you to evaluate the thoughts in a person’s head from a distance, but-

Preet Bharara:

In a difficult head.

David French:

In a difficult head. But I think he feels like he succeeds when he uses force. And so that he’s kind of got this, in his mind, this unbroken line of success. So from sort of finishing off the fight against ISIS in 2017 to the strike against Soleimani in his first term, to the Maduro capture in his second term, to Operation Midnight Hammer, a very successful strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. I think he feels himself on a winning streak. At the same time, domestically, he’s been stymied again and again. He loses in the Supreme Court on his tariffs. The Minnesota operation turned into a terrible disaster for him. His approval rating is just sliding, sliding, sliding. So I think he sees pushing in foreign policy as his path of least resistance. And then also he has, I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat this. He has a Vladimir Putin gene in him.

He’s not an isolationist we now know. He’s a spheres of influence guy. He is, “I get to dominate my backyard. That’s what I get to do. ” And also he has that sort of Putinesque. Putin, by the time he, when he in February 2022 goes into Ukraine, he was also on a military winning streak. He had won the second Chechen war. He’d had a successful war against Georgia in 2008. He had successfully taken Crimea with minimal bloodshed. At that point, he had defended the Assad regime and had successfully defeated some of the Syrian insurgency. He was on a role until he wasn’t. And so this is a common phenomenon when you have authoritarian rulers is they will push and they will push and they will push. And then here comes the hubris brings us to the quagmire, the hubrist brings us to the defeat. Now, I don’t know that that’s going to happen here because the American military is just far more competent than the Russian military, but the political leadership that this excellent military has is a mess.

And so we might have one of these situations where once again, we have a lot of military competence displayed with political failure that then results in the kind of, yes, we can absolutely degrade Iranian military and missile production facility in the Iranian nuclear program, but we cannot actually accomplish the objectives that the political leaders have set. And by not accomplishing that objective, we create greater instability and greater problems down the line.

Preet Bharara:

Trump, in two respects, has kind of abandoned his base, one on Epstein and being seen to be stonewalling that, and the other going to war in Iran. Is that because lo and behold, he actually has convictions or is he losing his touch? For somebody who you have described and I think correctly has shrewd, it seems to be a very odd strategy now, or does he not care because he’s a lame duck? Is there any of that going on here?

David French:

Well, I think he accurately knows that his actual base isn’t going to abandon him over Iran or Epstein. Now, you will have individuals who put, again, using that off-ramp analogy, pop on the blinkers and exit. But he realized, and this goes back to the, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue line from 2016, he realized early on that his people love him. And then when he won against Hillary, this is one thing that I tell my Democratic friends all the time, you don’t understand the emotional bond that occurred between Donald Trump and the Republican base when he beat Hillary Clinton. Because when Republicans were walking to the polls in November of 2016, and I was living in my neighborhood at that time was 80% MAGA, so I’m surrounded by MAGA and people were walking to the polls in 2016 with no hope. They had seen all the polling, they knew.

They didn’t think Hillary Clinton was going to win. They knew she was going to win. So did I. And Hillary Clinton, you remember this, Hillary Clinton might have been more disliked by Republicans than Bill Clinton, that Hillary Clinton was sort of public enemy number one to Republicans and they thought they were going to lose to public enemy number one, and then he wins. And the sense of shock and glee and joy is almost hard to put into words. And that bonded people to Trump in a way at an emotional level that’s hard to describe. And it’s one of the reasons why somebody went from holding their nose and voting for him in 2016 to being the second boat in the boat parade in 2020. And so there’s this emotional bond between Trump and the GOP base that nobody else has, and it is not related to any policy.

It is really truly at bottom related to the fact that he beats the hated Democrats and he has beaten the hated Democrats twice now, some of them believe three times, but twice now, and there’s just an emotional bond. Now, that’s not to say that any given podcaster or influencer or whatever was deceived into thinking that MAGA was an actual ideology as opposed to a cult of personality. And they may be like, “I’m done with Trump now.” But there’s zero indication, zero, that MAGA is done with Trump. You’re going to see the Normi Republicans bailing before you’re going to see MAGA. And he just understood early on that the bond was personal. It wasn’t policy, it was the person. And I know it’s mystifying to me. I’ve not ever … At the height of the apprentice, I thought he was entertaining. I never have considered Donald Trump admirable.

Nothing about him have I ever wanted to emulate or admire. And so it’s mystifying to me. The whole bond is mystifying to me before they victory over Hillary, but then after when he beat Hillary and then I understood it, they just trust the man. They trust him, like him. They’re going to by default, agree with what he does.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I would just note that in the analogy of the metaphor of a relationship and being in love, people fall out of love, people get divorced, people break up. It happens every day. So none of that is … So when you’re into a politician based on something other than being aligned with your self-interests, there’s a chance that that falls apart too. Final question is, what’s the trendline? In 2028, can either a Democrat or Republican win who takes us back to kinder and gentler days, to coin a phrase, or is the lesson learned that success comes from being a modified version of an unkind pugilistic Donald Trump?

David French:

So I think that we are at some point, I don’t know exactly when, we’re going to have a thermostatic reaction as a culture against all this putulism and hatred, that the age of indecency is going to be followed by an age of decency. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how much damage will be done before that, or whether the damage will be ultimately even survivable.

Preet Bharara:

What gives you that faith?

David French:

So a couple of things. So one is just sort of inherently the nature of American politics that were thermostatic. And we actually have a historical precedent. Nixon leaves office in 74, he was corrupt, he was vicious, he was cruel. Gerald Ford wasn’t, but he’s still a hangover from the … He’s still the Republican hangover from the Nixon administration. What do Americans, the next election after Nixon, they choose a Baptist Sunday school teacher named Jimmy Carter, who is so not the imperial president that he walks in his own inauguration parade. He refuses to have hail to the chief played, for example, because he doesn’t want that trapping of monarchy and et cetera. So the American people reacted very strongly against that Nixonian imperial presidency. So we do have a recent example of that, but also right now, very interestingly, the Texas Senate race is an interesting early indicator.

So on both the Republican and the Democratic side, you had a choice between a more norm, what you might call normie politician who observes the standard rules of political decorum and then a much more populous, pugilistic person. Now, I’m not going to compare Jasmine Crockett to Ken Paxton because Ken Paxton’s one of the most corrupt politicians in America. I don’t see that Jasmine Crockett in the same way. I see Jasmine Crockett those very populist and pugilistic. And the Texas Democratic primary voters chose the more civil person who’s willing to engage with his opponents in James Talarico. On the Republican side, you got to have runoff between Cornyn and Paxton. And right now, if Paxton wins that runoff, that’s an absolute sign that the Republicans are doubling down. They’re doubling down on hatred, they’re doubling down on corruption, they’re doubling down on pugilism. But if Cornyn wins the primary, even in a place where the primary electorate is as radicalized as it is in Texas, to me, that’s a sign like the beginning notions that nature is healing a bit, that the way in which Republicans have rapped both-

Preet Bharara:

Sending back John Cornyn, there’s some interesting signs that nature is going to be providing, David.

David French:

But compared to Ken Paxton, compared to Ken Paxton. I mean, come on. So if you actually have a Talarico versus Cornyn race, what you do is have something that’s much more return to normalcy. But if you have a Paxton versus Talarico race, it is pugilism, populism, corruption, double down versus the Democratic alternative, which is more a return to normalcy.

Preet Bharara:

One word answer. Who’s more likely to be the Republican nominee, JD Vance or Marco Rubio?

David French:

Marco Rubio.

Preet Bharara:

On that note, David French, thanks so much for joining us.

David French:

Thanks so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with David French continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, French responds to criticism that he’s too polite.

David French (01:00:47):

I just completely reject that as a matter of how we treat other human beings. I also reject that as a matter of political expediency. I think it’s ultimately incredibly destructive.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about whether federal prosecutors have to follow the rules of the states where they practice and which president first used the autopen. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Andrew. I was recently introduced to the McDade Amendment in a New York Times article and I’d love to learn more. What exactly is the McDade Amendment and what are your thoughts on it? Andrew, thanks for the question. That’s a very, very important one and one that goes to the heart of a lot of things that are going on in the Justice Department and elsewhere. In particular, there’s recent reporting raising alarms about a troubling trend inside the Justice Department. More and more seasoned lawyers are leaving the department and some DOJ lawyers that are coming in or who have remained in the department have in recent times been accused of conduct that could violate professional ethics rules.

Things like misleading courts or failing to disclose required information. Now, if a lawyer violates those rules, as you might expect, the consequences can be severe. And state bar authorities, the licensing bodies for all lawyers are the ones who have the power to discipline attorneys and in extreme cases, even disbar them. There are also mechanisms within the Justice Department as well. We’ll get to that in a moment. So this is where the controversy arises. The Trump administration has floated a proposal that would essentially shield DOJ lawyers from independent state ethics investigations. Under the proposed rule, the Attorney General could ask any state bar to suspend ethics proceedings against a DOJ lawyer and instead route the matter to the department’s own OPR, Office of Professional Responsibility. But OPR is in the minds of many, not a good substitute. It answers to a political appointee. It doesn’t have the power to subpoena testimony from outside the department, and its findings are almost never made public.

And so critics basically say that the proposal unduly shields department lawyers from professional responsibility obligations. And it comes by the way as AG Pam Bandi and a number of DOJ attorneys are themselves facing active bar complaints in multiple states among them, somebody by the name of Ed Martin. So there’s a legal obstacle to the idea. Now we get back to your original question, Andrew. And that obstacle is the McDade Amendment. What is referred to as the McDade Amendment is a federal law passed by Congress in 1998. It’s named after Congressman Joseph McDade, a Republican from Pennsylvania who served in the House for more than three decades. McDade himself, interestingly, had been indicted by federal prosecutors in the early 1990s on racketeering and bribery charges. But after a lengthy trial, he was acquitted by a jury in 1996. And so in the aftermath, McDade became concerned about what he saw as aggressive or potentially unethical tactics by federal prosecutors.

And he worried more broadly about the Justice Department’s position that its lawyers weren’t always bound by the same state ethics rules that apply to other attorneys. So he pushed Congress to pass legislation clarifying this and he was successful. His amendment clarified that federal government lawyers, including DOJ prosecutors, must follow the same state bar ethics rules as every other lawyer practicing in that state. And so here’s the key question. Could the Trump administration’s proposed rule override the McDade Amendment? Not easily. The McDade Amendment is a federal statute passed by Congress and an executive branch rule shouldn’t be able to simply supersede it. So if the Justice Department finalizes this rule, it would almost certainly be challenged in court as violating the McDade Amendment. As for where things stand now, the proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on March five and is currently in a 30-day public comment period.

It hasn’t taken effect yet, but you can bet it’ll face legal challenges if it does. As we often say, stay tuned.

This question comes in an email from Peter who writes, “In a recent Cafe Insider episode, Preet and Joyce said that the founders did not use autopens. I’d like to offer a gentle clarification. It’s true that the modern auto pen did not yet exist at the time. However, an early precursor called the polygraph was available in the early 19th century. Thomas Jefferson used it extensively during his presidency and was in fact one of its strongest advocates. Given that history does the originalist argument against modern signature technology really hold up. Well, Peter, thank you for bringing that other polygraph to our attention. I guess we just assumed that that kind of automotive instrument was not available 200 years ago. So Joyce and I were originally discussing the autopen because last June, President Trump signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Biden’s use of the auto pen to sign presidential documents was illegal.

They actually tried to build a criminal case. And on this theory, Trump had even claimed that Biden’s pardons should be invalidated. So it’s interesting to learn from me, for the first time ever, that Thomas Jefferson used an early precursor to the auto pen. So the crack team did some research, and here’s what we found. The polygraph was patented in 1803 as a way to copy a letter in real time. The user would write with one pen and the machine would simultaneously reproduce the writing with a second pen connected by a system of wooden arms and levers. So when Jefferson wrote a letter in his own handwriting, the polygraph created an exact duplicate at the same time. Jefferson was a famously prolific letter writer. Over the course of his life, he wrote some 20,000 letters and many of them survived today. Why? Because he kept the duplicate copies produced by the polygraph.

But there’s no indication that Jefferson used the device to sign legislation. And as far as I understand, it was limited to creating one copy. In any event, the modern auto pen, as we understand it today, was developed in the 1930s, and it was originally called the robot pen. It works by using a template of a person’s signature that a mechanical arm can trace, allowing the machine to reproduce the signature on paper. Presidents began using the new technology pretty quickly. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower reportedly used autopens and JFK who relied on one so frequently that autograph experts sometimes struggled to distinguish his genuine signature from auto pen reproductions. Lyndon Johnson was the first president to allow the auto pen to be photographed. That photo appeared in a 1968 National Enquirer article entitled The Robot That Sits In for the President. For decades, presidents used autopens to sign letters, photographs, and other routine items.

But the question of whether a president could use one to sign a bill into law arose in 2005 when President George W. Bush asked DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze the issue. So what does the law actually say about presidential signatures? Well, surprisingly little. Article one, section seven of the Constitution, known as the presentment clause, simply says, “If he approve, he shall sign it. ” That’s it. The Constitution does not specify that the president must personally hold the pen, that the signature must be handwritten, or that the president must be physically present when the signature is affixed. So OLC finally concluded that the constitution does not require the president to personally perform the physical act of signing every bill. As long as the president has decided to approve the legislation, he can direct that his signature be affixed, including by autopen. So that opinion became significant in 2011 when President Barack Obama became the first president known to sign legislation using an auto pen while traveling overseas.

In that case, he authorized staff in Washington to use the device to sign a reauthorization of the Patriot Act while he was busy at a G8 summit in France. The first real potential challenge to that interpretation came when President Trump ordered the investigation that I mentioned into President Biden’s use of the auto pen. But earlier this month, it was reported that the Justice Department closed that inquiry, concluding there was no legal basis for criminal charges. So for now, the legal consensus is that a president may authorize the use of an autopen to sign pardons, bills, and other official documents. No court has ever ruled otherwise, though the question has never been squarely litigated. And there you have it, all that you ever wanted to know about the autopen.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, David French. 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. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.