Preet Bharara:

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

Jonathan Karl:

What if McCarthy, instead of bringing Trump back into the tent, had said, “You know what? We’re going to do it without him. We’re just going to ignore him. Let him fade away in obscurity in Mar-a-Lago”?

Preet Bharara:

That’s Jonathan Karl. He’s the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, and the co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl, who is known for his explosive political scoops, recently published his third book about Donald Trump. It’s called, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. Karl peppers the book with revelations about Trump’s return to prominence in the GOP after January 6th. We discuss how Trump has again become the Republican front-runner for president, and how he might further abuse the office if he wins in 2024. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Eliza, who asks, “What do you make of the Trump legal team’s efforts to delay the trial in Fulton County, Georgia?” That’s an interesting question. There’s been a lot of back and forth with all the defendants in the case, Donald Trump in particular, with respect to when that trial should take place. Obviously, the Trump legal team is juggling three other trials that are pending as well. As an initial matter, there’s one complicating factor in choosing a trial date.

That is, the case that began with 19 trial defendants still has 14, plus Trump, making it 15, because four people have pled guilty. The judge recently made comments about how he might divide up the trial into multiple parts. My view is, if a few more people plead, and you get that number from 14 down to 12 or fewer, maybe it can all be done at one trial. In fact, prosecutors in Fulton County have pointed out to the judge, who well knows that there have been trials in that county brought by the district attorney’s office that had 12 trial defendants at counsel’s table.

But putting that aside, Trump’s lawyers have argued vehemently and stridently that because he’s a campaigning person, because he’s running for high office once again, he can’t be bothered or burdened with having a criminal trial to deal with as well. Here’s how Trump’s lawyer put it at a recent court hearing, “Can you imagine the notion of the Republican nominee for president not being able to campaign for the presidency because he’s in some form or fashion in a courtroom defending himself.”

He leaves out, of course, the fact that Trump might be in a courtroom defending himself is because Trump engaged in conduct that’s allegedly criminal, and a grand jury agreed. Then the lawyer said something kind of interesting, colorful, maybe clever, depending on your point of view. He says, “That would be the most effective election interference in the history of the United States, and I don’t think anybody wants to be in that position.” So it is the height of irony, and we have examples of this throughout, by Donald Trump himself and by members of his legal team.

The height of irony to say, that to put someone on trial legitimately and within the rule of law for election interference is itself election interference. I don’t think that argument is going to fly, but like many arguments that are made in and outside the courtroom, the target audience may not be the judge. The target audience in large part is Trump’s base. Right now, there’s a trial date of August 5th next year. We’ll see if it holds, but I think there’s a decent chance that it will.

This question comes in an email from Liam. “Hi, Preet. I read that Judge Chutkan in DC rejected Trump’s motion to dismiss the charges against him. What do you make of that ruling?” Well, so we’ve talked about this before, both on the Stay Tuned podcast, and on the CAFE Insider with Joyce Vance. Basically, Trump makes a series of arguments, including that he has absolute immunity for conduct that he engaged in while he was the president. That there’s a double jeopardy problem, because he was already tried in the Senate in an impeachment proceeding. And also, he has a First Amendment right to say the things he said.

Judge Chutkan makes quick work of all of those arguments. As an initial matter, she finds that obviously presidents can’t be immune from conduct that aren’t part of their official duties, and made a determination. The same with the DC Court of Appeals hours earlier on the same day, made a similar conclusion. That not all of a president’s conduct, even while he’s in office as the president, is official conduct. Some of it is personal, some of it is campaigning, and those things are not beyond the reach of the criminal law or the civil law. On the question of double jeopardy, the judge made quick work of that also.

Holding that, “Neither traditional double jeopardy principles nor the impeachment judgment clause provide that a prosecution following impeachment acquittal violates double jeopardy.” Then finally, the judge found that the First Amendment argument didn’t hold water either. She ruled, “It is well established that the First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime. And consequently, the indictment, which charges defendant with among other things, making statements in furtherance of a crime does not violate defendant’s First Amendment rights.”

So, expected rulings on each of the points. Not much debate here, I don’t think. But more interesting is the kind of rhetoric that the judge used in her opinion, which I think was pretty interesting and striking. There’s this, for example, “Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time. And that position does not confer a lifelong get out of jail free pass.”

Then there’s this passage, “Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens. No man in this country, not even the former president, is so high that he is above the law” So I think an expected ruling, a good ruling, a rhetorically striking ruling, and we’ll see what the president does from here. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Jonathan Karl.

A quick heads up, folks. Next Monday on Stay Tuned in Brief, I’ll be discussing the saga of former representative George Santos with Mark Chiusano, the author of the recent book, The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos. Stay tuned for this revealing conversation.

THE INTERVIEW

Jonathan Karl has spent much of the last three years making sense of how on earth Donald Trump is still such a powerful force in the Republican Party. He joins me to discuss Trump’s confounding durability. Jonathan Karl, welcome back to the show.

Jonathan Karl:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So here you are with another book. You write a lot of books. This one is called, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. This I believe, for the record, is your third book about Donald Trump.

Jonathan Karl:

That is correct. I intended to write one. I’ve written three.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that?

Jonathan Karl:

Well, I wrote the first one because I was in the middle of the Trump White House. I thought it was an extraordinary period in American history, and I wanted to give a sense of what it was like to be a journalist in the middle of that storm. I wrote the second book, Betrayal, because I wanted to establish the history of what happened on January 6th, and the months leading up to it.

This one is different. This one I really write as a warning, as to what may be coming. It’s a look primarily at what Trump has done since he left the White House. Although there’s some extraordinary new details and new reporting of what he did in the final weeks in the White House, that I was able to get through a variety of sources, including sworn testimony that was never really looked at out of the January 6th committee. But this is more forward-looking, and it’s a more ominous book.

Preet Bharara:

I want to get to Trump, too, what a possible second term would look like in some detail in a few minutes. But first, I want to talk about some of these scoops that you have, and you have a number of them. One is, which is near to my heart because I wrote about it a few times, and people thought it was ridiculous and silly. You report in your book that Trump flirted more heavily with the idea of becoming speaker of the House than people otherwise knew. Can you tell us about that?

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. This is really quite a story, and some of this is on the record from the key players. I spoke with everybody around Trump, and those around the anti-McCarthy forces, and of course those with McCarthy. Officially, Trump endorsed McCarthy for speaker, and I go through the long torturous path that he made Kevin McCarthy go through to actually get that endorsement. But he got it. And then as the balloting played out, Trump was not particularly engaged. I mean, it was pretty interesting that the most pro-Trump people in the house were the ones trying to tank Kevin McCarthy, the guy that Trump had endorsed.

I mean, Matt Gaetz led the pathway. Matt Gaetz is as Trumpy as anybody that’s ever walked through the halls of Congress. And the others that joined Gaetz were, for the most part, the Trumpiest members of the House. But what I learned is, as you got through the balloting… As you remember, it went through 15 ballots. About eighth or ninth ballot, Matt Gaetz steps forward and votes for Donald Trump for speaker. You remember this, Preet, because it was-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Jonathan Karl:

It actually generated laughter in the House floor, and then it was the only vote. So when they did the tally, and of course all the cables, and as you know, I mean Trump was watching this all play out live, all the networks, including Fox, would show X number of votes for Hakeem Jeffries. He had 212. 201, or whatever it was, for Kevin McCarthy, and then the various others. And then it got to Donald Trump, one.

Preet Bharara:

One.

Jonathan Karl:

So one vote, and this infuriated Trump, absolutely infuriated. It was embarrassing. It goes through another round, and Gaetz does it again. So Trump calls Gaetz, and says, “Knock it off.” And actually there’s a funny little detail about this. Gaetz, when Trump calls him, starts the conversation by saying, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You are the first president since John Quincy Adams to get a vote for speaker of the House.” But Trump is mad, he feels embarrassed. It goes through, Gaetz doesn’t vote for him again. But then Trump reaches out once again, as we get near to the final rounds of voting. He tells Gaetz, the problem here was that his name was never actually put in nomination, so people didn’t realize they could actually vote for him.

I report, and I’ve talked to multiple sources on this. One says that Trump made the request directly of Gaetz, “Put my name in nomination.” Another is that he simply made it clear, and Gaetz knew what he had to do. So Gaetz goes to the next round of balloting, stands up and says, “I put in nomination for speaker of the House, Donald J. Trump.” He gives this whole speech. It’s actually one of the most effectively pro-Trump speeches that you’ve heard in a long time, because it deals mostly with his record on the economy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he says, “He made America great again. He will make the House of Representatives great again.” And then the round of balloting goes.

By the way, while he’s giving the speech, there are cat calls, there are boos and hisses from the Democratic side. When he finishes the speech, there’s only one person clapping, and that’s Boebert. The voting goes on, and voila, Trump still has a single vote. I report that Trump was watching this drama unfold. He had never been interested in being speaker of the House. That the idea had been floated immediately after January 20th, 2021, when he lost. There were people, including Steve Bannon, that were pushing this idea, that Trump could be speaker of the House when Republicans gained control, et cetera, et cetera. He never had much interest. But when he saw the drama play out on television, and you remember how dramatic it was.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, yeah.

Jonathan Karl:

And as one person close to him said, “He saw the guy with that big ass gavel, and he thought, ‘I could be the head of the greatest reality television show on earth.'” And it wasn’t to be.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t agree with Steve Bannon on pretty much anything, but I did speculate that you could make an argument for Trump’s purposes. Obviously, I don’t endorse this, and I think he would have been a disastrous speaker. I think he was a disastrous president, and he will be a disastrous president again, in my view. But as you point out, he would’ve presided over the greatest reality show of all time. He could preside over the impeachment proceedings against his erstwhile nemesis and his future nemesis. Why do you think he never ever seriously considered the speaker gambit?

Jonathan Karl:

Because I think that Congress bored him, frankly. I think it only sparked his imagination when he saw that drama play out on television. He loved being there for the State of the Union, but that was it, because that was all pomp and excitement. He saw Congress’s day-to-day stuff, and it just bored him, frankly.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s another thing you talk about in the book that I find super interesting. That when he left the White House, which by the way, not everyone was sure he was going to, on January 20th, 2021, he threatened to leave the Republican Party altogether, and to start his own. Can you tell us about that? And then indulge us in the counterfactual of what our party system would look like, what the political landscape would look like, had Trump actually left the Republican Party?

Jonathan Karl:

It’s a very important moment, I think, in our politics, and will be looked at as a very important moment in the history of the Republican Party. It was January 20th, the day he left office. As you recall, he left the White House at about 8:00 in the morning, deciding to forgo the inauguration. I’ve also reported, by the way, that his decision to forgo the inauguration was about to be forced, because Mitch McConnell was working to essentially dis-invite him from coming to the inauguration. But he decided not to be there.

He goes to Andrews Air Force Base, has a really pathetic farewell ceremony, where they actually have to bring in people that were on the streets outside so that they would have an audience for him. Virtually nobody from his White House staff joins. Mark Meadows is there. I believe Stephen Miller was there. Members of his family were there. But almost nobody from the White House staff past or present bothered to show up for this farewell, which in and of itself tells you how low a moment it was for him. I mean, one of the few who showed up was Sean Spicer. That was about it.

Preet Bharara:

Was he dancing?

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was wearing green of some kind. So Trump gives his farewell remarks, and then walks up the red carpet into Air Force One, and takes his last flight back to Florida. When he gets up to the top of the stairs, he has a phone call waiting for him. It’s from Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair. Ronna was another one that wasn’t there. She had twisted her ankle or something, and was back in Michigan, and couldn’t make it. She says, “Thank you. We accomplished a lot. We worked together.” Trump has none of it, puts her on speakerphone. Don Jr. is up there in that front office on Air Force One.

He says, “That’s it. I am leaving the party. If you people had worked harder, I would still be president. I’m done. I’m going. I’m starting my own party.” Ronna McDaniel at first starts to plead with him, saying, “You can’t do that. If you do that, we all lose. You’ll be hurting the people that worked so hard to do so much for you.” But he’s absolutely adamant. So McDaniel’s pleas turn to threats over the course of the next five days, where she makes it very clear… She and the leadership of the RNC make it very clear that, if he leaves the party, it’s going to cost him dearly.

It’s going to cost him money. First of all, the legal fees they were paying, boom, that’s gone. And most importantly, the biggest cash cow that he had at that point was the massive mailing list for the Republican Party, all his supporters. Which he would rent to candidates for House, Senate, governor. He would constantly rent it out. And they were going to make that asset worthless by providing it free for everybody. So after the threats, Trump backs down. He stays in the Party. The counterfactual here is what would’ve happened if-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I just wonder.

Jonathan Karl:

If she had said, “Good riddance, go start your party.” He was at the absolute low point. He still had supporters. The shoot them on Fifth Avenue crowd were still with him, but he was a disgraced former president on his way to an impeachment trial. Which by the way, how would that have turned out if he had just left the Party?

Preet Bharara:

You think there would’ve been more votes against him?

Jonathan Karl:

I mean, as you know, there were seven votes to convict him in the Senate. Absolute high water mark for the members of a president’s party voting to convict in American history. There had been reporting that Mitch McConnell was kind of on the fence about it, and was considering a vote to convict. I was doing a lot of math on this at the time, trying to do my own whip count. It was not inconceivable that you had 17 Republicans who would vote to convict. If McConnell had gone that route, certainly others would’ve followed. But it didn’t happen. Now imagine if he’s leaving the party, what’s that going to do to the whip count?

And is McConnell really going to make the same calculation that he made in voting not guilty in the impeachment trial? Even, as you know, he made that extraordinary speech right after the trial was over that said, not guilty in the impeachment party, but absolutely guilty in every other sense of the word. So I don’t know. And then eight days after that last flight on Air Force One, of course, Kevin McCarthy goes to Mar-a-Lago. So I put those two moments. What if McCarthy, instead of bringing Trump back into the tent, had said, “You know what? We’re going to do it without him. We’re just going to ignore him. Let him fade away in obscurity in Mar-a-Lago.” And what if Ronna McDaniel had said, “Go find another party”?

As you remember, he had all but disappeared. He was not on Twitter. Fox News had basically ignored him at this point, and would for the better part of the following year, not have him on any, no interviews, nothing. So it’s an interesting question. The calculation that Ronna McDaniel and Kevin McCarthy both made was just a very basic political calculation. That if Trump either left the Party or was not enthusiastically on board, they would do terribly in the midterm elections, because Trump’s supporters would either go with him to a new party. But even if he didn’t start a new party, they would stay at home. They couldn’t win without his supporters.

Preet Bharara:

Well, they didn’t end up doing so great in the midterms anyway.

Jonathan Karl:

Well, and they ended up losing pretty massively in every single election since that moment. They did win control of the House, but obviously far short of expectations. They once again lost the Senate seats in Georgia, and on down the line. But it’s a great moment. They could have… I think they had a chance to purge the Party of Donald Trump, but instead made the exact opposite calculation, and embraced him fully.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to this calculation by Ronna McDaniel. First, as you described, she was beseeching him to stay in the Party, and then she mounted a series of threats. I’m trying to think, and you would know better having written three books about the man. I can’t think of another occasion in politics where the strategy against Donald Trump was to threaten him or attack him where it worked. Are you?

Jonathan Karl:

Well, nothing immediately steps to mind.

Preet Bharara:

It strikes me as a fairly bold strategy. No?

Jonathan Karl:

I think it was a desperate strategy. But I was going to say, while I can’t think of a time that a threat, just off the top of my head, worked to change his behavior, I can also say I’ve never heard of a time where an appeal to loyalty and to the goodness of his heart worked either. Because she was appealing to the people that had worked so hard to get him elected president, who had worked so hard and served him in his administration. “How could you do it to them?”

His answer to her was, “You deserved to lose, because you didn’t fight hard enough for me.” So I don’t know either one of those strategies was going to work, but she was desperate. She really thought it would mean the end of the Party. She really thought that he would take enough people with him. He may not succeed in starting his own party, but he would succeed enough to relegate Republicans for the short, medium, and maybe even long term, minority status.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about the criminal cases pending against Donald Trump, because you have some insight into that also, at least how things unfolded. One thing you report on in your book is a meeting that the Trump lawyers had with special counsel Jack Smith a week before they brought the January 6th indictment. Can you talk about that, and what struck you about that?

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. I love this story, because it just shows some of the chaos within his legal team, and gives real insight into how Jack Smith operates. This happens as there is intense speculation that an indictment is about to drop on the January 6th, slash election interference case. The legal team holds kind of an emergency meeting up at Bedminster. They’d just hired this guy, John Lauro, to join the team. Todd Blanche is on that case, even though he’s also on the documents case. He’s also on the Manhattan DA case. He’s also representing Boris Epshteyn and various others. I mean, I don’t know how many cases this one guy can do.

So they have a meeting up at Bedminster to decide whether or not they would seek an effort to have a meeting with Jack Smith, to make one direct appeal to not indict on this case. And they decide to do it. The meeting is scheduled in secrecy. News leaks out that there’s going to be a meeting, but the details of it are a tightly guarded secret. They come down to Washington. They go to the DOJ Annex Building, where the special counsel has its office. They enter through a garage. They’re met in that garage, brought up in an elevator. The elevator gets off. They go down this hallway, where there are room dividers lining the hallway, so that people within the office wouldn’t be able to look out and see who was there.

It’s a very secretive meeting. They get to a conference room. Jack Smith is there with two of his prosecutors. They exchange hellos, offer them water, and they sit down. What then happens is, you have Lauro and Blanche on one side, and then you have these three members of the special counsel team on the other side of the table. Lauro proceeds to give effectively a presentation that lasts about an hour, going through all the key reasons why that an indictment in this case should not happen. They go through the free speech thing. They make an appeal also on political divisions in the country, and how damaging it would be. So they make like a whole-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a professional… Am I correct, that it was a professional and lawyerly presentation?

Jonathan Karl:

Yes. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Jonathan Karl:

It sounded like what you might imagine would be something akin to an opening argument by the defense counsel in the case, but here’s the interesting thing about this. Neither Jack Smith nor his two prosecutors ask a single question, or say anything. When it’s done, they basically just bid them farewell, shake hands, and leave. This was in the morning. The date’s in the book. I don’t have it on the top of my head right now, but it’s in the morning, and they leave. That afternoon, bam, superseding indictment lands, but it’s not on the January 6th case.

It’s the superseding indictment on the documents case, with all the evidence about the efforts to deal with the, destroy the video surveillance, and De Oliveira, the property manager, all that stuff. So it’s a big superseding, nothing to do with January 6th. Jack Smith, not a hint that this was coming to him. Then a week later, boom, the January 6th election interference indictment drops. If you look at it, it very clearly anticipates all of the arguments that had just been made by John Lauro in that hour long presentation. It was as if they had given the special counsel a roadmap to preempting the arguments that would be made by the defense. Now, these arguments-

Preet Bharara:

In fairness, they were arguments that were foreseeable.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Preet Bharara:

And expected.

Jonathan Karl:

I mean, you would know better, but it seems like it’s somewhat helpful to know exactly what they’re thinking.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no. The interesting thing is, I’ve been in a million meetings like that, not as consequential as the potential indictment of a president, where people make professional presentations about why you should not indict. Did those meetings all the time. I don’t recall a meeting in which neither I nor my team asked a single question. Because the purpose of the meeting is to hear information that maybe you didn’t understand fully, to hear what the innocent explanations of certain documents might be, or transcripts might be, or conduct might be.

Even if, as was almost always the case, we had decided to indict, but we had an open mind, and if they could convince us otherwise. On occasion, people should know, I mean not often, but from time to time, our minds were changed. That’s why you have this process. It happened enough that we had an open door policy, and we would allow people to make a presentation. But even if you thought that the presentation was lousy, and wasn’t making a lot of sense, you still kind of, to show that the meeting had some meaning, you would ask questions.

I wonder, in this case, given what you’ve said about how the special counsel team may have used the presentation to their own advantage. Maybe the special counsel team didn’t want to return the favor, and give clues about what their counter arguments were going to be, or what their evidence was going to be, and how they were going to use it. I just don’t know. But it is a little unusual for there to be a completely non-hot bench.

Jonathan Karl:

Is it unusual to have a meeting like that, and not give any indication that an indictment would be coming literally hours later?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I don’t think that’s unusual.

Jonathan Karl:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

Because it’s a different case. Particularly with Donald Trump, I mean we saw this with the Manhattan DA’s office, in that case. Donald Trump likes to get ahead of it.

Jonathan Karl:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

So if they had given any indication, we would’ve heard some gloss about it from Donald Trump first. And the government likes to control the narrative.

Jonathan Karl:

That’s probably another factor with not saying anything and not asking any questions. You just can’t trust the legal team. Not because you can’t trust the lawyers, but it’s the client, and how whatever… I mean, there’s just a complete breakdown when you’ve got a client who is willing to, already had threatened prosecutors, members of the prosecutors’ family, judges. You’re not dealing with a team that is operating in anything close to good faith.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’ll be right back with Jonathan Karl after this.

You mentioned one of the other lawyers, Todd Blanche, who listeners may recall is a former colleague of mine at the Southern District of New York. I haven’t had any communication with him since he took on these assignments. You also write in the book that there was a chewing out of Todd by Donald Trump. Tell us about that, and your understanding of how that’s going for my former colleague.

Jonathan Karl:

Well, I think he is by far the most important member of the legal team. As I mentioned, he’s on all of these cases. He is, as far as I can discern in my reporting on the ins and outs of that legal team, thoroughly professional. I can’t imagine where Trump would be on this stuff without him. He came in with no prior relationship with Trump. I don’t know what his politics are, but there’s no indication that he comes in as kind of Trumpy in any sense of the word. There’s a scene in the book where… And part of this, the world saw but didn’t hear. This was in a hearing in the Manhattan case, where Trump was answering questions via Zoom from Mar-a-Lago. You could see at one point, while the thing was on mute, that he was yelling or getting mad at something, he was gesticulating, looked clearly distressed.

Then the hearing is over, and we don’t know what it was. But there was reporting at the time, because the Zoom was played inside the courtroom. So the reporters that were covering the scene from inside the courtroom in New York could see what was going on. What I’ve found out is that what Trump was doing, he was screaming at Todd Blanche. What I was told is that the schedule had just been set, that the trial for this case was going to happen just as the Super Tuesday primaries were underway. He was infuriated, and he yelled at Blanche. I was told that after the Zoom went down, the yelling and the diatribe went on for about 30 minutes later. He yelled at him, he said, “You little fucker.” I hope I can say that on this podcast. I’m sorry, but I’m just quoting the former president.

Preet Bharara:

You took some delight in cussing.

Jonathan Karl:

“I’m going to lose this election, because of you. How could this happen?” Now, I have to say that, once the book came out, Trump and Trump’s people have only disputed two things in this book. One was a diatribe by Trump himself, not really disputing, but taking issue with what I had wrote about interactions between him and Kim Kardashian. The second was this instance. There was no denial that Trump was screaming at Todd Blanche. There was no denial of the use of profanity. But the pushback that I got, it wasn’t because of the scheduling of the hearing, it was because Trump… Get this… Before this, had been watching some legal analyst on Fox, who was saying that this judge was putting in a gag order. That was what was coming. When this hearing was underway, Trump interpreted what was being said as a gag order.

It actually wasn’t, he misinterpreted. But he actually brings his legal team up to his bedroom at Mar-a-Lago, where he has his television and the DVR on pause, so they can hear this legal analyst saying that they’re going to put a gag order in. This is what infuriated Trump. So whatever it was, it was clearly an eruption, and it was directed directly at Todd Blanche. As I report in this, he wasn’t only… He was yelling at Blanche. One of the things he was yelling at Blanche about was the other lawyers. He said, “These people are acting like they want me to be indicted. Why aren’t they… What’s going on?” So I think it’s a pretty tough assignment to be working on that legal team, although the bills are being paid, apparently, which was always the problem with Trump in the past.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask you that next.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Literally I have written down as you were speaking, “Is he paying his lawyers?”

Jonathan Karl:

There’s another scene with De Oliveira, who gets that superseding indictment. This is the property manager at Mar-a-Lago. They have the arraignment at Fort Pierce in Florida at the courthouse. As it’s about to get started, the arraignment’s about to go forward, suddenly the judge has to delay it because the lawyer for De Oliveira has not signed the requisite papers to represent his client. They had to delay the hearing. It was delayed, and it was rescheduled. They had it, I think it was the following week. The reason why the lawyer had not signed the papers is because the payment, the wire transfer hadn’t landed in his bank account yet.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, good for him.

Jonathan Karl:

Because he was being paid by the Trump folks. De Oliveira is all part of their joint defense agreement, et cetera, and they were paying the… So these lawyers do not work until, not only do they have the retainer, but the money has cleared. I mean, this is why Kise, the lawyer out of Florida, what was it, a million dollar retainer? I mean, these guys get the money up front. So they are getting paid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not getting berated by their client.

Preet Bharara:

You quote a former high-level White House official describing Trump as follows, “He lacks any shred of human decency, humility, or caring. He’s a traitor and a malignancy in our nation, and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and rule of law.” Okay, so who was that?

Jonathan Karl:

It is, no, I can’t tell you that.

Preet Bharara:

Can you tell us, was it someone who was in the White House itself? Was it someone in the cabinet?

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. So I’ll tell you this in the best way I can, without making it… There are a lot of people that went in and out of that White House. This is somebody that worked in the West Wing. This is somebody who served in the Trump White House for more than a year. I don’t want to specify it any more precisely, because that could out his identity. And it is a very senior official. There was a lot of attention about Anonymous, which turned out to be Miles Taylor, the chief of staff over at the Department of Homeland Security. Was the anonymous senior official, wrote the New York Times op-ed, et cetera, et cetera, talking about the resistance in the White House.

This person is significantly more senior than Miles Taylor was, and had contact, much more contact with Donald Trump, direct contact, this person over the course of his time, I’ll tell you it’s a him, over the course of his time in the Trump White House, would’ve had contact, eyes on Trump virtually every day. I mean, this is somebody very, very close. The other thing I will tell you is, it’s not one of the people that has come out already and has criticized Trump publicly. This is somebody who had a very important role, was not as high profile a public figure, and has neither been out there defending nor attacking Trump publicly. Has kind of left politics.

So this is somebody who saw up close and personal how Trump operated inside the White House. What prompted that statement, by the way… I went through, and I think this is an important thing about this book. I would say 95%, 90-95% of the people that I spoke to for this book are Republicans. The vast majority of them supported Donald Trump, or worked for Donald Trump. Some still support Donald Trump. One of the fundamental truths about him in his political life is the most searing indictments of Donald Trump, not legal indictments, but indictments of his behavior, are from people who served him and saw him up close and personal. That’s who this person-

Preet Bharara:

They know him best. They know him best.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. This is somebody… So what prompted this was I went and I talked to senior people that served him in the White House, people that have been around him at Mar-a-Lago since he left, in Bedminster. This person I had been talking to, and I’d reached out after the classified documents indictment came, with all the lurid details of obstruction of justice, and how he treated the nation’s secrets and all of that. So I called this person just to get a sense. This person had access to classified documents in the White House, takes that stuff very seriously.

He told me that he was so outraged by the details that he had read in Jack Smith’s indictment, that he sat down at his computer and typed it out, basically a note to himself. I asked him if he would share that note with me, and he did. So that was an effort by this one individual. Doesn’t want to come out publicly. I think fears retribution for himself and his family. And like I said, is not particularly involved in politics anymore, but is just as outraged as those words suggest.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, here’s how I want to segue into a possible Trump second presidency. Trump hired, I think, a lot of terrible people who didn’t really understand or care for the Constitution. He also accidentally hired and appointed some people who, in some fashion or another, like this official who you’ve named but not identified, who had remorse. And came to understand that Donald Trump was bad for the country, and either left or registered their disapproval to a journalist like you or publicly. At the end of a second Trump presidency, if you write your fourth or fifth book, my prediction is you won’t find such people. Because he’s going to choose a slate of White House officials and cabinet secretaries who are very clear-eyed about who Donald Trump is, and want to serve that Donald Trump. Fair?

Jonathan Karl:

That is a central thesis of this book. Because Trump in 2020 brought back in to the White House, Johnny McEntee. He was a guy I wrote about extensively in Betrayal, to head up what is called the Presidential Personnel Office, PPO. McEntee was a young staffer who had basically, he was the body man. He carried the president’s bags. And was brought back in to head up that office. Beginning in February, is when he came back in February of 2020, just as the pandemic was coming in, he set out to attempt to rid the administration of exactly the kind of people you’re describing. The people that would do the right thing, that were not totally loyal to everything Trump, but were loyal to the Constitution and to their country.

McEntee was the one… And this took a while, so the job was only partially done. But the biggest success that he had was at the Pentagon after the election, when it was McEntee and his team… Most of these people in their 20s, by the way, who decapitated the leadership, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon. Beginning with Mark Esper and three other officials, they were all fired, replaced by Trump loyalists. It was a process that was so disturbing to some, that I had also reported, this was from Betrayal, that Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, called over to Bill Barr, the attorney general, just after this happened. Said, “We need to be really concerned about what’s happening at the Pentagon.”

When Pompeo is concerned that the Trump forces are now fully in charge, the point is, that happened at the end of the Trump term. That’s how the Trump term begins. There’s a thing, which I know you’ve talked about, Project 2025. It’s not the only iteration of this, but Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation. They’re putting together an agenda for the next Republican administration. Clearly they’re doing it for Trump. That agenda, a big part of it is personnel. Johnny McEntee is a key advisor to that. By the way, it doesn’t need to literally be Johnny McEntee. The point is that anybody who is to be hired, will be hired first and foremost because of their loyalty, unquestioning loyalty to Donald Trump.

As one of McEntee’s lieutenants said, after they left the White House, looking ahead to this project, “Loyalty is more important than policy.” What he said is, “You can teach policy. You can’t teach loyalty.” So that’s what this is going to look like. The people who stood up, and there were a lot of them. I’ve written extensively about the people, again, Republicans, mostly Trump appointees, who really did the right thing at the end and faced incredible moral dilemma. Do you resign in protest, or do you stay, because you think that if you resign-

Preet Bharara:

You can mitigate-

Jonathan Karl:

… God only knows what’ll happen.

Preet Bharara:

To me, there are three different buckets of personnel. There are probably more, but off the top of my head. One is White House personnel, people who don’t get Senate confirmed, and don’t have civil service protections. With respect to those people, the people in the West Wing, Donald Trump has total complete carte blanche to hire any kind of loyalists that he wants, correct?

Jonathan Karl:

Absolutely. Absolutely, yes.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So now you have cabinet officials, who are subject to advice and consent from the Senate. How do you imagine that’s going to go? I guess one of your answers has got to be, it depends on what the makeup of the Senate is. But he’s going to have a little tougher time installing unqualified knee-jerk loyalists in the cabinet. And/or does it not matter, and he can advance and accelerate the trend that’s been going on for decades now, of kind of eviscerating cabinet officials, and having most important decisions made from the White House itself? Do you have a thought on that?

Jonathan Karl:

I do. As you saw the administration unfold, it took him until June to get his full cabinet in place, but every member was Senate confirmed. You had a Republican Senate that made that possible. But as the years unfolded, you had a large number of acting secretaries.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Karl:

Trump’s White House counsel’s office made sure that you abide by the law on these appointments, and the law in this case is the Vacancies Act. The Vacancies Act has definitions of who can be put into an acting secretary or acting position in any agency, and it has to be somebody who’s had previous Senate confirmation. There’s also limits to how long that person can serve. Like Rick Grenell was a guy that was never going to get confirmed as the nation’s top intelligence official. It’s one of the more absurd appointments that we’ve ever seen. But he was, for a time, the acting director of National Intelligence.

Rick Grenell was able to hold that job because he had actually been confirmed as ambassador to Germany, quite a different job than being the head of the entirety of the intelligence community. But Grenell had a limited time that he could serve in that, and eventually he was replaced by somebody who actually could get Senate confirmation. Matt Whitaker was the acting attorney general for a period of time. I don’t think that Matt Whitaker was ever going to actually be confirmed by the Senate for such a job-

Preet Bharara:

So there are loopholes, and you can have loyalists through those loopholes.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah, but here’s the larger point. Trump, there’s a great line, a very memorable line from him, when he was asked about, “Why do you have all these acting officials?” And he says, “I like acting.” Well, of course, he likes acting. He likes acting. Not because he’s into drama, but because he doesn’t have to get the Senate to confirm anybody. What I wonder, Preet, as he gets elected president, he puts through his cabinet nominations, what is to keep him from simply ignoring the Senate, and just going and putting officials in prior to confirmation? Now there’s a law, there’s the Constitution, there’s a process. But I think he has shown a willingness to completely disavow such laws. And then how is that law enforced?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Let’s turn to now the largest bucket relating to personnel. That’s the rank and file civil servants in the Justice Department, or the Treasury Department, all these places where there are protections in place. As I understand it, and as you have reported, there’s already thinking underway on the Trump side to do away with all those protections, and eviscerate in a dramatic and large way, armies of civil servants.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. There are 4,000 political appointees. Those are the ones that are present in your first two buckets, either fire and hire at will, or hire, but require a Senate confirmation. The far larger group are these civil servants, who have protections that are well-established in US law. The thinking, and this is a big part of the Project 2025, but this idea has been floating around even before that effort got started, is basically turn everybody into a political appointee. Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a little kind of Trump clone running for president, had proposed a variation of this. Which is, we’ll fire half of all federal employees. We’ll just fire half of them, and we’ll do it based on whether or not their Social Security number is odd or even. Just eviscerate the ranks of the public service.

But that’s the thinking, is that they can go through and just undo this thing. It’s the so-called Schedule F. We interpret the regulations to make it possible for the president to hire and fire anybody in the vast federal workforce at will. By the way, one of Mark Esper’s sins, in the eyes of Johnny McEntee and the Presidential Personnel Office, that was cited in the reason to fire him as defense secretary, was that he had vowed to keep the department, meaning the Department of Defense, apolitical. That was one of his sins that warranted him being fired. There were others. He had also, you can imagine this, had moved to ban the Confederate flag on military bases. I mean, he had a long list of sins, which he now uses as his resume, I think. But this is orienting the entirety of the federal government in service of Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Well it’s crazy. The department that I’m most familiar with, obviously, and have the most love for is the Justice Department. At the same time, Donald Trump and Project 2025 are literally trying to fabricate or revolutionize the way we do justice in this country, by arguing internally, and ultimately they’ll do this publicly, that the Justice Department should not be independent. In fact, nothing prevents a president from directing particular prosecutions or shutting down particular investigations. Basically announcing and planning to weaponize the Justice Department, as he whines and complains and brays about the Justice Department having been weaponized against him. So there’s a bit of irony there.

Jonathan Karl:

Yeah. Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, you have to say, as two confirmed Attorneys General, both faced enormous pressure to use the Department of Justice in the service of Donald Trump, and ultimately refused. I’m not just referring to the Russia investigation with Sessions. If you remember the case of the two Republican congressmen who were being prosecuted, Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, Trump was infuriated. And expressed it privately and also publicly on Twitter that Sessions would allow these prosecutions to go forward, even though this was going to hurt Republicans’ efforts to get control of Congress. Not on the substance. I mean, these were really rock solid cases. Both of them were convicted.

Preet Bharara:

Well, one of the crimes was committed from the lawn of the White House.

Jonathan Karl:

Yes. On video, yes.

Preet Bharara:

On video and by telephone. I also wanted to discuss with you another feature, which is related to what we’re talking about here of what would be a second Trump presidency. That is the Revenge Tour. Who’s keeping the list? And based on your reporting, what is the method of revenge, other than directing prosecutions against his enemies, that you think will be undertaken?

Jonathan Karl:

Well, Trump is keeping the list, and at the top of the list are-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not Democrats.

Jonathan Karl:

No, it’s Republicans. I mean it’s the Republicans that defied him. I mean, I think that Bill Barr may be in position number one. I think because he’s so effective in his critique of Trump, and he’s got such credibility among very conservative Republican voters. Actually, Barr had been seen as the most popular figure among the Trump base in the cabinet. Dan Scavino had told Barr this on multiple occasions. He had ways of measuring this, and Barr was the guy. So the betrayal of Barr I think is at the very top, but it’s a whole series of the people who served him. It’s John Kelly.

And it’s certainly also prosecutors and judges, and all of that. By the way, when you get lower down the list, it’ll be Democrats as well. But the method of revenge will be, he will certainly want his Justice Department to prosecute. He has said this. He has said this directly. But he believes that all the power of the federal government should be at his will. So IRS audits. I mean, whatever tools he has at his disposal. God knows what he’ll want to do to journalists.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think he’s capable of directing the IRS? Not surreptitiously, but directing the IRS to audit his enemies?

Jonathan Karl:

I mean, he certainly thinks he is. I think this is one of his frustrations, that he wasn’t able to do some of this stuff. He doesn’t have a tremendous granular understanding on how the federal government works. He has more of an understanding now than he did when he first walked into that White House, and there will be people around him who have a better understanding, that are willing to do things like this, but I don’t think he has any idea.

Preet Bharara:

You said something earlier in the interview that I wrote down. With respect to Trump and how he hires people and how he appoints people, you said with respect to that, loyalty is more important than policy. The reason that struck me is… I was going to ask you a different question, and it occurs to me that that principle of loyalty being more important than policy doesn’t just run from Trump in the direction of people he hires and appoints, but also runs from his base back to him. Somebody posted on social media this past week, I can’t remember for sure, and I’m paraphrasing. But it was something like, “His base is a group of loyalists who actually don’t care about policy. So if Trump decided tomorrow that he was for open access free abortion, everywhere, all the time, he wouldn’t lose support. Because loyalty is more important than policy.” Do you have a view on that?

Jonathan Karl:

I think there’s another way to look at it. I think that’s largely correct. Another way to look at it is there really is no Trump policy. I mean, there are a few broad brushstrokes, the build the wall. I guess not have Mexico pay for it anymore, but build the wall, tariffs on our trading partners. I think he’s been pretty consistent on the idea of beating up on our allies. He doesn’t really understand how NATO works. He thinks that the requirement that 2% of GDP is spent on a nation’s defense is like dues paid to NATO headquarters or something. So he’s confused about it, but the idea of demanding more from our allies. But he was also very focused on changing the color scheme of Air Force One. There are no real Trump policies.

Preet Bharara:

Right up there.

Jonathan Karl:

I mean, there really aren’t. It’s whatever is going to make him look better in the moment. This is why the Insurrection Act, using active duty US forces on the streets of American cities. I guess, is that a policy, or is that just a dictatorship? He became enthralled with that idea, and was thwarted on it. Again, I don’t think that he would put people in power that would thwart him on such an idea next time around. But I think that policy is entirely secondary here, if not even maybe lower than secondary. It’s not about policy. It’s about the perception. Trump the strong man, the guy that irritates all the people that we hate. Let’s stick it to them. Let’s stick it to the Democrats. Let’s stick it to anybody who he’s opposed to. Donald Trump’s the guy. It’s image, it’s strength, it’s the perception that he’s this great powerful winner. Which I spend a fair amount of time debunking in this book.

Preet Bharara:

All right. Well, you’ve been very generous with your time. Jonathan Karl, the book is, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. I look forward to hearing your thoughts as we go forward and follow the election.

Jonathan Karl:

Great, Preet. Thank you. It’s always great to talk to you, and I hope to see you again soon.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Jonathan Karl continues, for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, Karl and I talk about the 2024 GOP presidential field, and whether anyone can effectively challenge Trump.

Jonathan Karl:

I think that this race, look, he’s clearly the overwhelming front-runner. It would take a minor miracle to see him go down, but I think it is not over, for a couple of reasons.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

To end the show this week, I want to take a moment to honor former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, who passed away last week at the age of 93. Justice O’Connor, who was appointed by President Reagan in 1981, was, as you surely know, the first woman ever to serve on the high court. The position was a culmination of her trailblazing career as a lawyer, politician, and appeals court judge. The late justice grew up in Arizona. She received her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, which she entered at age 16. And later graduated from Stanford Law School.

It’s widely known that when she applied to positions at major law firms, after graduating at the top of her law school class, she was only offered a job as a secretary. It was the early 1950s. She pushed on, turning to the public sector, which eventually led her to a position as an Arizona State senator. When she became majority leader of the State Senate, she was the highest-serving woman in a state legislature in the entire country. She later served on the bench in Arizona, from which she was appointed to the high court.

When she got to the Supreme Court, there wasn’t a women’s restroom anywhere close to the courtroom. Justice O’Connor is well-known and celebrated for her pragmatism, compromise, and for making judicial decisions based on how they would impact real people with real lives and experiences. Something that seems rare these days in the court. She held a profound power on the court for much of her tenure, often providing the deciding vote in major cases. She rejected the notion of being a swing vote, though, telling NPR in 2013-

Sandra Day O’Connor:

I don’t think any justice, and I hope I was not one, who would swing back and forth. And just try to make decisions, not based on legal principles, but on where you thought the direction should go. And so, I never liked that term.

Preet Bharara:

She was part of a slate of pivotal rulings, like Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, which upheld affirmative action. Though Justice O’Connor articulated criticisms of the ruling in Roe v. Wade, she voted to uphold the right to abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. She said that to overturn precedent would do, quote, “both profound and unnecessary damage to the court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law,” end quote. She was undoubtedly a conservative, and I certainly disagree with many of her rulings. I have a particularly hard time with her vote in Bush v. Gore, which settled the contested Florida recount, and gave George W. Bush the presidency. When Justice O’Connor was appointed to the court, she said in an interview that she was nervous.

Sandra Day O’Connor:

Because as the first woman, I could either do an adequate job, so that it would be possible for other women to be appointed without saying, “Oh, see. A woman can’t do it.” So it became very important that I perform in a way that wouldn’t provide some reason or cause not to have more women in the future. That was very important to me.

Preet Bharara:

Well, 12 years later, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed. Justice O’Connor remarked about how happy she was when Ginsburg got there. The two of them continued to pave the way for more women, both on the bench and in the legal field more generally. After her retirement from the court in 2006, Justice O’Connor remained a loud advocate for civics education, and led a campaign against the election of judges. In 2009, she founded iCivics, a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that all Americans have the education to participate in our political system. Notably, she was the last justice to have held public office before serving on the high court.

There’s a great history of former elected officials serving on the court, but sadly, this hasn’t been the case since Justice O’Connor retired, and I believe it would be invaluable to our political system right now. In recent years, in my view, the Supreme Court has made it easier for corrupt politicians to act corruptly. One cause of this trend may be that the court does not have a pragmatic former politician, who understands as a practical matter how politics works and how corruption can find footing. From her work in the State legislature, O’Connor knew how to get people with opposing views to sit down, have a meal, and talk to one another. As the New Yorker noted, she often nudged the other justices to sit down to lunch together during oral argument days.

One of her former clerks, law professor Oona Hathaway, wrote about the justice in a piece for the New York Times after her death, “Justice O’Connor remains a transformative figure in the law. A woman who charted a path that I and so many others have followed. If the court is to regain the public trust, it should look once again to her shining example, which embodied a powerful ideal. The court is not a body meant to enact the justices’ vision of what the law should be. Its role is instead to encourage our imperfect democracy to find its way forward on its own.” I couldn’t agree more. Rest in peace, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Let us all remember the lessons she leaves behind.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Jonathan Karl.

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 Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET. 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 editorial producers are David Kurlander and Noa Azulai. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The audio producer is Nat Weiner. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan and Claudia Hernández. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.