The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent:This is The Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Over the weekend, President Trump explicitly commanded his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to hurry up and prosecute his political enemies. In a crazed Truth Social tirade, he even named the Democrats he once prosecuted and ranted wildly about them, even admitting that he’d ousted a career prosecutor for refusing to do his bidding. Since then, the story’s gotten worse. White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, offered some comically awful spin to try to justify all this. And Rolling Stone reports that Trump’s open demand of his attorney general was so corrupt that it surprised even some of Trump’s own advisors who couldn’t fathom that he’d want it to be public. But we think Trump once had publicly understood that he’s making this threat and that this is essential to understanding this moment. So we’re going to talk about all this with the Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng, who wrote that great story. Swin, good to have you on as always.
Asawin Suebsaeng: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It’s good to be back.
Sargent: So Trump just ousted a career prosecutor in Virginia, Eric Siebert, because he was unable to find evidence that New York attorney general Letitia James had committed mortgage fraud. Now those fraud allegations were bullshit manufactured by a top Trump ally who heads the government agency that oversees mortgage markets. That prosecutor investigated this for five months and found nothing. So Trump removed him. Swin, can you bring us up to date on that?
Suebsaeng: Sure, and think something that’s important to underscore here is that this is not a guy that literally every fire breather or MAGA diehard in the upper echelons of the government wanted to be ousted. We had heard from multiple sources over the weekend that top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, including her deputy Todd Blanch, did not want this guy ousted. They thought that would be a bad idea, not just because it would be a quote unquote bad look or anything like that, but they thought he was helpful and good at what he was doing. But to the president of the United States, that does not matter. If you cannot execute a very MAGA fried version of show me the man and I’ll show you the crime, Donald Trump gives you a zero. You get an incomplete on the exam. So that’s where we’re at right now.
Sargent: Yeah, I’ll say I think that’s really important because it shows that Trump is actually acting in a way that could make crime worse. This is true on multiple fronts. But here, these these top Justice Department officials wanted this prosecutor to remain, Eric Siebert is his name, because he’s a good prosecutor.
Suebsaeng: So when someone like Pam Bondi is saying, let’s pump the brakes on this, maybe we shouldn’t just completely ask this guy just because he’s starting to make Donald Trump mad. That says something. This is, there are no more John Kelly’s or Mark Esper’s of the world surrounding Donald Trump in the first term to try to tell him, maybe you shouldn’t shoot American civilians in the street just because you were mad anymore.
He is getting to a point where even the ultra-MAGA, very authoritarian-minded, very personality-cult people who Trump has surrounded himself with—some of them are starting to say here and there, Okay, maybe we shouldn’t go too far with the authoritarianism and the purgings in this respect or that respect.
Now, I’m not here to say anything as lofty as, Pam Bondi, welcome to the resistance, or anything like that. I’m not naive or stupid. What I am saying is that it is showing you, to use a polite term, how much Donald Trump and his chief lieutenants are pushing the envelope when it comes to this administration and how much authoritarianism and how much autocracy and democratic backsliding they want to get away with. It’s starting to get too much in isolated individual respects, even for the Pam Bondis of the world.
Sargent: Well, that brings us to Trump’s truth social tirade. He erupted and addressed directly to Pam Bondi in this tweet as well. He named Letitia James and also Senator Adam Schiff a longtime Trump foe. Then Trump ranted, “They’re all guilty as hell.” Trump then openly declared that he fired this career prosecutor for not acting on the case against James and said, “we can’t delay any longer. They impeached me twice and indicted me over nothing.” Swin, there Trump officially commands his attorney general to criminally charge his leading enemies. And he says explicitly that it must be done because it was done to him. Of course, he was impeached for good reasons, extorting Ukraine, fomenting a violent insurrection, and he was indicted for stealing state secrets on for January 6th. Swin, have any other presidents ever done this before in this particular way?
Suebsaeng: I mean, there have been moments in our history where incredibly corrupt presidents like Richard Nixon have tried to disappear the line between their political interest and the supposed independence of main justice and the DOJ. So there have been moments in our history where the very dark chapters have brought that conflict to the fore, but Trump is turbocharging that in a very, for lack of a better term right now, Trumpian respect, where there’s not even a veneer of intellectual capacity or philosophy here. It’s just stating openly, whether on purpose sometimes and whether accidentally perhaps at other times, that there is no line. There is no imaginary norm or wall that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance want to abide by. The Department of Justice is a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA and Donald Trump’s political whims as long as he is the nominal leader of the free world. And we get to a point over the weekend where he is basically shouting on his social media platform, Truth Social, Pam, just call her Pam like she’s someone at the yacht club or whatever, not like she’s a literal top federal law enforcer in the country. You gotta do this because it’s starting to shred our credibility. It’s starting to make me look bad. It’s starting to make me mad. And you gotta appoint one of my former personal attorneys, Lindsay Halligan, to this position to do it because she likes you a lot. It’s very casual. And in that sense, given what he’s trying to do, very grotesque, the way he’s talking about this and the related personnel deceiver. And he is just posting it on his own personal company and social media site where he is saying something that in any other presidential era, even the first Trump administration, would be a generation defining presidential scandal. And he’s just posting about it on his stupid fucking Truth Social app on a random Saturday night.
Sargent: Yeah, well, Swin, you reported that top officials inside the administration and the Justice Department wondered whether this was meant to be a private directive to Pam Bondi and that White House advisors were totally blindsided by it. They couldn’t imagine that he’d publicly utter something so obviously corrupt. I think my favorite part of your report is that some of them decided that even if it had been intended privately, it would be better to just pretend that he’d always intended it for public consumption. Obviously, the mad king is absolutely infallible in every conceivable way, so he couldn’t have posted anything by accident. Can you talk about what you found on this front?
Suebsaeng: Something I just want to say up front to your listeners is that for those of you who read that Saturday night Truth social post and thought there is no way that that could have been meant as a text or a private message of some sort to Pam Bondi, I assure you it definitely could have been that. I have been shown enough private messages that Trump has sent to an assortment of people in recent years to the point where it really drives home the point that yes, this is how this fucking idiot texts people in the privacy of his quieter moments. They oftentimes do look like tweets or Truth Social posts.
Sargent: Yeah, well, so when I just want to point out for listeners that what you’re referring to is the fact that this tweet ended with, uh, justice must be served now, triple exclamation point, president DJT. I take it from what you’re saying that he actually sends texts that conclude with president DJT, right?
Suebsaeng: Yeah. And also have rambling bullshit in it that, it’s like, you don’t need to tell Pam Bondi this. She’s already on board with the whole project. Like you don’t have to repeat her things that you keep wanting to tell the hundreds of millions of American people who you want to propagandize to. So with that and the fact that the way it was worded where he’s saying like, Lindsay Halligan really likes you, comma, a lot, comma, whatever the fuck. And it just, the other little flourishes in it, it really made senior officials in the administration, including DOJ, including the White House and elsewhere, like just think to themselves in real time over the weekend, did the president mean to put this on the internet? Whether he meant to put that out in public initially or whether it was meant as a private message, it certainly came off. as something that he wanted to send to Pam Bondi privately to a bunch of people working for Donald Trump. But as you pointed out, as we found in our reporting, there were a lot of people in the administration, including perhaps Donald Trump himself, who were like, let’s just go with it. Let’s just pretend I tripped over my own dick in public and, you know, fucking meant to do that anyway. Forget it, let’s go with it.
Sargent: Well, Swin, let me ask you, whether or not this was a mistake, I think he very much wants this type of threat to be understood as a live one out in the public realm, right? A lot of this is about telegraphing to other institutional actors across the system, that they should be aware that putting up resistance to Trump very well could get them targeted by the state and by the vast federal law enforcement apparatus. And I think the corruption here is itself often intended to be open and public. The deliberate message is that nothing, no laws, no institutions can stop him. Everything’s feudal. The battle’s all over. Jamelle Bouie had a good line about the need to resist this thinking as well, that it’s something Trump wants us to think. What do you think of that? Do you think that he sees some percentage in it being publicly understood that he’s making these threats?
Suebsaeng: No, absolutely. And look, like, whether he wanted that initially to be public or private, I have no doubt that in one form or another, this would have probably pretty soon bled over into the public domain. And I think I know that because he’s already done a lot of bleeding into the public domain on these very impulses and on these very orders. He and the Steven Millers of the world, and the JD Vances of the world, and the Karoline Leavitts of the world—and particularly the Donald J. Trumps of the world—are not making any secret of the fact that they think the Department of Justice is their plaything and that they can launch criminal investigations against Trump’s personal and political enemies just because they feel like it. They want the entire world to know that. Now, that message in the way he wrote it, including how he described that him and his administration’s credibility and reputation were being murdered. Maybe he wouldn’t have put it that way publicly initially necessarily if he had all of his druthers. But the broader sentiment of like, you need to do this. It’s not getting done. Everybody around me needs to be pushed to crack down as hard as I want on the things, however arbitrary that I want to have cracked down upon. That’s just the ethos of the second Trump term. That is the operating principle of the entirety of the Trump project as we currently see it.
Sargent: It absolutely is. Let me quickly go to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before we close this out. She had some choice spin about all this. She was asked about the firing of the prosecutor. Here’s what she says. She talks about the big fraud settlement that Letitia James secured against Trump. Listen.
Selina Wang (voiceover): And so he suppressed it, saying here it doesn’t matter if there’s a crime he just wants his political enemies to be charged.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Well, let me just walk you through Letitia James. Letitia James completely abused her oath of office. She also led the witch hunt, the financial fraud investigation against President Trump and the Trump Organization in an appeals court, tossed that case out a $500 million civil fraud penalty in August, which was another win for the president and exonerated him of this witch hunt and showed that this is an individual who is corrupt and abused her oath of office. And we also have evidence of her mortgage fraud.
Sargent: Swin, no doubt she doesn’t answer directly. She filibusters a bunch about Letitia James and she claims that Trump has been exonerated when in fact the penalty was tossed up, but the fraud judgment stood. And she simply reasserts that there’s evidence of James’s guilt glossing over the fact that this prosecutor investigated it for five months and found nothing. Swinn, here’s what I want to ask. How can they actually talk their way around this one? This is a Republican career prosecutor who did Trump’s bidding in investigating this thing that was cooked up by one of his allies at this agency that oversees mortgage fraud and found nothing there. They have absolutely no way to spend this at this point. And yet Karoline Leavitt believes that she can just absolutely gaslight the shit out of the whole press corps. I think the impudence of this, the almost boldness of it is kind of breathtaking. What do you think?
Suebsaeng: Well, there’s a lot to unpack there. But for starters, when Karoline Leavitt and Donald Trump and all those other guys keep saying over and over and over again some version of, well, they did it to Trump, so we’re doing it to them. I’m sorry, they didn’t do it to Donald.
Sargent: Exactly.
Suebsaeng: Like whether you’re talking about the investigations over his efforts to end democracy in America or the classified documents cases or the George… We could go down the list. What they are upset about is that there were some people in this country, while Joe Biden was president of the United States, who did not want Donald Trump to get away with crimes or abuses that he did.
Sargent: Right. He did them.
Suebsaeng: That is what this whole revenge fantasy that is now just federal operating principle is based around. They will never let go, because they are authoritarians in practice and at heart, let go of the fact that some people tried to hold the dear leader accountable. And for that, they must pay. So it’s a cliche to say that with Trump and all these other top Republicans that every accusation is a confession. But whenever they start accusing people of lawfare, or weaponizing the Justice Department against their enemies, including Donald Trump, that is nothing but a confession. It’s largely, if not in some cases entirely, just lies. But it’s not just that. It’s more than that. It is a confession of what they intend to do and what they are doing to their own political enemies.
Their electoral philosophy in the modern day Republican Party and within Trump land is that with elections, it’s heads I win, tails you lose. And when it comes to the supposedly impartial or equal or fair application of justice in this land, it’s nothing but favors and grace and all the coverage in the world for Donald Trump and his rich pals and nothing but the stick and contempt and jail time, whether aspiring or real, for his enemies. And anybody in the White House press corps who I see even slightly out of source greasing, entertaining what the Trump White House has been putting out. When Trump and his minions keep saying, these two things are the same, or I’m the one who was victimized. It is nothing but beneath my contempt. Whenever I hear people willing to even entertain that amount of spin and bullshit, because to call it spin is even elevating it further past a point that which it is. It’s just authoritarian lies. That’s it.
Sargent: Very well said. Asawin Suebsaeng, really a great pleasure to have you on as always.
Suebsaeng: I’ll try to be less mad the next time you have me on. Thank you so much, Greg.
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