illustrates the incredible of both trump and steve bannon connects them and the incredible contempt that they have of the most loyal supporters that they believed and they were able to execute a plan to fleece the most gullible trump supporters to the tune of $250 million. so, yes, there s very clear legal case involve that i agree and not necessarily a slam dunk, but just step back for a moment because one ever trump s claims has been that you people are victims. i am your big defender. i am the only one who can protect you when in fact the opposite is true because he looks at them as marks and he looks at them as people to grab by the ankles and turn them upside down and get the last nickel out of their pockets. you have these donors who have been lied to over and over and over in an effort by this from
and carol s talking about witnesses, we know the two lawyers who sometimes sit at the nexus of a lawless president and what the office is supposed to be, don mcgahn found himself in this position, too, are sometimes the one that respond to subpoenas and tell the whole truth. yeah, let s forget famously al capone was not taken down for the murders and his racketeering career, but simply on tax violations and it does look like as carol said, doj may be headed to a straight-up fraud violation. you told people you were going to take their money for x and you used it for y, and i m curious to hear his analysis. this gets complicated, unlike the steve bannon case, where he took money to build a wall and stuck it in his pocket and he converted to personal use. doj is not there yet.
realizing and really taking the charge for his party, that that s not the case, that he s not able to work with the republican party in the same way. former president barack obama has acknowledged the same thing in private remarks at fundraisers with democrats recently, and so i think that in some ways, the president is really helping the rest of the party refine this message that really sets up this contrast between republicans but republicans are realizing, sort of to the point we were talking about earlier, that they don t have a lot to fight against with democrats, except for president biden. so, i think that s in part why they re going so hard against him because now everything, to them, is a referendum on the president. you know, charlie, it didn t have to be this way, but it does, and i guess by that, i mean, the republicans made their bed. they made their bed when, after the 2020 election, they refused to condemn trump s lies about fraud. there was no fraud. mitch mcconnell k
had to keep alive was the 2018 prosecution of mr. cohen, the president s former lawyer that august cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations over payments he arranged before the 2016 election to keep two women from disclosing affairs they had with trump. berman did not participate in the investigation because he had volunteered for the campaign, but he was later briefed on the interference in the case. before the plea, berman writes, as his office was preparing a charging document, detailing the crimes, a justice department official badgered his deputy, mr. kazumi, without success, to remove all references to a person identified as individual one. it was mr. trump. in the months after cohen s guilty plea, berman writes, southern district continued to pursue investigations related to possible campaign finance violations. apparently by others in trump s orbit. but after barr became the a.g. in february of 19, berman writes, barr tried to kill the investigations and suggested t
what happened. and so should kerry, who we learned from this reporting was a target of trump. kerry was a target for criminal prosecution, and what s made clear in what the times is reporting about the berman book, mike schmidt, is something that you reported about the mueller investigation. what trump tweeted very clearly directed his justice department. i mean, trump attacks kerry, the justice department, and sdny is asked to investigate john kerry, i think, for violations of the logan act, because he maintained diplomatic relations with iran. and then the greg craig intervention is just remarkable. it s a case that was investigated. they declined to prosecute at sdny, so doj leadership ships it out to another office where they do prosecute and lose. the heart of this issue here is something that we ve talked about a lot and i m sure we ll talk about in the future is that when you have a president of the