The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 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.
President Trump’s lawlessness has just gotten worse on many fronts at once. We just learned that the Justice Department’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey has been undercut by a key witness, making it look even more corrupt. Meanwhile, Trump just called for the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago to be thrown in prison. And when Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s call for their jailing, the speaker evaded and dodged. It’s becoming jarringly clear that there’s very little in the way of defenses standing in the way of Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. And yet, at the same time, there is resistance developing inside places like DOJ. And that matters, even if it doesn’t seem like it at this fraught moment. How do we make sense of all these conflicting signals? We’re trying to dig through all of it today with Kristy Parker, who knows DOJ from the inside as a former federal prosecutor and is now counsel at the group Protect Democracy. Hey, Kristy, thanks for coming on.
Kristy Parker: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s deranged attack on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Here’s what Trump’s tweet said: “Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also.”
Kristy, this comes after the Illinois Governor Pritzker has resisted Trump’s corrupt efforts to send the National Guard into Chicago. Trump is now in effect threatening to jail them for not acquiescing to his bidding. Your response to that?
Parker: Well, unlike the speaker of the House, it’s fairly easy for me to come up with a response to that. There’s absolutely no basis for the president to threaten to put the governor of a state or any other American in jail for simply resisting one of his policies. And even if there were some basis for investigating a person based on any of that, it would not be appropriate for the president to be announcing from his social media account that any person who has not been formally accused of a crime should go to jail. So that’s an easy one.
Sargent: Yeah. And he’s really doing it precisely because the Illinois governor is standing in his way. There’s been this very public fight over whether Trump can send the National Guard into Chicago. Pritzker has been resisting it. The Chicago mayor has been resisting it. And he is, in essence, calling for their jailing for not rolling over and doing what he wants them to do.
Parker: That’s right. It’s just another layer in his overall scheme of attempting to chill and squelch all of the opposition to him and his administration by deploying the levers of government power to punish people.
Sargent: Yeah. And we should be clear that the Illinois governor has strongly responded to this, as well. He’s not getting pushed around by it. But the point is, this is a message to all other actors in the constitutional system from Donald Trump—“If you don’t do my bidding, I will threaten to prosecute and jail you.”
I mean it’s just almost inconceivable. It’s so hard to really process it. It seems like there’s like this major degradation going on in which Trump is just trying to almost make it seem normal that he’s doing these things, just by doing them day in and day out, and yet they’re obviously highly abnormal and in fact, symptomatic of a deeply sickened system, I think. What do you think?
Parker: Well, I think that’s exactly right. I think you’re right to focus on his effort to normalize all of this just by the dailiness and, quite frankly, even the hourliness of it. He threatens somebody on a nearly daily basis with some form of retribution for opposing him—whether it’s a person, whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a powerful person, whether it is an undocumented immigrant.
He does it all the time, to the point where people become used to hearing it. And I think what’s really important to do is to take a step back and ground ourselves in the fact that this is the United States of America. We have a Constitution. We have a democratic form of government based on the rule of law.
And central to all of that has always been that people have a right to criticize their government, have a right to criticize the policies of the president. And even government officials have a right to push back and resist certain policies within the legal system. And the manner for the president to respond to that is through the legal system—and not by extrajudicial threats to just summarily put people in jail.
These are things that strike at the very heart of the system that we need to remind ourselves we still have and that is still operative in this country.
Sargent: So reporters tried to talk to House Speaker Mike Johnson about this. He was asked whether it’s appropriate for Trump to be calling for the jailing of those Illinois officials. And here’s Mike Johnson’s answer.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (voiceover): Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison? I’m not the Attorney General. I’m the Speaker of the House and I’m trying to manage the chaos here. I’m not following the day to day on that. I do know that they’ve resisted the introduction of or the offering of National Guard troops.
Sargent: After this, Johnson went on a long ramble about crime in cities, which was just loaded up with bullshit. Kristy, what I take from this is that Republicans will at no point ever stand up and say that Trump’s lawlessness is too much. He could be arresting Democrats by the hundreds and you’d hear rhetoric like that coming from Republicans. Is that too pessimistic? Do you think?
Parker: Well, I think it’s not too pessimistic when it comes to the speaker of the House. Notable that the speaker of the House decided to engage in the Senate filibuster tactic instead of answering the question that he was asked there. He didn’t want to answer the question.
But, you know, the right thing for him to do—and for any other American leader to do—would have been to do what Republicans did back when Richard Nixon was weaponizing the government in this manner. And that is to stand up and say, you know, that’s an abuse of power. And that actually, in fact, is an impeachable offense.
So no, we’re not really seeing that right now from any of our elected Republican officials. And that is a large part of the reason why we are in the situation we are in right now, with these rampant abuses of power.
Sargent: Well, let’s switch to former FBI director James Comey. When you look at something like that from Mike Johnson, you kind of get the sense that there are absolutely no bulwarks whatsoever against Trump’s lawlessness.
But the Comey case is telling a bit of a different story. He’s being prosecuted for supposedly lying to Congress. He just pleaded not guilty and his lawyer said he will seek to get the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Kristy, can you walk us through what a vindictive prosecution is and the prospects for it succeeding here given the facts set?
Parker: Sure. So every person who’s accused of a crime in this country you know, has all of the rights afforded to them in the Bill of Rights and in the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. So a vindictive prosecution is something that violates due process. And it’s a prosecution that is essentially a retribution for the subject doing something that they had a legal right to do. And here you could absolutely argue that the prosecution is Trump’s vindictive effort to retaliate against James Comey because Comey oversaw the 2016 investigation into Russian interference and potential collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. And he’s been calling for that long since before the facts of the particular case in which Comey is charged ever crossed anybody’s radar screen.
Sargent: Yes. And the Comey story has this new bombshell coming out from ABC News, which just reported that federal prosecutors have concluded that a central witness against Comey is very “problematic” for their case. His name is Daniel Richman. He’s a law professor. He has told prosecutors unequivocally that Comey never authorized him to leak information to the media. According to ABC News, this would badly complicate the prosecutor’s efforts to show that Comey lied to Congress about authorizing such leaks. Kristy, can you walk us through the details of this new turn?
Parker: Well, so let me just start by saying that, you know, it’s important for people to understand that we don’t have a great sense of what it is that Comey is supposed to have specifically lied about to Congress. The indictment is very vague on that. You heard Comey’s lawyer reference that at the legal proceedings today, saying, you know, we don’t really have a clear sense of what my client is even being charged with here.
But based on what we are given to understand, it has something to do with Comey supposedly lying to Congress about whether or not he authorized another person to talk to the media about a case the FBI was investigating. The person involved in that potentially is this friend of Mr. Comey’s named Daniel Richmond.
And what we’re hearing in this reporting is that Richmond has undermined completely any notion that Comey instructed him to give information. And in fact, according to the ABC report, he’s saying not only did he never tell me to give information about this particular case, he explicitly told me not to talk to the media about FBI cases.
So unless they’ve got something else to establish that Comey’s statements were false—undermining the central witness in the case—then that’s not a very good case. And it stands to reason, because we’ve also heard that numerous lawyers, prosecutors, experienced prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, and even at Main Justice, have looked at this case and said that it wasn’t prosecutable. And that’s the reason that Trump’s own appointed U.S. attorney had to resign a couple of weeks ago.
Sargent: To your point, I think we should also note that Trump removed a top prosecutor from that office, which is the U.S. attorney’s office for Virginia’s Eastern District, precisely because he wouldn’t bring bogus prosecutions against Trump’s enemies. And Trump put in this handpicked stooge, Lindsay Halligan, and she’s the one who brought this case against Comey, even though, as you say, other prosecutors thought it was weak. So now that we’ve learned that the prosecutors are saying that the key witness is problematic, doesn’t that underscore just how corrupt Lindsay Halligan’s prosecution of Comey really is?
Parker: Well, there’s nothing about this that has any appearance of anything other than corruption. I mean, all the reporting that we have gotten, assuming that it is true, is that career professionals and political appointees alike looked at the evidence in this case and concluded that it was not sufficient to meet DOJ standards for bringing an indictment.
Trump then publicly forced out that U.S. attorney and then, whether it was meant to be public or not, in a statement on his social media account that was published to the entire country, he made it very clear to the Attorney General that he wanted Comey, Letitia James, and various other people prosecuted—that it needed to be done, that it needed to be done because he had been himself indicted by these people and that his credibility was being destroyed as a result of all of it.
So all of that certainly gives rise to the inference of vindictiveness on his part. And then he installs a loyalist who has no experience to lead any U.S. attorney’s office, much less one of the most important ones in the country. And just, you know, literally hours after taking the position, she goes by herself and is the only person to sign this indictment.
So, you know, none of that looks normal. None of that looks regular. None of that looks anything like the Department of Justice that I served. And I think that you’re seeing that in the departures of all of these folks who understand their own ethical obligations not to bring baseless charges.
Sargent: And I think we should point out on top of all that, that even if you get rid of this crazy stuff, it would still be highly unusual to be prosecuting a former FBI director, particularly after the president spent years saying he was going to get his revenge on this person. So the whole thing is just one layer after another of abnormality, it seems to me.
Parker: Well, right. And, of course, you know, no one is above the law, and any public official who, you know, abuses their office to do illegal things should be subject to criminal prosecution—as I and many others argued with respect to Mr. Trump.
But if you just look at what is available to us to understand the situation regarding Mr. Comey, yes, I mean, President Trump started calling for Comey to be prosecuted and jailed during his first term years ago—just for, so it seemed, you know, based on the circumstances, just for doing his job as the FBI director to investigate what has been a substantiated claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
So, yes, you know, when you link all of the things together that have gone on here, not two weeks ago but starting years ago, then yes, you know, this is — this every aspect of this is—is, you know, off the beam from what it is supposed to be. And again, I think you don’t need to look further than all of the people who have left their jobs as DOJ prosecutors in order to get away from doing something they clearly would believe would be inappropriate and legally unethical in this case.
Sargent: And I can actually add yet another link to this chain, which is that NBC just reported that another prosecutor in that office is resisting bringing a case against New York Attorney General, Letitia James, another Trump enemy on bogus mortgage fraud charges. That comes after the extraordinarily corrupt spectacle of a senior official in Trump’s administration, William Pulte trumping up these charges of mortgage fraud precisely in order to give DOJ something to investigate to make Trump happy. The whole thing is in collapse. they just none of these cases are real. They’re like houses of cards that are falling.
Parker: I mean, again, the red lights don’t flash any brighter. The blue lights and red lights don’t flash any brighter than when federal prosecutors go to the point of saying, I’ll quit my job if they try to tell me I have to indict this case. I’m writing a memo saying why we can’t indict this case.
And I recognize that the reporting with respect to this other attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, with respect to the Letitia James case, is like—she looked at the evidence, she did not see any evidence to bring a case against Letitia James for mortgage fraud. She wrote a memo, made a recommendation to that effect, and it’s reported that she told her colleagues there, I recognize this is probably going to get me fired. She’s willing to do that.
So again, when you’re getting that kind of reporting and you’re seeing it come to fruition with people walking out the office door because they won’t go seek an indictment, that really tells you all you need to know. Because, we’ve talked about this before—Trump was given broad immunity for abusing his power with respect to the Department of Justice by the Supreme Court. And he’s clearly taken that and run with it.
But the people below him don’t have that immunity. They’re not immune. And they also, if they’re lawyers, they have to have licenses to practice law. And what we’re seeing is people actually caring to keep their law licenses and to keep themselves out of trouble, which is still something of a bulwark against bringing baseless cases forward and trying to get them indicted.
Sargent: Well, if you add all this together, you kind of have a split-screen effect. So on one screen, you’ve got someone like Mike Johnson committing a homina homina homina about something as extraordinarily corrupt as Trump essentially calling for the jailing of a governor and a mayor, which suggests that there really aren’t any bulwarks. The Republican Party won’t act as a bulwark against Trump’s lawlessness and abuses of power.
But then on the other, you’ve got story after story coming out of the Justice Department in which career prosecutors are saying, no, the facts matter. We’re not going to bring prosecutions against your enemies, Mr. President, simply because you tell us to. And we’re not going to throw away the rule of law and throw away our careers for you.
So what I wonder is, should we take some heart from this second screen? You know DOJ—is it really striking that we’re seeing this level of resistance? And can that level of resistance actually, you know, hold back some of the terrible things from happening?
Parker: You know, I think we can take some heart. I frankly was someone who was very concerned about, you know, Mr. Trump’s agenda with respect to the DOJ and his desire to use the levers of law enforcement to retaliate against people is so clear that I have been a little bit concerned that people willing to stay and work on cases that involve these individuals that Mr. Trump has targeted, you know, might result in some people being willing to carry his water.
But I do think we can take heart that people are paying attention to the fact that they have to protect themselves. Like, they have to think about whether what they are doing is legal and whether or not it is ethical. And they have to be willing to sacrifice their own careers and possibly put their own liberty in future jeopardy if they’re going to go forward with cases for which they just can’t find the evidence to prove a charge.
So I would say, yes, that it is heartening to see that that is still something that is holding—that the lawyers are still looking at their own professional obligations and taking them seriously when it comes to moving forward, again, with cases where all the reporting suggests there just is not the evidence to put them forward.
And I would tie that together with that even if you find people who will do that, they still have to get it past juries. They still have to get it past twelve Americans to unanimously say that these are crimes. And I think we’re seeing at the grand jury level already that even, you know, that a lot of grand juries are saying, no, you don’t even have probable cause for this, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So there are still a lot of roadblocks that even somebody who has shown himself as willing to bulldoze through laws, norms, procedures, rules as President Trump, are going to still find to be significant roadblocks.
Sargent: Well, Kristy Parker, I am going to choose to feel optimistic and end on that note with you. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Parker: Thank you for having me.