Transcript: MAGA Dope Jim Jordan Accidentally Exposes Trump’s DOJ Scam

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 16 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.

All of a sudden, a lot is happening on the legal front. Former special counsel Jack Smith just revealed that he had collected a lot of damning evidence that Donald Trump willfully hoarded classified documents as president the first time. The report that Smith did on this, however, remains confidential, and Trump’s Justice Department will keep it completely covered up. On another front, we just learned that a career prosecutor was forced out because he refused to buttress the idea that criminality had occurred in the FBI’s original Russia investigation. And on top of that, there are new signs that Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor in Virginia is taking highly dubious steps to prosecute Trump’s enemies. The through line here is this. We’re seeing an extraordinary level of corruption of DOJ all to serve Trump’s political demands. Will any of the people carrying all this out for Trump pay a price for any of this ever? Today we’re talking to one of our go-to commentators when it comes to unraveling legal complexities, scholar Matt Seligman, a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center. Matt, good to see you.

Matt Seligman: Good to see you too, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with this top line bombshell. Jack Smith says he’s amassed huge amounts of evidence that Trump knew he was engaged in wrongdoing in hoarding all the classified documents he stole at the end of his first term. Smith has written a full report on this. Matt, what is that report likely to contain roughly and is there any chance we ever get to see it?

Seligman: What it contains, we don’t fully know, although we know the broad outlines. You know, one of the things that’s remarkable about Donald Trump’s crimes is that he’s committed them virtually out in the open.

The thing that might be added to what we’ve seen in public already is just more direct evidence of his state of mind. You know, if he said to his colleagues, to his staffers, that, I know, you know, the law says I have to return these documents, but no, they’re my boxes—you know, that sort of evidence would certainly strengthen the criminal case that was once brought against him.

Now, as to whether we’re ever going to see this—you know, that’s a hard question to answer. In the short term, the answer is almost certainly not, because that’s up to Pam Bondi, who, as we have seen, will do Donald Trump’s bidding virtually any way he asks.

Now, in the long run, you know, if a Democrat wins the White House in 2029, then they would have the keys to the Justice Department. But remember that Jack Smith turned this report over to the attorney general in January of 2025, before Donald Trump took office. And the administration—the Biden administration—didn’t release all of the reports that Jack Smith had created. And there may be good reasons for that.

So it’s really hard to tell whether, in the long run, a different Democratic administration would make a different judgment.

Sargent: We have GOP representative Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee right now. He’s demanding that Smith testify in order to prove that Smith weaponized the DOJ against Trump. Jordan is claiming that the search of Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents constituted this weaponization. What’s funny, Matt, is that House Republicans are not going to want that report to come out on what Jack Smith actually found about Trump’s hoarding of classified documents. They only want Smith to testify in some way that will show guilt in the pursuit of the truth about what Trump did. It’s kind of a revealing disconnect, isn’t it, Matt?

Seligman: Yes, it is. And what that demonstrates is that Jim Jordan is not in a pursuit of truth. He is in a pursuit of political propaganda, where they can show clips, probably taken out of context, of congressional testimony that they can post on social media to inflame their base. If they were actually interested in determining whether the prosecutions against then former President Donald Trump were politically motivated, they want to know whether there was actually evidence that he committed crimes. And in order to do that, you would want to look at the reports that were created by the prosecutors. The fact that they don’t want to do that means that they aren’t actually interested in the underlying evidence at all.

Sargent: Just to underscore what you said there, Matt, Jim Jordan really revealed the whole scam because he’s claiming that House Republicans want to probe whether Jack Smith corrupted the investigative process. But he doesn’t want to see what that investigative process against Trump revealed, which would clearly show that it wasn’t corrupted, that there was an actual pursuit of truth on Smith’s part. And that’s the thing that Jim Jordan can’t actually allow House Republicans to learn.

Seligman: That’s exactly right. And so the, the perspective that Jim Jordan and his allies have is that any prosecution—any legal pursuit of accountability of any kind—against Donald Trump or any of his allies or subordinates is, because of that fact, a politicized prosecution, or politicized whatever type of accountability you’re talking about.

And that’s just not the way it is. Politically motivated prosecutions—that’s not equal to a prosecution of a politician. The question of whether the person actually committed a crime is the ultimate question. Jim Jordan has manifestly shown that he has a complete disinterest in answering it.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it, actually. And more broadly, the corruption of DOJ is getting wildly out of control. Trump wants DOJ to find that the original Russia investigation—the investigation into whether Russia tried to help Trump and whether Trump colluded with that—was itself criminal. That’s in keeping with the claim of weaponization against him.

But now The New York Times reports that the U.S. attorney for Virginia’s Western District, Todd Gilbert, was pushed out because he refused to sideline a career prosecutor who looked at the evidence and determined that, no, sorry, Mr. President, the Russia investigation wasn’t criminal.

Matt, people are literally getting fired precisely because they’re sticking to the facts rather than do Trump’s corrupt bidding. How do we get our heads around how bad that is?

Seligman: I mean, I think it’s the most chilling manifestation of the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism that we’ve seen so far. We’ve seen the use of threats and actual withholding of funds. We’ve seen threats to television stations’ licenses over Jimmy Kimmel’s comments. And that was all a prelude to what we’re seeing now, which is the actual weaponization of the criminal justice system against political opponents not Jim Jordan’s fever dream fantasies of what he claims happened under the Biden administration, which there just wasn’t any weaponization there, but now we’re seeing it right in front of us.

Sargent: Well and on this FBI probe of the Russia the the Russian, you know collusion hoax as Donald Trump calls it Trump just wants above all to be absolved entirely of the fact that Russia actually did try to help him get elected. The obsessiveness is very strange, but six or seven years or whatever it is later, we’re now seeing Trump try to weaponize the process with Jim Jordan’s help to somehow prove that that whole investigation was itself criminal. mean, how ludicrous is that, do you think?

Seligman: I mean, it’s incredibly ludicrous. Also, we’ve lived, unfortunately, with Donald Trump’s broken psyche for a decade now. And I think that the reason why he’s still obsessing about this is that he cannot process the narcissistic injury, that he didn’t win a landslide in 2016 because everybody recognized his world historic genius like never before. We hear him say stuff like this all the time. And the fact that Russia did, they hacked DNC emails, they selectively released them. Whether or not Donald Trump personally colluded with him or not, you know, that definitely happened and that definitely tipped the scales and Donald Trump just can’t handle that blow to his ego. And so still, almost a decade later, he’s obsessing about it.

Sargent: Right. And in fact, he’s still saying that he won the 2020 election in a landslide and he’s saying he won the 2024 election in a colossal landslide, even though he actually didn’t win in a colossal landslide. It was one of the narrowest victories in modern times. So now let’s go to Lindsay Halligan, who’s Trump’s pick for US attorney for Virginia’s Eastern District. She’s brought charges against two of Trump’s enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James for bogus trumped-up mortgage fraud charges and former FBI Director James Comey for supposedly lying to Congress. But to do this, Halligan is essentially ignoring what experienced career prosecutors have found, which is that on the facts, these cases are incredibly weak or even non-existent. Matt, can you talk about how bad this component of it is? And also, does someone like Lindsay Halligan ever pay a price for this kind of thing later?

Seligman: To give the short answers to your two questions: number one, it’s horrible. It is the sharp tip of the spear of trying to persecute your political enemies by attempting to put them in jail on essentially trumped-up charges—that’s number one.

Number two, does someone like Lindsey Halligan ever face consequences?

And the answer is yes. And she very likely will, at some point, face disbarment proceedings. The caveat there is that she’s from Florida, and I don’t know how much the Florida Bar is going to try to hold Trump’s lawyers to account—but at least elsewhere in the country, we’ve seen Rudy Giuliani get disbarred. We’ve seen Kenneth Chesebro have his legal license suspended. We’ve seen John Eastman, who I testified against on behalf of the California Bar, be subject to attorney discipline—he’s been disbarred pending appeals.

So there are potential consequences here, but the wheels of legitimate justice go pretty slowly. And, ultimately, Lindsey Halligan has paid her political pound of flesh to Donald Trump. So I’m not sure she’s ultimately going to care.

Sargent: Right, I think the real game here is that someone like that is just angling for a different kind of career altogether after it’s all over. And that’s troubling in a whole different way.

And maybe you can comment on this as someone who kind of studies legal ethics and procedure. They’re banking on the fact—in other words, Trump’s whole project rests on the fact—that good-faith legal proceedings, in order to get them done right, take time.

That, to me, I think, is really a terrible thing to contemplate—that they’re actually manipulating an aspect of the system that is there, maybe to a fault, because the delays, they, you know, they’re pretty crazy sometimes—but it’s still a component of our legal system that is about getting things right. And they’re corrupting that and exploiting that.

Seligman: That’s absolutely correct. And Donald Trump was maybe history’s greatest beneficiary of the slow wheels of justice, because the reason why he was not convicted in the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case—and, in my view, the January 6th case in D.C. as well—is because those cases didn’t come to a conclusion. There were never trials.

And the reason why the charges were dropped against him was not that he was totally and completely vindicated, as he often likes to claim—it’s because he was elected president again. Now, you can look back through that process from January 20, 2021, until January 20, 2025, and you can see parts of that process that I think should have gone quicker.

It took 18 months for Jack Smith to be appointed special counsel. Those 18 months, you know, in my view, were just completely unnecessary, especially with respect to the January 6th case. Again, we saw it on TV. The guy was impeached and very nearly convicted. There were seven Republicans in the Senate who voted to convict Donald Trump of impeachment and bar him from all future federal office.And so, you know, the fact that the process worked slowly there—well, it went a little bit more slowly than even the demands of due process require. And also, Donald Trump is back in the White House very plausibly only because of those delays.

And now, if you look again at what’s happening now—Lindsey Halligan, what consequences is she going to face, and when? You know, we’ve already seen that Donald Trump is willing to reward his lawyers with federal judgeships if they do his bidding. We see the radical Emil Bove now on the Third Circuit, notwithstanding the fact that he allegedly, according to multiple whistleblowers, told subordinates at the Department of Justice to ignore court orders and to lie to the courts.

So if I’m Lindsey Halligan, you know, okay, maybe I’m, you know, not acting within the sort of ethical confines of the role of a lawyer—but that sort of seems like a quaint standard to apply in this new, brave new world we’re in.

Sargent: You know, I think you get at a really dark irony underlying all this as well, which is that the whole weaponization claim about Trump is really, really awful when you step back and contemplate the idea that Donald Trump has benefited probably to a greater extent than any human being alive from high priced, high quality lawyering, which itself secured the delays that enabled Trump to escape justice and with the Supreme Court kind of having a hand in it as well. Can you talk about that? I find that to be really galling. This is a guy who has benefited more than anyone from the legal system actually affording rights to the accused. And we’re being told that he’s the victim of a massive weaponization scheme? It is galling and trying to unpack whether he actually believes that or not.

Seligman: I think he probably does, because he has a huge persecution complex. But at the end of the day—his internal monologue aside—the fact remains that yes, he has benefited from the protections of the criminal justice system, from lawyers who are very effective. Say what you will about Todd Blanche and Emil Bove—they are very technically talented lawyers. And they were able to utilize the system for delay, and Donald Trump was definitely the beneficiary of that.

And then when you look at the other side—what happened in the immediate run-up to the installation of Lindsey Halligan as Trump’s lackey in the Eastern District of Virginia, and then the subsequent indictments of James Comey and Letitia James—is that Donald Trump, publicly on social media and in interviews, was pushing that this isn’t happening fast enough. You have to go, go, go. ‘It’s destroying our credibility with the base,’ he said on Truth Social, in a message that might have been intended to be a private message to Pam Bondi.

And so he doesn’t have much respect for the niceties of due process when he’s in charge of the federal government. It’s a sort of interesting variation on the old saying of the authoritarian’s approach to the rule of law, which is that everything for my friends—and for my enemies, the law. And his version of it is: everything for me, and for my enemies, the law.

And so he’s trying to use the criminal justice system—and abuse the criminal justice system—in the precise ways that he benefited from the non-abuse of that criminal justice system when he was a defendant.

Sargent: Right. It’s actually everything for me and for my enemies. the corrupted law, if you think about it.

Seligman: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, how can if we step back for a second, how can you possibly think that the prosecution of Donald Trump for what we saw on TV on January 6th, you know, from his speech on the Oval on the ellipse to the storming of the Capitol and then what we know that Republicans said out loud after that about what he had done that he had refused to send in the National Guard and on and on and on. How can you think that was a politicized prosecution, but it’s not a politicized prosecution when Donald Trump is firing career attorneys and then demanding on social media that his political opponents be prosecuted. Like that split screen tells you everything you need to know.

Sargent: Right. Well, prosecutions on Trump’s behalf and keeping with what he wants are inherently non-corrupt and inherently good. Just to close this out, Matt, let’s sort of spool forward maybe a few years. I’m presuming that probably most of the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies end up failing. Letitia James, James Comey, maybe Adam Schiff as well. Maybe all those get tossed out in some way or just fail in the long run. But still, we’re looking at a level of corruption of the Justice Department that’s probably unrivaled in a half century. I’m sure I’ll get nitpicked for that one, but let’s just sort of say that we think that’s the case. What happens in the long run here? Is there something like the rule of law on the other side of this?

Seligman: I think the answer is yes, but people may nitpick me for being unrealistically optimistic. So I actually think that your choice of going back 50 years is really revealing here, and it actually gives me a paradoxical sense of hope.

So the 50 years you were talking about is going back to Richard Nixon.And Richard Nixon did try to weaponize the national security apparatus of the United States and its law enforcement capabilities. Now, the way that he tried to go after his enemies—you know, the famous enemies list—one of the principal ways he tried to do it was by using the IRS to investigate people’s taxes. And ultimately, his commissioner of the IRS refused to do so and pushed back, and so that didn’t ultimately go too far.

But the idea behind that was that if you look close enough at somebody’s taxes, they probably messed up one way or another. And so conservative libertarians like to say—you know, there have been books written about this—that if you look at anybody’s life, they’ve probably committed a federal felony every day, just because there are so many criminal laws.

And to me, it’s interesting that we aren’t seeing—at least not yet publicly—tax investigations of Adam Schiff or Letitia James or James Comey. You know, did they claim reimbursement, or, you know, expenses that they were reimbursed for, or something like that?

Sargent: We will see those.

Seligman: I suspect you’re probably right. But what we are seeing right away is these transparently political absurd prosecutions. And those are so obviously politically motivated that there’s actually a pretty good chance that both Jim Comey and Letitia James get these indictments dismissed before trial, which is extremely rare on vindictive prosecution grounds because Donald Trump can’t control himself. He’s saying everything out loud. And that paradoxically gives me hope for the restoration of the rule of law because this isn’t him pushing the boundaries just a little bit. This is just him saying out loud, you are my enemies, therefore you shall be prosecuted for the thinnest, thinnest of pretexts. And that’s something that I think is actually a little bit easier to come back from because everybody in the aftermath of it, hopefully, we can get to a place where everyone says, okay, that’s not okay. Whereas if you’re talking about selective prosecution of rinky-dink tax crimes, but actually maybe there’s something there, if you squint at it, that’s, I think, a lot harder to come back from. So it’s his dumb authoritarianism that it might ultimately save us.

Sargent: Matt Seligman, all of that is so beautifully said and I’m going to choose to feel optimistic about it. And I actually think you’re right. I think we can come back from it. Matt, thanks so much for coming on with us, man.

Seligman: Thanks for having me.