Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: This week, the criminal cases against former FBI director James
Speaker 2: Comy a New York Attorney General Letitia James came to
Speaker 2: a sudden halt. A federal judge today tossed out separate
Speaker 2: criminal cases against former FBI director James Comy and New
Speaker 2: York State Attorney General Leticia James. Both Comy and James
Speaker 2: had been facing criminal charges brought by the Trump administration,
Speaker 2: and both had been fighting those charges in court. They
Speaker 2: were both expected to stand trial in January, but on Monday,
Speaker 2: the federal judge presiding over their cases dismissed those charges,
Speaker 2: ruling that the prosecutor tapped by the Department of Justice
Speaker 2: to bring the cases had been illegally appointed.
Speaker 1: Judge Cameron McGowan Curry found the appointment of Lindsay Halligan
Speaker 1: as interim US attorney was invalid and unlawful.
Speaker 2: The White House has said the Department of Justice plans
Speaker 2: to file an appeal, and prosecutors could be able to
Speaker 2: against Comy and James in the future. Comye and James
Speaker 2: are among several of President Trump's perceived political enemies who've
Speaker 2: been investigated or charged by the Department of Justice since
Speaker 2: Trump took office in January. Trump's emphasis on retribution and
Speaker 2: the way the DOJ has been reshaped under his presidency
Speaker 2: is something we've been covering on the show. I recently
Speaker 2: sat down with my Bloomberg colleagues Nancy Cook and Chris Strome,
Speaker 2: who covered the White House and the DOJ, to discuss
Speaker 2: the stakes of the Comye and James cases, the role
Speaker 2: the DJ has played in carrying out Trump's second term agenda,
Speaker 2: and what to expect next. Here's our conversation. For those
Speaker 2: who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
Speaker 3: I am your retribution.
Speaker 2: Retribution was a key theme of President Donald Trump's return
Speaker 2: to the White House. Here he is in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two speaking about the injustice he saw in the convictions
Speaker 2: of January sixth, right, and if it requires pardon, we
Speaker 2: will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.
Speaker 2: And in twenty twenty three talking about the injustice of
Speaker 2: the cases brought against him. But remember it's a democrat
Speaker 2: charging his opponent.
Speaker 1: Nobody's ever seen anything like it.
Speaker 2: That means that if I win and somebody wants to
Speaker 2: run against me.
Speaker 3: I call my Attorney general.
Speaker 2: I say, listen, indict him.
Speaker 3: Well, he hasn't done anything wrong that we know. I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: Indict him on income tax evasion. You'll figure it out.
Speaker 1: Going into his second term, it was an open question
Speaker 1: about how much time would be spent on policy versus
Speaker 1: how much time would be spent on revenge.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg's senior national political reporter Nancy Cook has covered Trump
Speaker 2: for a decade and interviewed him in mar A Lago
Speaker 2: a couple days before the first twenty twenty four presidential debate.
Speaker 1: I think there were people around him who wanted him
Speaker 1: to really build a big policy agenda and were tearing
Speaker 1: him away from the retribution agenda. But what we've seen
Speaker 1: in office so far is that the retribution agenda is
Speaker 1: alive and well, and even more so than I think
Speaker 1: Republicans and even people close to Trump thought were possible.
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News Today. On the show, how Trump is upending
Speaker 2: norms and expanding presidential powers to target his perceived political enemies.
Speaker 2: A major weapon in that fight the Department of Justice.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg's Nancy Cook says that when Trump took office in January,
Speaker 2: he made it clear that retribution wasn't just a campaign theme,
Speaker 2: it was a key part of his second term agenda.
Speaker 1: The tools at his disposal are quite large at this
Speaker 1: point because his administration is taking a very broad view
Speaker 1: of presidential executive power. And I would say that unlike
Speaker 1: the first term, this time they have really approached the
Speaker 1: retribution campaign with real military style precision, a lot of
Speaker 1: savviness about how to use the levers of the federal government.
Speaker 1: We saw him very quickly go after law firms that
Speaker 1: had done work for people he didn't like, using social
Speaker 1: media to go after people pulling security clearances, and then
Speaker 1: lately we've seen him go after specific people who have
Speaker 1: been personally critical of the Trump administration.
Speaker 2: The Department of Justice has indicted former FBI Director James Core.
Speaker 1: President Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolten, has just
Speaker 1: been on the Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted.
Speaker 2: Part of what's enabled the Trump administration to pursue these
Speaker 2: targets is the cooperation of the Department of Justice.
Speaker 3: Pam Bondi said during her confirmation hearing to be Attorney
Speaker 3: General that she wasn't going to have an enemy's list
Speaker 3: at the Justice Department, but she doesn't need an enemy's
Speaker 3: list because she has been given Trump's enemies list.
Speaker 2: Chris Strom covers the Department of Justice for Bloomberg.
Speaker 3: Across the board, Bondie and her top staff have been
Speaker 3: carrying out essentially a purge at the Justice Department, where
Speaker 3: hundreds of people, career prosecutors and staff have been fired
Speaker 3: or resigned, and in concert with that, they've been investigating
Speaker 3: and now prosecuting individuals who Trump has identified as being
Speaker 3: his political enemies. They are carrying out broad, sweeping investigations
Speaker 3: into what Trump and his allies have said is a
Speaker 3: grand conspiracy against Trump dating back to twenty sixteen, starting
Speaker 3: with the Russian investigation, going into the Mouler investigation, going
Speaker 3: into the investigation to Trump's efforts to overturn the tw
Speaker 3: twenty twenty election, and then the investigation into Trump retaining
Speaker 3: classified documents.
Speaker 2: It seems he doesn't view this as weaponizing the justice system.
Speaker 2: He views this as using the justice system in the
Speaker 2: same way that it was used against him.
Speaker 3: Is that fair? Yeah. One of the really interesting approaches
Speaker 3: that Trump and his allies are taking is to say
Speaker 3: that the Justice Department was weaponized against them, and therefore
Speaker 3: they're trying to correct the record. They're trying to prosecute
Speaker 3: people who carried out criminal actions up to and including
Speaker 3: treason against Trump. And if you look at the actions
Speaker 3: that are being taken now against Jim Comey or Letitia
Speaker 3: James or John Bolton, a lot of it is finding
Speaker 3: any kind of charge that they possibly can to hang
Speaker 3: onto somebody. It doesn't matter that these charges or just
Speaker 3: don't have anything to do with a grand conspiracy. All
Speaker 3: that matters is that these people are under investigation and
Speaker 3: now being prosecuted. And so Trump can claim that he's
Speaker 3: been right all along in saying that these people are
Speaker 3: dirty and these people are corrupt, and therefore they deserve
Speaker 3: to go to jail.
Speaker 2: Are there any mechanisms in place that are supposed to
Speaker 2: prevent the president from using the Department of Justice in
Speaker 2: this way.
Speaker 3: One of the really interesting lessons from the Trump era
Speaker 3: is that what we thought were rules and regulations governing
Speaker 3: how the Justice Department operated and how criminal prosecutions were
Speaker 3: conducted actually don't really exist. What Trump has exposed is
Speaker 3: that we've been relying on a series of norms and
Speaker 3: traditions where the Justice Department would willingly have a distance
Speaker 3: in an independence from the administration. Multiple attorney generals and
Speaker 3: arment officials across administrations have enforced policies and rules that
Speaker 3: would separate the Justice Department from the White House when
Speaker 3: it came to conducting investigations and making decisions about prosecutions.
Speaker 3: Trump has obliterated that he's come in with a wrecking
Speaker 3: ball and essentially has declared himself as being the chief
Speaker 3: law enforcement officer of the country and the person who
Speaker 3: can make decisions about who should be prosecuted and even
Speaker 3: how they can be prosecuted.
Speaker 2: Nancy Cooke says that change in norms is something you
Speaker 2: can actually see.
Speaker 1: One thing that has struck me just visually about Trump
Speaker 1: in the second term is Pam Bondy is over in
Speaker 1: the Oval Office a lot of public events. I covered
Speaker 1: the first Trump term, I covered two years of Biden's
Speaker 1: White House, Like I don't remember Mark Gartland being over
Speaker 1: in the Oval Office all the time for events. Pam
Speaker 1: Bondy is over there, often standing behind Trump as he
Speaker 1: makes pronouncements, standing there with other officials. I would say
Speaker 1: they're upending a lot of the legal agencies, including the FBI,
Speaker 1: the CIA, but it's like she is visually aligned with
Speaker 1: the president in these photo ops all the time as well.
Speaker 2: The distance and independence the White House has traditionally kept
Speaker 2: from the Department of Justice is a modern phenomenon that
Speaker 2: only dates back to the aftermath of Richard Nixon's presidency
Speaker 2: and the Watergate scandal.
Speaker 3: Nixon tried to use the powers of the presidency in
Speaker 3: order to investigate his political enemies, and Nixon tried to
Speaker 3: actually tell the Justice Department how to carry out investigations.
Speaker 3: Members of Congress actually stood up to the president and
Speaker 3: determined that the actions that were being taken were offensive,
Speaker 3: that there had to be certain guardrails put in place,
Speaker 3: and so that's when you began to see laws that
Speaker 3: were actually passed, such as creating inspector generals within these agencies.
Speaker 3: But during this Trump administration, those safeguards have just been
Speaker 3: knocked down. Trump fired a bunch of inspector generals. He
Speaker 3: has declared that he can do what he wants with
Speaker 3: the Justice Department, and you're not seeing the same pushback
Speaker 3: in Congress that you did forty years ago.
Speaker 2: Coming up, what's next In the cases of former FBI
Speaker 2: Director James Comy and new York State Attorney General Letitia James,
Speaker 2: and what kind of new precedent Trump's norm breaking DJ
Speaker 2: could set. It's been over half a century since Nixon's
Speaker 2: Watergate scandal pushed Congress to create firmer boundaries between the
Speaker 2: Department of Justice and the president, but now Trump has
Speaker 2: started breaking them. Critics said that many of the indictments
Speaker 2: Trump's DOJ has opened so far are motivated by the
Speaker 2: president's quest for revenge. Trump doesn't see it that way.
Speaker 3: It's about Justico's thrill.
Speaker 2: It's not revenge is about. In late September, he was
Speaker 2: asked about the indictment of former FBI director James Comy
Speaker 2: as he boarded Air Force one. Komy was charged with
Speaker 2: making a false statement and obstructing a congressional proceeding related
Speaker 2: to his twenty twenty testimony at a Senate Judiciary hearing.
Speaker 2: He's pleaded not guilty, as it's also about the fact
Speaker 2: that you can't let this go on. They are sick,
Speaker 2: radical left people and they can't get away with it
Speaker 2: and call me, call me was one of the people.
Speaker 1: He wasn't.
Speaker 2: Comy first got on Trump's bad side back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: when Comy opened an investigation into alleged ties between Trump's
Speaker 2: first presidential campaign and Russia. That was the original Sin
Speaker 2: Bloomberg DOJ reporter Chris Strome.
Speaker 3: Devestigation continued. Trump fired Komi in May of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: and Komy then leaked some of his written memos about
Speaker 3: his interactions with Trump, and the public revelations were very
Speaker 3: damaging to Trump and actually led the Justice Department at
Speaker 3: that time to appoint Special Counsel Moler to carry on
Speaker 3: the Russian investigation, and ever since then, Trump has vilified
Speaker 3: Komi and called for his prosecution.
Speaker 2: So it was something he couldn't get done in his
Speaker 2: first term and became a big priority and part of
Speaker 2: how he shaped the Justice Department in his second term.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was not getting the results he wanted during
Speaker 3: the beginning of his second administration, and so he put
Speaker 3: out a very public demand on social media, essentially in
Speaker 3: order to Bondie, demanding that Komi and others like Letitia
Speaker 3: James be prosecuted. And it was only days later that
Speaker 3: the White House installed one of Trump's White House aides,
Speaker 3: Lindsay Halligan, who Trump abruptly put in as the interim
Speaker 3: UIs Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and just
Speaker 3: days after she was inserted into that position, she brought
Speaker 3: an indictment against James Comy, and then a couple weeks later,
Speaker 3: she brought an indictment against Letitia James.
Speaker 2: James had launched a federal civil fraud case against Trump
Speaker 2: and the Trump Organization in twenty twenty two and one
Speaker 2: in October, she was charged with mortgage occupancy fraud and
Speaker 2: for making false statements to a financial institution. She's also
Speaker 2: pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 3: The career prosecutors working in the Eastern District of Virginia
Speaker 3: had reached a decision that there was no justification to
Speaker 3: bring these cases against Comy and James and that most
Speaker 3: likely these cases would fail in court.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering how Trump, being very open about his dislike
Speaker 2: of Comy might play into this case, because I know
Speaker 2: Komy has asked for the charges against him to be dismissed,
Speaker 2: arguing that he is being personally targeted.
Speaker 3: Komy has already filed a motion to say that the
Speaker 3: indictment against him should be dismissed because it represents an
Speaker 3: addictive and selective prosecution, and his legal team has cited
Speaker 3: the multitude of times that Trump has disparaged Comy or
Speaker 3: called for his prosecution. These motions have already been made,
Speaker 3: they're under consideration by the judge, and trying to succeed
Speaker 3: with emotion claiming vindictive and selective prosecution is very difficult.
Speaker 3: A lot of defendants do it but don't have success.
Speaker 3: Komy might be the poster child for a case that
Speaker 3: can actually succeed, and if Comy's motion succeeds, it most
Speaker 3: likely will also be replicated by Letitia James in her
Speaker 3: and others who are still to come.
Speaker 2: Comy and James, for their part, are both determined to
Speaker 2: fight their charges in court. Their trials are set for January,
Speaker 2: and over the past year, several DOJ attorneys have resigned
Speaker 2: in protest over directives they were given in other investigations.
Speaker 2: But Chris says Trump's DOJ is facing resistance that's much
Speaker 2: more mutant than it was in the Nixon era.
Speaker 3: Congress has largely been absent. I mean Democrats don't have
Speaker 3: any power. They don't control either the House or the Senate,
Speaker 3: and so in order to have oversight hearings or to
Speaker 3: demand information from the administration or issue subpoenas that can
Speaker 3: only come from the Republican majority, and they're not doing it.
Speaker 3: You do have individuals inside agencies such as the Justice
Speaker 3: Department that are questioning what the White House and what
Speaker 3: Trump are doing. There have been some examples where even
Speaker 3: Attorney General Bondie and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche have
Speaker 3: resisted certain steps that Trump and his allies want the
Speaker 3: Justice Department to take. There's still some open questions about
Speaker 3: what the Justice Department is going to do with some
Speaker 3: of these cases that they haven't been fully on board
Speaker 3: with what Trump has been demanding that they do.
Speaker 2: I'm curious about long term precedent here. It's something that
Speaker 2: comes up a lot when we talk about the way
Speaker 2: that Trump is operating as president. Is it possible and
Speaker 2: is it a concern that future US leaders, Republican or Democrat,
Speaker 2: could turn around and do the same thing to their
Speaker 2: political opponents or use the DOJ to similar ends.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean that's one of the concerns that has
Speaker 3: been raised is that as Trump breaks down the walls
Speaker 3: that have existed between the Justice Department and the White House,
Speaker 3: he's setting a new precedent that any administration going forward
Speaker 3: can use, and there's really nothing to stop that from
Speaker 3: happening short of either a public outcry that becomes so
Speaker 3: overwhelming or congressional resistance. I think for Trump and his allies,
Speaker 3: it's not even a matter of getting a conviction. It's
Speaker 3: the process of indicting these individuals and forcing them to
Speaker 3: have to get legal representation and go through court processes.
Speaker 3: The process is the punishment, not.
Speaker 1: Just the process as the punishment, but also the message
Speaker 1: that it sends to other people.
Speaker 2: Bloomberg's senior national political reporter Nancy Cook again, if you.
Speaker 1: Speak out, there is a huge rist that will go
Speaker 1: after you. And I think that you're seeing in Washington,
Speaker 1: DC a lot of self censorship, you know, with like
Speaker 1: maybe lawyers not speaking out as much, or former Trump
Speaker 1: officials who were very vocal and on TV a lot
Speaker 1: going quiet. And so I do think that it's it's
Speaker 1: the message that you know, you just keep it to yourself.
Speaker 2: In late September, Trump was asked was next on his
Speaker 2: list after the Komy indictment, and he said he isn't done,
Speaker 2: not a list, but I think there'll be others. The
Speaker 2: next wave of indictments could come as soon as January,
Speaker 2: when a federal grand jury convenes in Florida, the Trump's
Speaker 2: allies expect will investigate what they believe has been a
Speaker 2: long running conspiracy by former government officials to undermine Trump.
Speaker 3: Trump has even said that the Justice Department needs to
Speaker 3: take a look at Merrick Garland, Chris Ray, Lisa Monico,
Speaker 3: Jack Smith. These were all the key officials in charge
Speaker 3: of investigations that were against Trump. So that's the next
Speaker 3: phase of the retribution campaign that I'm really paying attention
Speaker 3: to right now, in which individuals will get swept up
Speaker 3: into that.
Speaker 1: And also, you have to keep in mind we're only
Speaker 1: in year one of his four years second term, so
Speaker 1: it's very unclear to me what does the Justice Department
Speaker 1: look like at the end.
Speaker 2: Of this This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take
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