Title: When DOJ Investigates the President

[MUSIC]

Tiffany: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen, filling in for Brian today. Coming up on the show, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso will join us to talk about a new redevelopment along the waterfront. He recently changed his mind on that plan and went from a nay to a yay. I'll ask him what changed his mind, what the plan will entail, if it passes a key vote that's scheduled for this coming Monday.

We'll talk with a guest who is something of an AI doomsayer. He worries that with lax regulation, artificial super intelligence, and yes, we'll ask what that means, could lead to human extinction. Look, not everybody agrees with his assessment, obviously, so we'll ask him some questions, and of course, we want yours as well. That's coming up just after 11:00.

We'll wrap up the show today with a question for you. What is so great about New York? This question is tied to a new Siena Poll that found a majority of New Yorkers say the state is right on track. Most did not have as positive a view of where the US is as a whole. That's not the case for New York, however. Look, we like to complain a lot, but we're asking you to tell us what you think is going well for New York. That's on the way.

It's been a busy week for anybody following the high-profile, politically charged legal battles that are playing out across the country. Just to name one, on Monday, President Trump filed a civil lawsuit against The New York Times, four of its reporters, and Penguin Random House. That case centers around statements regarding the president's business acumen. He alleges that those statements were made in an attempt to sink his 2024 campaign. For that, he's asking for $15 billion.

We'll talk about that lawsuit specifically, as well as some of the other legal news of the week, which includes, as everyone is talking about this morning, the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, with Elie Honig. He's a legal analyst for CNN and a former federal prosecutor, and by the way, an author of a new book titled, When You Come at the King: Inside the DOJ's Pursuit of the President, from Nixon until Trump. We'll talk about that book, too, of course. Welcome back to the show, Elie.

Elie: Tiffany, thanks for having me. A perfect morning to join you.

Tiffany: Absolutely. All right. Listeners, we want you to join us as well. Come in the conversation with your questions for Elie. Are you following these cases rather closely? Are there specific legal challenges you're concerned about? Listeners, do you have some interest in some specific cases? You can call us, you can text us, you can join us, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

Elie, I think we're going to have to start with Kimmel. It's what everybody is talking about. On his way back from the UK, he was there for a visit, President Trump said that TV networks, and I'm paraphrasing here, should have their license taken away for not supporting him. This statement comes on the heels of the indefinite suspension of late-night talk show host, [laughs] Jimmy Kimmel, for comments he made. Hey, he's a comedian. He would appreciate that, right?

Elie: Yes, exactly.

Tiffany: Jimmy Kimmel, for comments he made following the murder of Charlie Kirk. It brings to mind another defamation lawsuit that was settled in 2024 with ABC, who Jimmy Kimmel worked, still works for ABC. ABC agreed to donate $15 million to President Trump's library as a settlement for a lawsuit centering around remarks made by George Stephanopoulos. I know that's a lot. I'm tying together here a couple of dots, so maybe help the listeners as we trace this. From President Trump's remarks to Jimmy Kimmel back to that initial settlement in 2024 that ABC made.

Elie: Donald Trump has always made no secret of the fact that he wants to aggressively control the narrative, the coverage of him, often in tension with, often in flagrant violation of the First Amendment. His previous tactic of choice was these defamation lawsuits. Defamation cases are really, really hard to win, especially if you're a public figure like Donald Trump. The US Supreme Court set the bar very high many years ago. Essentially, you have to show that whoever you're suing, ABC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, first of all, published a falsehood about you. Second of all, that they knew it was false or that they were reckless as to falsity.

Now, the end run here, however, that Trump seems to have discovered is a lot of these entities will just settle, and you just laid out some of the terms, because if you're a corporation, a private corporation, if you're ABC, you might well make the bottom line calculation. Look, you're a corporation, your job, maybe by some takes, is not to do the right thing, but to protect your bottom line. I would argue there's a different obligation if you're a media organization, but let's put that aside.

It seems some of these organizations have said, "Look, we'll pay $10 million, we'll pay $16 million. It's cheaper than going through a lawsuit, risking a verdict," although I don't think any of them would have actually lost, especially in the ABC case. That was the way Trump went about it for a while. Now, he's upped the ante to where he's using the licensing arms and the approval arms of the federal government. We're talking about the FCC, we're talking about the DOJ's power to approve mergers when there's big corporate mergers, and that plays into the Jimmy Kimmel case as well.

I think the concern when many of us heard the news about the Jimmy Kimmel suspension was, would it go further? Would this just be a one-off? Now, Trump, just today, as you said, has said, "Oh no, anyone who doesn't support me is going to face a similar issue." Now, the legal problem here, of course, is the First Amendment. What the First Amendment tells us is the US government cannot use coercion. That's the term that has been adopted legally by the US Supreme Court.

There were actually a couple of cases, a few, brought against the Biden administration for its behind-the-scenes effort to try to get social media companies and other media companies to take down certain content. What divides an acceptable form of that from something that violates the First Amendment is coercion. In other words, it's the or else part of it. If you are a White House staffer and you get in touch with Facebook and say, "Hey, we think this post has misinformation," that's generally okay, but if you say, "Hey, we think this post has misinformation, and if you don't take it down or else, we will have the CDC or DOJ look at you." I think that's the line here.

Tiffany: Elie, I want to ask you about the difference, though, between what the US government can do and what a corporation can do, because, hypothetically, if Jimmy Kimmel were to say my free speech was violated, ABC is a corporation. This is not an issue of his First Amendment rights. That corporation can do whatever it wants, right?

Elie: Very good point. The First Amendment begins with the words, "Congress shall make no law," meaning the government. This only applies to the government. Jimmy Kimmel may be able to sue ABC if they violated his contract. We don't know what his contract is. That's a separate issue. Jimmy Kimmel cannot sue ABC for violating his First Amendment rights because, as you say, Tiffany, they are a private entity, or any of the other Nexstar or other companies that are looking to merge.

The clean way that this would reach the courts would be if ABC or some other company were to resist what Donald Trump and the FCC chair were calling for, and then some action was taken against them by the FCC, then you'd have a clean First Amendment claim. Jimmy Kimmel is in a tricky spot because if he is going to assert some sort of First Amendment right here, it's going to have to be a bank shot. He's going to have to bounce it off of something. He's going to have to say, basically, "ABC suspended me because of the coercion of the government," but that's a two-step. That's a little trickier.

Tiffany: We do have a president who's on Air Force One, saying he's going to take licenses away from corporations.

Elie: The problem, I think, is if anyone at ABC just testifies and we've seen statements along these lines, there was a problem with our viewer satisfaction, there was a problem with our bottom line, the show is expensive, whatever it may be, we at ABC made the decision that we didn't like his statement. We found that offensive. Then that's going to that's going to be that in terms of the legal issue here.

In order to really bring a case like this cleanly to the courts, we need a media entity that says, "No, we're not giving in," and then, you know, you fight it out in the courts. Now, I guess easier for me to say from the outside than somebody who's in the boardroom there trying to look at the bottom line. That's what you would hope would happen to vindicate the First Amendment.

Tiffany: I want to get back to these issues you brought up around defamation lawsuits, because as we look at the one that President Trump brought against The New York Times this week, there's another against The Wall Street Journal. Now, these are two separate cases in terms of why he's asking for damages related to defamation. The one at The New York Times has to do with essentially negative comments that were printed about his business dealings, that he views as detrimental to his campaign in the run-up to the 2024 election.

As far as The Wall Street Journal is concerned, we're talking about an article, I believe, that was printed that made an allegation regarding President Trump's involvement in the now notorious "Epstein birthday book." We're talking about two separate cases, but very similar in the fact that he's seeking damages for defamation, and you alluded to this. My question is, is he doing this to win?

Elie: Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. Donald Trump has unusual incentives when it comes to lawsuits. Most people would think about that. What's the cost going to be to me? What's the risk? I don't think Donald Trump cares. I think he just wants to have the fight. Look, as you said earlier, a lot of these companies have just settled with him, and so maybe he's hoping for that. I think the lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is doomed, the Epstein birthday book.

We now know the letter exists, which was the crux of his complaint, if you look at it, was that that letter is "non-existent." Now he's saying, "I didn't sign it," but that's not what The Wall Street Journal said. I think that lawsuit is going to fail. The New York Times lawsuit is incoherent. It's just an airing of grievances. Over many years, they have covered me in an unfavorable way. Again, he has to prove falsity and knowing falsity. That's different than they don't like me.

Tiffany: They have to prove malice?

Elie: Yes. Malice, meaning that the false falsity was intentional or that it was reckless. In other words, we printed something we knew was false or we were completely reckless, didn't even look at it, and just threw out some crazy thing. That's what the malice part of it is.

Tiffany: I wonder if there's an effort here, a broader effort by maybe President Trump, maybe his supporters, in terms of overturning some sort of legal precedent as these cases, when their way through the court, eventually, one would imagine, up to the Supreme Court. I'm thinking of New York Times v. Sullivan, for example. Could this be a challenge that his supporters, that his attorneys are looking to take on?

Elie: It could be. That decision goes back to 1964. You nailed the citation. Good job, Tiffany. That's the case where the Supreme Court set the bar high. They said there has to be this malice standard. There have been various attempts over the years to get a case up to the Supreme Court, hoping that they will somehow lower the standard and make it easier to show defamation. By the way, the standard is only that high for public figures. Obviously, Donald Trump, the president, is a public figure. It's lower if you're a private individual.

Pretty much ever since the case came down in 1964, there's been efforts to get the Supreme Court to revisit it. That could be part of it, too. Look, if they lower the bar, that's only going to encourage more and more of these defamation lawsuits by Trump and by others.

Tiffany: I mentioned that one presumes, doesn't one, that these will end up in the Supreme Court. We have a text here that says, "Thank you for reminding us of the old laws, but the fact that the majority of the Supreme Court almost always rules in favor of the president, isn't that a moot point?" We could argue that. This texter goes on to say Trump will get his way on any lawsuit that ends in front of the Supreme Court and that laws no longer matter.

My question for you, Elie, is about the Supreme Court and the long game that the Republicans have played here in terms of we got to this point with the Supreme Court because President Trump supporters and Republicans for decades have played the long game, and most recently, right within the last decade, played the long game about getting right leaning justices on the Supreme Court, and now they're reaping the benefits. True, false?

Elie: I think that's true. There have been really two aspects of that long game. One of them is just playing tough, you can call it dirty, but Mitch McConnell, of course, famously refused to put through Merrick Garland's nomination because the election was a year or so away. Then when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed just a few weeks before the election, they ran through Amy Coney Barrett. You do see disparity in tactics on the US Senate floor, and you can criticize Mitch McConnell for being overly aggressive, you can criticize Chuck Schumer for not responding in kind. That's phase one of the long game.

The other thing is, almost literally the long game, these nominees are getting younger and younger because these are life tenures, and Republicans were onto that very early. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett were all put on the bench in their late 40s or early 50s. Democrats took a little longer to get there, but they're clearly there now. Justice Jackson took the bench when she was, I believe, in her low 50s, again, maybe late 40s. There were several very qualified candidates who were written off because they were in their 60s and 70s.

I do think both sides can now do the math, and I do think you're going to see these nominees getting younger. Don't be shocked if we see a nominee in their 30s at some point, maybe the next one, because look, you put someone in there who's 38 years old, you're going to have that seat for 50 years if you want it.

Tiffany: This is a little bit of a sidebar, but whatever happened to all of the talk of expanding the court?

Elie: That was a big promise that Joe Biden ran on. He didn't promise to do it. He was a little bit wishy-washy. I'll tell you what happened. He appointed a commission. This is where things go to die. This commission came up with some very anodyne hedged recommendations that came out in a report a year later that nobody ever saw. It's on the Internet somewhere, but it's just we might consider-

Tiffany: Of course, it is.

Elie: -this or we might consider that, death by administration.

Tiffany: Got it. Listeners, Elie and I would love to have you in this conversation. Any specific cases you're following closely, specific legal challenges you're concerned about, have some interest in, have questions for Elie about, you can call us, you can text us, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Elie, let's talk to Marvin. Good morning, Marvin.

Marvin: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. One of the things that I'm wondering about is we know that Trump learned from Roy Cohn to use lawsuits to intimidate and even bankrupt his opponents. What possibilities do institutions like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, which is less likely to do it, who are being dragged into these frivolous and illegal attempts to destroy the Constitution, to counter sue Trump and make him pay a significant price for using these authoritarian tactics to intimidate the press and to suppress free speech?

Tiffany: Thanks for the call, Marvin. Elie, he is the litigator in chief.

Elie: He always has been. I wrote a piece about this a few weeks ago for New York Magazine, basically saying he doesn't even foot his own bills now. By and large, he's represented, not necessarily in his defamation suits, but a lot of the lawsuits that he brings by the United States Justice Department. The caller's right, one of Trump's tactics has been to outlast and outresource and outfund his lawsuits to make it basically inevitable that the other side settles.

You can't really counter sue for someone being an authoritarian, I think, as the caller said, but you can get attorney's fees against Trump. That has happened a few times. I don't think that's much of a disincentive for him. I think he's done the math and realized that he can manipulate the courts in this way.

Tiffany: Before we pivot here to talking about your book, which I am absolutely wanting to do here, I want to ask you a little bit about hate speech. A couple of things happened this week. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department will "go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech." Some conservative commentators came after her. I should add that an assistant AG then backpedaled, saying that she was referring to "true incitement of violence."

It dovetails on something that Stephen Miller said. Stephen Miller is a policy advisor for President Trump in the administration, that he has a plan to go after unnamed left-wing organizations accused of "inciting violence." From a legal perspective here, tell us why Pam Bondi got such pushback on the hate speech front. Then also, what is the legal threshold for inciting violence?

Elie: She got such pushback from both sides of the ideological aisle because she's so obviously flagrantly wrong. Hate speech is protected speech. There is a line, "not all speech is protected." For example, to go back to my prosecutor days, if a gangster says to the corner butcher, "Hey, you're going to have to pay me $500 every week in a paper bag or else I'll break your legs," that's speech, but that's a threat. That's extortion. This term, "incitement," has started to get used by Stephen Miller and others way too broadly.

Incitement, again, there's a Supreme Court case on this. People looked at it with respect to January 6th, and the prosecutor, Jack Smith, concluded that it did not apply. He charged Donald Trump, but not for incitement, because for incitement, you need a very direct link between the speech and imminent criminal action. It essentially has to be, hey, everyone, let's commit this act of violence now. Even Trump's ellipse speech in Jack Smith, who was very aggressive in his view, did not reach that bar of incitement.

I say that to just make the point that just saying bad things or hate speech or negative things that people don't like that, it's not nice to do it, but it's not incitement. It's not criminalizable to coin a phrase there. The fact that they're using that as a hook to threaten investigations shows either that they don't know or don't care what the First Amendment really means.

Tiffany: You're listening to The Brian Lehrer Show here on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Brian today. Our guest is Elie Honig, who is a senior legal analyst at CNN, former federal prosecutor, and the author of a new book, When You Come at the King: Inside the DOJ's Pursuit of the President, from Nixon until Trump. Elie, let's talk about this book.

One of the things that I am most interested in is all of these prosecutors, defense lawyers, law enforcement agents, White House staffers that you talked to for the book. I'm curious about your perception of how forthcoming they were with you. Did you see differences depending on where they were coming from, if they were coming from the White House. I guess I'm just looking for broad generalization about how you found these interviews?

Elie: I love that question. I was shocked in the best possible way by, A, how many people were willing to speak with me. Everyone's on record in this book, by the way. There's no anonymous quotes. I wouldn't take it if they were not willing to put their name on it, and how candid people were. As you said, prosecutors going back from Watergate all the way up through the modern era, defense lawyers who defended Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, on down the line. People who were prosecuted by special counsel, White House officials, you name it. I did not put information in the book if it was not backed up.

That said, there are plenty of times people disagreed. Look, let's use the Bill Clinton, Ken Starr case, for example. I have in that chapter extensive on record perspective from David Kendall, who was and still is the lawyer for Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, Lanny Breuer, who worked in the White House and was defending the Clinton White House, and Ken Starr himself passed away a few years ago, but a guy named Saul Weisenberg, who was the number two in the Ken Starr investigation. He's actually the guy who asked Bill Clinton the question that elicited the response, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Tiffany: It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. [laughs]

Elie: Yes, exactly. That was my terrible Clinton impression right there.

Tiffany: That's great.

Elie: It's so fascinating. They take you inside the courtroom, the grand jury, and you see the competing strategies between them, and you see the ways they were sizing each other up. At times, there's agreement. I'll tell you, there are some candid admissions in this book that I found really interesting. I won't give them all away, but as to stay with this example, Saul Weisenberg admitted to me that in some instances, the sexual detail in the Starr report went too far. Now, we know that Clinton's team has long said that it was outrageous, but this is really, I think, the first time we've seen a member of Starr's team say some of that was probably too far and unnecessary.

Saul Weisenberg also admitted to me that his team leaked, and that's long been a point of contention. Did Starr's team leak? Starr furiously denied that in front of Congress, and Saul said, "Oh, we did. I didn't like it, but other people did. I thought it was bad for us." Look, like you said, I was a prosecutor and I love bringing people behind the scenes of the prosecutor's office, whether it's Mueller or Jack Smith or back to Archibald Cox in Watergate.

Tiffany: One of the cases that New Yorkers will no doubt remember is the jailing of New York Times journalist Judy Miller. She was jailed by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She refused to reveal the identity of a White House source. You spoke about this. Tell us who you spoke about this with and what you learned.

Elie: I got Judy Miller, who has been a bit reclusive. She's no longer in the media. I'll give you a little behind the scenes. A mutual friend gave me her email and said, "Good luck. She doesn't really do this anymore." She talked to me for hours about her experience. This was the investigation during the George W Bush administration, 2005, '06, '07, of the outing of the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in order to get back at her husband, Joe Wilson, who had basically written a piece for the newspaper saying that the premise for the war in Iraq was faulty, that there was no uranium yellow cake.

This became the prosecution of Scooter Libby, which people may remember. I talked to a prosecutor on that case and Scooter Libby's defense lawyer. He gets convicted, but he ultimately doesn't go to prison because George W Bush commutes his sentence, and I have some interesting background there. There was a furious disagreement between Bush and Cheney. Cheney wanted to pardon them all together. Bush wouldn't do it. Bush only would commute his sentence.

Of course, fast forward a decade or so, Donald Trump fully pardons Scooter Libby. The crazy fact about this case, as you said, Tiffany, the only person who actually went to prison was Judy Miller, a New York Times reporter who refused to give up her sources. A lot of other reporters were subpoenaed, and they got waivers, and they did give up their sources. I talked to Judy about that, and she said, "I was not going to do this until I was convinced that my sources were allowing me to go public voluntarily and not under pressure."

She stood by her principles. She went to prison for almost three months, 85 days in a max security prison. I actually asked her, "How was that for you?" This New York Times reporter in a max security prison. She said, "You know what? They all respected me. I was perfectly safe because they knew I was in there for refusing to snitch, and they liked that." There's great color from Judy Miller, what I think is a forgotten chapter of our history.

Tiffany: One of the things that I like that you do is follow this through line about special prosecutors. I'm wondering what you learned from those conversations about that whole incident with Judy Miller in terms of the power of Fitzgerald as a special counsel. What did you learn about wielding that power?

Elie: We give these prosecutors and any prosecutor, I was one held enormous power, but these prosecutors have even more power because they have the ability to investigate and potentially eventually recommend an indictment or indict anyone up to the president of the United States. By the way, a lot of the book I'm pointing out the flaws and the shortcomings in the system, but ultimately, at the end, I propose a system to revamp it, and I argue that we need this. We'll talk about what's happening now in Trump 2.0.

Some of my favorite interviews here were with people who were charged by independent counsel or special counsel, tried, and acquitted. I talked to a guy named Mike Espy, who people might remember, was a cabinet official for Bill Clinton. He had been in Congress. He gets indicted by a special counsel. A case takes years and years. He goes to trial, and he's found not guilty, but it tore his life apart. He had to resign from the cabinet. He spent millions of dollars in legal fees. It destroyed his reputation.

He told me, and he sent me a picture, and I described it in the book, the independent counsel had made watches to celebrate the indictment of Mike Espy. They say United States v. Mike Espy. An FBI agent, after the trial, sent his watch to Mike Espy and said, "I apologize. You should have this, not me." I also talked to a person who was prosecuted by-- You may remember John Durham. This is the guy who came in after Mueller, the guy with the goatee glaring into the camera. His investigation was just a train wreck. He actually tried two people, and both of them were acquitted. I spoke with one of them, Igor Danchenko, and same thing. He was found not guilty, but it tore his life apart.

Tiffany: One of the things that I think we do well here in public media is that we often provide context that people don't get a lot of the time in bullet point media. What I like about what we do is giving historical context, and so I love the historical context you have here for this role of special prosecutor. Why was that important for you, as we have seen special prosecutors come and go here, maybe even more so in the recent years, in recent memory? Why is it important for us to understand that historical context?

Elie: Part of it is the storytelling itself. I think the stories are almost read like true crime when you look at them chapter by chapter. Also, no one's ever done a definitive history of Watergate, really goes back beyond that, but Watergate up through Jack Smith. To your first question, that's, I think, a big part of the reason so many people wanted to talk because they wanted to have their perspective shown. The history, though, is important, I think, in understanding where we are now, because the history shows us that president--

Look, no president has ever enjoyed being investigated, from Ulysses S Grant, the first one ever to appoint one of these prosecutors, on through Nixon, on through Clinton, on through Donald Trump, but there has always been a line observed. Even Nixon, he fires the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, and two others resigned during the Saturday Night Massacre, but even he did not end the investigation. It continued. I talked to two of the prosecutors who told us what it was like the next morning, the Sunday morning after, and how they decreed that they would carry on.

Even Trump during his first term, Mueller, he hated Mueller. He tweeted negative things about Mueller every day. He obstructed Mueller, but Mueller got to finish his job. Here, however, and what I argue in the book is we are at a break point where Trump 2.0 and Pam Bondi have made it clear there will be no internal looking investigation, and anyone who even broaches the topic will be the subject of retribution. Hence the title, by the way. I think anyone who watched The Wire knows the title, but when you come at the king--

Tiffany: Or if they know the real original--

Elie: Machiavelli?

Tiffany: Yes. [chuckles]

Elie: Look, I'm going to say Omar over Machiavelli any day.

Tiffany: Okay, all right.

Elie: The expression is when you come at the king, you better not miss. That is the era we are in right now.

Tiffany: You mentioned Pam Bondi. There was a moment in history when a law expired that I'm hoping you can just touch on, late '90s, that gave way to the fact that the DOJ, the Attorney General, will appoint a special counsel. Just talk to us about the history there, about who appoints the special counsel, as we're talking about if you're going at the king. We now have a system in place in which the Attorney General, appointed by the President of the United States, is the person who appoints a special counsel. It wasn't always that way.

Elie: Up until and through Watergate, we had no laws on this. I interviewed Carl Bernstein, everyone knows who he is, the legendary reporter, and John Dean, who was the star witness. They both said it was ad-libbed. The members of the prosecution team said we didn't have rules, we didn't have protections. After and because of Watergate, we passed a law in 1978 that established the independent counsel. That was in place till '99, when Congress said no more of this, largely because of the disaster of the Ken Starr/Clinton case, but also the Espy case and others.

That law expired and was allowed to sunset by bipartisan agreement. Since 1999, we have now had in place a set of regulations, not a law passed by Congress, but a set of internal DOJ special counsel regulations that say, in a case of extraordinary circumstances or conflict of interest, both of those are pretty broad terms, the attorney general can appoint a special counsel. For the first 17 years of that, we had one special counsel. That was the Valerie Plame case you and I discussed before, but since 2017, we've had five of them. We had Mueller.

Tiffany: We're not imagining that, right? [chuckles]

Elie: No, you're not imagining it. They had become very, very prevalent. There was one moment, not long ago, when we had one special counsel investigating the president, Joe Biden, and I spoke with Joe Biden's legal team, Donald Trump, who was getting ready to run against Joe Biden, that's, of course, Jack Smith, and the president's son, Hunter Biden. Again, I talked to lawyers involved in that one. I will hazard a guess we will never again see that scenario.

Tiffany: Before I let you go, I want to make sure that I ask you, because you mentioned this, what sort of legal reforms, what sort of future you're predicting, or what you would like to see happen here, just in terms of the special counsel system?

Elie: My number one pitch here, plea, in this book is, look, I'm not going to tell you that there's any way there will be a special counsel during Donald Trump's remaining years, but whoever comes next, the 48th president of the United States, is going to find that a lot of these important guardrails have been ignored or destroyed. Whoever comes next needs to understand that we have to have some type of system for this, and presidents of both parties, going back to Ulysses S Grant, have understood this. It's too important to let this go away, because we will have no accountability, and we will have no rules.

By the way, if you want an example of what happens when you have no rules, and I have a chapter about this, look at the disaster that Jim Comey created in 2016. No special counsel, Comey ran wild. We know the rest with the announcements on the eve of that election. I propose a system in the book that-- By the way, I drew that not only from talking to scholars and looking at past legislative proposals, but I asked the people who did these cases, what would you like to see happen? What rules work for you? What rules did not?

Essentially, it would be a semi-permanent role within the Justice Department, like an inspector general, but with actual prosecutorial powers that should be ideally presidentially nominated, Senate confirmed, should serve for a term of years, 5 or 10, a set term of years, that would carry over across administrations. You would only really get a person who is nonpartisan or bipartisan through that process, and there would be a level of political accountability that is not present in our current system. There's other nuances, but that's the policy solution-- Look, there's no perfect solution. These are inherently difficult cases, but that's the policy evolution that I lay out at the end of the book.

Tiffany: All right. The new book is When You Come at the King: Inside the DOJ's Pursuit of the President, from Nixon until Trump. Elie, the book's out now?

Elie: Yes.

Tiffany: All right.

Elie: Get it where you get your books.

Tiffany: Get it where you get your books. He'll be in conversation with Kaitlan Collins at the 92nd Street. Why? About this book coming up on October 5th. Elie, tickets still available for that?

Elie: Yes, they're going, though.

Tiffany: They're going, though. All right. Elie Honig, thanks so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Elie: Tiffany, thanks so much for having me.

 

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