Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Off Rails as Susie Wiles Mess Worsens
But again, even something like that, when you are arguing before a judge that this needs to be thrown out because my client is being selectively and vindictively targeted by the president of the United States or by the Justice Department or by whoever, it is a really tough nut to crack and a case to prove, even when the president of the United States is doing boneheaded stuff like that. So now they have Trump. Now they have other shreds of him campaigning profusely in 2024 about coming back and jailing or prosecuting all these different enemies just because he’s mad and out of personal vendettas. And now they have, according to Vanity Fair—they don’t have it in their possession, I’m assuming, but somewhere out there in the world there is a literal tape of Donald Trump’s top White House official basically saying, Yeah, you got me. This is a retribution campaign.
So when that happened and all of these different sources and lawyers started to talk to me about how this is the part of the interview that we think is going to actually be the most consequential from a legal and political perspective, I started paying attention because so much of it—even though it’s fun, even though it’s revealing—a lot of it can kind of get lost in the maelstrom of political gossipiness, especially when you’re talking about a place as backbiting and as catty as the upper echelons of Trump World.
But this is something that I think your listeners should pay more attention to just because the stakes are so fucking high on this. I’ll read you right now a text that Abbe Lowell sent me on Tuesday afternoon. Lowell is, as your listeners probably know, one of the top attorneys for people like Letitia James and several others who—look, he’s the lawyer right now who, if you are a top political target of Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you call this guy. So he texted Zeteo on Tuesday:
“The White House chief of staff admitting that President Trump turned the Justice Department into his weapon for political retribution against Attorney General Letitia James only confirms that this has been an improper, vindictive prosecution. The astonishing admission comes after President Trump publicly demanded Attorney General Bondi target Ms. James for doing her job and his DOJ ignoring career prosecutors and two grand juries that rejected the case. It all proves beyond any doubt that the attempts to bring charges against Attorney General James are nothing more than Trump’s political crusade. When they admit it’s not justice they’re after, but pure revenge, believe them.”
Sargent: Swin, I will say that is extremely powerful. And just to wrap this all up, I want to return to what you said at the very beginning. You got at this notion that Susie Wiles was admitting that there was something wrong with the prosecutions. And that, I think, is an added piece to this. And yet it also gets at something very dark about it all, which is that people like Susie Wiles, who have been around a very long time and understand how things work, are going along with this shit, even though they know how depraved and how contrary to the rule of law it really is, right?
