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TRANSCRIPT
Ken White: I think he got the job because he knows exactly who Trump is, and he’s giving him exactly what he wants, which is vigorously going after his enemies to a frankly shameful extent and just doing whatever Trump wants without much concern about what the law is or what the facts are.
Jane Coaston: I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that is stunned to find itself agreeing with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and asking, why did President Donald Trump watch last night’s NBA Finals game with his eyes closed?
[clip of Stephen A. Smith] Go online, look at the videos. I’m not gonna accuse him of snoring because I wasn’t in earshot. But the brother wasn’t awake. He wasn’t awake. If it was that important for you to be there, why did you look like you were asleep? Didn’t you call our former president, Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe? Well, what should we call you?
Jane Coaston: What should we call Trump? Tired Trump? A REM cycle Republican? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. On today’s show, we talked to former federal prosecutor Ken White about Trump’s nominee to serve as Attorney General and beloved friend Todd Blanche. Before we get into all that, here’s what we’re following today, Tuesday, June 9th.
[clip of unknown news reporter] There’s a report that an army helicopter went down in the street. Can you give us an update on that? Are the soldiers okay?
[clip of President Donald Trump] The pilots are fine, yeah.
[clip of unknown news reporter] And was that, do you know what brought it down?
[clip of President Donald Trump] Nobody injured.
Jane Coaston: President Trump spoke to reporters in New York after the NBA finals about a US Army helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz. And this afternoon, Trump gave an update on that crash. He blamed Iran for shooting down the helicopter and said the US must respond to the attack.
[clip of President Donald Trump] These federal judges are really giving us a hard time. It’s really crazy what’s going on with the court system. They are giving us a very, very hard time, and they shouldn’t be doing it. They’re hurting our country very badly.
Jane Coaston: Well, that depends on who you talk to, so stay tuned because we’ll be talking more about federal judges in a few minutes. But back to President Trump, who ended that press gaggle reacting to news that a federal judge struck down the administration’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas. The Judge Monday sided with 20 states and ruled that the Trump administration exceeded its authority by raising the fee without congressional approval. H-1B visas are meant for high skilled jobs that are difficult to find American workers to fill. The administration announced the astronomical charge in September as a way of preventing foreign workers from taking American jobs. Voters are headed to the polls for primaries today in North Dakota, South Carolina, Nevada, and Maine. As we discussed on yesterday’s show, Oyster Farmer Graham Platner is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee against Senator Susan Collins. South Carolina voters will choose nominees to succeed Republican Governor Henry McMaster, who is term-limited after 10 years in office. Trump’s endorsement of Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette to succeed McMaster could be decisive. And just weeks ago, longtime Representative James Clyburn, the Dean of South Carolina Democrats, appeared to be facing the greatest threat to his political future. But after GOP lawmakers rejected the changes to the state’s congressional map, it looks like his nomination will be safe and sound. A study commissioned by the Biden administration to investigate alcohol-related health harms was released independently on Tuesday. The study had faced pushback from the alcohol industry and a congressional committee. One of the officials involved accused Trump’s administration of sidelining the research, an allegation the Trump administration denies. But guess what? The findings were in line with what most of us already knew. Health risks go up with just one drink a day, and no level of alcohol has a protective effect on mortality. Sad, I know. And that’s the news. Let’s talk about the Department of Justice. Trump made it official. Todd Blanche is his next nominee for attorney general. After firing Pam Bondi back in April, Trump chose his former defense attorney to lead more than 10,000 attorneys in the federal government. To me, it seems pretty clear why. Trump wants someone who will do what he wants, like prosecute his political enemies or set up a $1.776 billion MAGA anti-weaponization fund. But in doing so, Blanche has made a lot of his own enemies. Like Senate Republicans, who screamed at him during a closed-door meeting over the anti-weaponization fund a few weeks ago. And judges, who just don’t trust DOJ attorneys anymore. So what does that mean for Trump’s legal agenda? To find out, I spoke to Ken White. He’s a former federal prosecutor, partner at Brown, White, and Osborne LLP, and co-host of the podcast, Serious Trouble. Ken, welcome back to What a Day.
Ken White: Thank you for having me back.
Jane Coaston: On Monday, President Trump formally nominated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to take on the job full-time. How exciting for him. Blanche took over the AG role in April after Trump fired Pam Bondi, RIP, we miss her. What do we know about how Blanche has run the DOJ so far?
Ken White: Well, it looks like Blanche is running it the way Trump wanted, which is sort of consciously as Trump’s personal lawyer and as you know the person carrying out the Federalist Society’s unitary executive theory that all mechanisms of the government should be directly under the service of the president and there shouldn’t be any sort of independence to the Department of Justice. So you know when this nomination, which was expected, came out, Senator Dick Durbin said that uh Todd Blanche has been around and he apparently hasn’t noticed that Trump is corrupt. And I think that’s exactly wrong. I think he got the job because he knows exactly who Trump is and he’s giving him exactly what he wants, which is vigorously going after his enemies to a frankly shameful extent, like in the you know the seashells case and things like that, and just doing whatever Trump wants without much concern about what the law is or what the facts are.
Jane Coaston: Yes, we all remember the adventures of James Comey. But, I mean, to your point, Todd Blanche was literally Trump’s former defense attorney. Now, Pam Bondi served as attorney general of the state of Florida. At some point, there had been the words attorney general after her name doing something. What about Todd Blanche? Like does, I mean I know what I am asking, but does he actually have the bona fides for this position if he were not Trump’s former defense attorney?
[clip of Stephen A. Smith] I mean, as much as anyone who recently has been up for the job does, considering the president was previously considering Matt Gaetz, uh I would say he’s well qualified. He is a former assistant U.S. Attorney.
Jane Coaston: Okay.
Ken White: He was a supervisor in the U. S. Attorney’s Office. He understands how the Department of Justice works on some level. That’s not to say he respects how it works or how it’s supposed to work, but he very clearly in his public statements of sort of canine devotion to Trump has demonstrated that he’s going to do whatever Trump wants, that he loves him. And I mean he says that literally and openly and that he sees his job as to be the president’s lawyer. The president as Donald J. Trump the individual not as the office of the presidency So that has been his strategy that he will push the department to do things that attack Trump’s personal enemies to use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm and to carry out his agenda items without, again, any sort of reference to whether they’re legal, whether the things that are being said to federal judges are truthful, or whether they were within the lawful authority of the Department of Justice.
Jane Coaston: We’ll get back to my conversation with Ken in a moment, and we don’t even need to check with a judge first. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: Let’s get back to my conversation with Ken White. Trump has long wanted, essentially, a servile attorney general it’s interesting because he seems to believe that democrats have had that. That Barack Obama had Eric Holder and he believes that relationship to have been, Eric Holder was Barack Obama’s personal attorney even though that’s not what happened.
Ken White: Right.
Jane Coaston: So what’s funny is that Trump is getting what he wants in some parts, but he’s losing a ton. So how has the DOJ been functioning with this more servile attorney general compared to Trump’s first term?
Ken White: Not well. So they have been noticeably stretching more in all sorts of cases. In other words, the first Trump administration DOJ did some crazy things, but not as overtly and aggressively as they have during this term. And that has yielded bad results. They are down around 20% of their lawyers, uh which is a lot given how sought after and prestigious those jobs used to be. They resorted to offering bounties to get people to come in and work for the Department of Justice, which is laughable. And their reputation with courts has taken a huge hit. And you can see that not just in the results of judicial decisions, but in the tone of them.
Jane Coaston: Can I, can I go back to one, one quick thing, bounties in what way? Like, are they getting literally like, please come work for us here as a check?
Ken White: Yeah, they were offering money for people to come work as US attorneys, assistant US attorneys in these hubs that they’re trying to set up to do more immigration work and other Trump agenda items work. And that’s ridiculous.
Jane Coaston: That’s wild.
Ken White: I mean, you–
Jane Coaston: That is actually wild.
Ken White: Yeah. I mean you would typically have, you know, 50 people trying to get the same one spot as an assistant US [?].
Jane Coaston: Yeah, I’ve known people who have, you know, in previous times, like the people who went to like Harvard, Yale, Duke Law, all being like, I’m going to be an assistant U.S. Attorney. Like they’re they’ve been gunning for that since they were in grade school and to need to write a check. But you were talking about judges and those losses. You can go on.
Ken White: Sure.
Jane Coaston: I was just stunned.
Ken White: So at the beginning of my career, I was you know super proud to say I’m Ken White and I represent the United States of America. These days, um it’s increasingly becoming a resume stain, frankly, because the judges are showing increasingly overt disbelief and skepticism about the word of assistant US attorneys. They are calling out lies in a way and previously they would have sort of presumed that was a mistake or an oversight or something like that. They’re using scathing language in decisions. And these are all sorts of judges. These are not just, you know, Biden appointees or Obama appointees. This includes conservative judges appointed by Republicans, even Trump. So there’s been this, traditionally, you’ve probably heard him use the phrase presumption of regularity. This thought, we’re going to assume the Justice Department is basically trying to do what it’s supposed to, trying to comply with the law. And there has been this deference and respect given by the judiciary to federal prosecutors and federal attorneys. And that has largely disappeared and it’s shocking how fast it happened. So me now the current Ken White, who’s been a defense attorney for 25 years thinks it’s a good thing if the federal judiciary is no longer gonna be automatically trusting and deferential of federal prosecutors. But it is a gigantic blow to the prestige of the justice department and to the ability of the Justice Department to get things done. Because a lot of things they could get done, they could get done because federal judges believed an assistant U.S. Attorney wouldn’t come into my court and lie to me. That is gone. That is completely gone.
Jane Coaston: Yeah. And it also seems as if, if Trump wants to get the terrible things he wants, then it’s going to be a big problem that the judges whom he may have even nominated won’t give it to him. So are judges going to to be the biggest check on the president this term because of all of this?
Ken White: I think they will be, and you know, a lot of people have sort of given up on the judiciary largely because of the Supreme Court and its decisions and its, you know shadow docket or as I call it, the separate but equal docket. Um. But you know the truth is that district court judges are doing an enormous amount of important work and they are acting as a break on some of the biggest extremes of this administration. The thing is um what you see again and again in cases that the administration is losing at the trial court level. Is a total lack of discipline or effort or planning so a lot of the things they’ve done yhey could have gotten away with it if they put in effort and time and planning and discipline, but they have none of those things. Uh, you know, they don’t feel like–
Jane Coaston: That sounds about right.
Ken White: Right.
Jane Coaston: That sounds right.
Ken White: They don’t feel like putting in the work or coming up with a plausible story. Uh. Their sense is, this is what we want, we’re the executives, and so we get it. And that’s how you get cases that are just facially ridiculous, like the James Comey prosecution for the seashells that every judge in America is going to laugh at, that the most dedicated um you know right-wing legal analysts are embarrassed about. And that that has consequences. It has consequences in the credibility of the cases the Justice Department brings and the credibility of every attorney from the Justice department who shows up in court, including the decent ones.
Jane Coaston: So, here’s my question, right? It was paranoia, but now it just seems like a thing that might be happening. Even though they’re losing, and you said that, you know, they’re not even trying, does that because they feel as if they can just keep appealing and then the Supreme Court will give them what they want? Like, are they complying with these rulings at all? Or are they just basically saying at some point, the conservative Supreme Court will let us what have what we want anyway?
Ken White: It’s a mix. On some things they’re counting on the Supreme Court to save them, on others they’re just moving on. So they’re taking sort of the public relations and political win for having done this big flashy thing. And then they lose in court and they move on to the next big flashy thing. So the problem is that has lasting consequences for the credibility of the department and it develops bodies of law that are not favorable to the department. But the problem it is that, um you know, it’s much harder to defend and preserve institutions than it is to corrupt and turn them down. So Trumpism wins if they corrupt the Justice Department, make it a corrupt instrument of Trump, or if they completely destroy its independence and reputation. They win either way because that empowers the unitary executive of Trump. You know the federal society wins. But people trying to defend the institution lose either if the Justice department is taken over by corrupt people or if its reputation is permanently damaged. Because then it can’t accomplish the good things that it does accomplish.
Jane Coaston: So, the Epstein files have haunted this DOJ since the very beginning. It’s their own fault. We’ve talked about that. And their botched release is likely a large part of why Pam Bondi lost her job, specifically because she could not get past this issue.
Ken White: Right.
Jane Coaston: But last month, Bondi testified on Capitol Hill that it was actually Blanche who had overseen the department’s release of the files. Do you think that’s going to impact his nomination?
Ken White: To some extent, I think it will. And there’s certainly some congressional Republicans, some people in the Senate who are more skeptical about Epstein issues than they are about other Trump issues. But I have not seen a lot of indication that they’re willing to push back that hard to get something this big. And, you know, the nominating the AG is a big deal, a relatively rare historically from the Senate to successfully push back. And it really does seem as if the public has to some extent moved on. That the prediction, the cynical prediction of the Trump people that eventually everyone will get tired of it and move on to other stuff seems to be mostly true. I mean, it flares up now and then, but it has not been the consistent story it was, you know, in the winter and just a few months ago even. And so, you now, attention has successfully shifted to uh, you know, whatever is allegedly happening with Iran today. And uh to other issues.
Jane Coaston: Ken, as always, thank you so much for joining me.
Ken White: I’m the blue bird of happiness, Jane. I’m always happy to be here for you.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Ken White, partner at Brown, White & Osborne, LLP, and former federal prosecutor. We’ll link to his podcast, Serious Trouble, in the show notes.
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate a woman who is swimming the entire length of the state of California, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about Catherine Breed, who next month will swim more than 900 miles, roughly five to eight hours a day. Dealing with sharks, jellyfish, and storms, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and if Breed succeeds, she will be the first person to ever swim the length of California. Not the first woman, first person ever. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
