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

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.