Hi.
Today, we have a special crossover bonus episode for you where I talk to Talking Feds Harry Litman live from this weekend's Texas Tribune Festival.
I hope you enjoy it.
I'm Harry Littman of Talking Fits. I'm really pleased to welcome. I want to say Malli john Fest. But I keep reading that it's a reverend.
Something.
I think your first name is a reverend? Were there many kids in school who have? When did you become a.
Reverend?
Is such a weird thing to have as a describer?
Do you think it's not? Until you think it's like a little shade.
Let's take no reverence. Great, I've been called much worse.
Even today, we're in the middle of like a million different legal like just everybody is in legal jeopardy right we have. I mean, Trump is the main event, but there are a lot of other satellite events. What case do you think right now seems most open and shut to you?
Oh, open and shut?
That's not where I thought you were going, because I don't know if it'll open and shut in the time we want.
But the most open and shut I actually think is the mar Lago case. The document, the doc it's so straight forward.
The law is so clear. All it has to be. You have classified documents. We know that it says that I'm you take this man. You know you're not supposed to, and you know it just gets stronger and stronger every day.
Killer evidence.
So it's like a weird time that where you know, teeny little things, pieces of knowledge you've acquired over twenty years, have all some political significance, removal and burden of proof, but it actually matters. So here this witness who came forward to who we learned about a couple days ago, right, Michael, she's going to bury him because he's the she is unimpeachable. Tried to stay with him, nicely, well presented and will say, oh yeah.
When he found out it's going to talk with the FBI, I said, you don't know anything about those documents. You can like the.
Majurial, right, and that's we We focus on stunning the Bullgravano or me Parkment. But but they'll have bruising cross examinations. I think John Laurel will just weep and say, no further questions.
What are you gonna do with the with it?
So so mar Alago, Okay, now I got one for you. I'll stick with the irreverent themes.
So this can a little is it a little more meta and reflective?
See as, because you know, truth be told, you're very sort of susbanative and trenchant.
But through the prism of irreverence.
What do you see as the kind of role of irony, wit, humor and actually the you know, the the mission of journalism of you know, not just imparting facts, but giving the kind of point of view that hopefully will make people see the stakes.
Here the goal is always honesty, right.
I mean, I'm on the opinion side, which gives me a lot of freedom. I don't have to not say what I think, whereas like a straight reporter needs to be able to tell a story without I mean, of course we always know, right, but without their own personal bias,
Whereas I don't have to do that. But I do feel like there's even more impetus on me to be honest and to be honest about when I'm looking at a case because I'm on the opinion side, and also because the goal here is always honesty, right, So it might be funny that there's nothing we can do about the fact that the world is so deeply insane. I think if it were less insane, it might be less funny.
You know, you have to laugh to not cry. The thing is right, the Republican front runner has foreign indictments and a superseding indictment and he can't stop winning.
But I mean it's preposterous.
But on the face of it, like imagine, think of gour Vidal writing about that.
I mean, he wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't. I mean, I was listening.
To some of his writings on the plane on the way out here, and he was talking about how George Bush was so beyond the pale George but it thought of as like now a statesman, I mean, not by me, but you know, as a painter in a.
Richard Nixon's the best thing that ever happened, right, I mean.
So I think that the sort of preposterousness of American politics lends itself to humor in a way that it's still very serious and we always have to be serious about it.
But it is I mean, remember like think about right.
I mean John Patty right, Okay.
Think about yesterday is like big or the day before big breaking news about Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani sexually harassed or in a very inappropriate sexual contact with a young girl Mark Meadows.
You know with that Cassidy wild Trump is making this watch at the right and Johnny through clearing that right now, it's like at a Hoeronymous spot, right, Yes.
Truly a horrendous, horrendous scene from a different century. But I want to point out, like we could talk about Rudy Julian and look back at Rudy Giuliani's time in the Borat movie?
Will you did this game the right?
Right?
The Borat Movie supposed to be a satire.
I say, sorry, so, I mean, it's just I wouldn't be so irreverend if everything wasn't so insane.
Right, and in fact, if the if the actual touchstone is truth, then it really how do you get out at a time where even that's up for grass?
But I shouldn't have said that because it's your turning over.
Yes, wet all right. So Laurence O'Donnell was on my podcast. Yeah he's my body.
Yeah, he said that a very very very high number of jury trials end in guilty verdict like ninety percent plus.
Is that true?
And why, well, a very very very high percentage of criminal press acutions and in guilty verdicts, although they're usually by plea.
But you know, I'm here to tell you.
So I went to law school kind of last refuge of the amateur. Like a lot of people, I thought I might be a defense lawyer. It's just by way of saying, I'm not a fire in the Valley prosecutor. But it's just a fact, like there's you know, like facts we were just talking about. To the prosecutors choose their their cases. Defendants are honestly mostly guilty. I have whenever I've gotten close to like it's just true and it could be some solid maybe they have a good
legal claim. I don't mean, and I totally respect defenser, But whenever I get close to defense, I always say, like, over, so, have you.
Ever had like someone who didn't do it?
And they're you know, I think the sky in twenty fourteen maybe, so you know, the evidences, So they choose now, of course in the incredible it really and it should be sort of reassuring because I know some people, especially in the age of Trump, have such fundamental mistrust for law enforcement. It is, you know, as of course, said the competitive business affairity on crime.
Once you're one, you're engaged. You don't want to lose.
But in any professional office, somebody there's a lot of cases out there and somebody who you're going to have trouble proving or god forbid, you're not sure did it unless they are themselves and you know, for independent reasons.
A real plague on the community.
So you really want to dig dig card kind of an al capone situation, you go to the next guy. So it's really the case. Now, trials are different because beyond a reasonable doubt, you only need one shit happens. I was just thinking of this Fulton County trial that's coming up.
She charges a rico.
We're going to have two people sitting there supposedly for four months, while what a week of the evidence concerns them directly, you know, twelve real people sitting on your might think what.
The how am I doing here?
And there sort of human reaction, et cetera. So that can happen, especially if you count a mistrial. But the short answer to Lawrence so O Donald, he's got a real vantage point. He's I don't know if you read his book about the big criminal case and stuff.
But the real answer, don't shoot the messenger.
It's a fact almost all charged criminal defendants, certainly in the federal system, are gilly my turn.
Interesting you said recently, I'm kind of terrifying, which is the media is giving us flashbacks to twenty sixteen. Yeah, you know, I think there's a sort of overarching question of this festival of you know, where do we stand after sort of eight years of Trump is?
And how much is an in root and branch and how do you purge it? And I've asked this question. We had a journalism panel with Jacob Weisberg and Johnny Cobb and Katie Benner, and I just spoke with the Major Garrett about this indictment, and everybody said, you know, guilty is charge of journalism back then for giving Trump so much airtime as if they were like to calling in too, and then they take the call kind of
as if you know, he's this. I think there was a sense of which he was always a kind of attention gathering buffoon, but the joke was sort of on us, right. So when I hear you say you're getting flashbacks, that suggests to me that those grievous and consequential errors are being replicated.
Is that how you see it.
One of the things that I wrote in that piece, which I think is is really as i've you know, sometimes I write something and I'll look back and I'll be like, oh.
That was not no. I usually I think, oh that was stupid, that's not right, but or it'll haunt me.
But this I actually think was right, which was I said that Trump was treated as a joke and Hillary was treated as a peto complay. She was sort of going to be it, and he was really like a Joe candidate. So if you covered him, the stakes were low because he had a twenty percent chance of winning. Right after he won and we were grappling with how to cover an autocrat that was a different story. There is some feeling now, right Biden is he won once
against Trump. I mean, what's so interesting about being a writer and being on the opinion side is that I see these anxieties boil up. And sometimes they are the anxieties of straight journalists and politics editors, and.
Sometimes they are the fantasies.
Right And last night at this talk that I was at, Chris Hayes said, he said something brilliant.
He said.
The age issue is a great issue if you don't know anything, right, Like political journalists love it because it's meaningless. Right, you can say he's old, and you have to say, yes, he's old, and the other guy says yes, still right, and Trump is three years younger than Biden. Like fundamentally,
you know, it's just so meaningless. But the child tax credit and the nuances of legislation, something that Trump has never been guilty of legislating, is more substantive and harder to write about, which is true.
What you're seeing the flashbacks of Twoentown sixteen are not the sort of slavish attention to Trump, but the simplicity of storyline narratives.
Yeah, I mean, it's just and it's also just this sort of way that the media. And again I don't want to blame the media, because the media is super important and we're part of it, right, like the idea people, right when they call out the mainstream media and they're
in it, it's very annoying. So I would say, I think the thing that I worry about is that there seems to be stories kind of come from groupthink and sort of go around and sometimes they influence real like sometimes they're meaningless and they go away, right like you know, but they influence voting and sometimes they actually create themselves into being. And I think of like the Hillary email story, right, like she was sloppy with her emails?
Is she a criminal mastermind? Now? Was she treated like she was a criminal mastermind?
Well, there was a question, and that's for example, like the Hunter Biden gun charge, right like he didn't dispose of the weapon like a federal gun charge. Okay, now we go to your question. How usual is what Hunter Biden was charged with?
The choices are a very unusual, be non existent, and I can go in with b in this. You do have to understand DOJ policies because that crimes on the books. Right, they'll occasionally have recourse to it. But those occasions are because of an X factor, right for example the president. Well, no, that's that's the Y factor here, the Z factor, the B factor. But no, it's like the guy who lied on the form used the gun to commit another crust.
The guy who lied on the form was a straw purchaser.
The guy we happened to know is responsible for twenty never though, just a free standing charge literally, and I've really plumbed the depths. I can't find a single case. And you know, as you say, it's not simply didn't have eleven days unloaded in the in the dumpster.
He throws it out, the girlfriend throws it out, and then they call the FBI.
They wouldn't have even known about it exactly.
So I'm calm and I've written you know this.
He he was charged with his offense as being the you know it was his last name, So.
That would you john question.
I just want to transmnd my gratitude because, like many.
Question, here we go the book.
I remember almost every scenario in the frame.
This is great. Oh good, So talking about my mother.
It was so exciting.
But I mean I just things I.
Like more than talking about So I'm going to ask you about polling. No, so, oh yeah, you're my life is talking about my mother sexual I mean.
I literally found the book on the third floor.
All right, well let's talk about pulling. I feel like we could talk about pulling. Here's my I love this.
Yeah, I know. I just will you please from yes.
Gratitude for her elevation until fifteen year old boy?
Yes?
All right, really, I can't wait to have that conversation with her.
I'm counting to a Sidebard, Yes, I forged it.
Okay, pulling, so I this vexing question of finance, fine stewardship of the economy and all these things. But besides that, compared to what and the Autocrat ninety one count criminal I think you've written and I think thought quite a lot about yes, And I think there's.
A sense in which the sour.
Mood of the nation, I think of Groucho Marx and horse feathers and whatever it is. I'm against it and whenever, So when you say Biden, you're gonna get trapped, you know you're gonna wind up with a tie, but it doesn't really augur a tie electorate. And yeah, because of polling and the mood of the electric today.
Thoughts okay, so national polling is bullshit and it's.
Mental national national.
Am I allowed to curse you because I don't think.
Of a word we haven't said on but I can't.
National polling is bullshed.
We don't elect with a popular vote number one, number two. National pulling in twenty fifteen one polls were more accurate because we had more landlines, had Hillary Clinton at a ninety three percent chance of winning the presidency.
So remember that day seven.
Oh no, I still from looking at that needle. So number one, that is just a meaning syndicator. I think polls are you look at polls for trajectories. You look at obviously if somebody drops in polls, you know, in a in a sort of stratospheric way that you look at that. But I think that we've seen really again and again that polls tend to underrepresent, underrepresent really the truth. And I think of the Lauren Beaupert Adam Fresh runoff
that you know that was a congressional seat. We had him on on my podcast in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two before the midterm election, and everyone said, you're crazy.
He lost by five hundred votes. That matter. You know, a producer has real PTSD when he's like five hundred. But the money.
If he hadn't had those bad polls, he would have raised more money and he would have won by seven hundred, five hundred votes whatever.
So he polland what you said, what I'm saying.
Than Paul, there you go, all right, getting.
Ahead of contact. Such a pleasure.
What it is?
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.