CNN's Jeffrey Toobin Is Not Just a Talking Head

his Patty Hurst book. But first I want to ask him about a theme that runs through his work, namely that he seems to like pissing people off. Fox Studios was going to make a Patty Hurst movie with Tuban

until Hurst called the book a hit job. Supreme Court justices felt betrayed by the clerks he coaxed into interviews for his ex is a The Nine, and when he wrote a book about his first job, prosecuting Oliver North, his mentor Iran Contry Independent Council Lawrence Walsh threatened to prefer to to be prosecuted himself if he released the book, in which Walsh claimed he disclosed strategies and secrets of

the ongoing investigation. You know, there are people who are friends of mine who have said, you were a punk kid twenty nine years old, What the hell do you have to write a book right away? And and you know, I, I can certainly understand that criticism. That's a that's a sort of matter of taste rather of legality. But I think in terms of like legally certainly had every right to do. In fact, I had to go to court to get a judgment that it was legal for me

to do it, which I did. But you know, people who thought it was distasteful. I can certainly understand that. The nine another book he wrote about the court. What prompted you to write that book? I decided to write a novel and it was like a legal thriller, and it's about a TV anchor who gets killed on the air, and it was sort like combining my two worlds, the legal world in the TV world. And I wrote three chapters.

And my agents said, you know, there's a famous editor, Phillis Grant, who wants to who thinks it's a great idea, wants to read your novels. You send her the chapters. So I center the chapters and Phillis invited me to her house, gave me a diet coke and said, Jeff, your novel is terrible. Your novel, it's like it's never gonna be good. You should drop it, and instead you should write a book about the Supreme Court. Because you've

written profiles of justices. There hadn't been a real behind the scenes book about the Supreme Court since Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong's The Brethren and the Seventies. I mean, the subject was just waiting to be exploited. And it's still my most successful book, still taught in all sorts of school and the nine and it was a great idea which was not my think. Ginsburg should be able to hanging there. Um, you know, I just saw her

the other day. I mean, she is so stooped over. Uh. You know, Ruth Ginsburg is about five foot tall, eighty pounds and tough as any NFL linebacker. And she's gonna fighting claw. She's certainly got all her marbles. She's doing her job as well as she can. She's going to try to hang in there, but we'll see. You know, she's eighty four. Eighty four is not the new anything.

Eighty four eighty four. I worked with people for the American Way Norman Leaders organization, a lot of judicial watching going on there and just stressing the people over and over and over again that the court matters most in a way, And and Republicans have recognized that more than Democrats.

And and you know, the fact that the majority leader was able to stop uh Barack Obama from filling that seat with Merrick Garland, and the fact that that was certainly taken for granted and the Democrats sort of put up with it, was indicative of the fact that they were a Publicans care as scared so much. You grew up in a household of two very accomplished, smart people. You're an only child. I am, well, you know, in the typical American way, I have a complicated family. I

have a much older half sister. What I was raised as an only child. Yeah, and she grew up where Philadelphia, how much older than he was shaved your child in New York, very much so so she was she wasn't around so growing up in your house. So obviously your father is very accomplished, your mother is very accomplished. Your mother Marley and Sanders, who was a big pioneer and broadcast news. Were you kind of like a latchkey kid? I felt like I had a great degree of independence.

I remember visiting my friends in the suburbs, thinking, oh my god, this is horrible waiting around for your mom to drive you around somewhere. I mean, you know, I think I started walking to school when I was like seven or eight, earlier than kids do it. Now, we're gonna have guys on like a security detail to tape my kids to school, who are like X Boomberg security people and cops with guns driving my kids to school. It's because you have so many enemies. It's a different

but the the uh, who would you say? Would you say? It was equivalent? Which one of them is responsible for your great academic success? She did very well in school in law school, I did. But one of the lessons I learned, and again one of the things I don't think you learn until you have kids of your own is sort of what your parents were like, and the way my parents acted equally as supervisors, as educators, as

people who love me. I mean, I really felt like my parents were equals in ways that I didn't realize that the time were so extraordinary. You know, my mother used to tell a funny story that when I was in first grade, for whatever reason, someday I went home with another kid at lunch and I came home and I was talking about my day. I said, mommy' not gonna believe this. His mother was home in the middle

of the day. Why wasn't she at work? And that to me was like was was a revelation, because you know, I had I had a mother who worked. Now also, you know, they were hardly wealthy, but they had enough money to have full time help. So we were cushioned in that respect. But you know, my dad was an extraordinary intellect. I mean, he was largely self taught from he was from Philadelphia, and he really grew up in

the classical music business. Wound up running the Symphony of the Year, which was Stokowsky's last orchestra, which failed under my father's leadership. It was the days before government subsidies of the arts, and and it was it was a heart wrenching experience, fortunately before I was conscious. And and he then went on to a career in public television where he's really one of the founding fathers. But his love of music was really the great passion of his life.

In the one disappointment I think that I was to my parents is that I have utterly no talent in music and not even that much interest in it, which is really no know if you don't know, I did, I took I did take piano lessons, and I was perhaps the worst piano student in American history. I used to have a kitchen timer that like, I had to practice fifteen minutes a night. My most vivid memory of playing the piano was pushing the timer forward so it would end faster. I just was. I just hated it.

And musical tastes, you know, I mean I I like the music of my youth, and you know I still love Elvis Costello and but but classical music I don't really know much about. And my dad could identify any piece immediately, opera, anything, and that. Um, for some reason, that was the one sort of intellectual piece of DNA that completely skipped me. Now to jump to the Patty Hurst project, which is based on your book, eRASS was this a pitch from you? Did you say to CNN,

let's make my book into a documentary series. Um, it was sort of their idea. How involved were you mean, do they show you cuts? And they show you They showed me cuts. But the most important involvement was early on when I shared with them all my notes, the still photographs that I had, the links to video that I had, UM most importantly really the phone numbers of the people whom I interviewed so they could contact them directly.

You interviewed Bill Harris, Emily Bill. That's that's a that's a whole, that's a story on We're going to talk about that. The first thing I say to myself is that Bill Harris is as joyful and unrepentant as can possibly be about what he did. Is that a mistake? That is um that that is not not a mistake at all? And and was he repented in other ways that were left out? Or what you see is what you saw? What you saw is what you get. I mean, I spent a tremendous time amount of time with Bill Harris.

Um I um the and I admit tremendous ambivalence about Bill because he did really horrible things. He kidnapped Patty Hurst, which is an unspeakably wrong act. He was a UM you know, he tried to set off bombs. Fortunately he was incompetent, and he never managed to hurt anybody with his bombs. He helped rob Banks. I mean this, I have absolutely no tolerance for, no respect for it, no indulgence for but there is he did it for perversely decent reasons. He was never in it to make money.

He was never in it for um, you know, any sort of personal gain. This was a twisted kind of altruism that was behind the whole s l a that they were not to freeze as well. They were twisted and wrong. But you know, in my line of work, I dealt with a lot of criminals. I've been thinking about O. J. Simpson lately with this horrible interview. That's I mean, that is a true sociopath. Bill Harris is

not a sociopath. He is a deeply, deeply mis guided person, but there is something about him that is not entirely evil. And the reason why I guess I had perhaps more tolerance for Bill than I should is that I got into the seventies as a subject, and and you know, I was alive in the seventies, but I was a kid, and the degree to which the country was really falling apart in the seventies was something I did not remember or recognize. I mean, the statistic that that haunts me

because it's just so amazing. In the early and mid nineties seventies, there were two thousand political bombings a year in the United States. Consider what it's like now when we have one political bombing, and and the fact that the country was convulsed in this way. It wasn't just Bill and Emily Harris and the s l A setting

off bombs. It was the weather underground, and you had Watergate, and you had the energy crisis, and and then and then you had the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, which I had never even heard of, where these African Americans were just killing random white people on the street. And then you have Jim Jones, you know, the People's Temple

where nine people committed suicide. I mean, it's just those convulsions Bill and Emily Harris look less aberrational when you see what was going on in the country at the time. You know, you can't help but come out of this thing with a real concern about what a fraud Patty

Hurst was. I mean, one of the most harrowing moments is and I think you're narrating at the point when they say she's in the room and the FBI guys come in to take her out of that room, and rather than rushing into their arms and saying thank God you're here, they cover and she could do in the salute. And and when when when they come in the door,

she's heading to the bedroom where the guns are. And and you know the reason why I think the Patty Hurst case still compels people so much is so interesting to people. It is because it's a mystery about what goes on in a person's head. And the arguments about whether Patty Hurst was simply coerced to do all that she did or that she actually joined the s l A is a rich, complicated subject, and I don't pretend that it's an easy question to answer. She claims that

she was she was coerced by them. When she makes that claim as a defense, I'm sure she opens herself up in California law to have detailed forensic psychiatric examinations correct well. In fact, her trial was very much the battle of experts. There were six psychiatrists to examine her, three from the prosecution, three from the defense, sure, and and and they all testified and and frankly it was

not a great moment for the psychiatric profession. It was a lot of gobbledygook that sort of canceled each other out. But what really moved the jury was her behavior during the year and a half she was on the road, on the run with the s l A. And and you know, I never missed, I never minimized, you know, the terror of her kidnapping and the fact that she had sex in a closet, which you know the s

l A said was consensual. But I don't believe people who are you know, who who are you know, kidnapped in a closet, are capable of consent in the way

that we understand it today. But when you look at her behavior over that year and a half, three bank robberies, including one where a woman was killed, as you mentioned, Rna hoppsle Uh where she shot up a street in Los Angeles, and male sporting goods, which to me is the defining event of her period as a kidnapper, where she tried to set off bombs under police cars in San Francisco, When when she was by herself for long periods of time where she could have made made no

attempt to escape. When you add all that up, I think, you know, the the the only verdict I could come to is that she did, actually she did go over what was in her past, what was in her youth? Did she hate? You know not? You know, the interesting thing about Patty's youth, first of all, was how young she was. She was only when she was kidnapped. Uh. But you know, even though she came from a very wealthy family, it was very typical of the era. You know,

she piste off from mother. Her mother was a Catholic southern Southerner, you know, very concerned about appearances and propriety and and you know, Patty like boys, and she moved in with her boyfriend, which horrified her mother. But I mean, these were the kind of conflicts that were utterly routine. You know, she was not a particularly political person. She you know, she had worked as a clerk under you know, without people knowing where she was for a few months.

She got a sense of a little bit of how the other half lived. But this was not a budding political activist. This was not a huge rebel. You know, there were signs that she was somewhat more rebellious than most kids. You know, she she uh, she she was very tough on the nuns, and she kept getting thrown out of Catholic schools. But I mean this is very minor stuff by the standards of the of the era. So the idea that she was some sort of radical in embryo, they really just wasn't much proof for that.

Is it assumed that the Freeze and his organization, everything they did, they were super effective in this brainwashing. You know, to know the s l A is to know they weren't super effective at anything. I mean, they were not competent. They didn't have a plan to brainwash her. You know, quite no one thought she was actually going to join up with them. They basically wanted to get rid of

her after a certain period of time. But but I think the best way to describe her her behavior is that, you know, she sort of adapted to her surroundings and and you know she she had a thing for authority figures. When you think about you know, her boyfriends and lovers over this period, Uh, Steve Weed, her fiance had been a math to chure in her high school, an authority figure.

Steve Um. Uh, Well, that's that's that's that becomes her husband Um, and he's not just a copies her bodyguard UM and the two boyfriends she had while she was with the s l A. The first one was Willie Wolfe, was sort of her bodyguard within the s l A. And then later in in her period where she acknowledges she has a consensual relationship with Steve Salia, another who was sort of a protector within what became the later s l A. And then of course, her lawyers hire

a bodyguard for her when she's out on bail and off duty cop UM named Bernie Shaw, and they they fall in love and they have a long and successful marriage. So she had a thing for sort of authority figures, and she adapted to her surroundings with them. And that's sort of the best way I can characterize, at least her relationship with Matt legal expert Jeffrey Tuban. Another smart kid who turned into a journalistic superstar is George Stephanopoulos.

But when he left the White House where he was domestic policy adviser to President Clinton, he wasn't sure where he'd land. I knew I didn't want to be someone who just hung around Washington trading off of what he had done forever, and I knew that in order to feel my age again, I had to start a different career. The rest of that interview is that here's the Thing, Dot Org coming up, Tuban and I go deep on o J. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to

Here's the Thing. New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Tuban wrote the definitive book on o J. The thing about o J that was so rich and it was so complicated was that Johnny Cock and who again a complicated person, but someone basically I just loved, understood the context of the story and understood what it meant to blame white cops in Los Angeles and how there were so many justifiable reasons to be for black people to be pissed at the at the l a p D.

And he took that history and put it to use in favor of the least deserving person in America. And and so you had this crazy juxtaposition of Cochrane pointing out all these injustices and and then you know, like Manna from Heaven, Mark Ferman appears, who is the personification of all that's wrong with the l a p D. And he puts it to work for the benefit of of O. J. Simpson, who is basically just a wealthy wife beater, that's all he is. This was a domestic

violence homicide. Happens all the time in the United States. He's just spoiled, Brad. It was a was spoiled, you know. I mean when he was at Galile High School in San Francisco, he was a football prodigy. He goes to USC, superstar at at USC, the first you know, Heisman Trophy winner, first pick in the draft, and and you know, he led this gilded life, insulated not just from the the

broader African American struggle. Yes, the perfect setup for someone who who had this sense of entitlement um that led him to have expectations about his wife that when they were not met, he beat the hell out. What do you think happened? I mean, I mean I hate to ask you specifics like this, Like you watched the program,

you know, the one based on your book. You know, you watch this program in five episodes, go by seven and a half hours, and you're still stopping you and I want to get you in a room and I want to go do you still think O J. Did it so all the all the DNA evidence, the DNA of is it? That's it. It's not just the DNA evidence. I mean, you know, there are some glove planted. The glove wasn't planeted, the the the there are one set

of bloody footprints walking away from the crime scene. They are size of Levin Bruno Molly shoes that O J owned. I mean, what more do you need to know? And again, you know, people talk about this case as if you know, he it's inexplicable, why would he do this? He was a domestic violence perpetrator. These is this is how these stories escalate. This was not a random crime. This was

a domestic violence homicide. And and that I think, I mean, you know, the whole me Too movement I think, you know, has illuminated just how per I mean, obviously that's a somewhat separate subject, but it just shows, you know, how people could discount the domestic violence aspect of the story when it's the core of the story. I mean, it's why this murder took place, and poor Ronald Goldman sort

of stumbled on the scene. You know. One of the dirty little secrets of of particularly homicide investigations, is that in the vast, vast majority of the time, it's completely obvious who the perpetrator is. I mean, you know, there a lot a lot of homicides are what people called disputes. And I did a story in Milwaukee about the prosecutor's office there and it said, of the crime victims, of the murder victims in um Milwaukee have criminal records their

disputes between criminals. And it's like it's pretty easy to tell, you know, who killed whom and why. When you have cases where you have an aggressive defense, where you have cases where people are going to challenge the evidence. The cops aren't used to that, and um, you know that when you had a genius like Barry Shack challenging the DNA evidence and and talking about the possibility of planning, was the blanket over the bodies? Yeah, I mean it was just this stuff. Was the Asian guy. It was

just a criminalist. I mean, you know who was just you know, supposed to be collecting the evidence. And you know, because most most cases ending guilty. Please, that's sort of and the vast majority of cases don't have lawyers the caliber of Barry Check. None of that behavior has ever challenged, but it was and there you see, did she do everything she could have done to protect herself? Did she really really do what a lot of women do and

they just knuckle under and hope things get better? Well, no, I mean she left, she divorced him, She called the police eight times at least, I mean, you know this, she did more than a lot of women do under under these circumstances. And also remember you know when she called the police, she knew that the police socialized with OJ, that they went, and that they were as star struck as anybody else by o J. So where was she supposed to turn if the police were essentially on o

J side? So I have a lot of sympathy for Nicole on that front. Do you think of that a team of Coquine and Check and Shapiro, uh and Bailey, did any of them voice any serious regrets about the outcome of the trial? I mean Shapiro kind of boycotting the festivities afterward and kind of backtracking on certain things in the race card. And I actually have a lot of contempt for how Robert Shapiro handled the whole thing,

because Shapiro wanted everything both ways. He wanted to be a good lawyer for his client, but he wanted his palace in West l A To still like him. And they all, they all saw how bad, you know, how poisonous the trial had become. So he wanted to help o J. But he wanted to dissociate himself with the defense. I think that's crap. I think he shouldn't have done that, Efflee Bailey, because he's a nut. I think so Ja's innocent, like has a whole crazy theory about how I don't know,

I know, I think he actually believes it. I mean, he um Johnny, and Johnny was like, I did my job, I blame the cops. I always blame the cops in my case, and you come and take me happy with the result. Barry Scheck believes with all his heart that the evidence was planted. What he ultimately thinks about o J's guilt or innocence, I'm not sure. Well we you know, I said, I mean, I know one loved Barry Scheck.

I haven't gone there with him, but he believed with all his heart that the evidence was planted, and he thought that alone justified an acquittal. I don't think the evidence was planted. I didn't think there was a justified acquittal. So there were different attitudes on the part of the defense. When you look back on Clark and Darten, Uh in retrospect, I'm wondering, there's a real distance from all this, uh, you know, develop your perspective at all, or people's perspectives

about it. Do you look back and think beyond is firm in the pivotal moment. I think the case when they put him on the stand, well, I mean it's not so much they blow the case when they put him on the stand, because the defense would have put him on the stand. I mean, Ferman was the cancer at the heart of the case. And they couldn't not they couldn't read them out, read them out of the case because you know, he did discover the glove at OJ's residence. I mean it was not he. They couldn't

pretend that he had no role in the case. You know, when you look at you know, a four month trial where the jury deliberates for half a day, there was no one turning point. I mean, obviously Chris Dartin shouldn't have told him to put on the glove. But the case was lost in a million ways, and it was

probably lost in jury selection. So, I mean one of the things I like about going back to stories that, um, you know, we're twenty years old or even forty years old, like Patty Hurst, is that people have sort of a tragic sense about them and I don't I mean tragic in the Greek sense of it was all preordained. We think we can control events, but events control us. You know, we're so engaged in being angry at the time, and why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?

When you go back twenty years or forty years, people are I think more philosophical about about these subjects, at least I am, and I enjoy that kind of that kind of work. Do you have more editorial freedom, would you say writing books around the New Yorker books? Um, the the difference, Well, the New Yorker is and it's one of the reasons I love it. But it is a very intensively edited magazine. I mean, you know, starting with David Remnick, but also the senior editors who who

you know deal with you day to day. I mean they are they are tough and fastidious, and they tell you to go rewrite, and they tell you to do more reporting and um, there is a um and I mean this in a good way, but there is a formula of sorts. I mean there is a rigor that is imposed on New Yorker stories that at least I feel kind of constrains my voice. I and and and New Yorker story. You know, the New Yorker stories, you know, off and have a point of view, but mostly they

are laying out facts. I feel like when I write a book, when I go to the trouble of writing a book, I owe it to the reader sort of laying out where I stand. And like, for example, I wrote a number of pieces about O. J. Simpson in The New Yorker at the time, but I never said, you know, do I think he's guilty, because that just wouldn't have fit within the truth. I am a bit of a New Yorker story in my book. I think I said it on the third page that you know,

it's absolutely positively guilty. And I think, you know, when I wrote a book about impeachment, I I said I thought the impeachment of Bill Clinton was a disgrace. Uh, you know, written two books in the Supreme Court which have less clear there's not sort of guilty innocent dialectic in them. They are, you know, more broadly narrative. But I feel a greater freedom to give my opinion in a book than I do in a New Yorker story. What would you say from people who aren't that familiar

with to go to Clinton now? To jump to Clinton now? A big is all these stories of something in common where someone does something and some big, big ticket litigation ensues, and that litigation is complicated by the fact that the person is no altar board. They've done O J killed his wife. But as Juror number ten says, we're gonna We're gonna settle the score for Rod Mcking. I want to say this carefully. I mean, I know Clinton. I'm friends with Clinton. However friendly you can be with the

former president the United States. Uh, And yet you know, you wonder beyond his libido and his appetites and things that got him in trouble, the people that wanted to bring him down politically, they hated him for what. Well, you know, it's funny. I think it returns to what

we were talking about earlier, the sixties and seventies. I think they thought Bill Clinton was the embodiment of the changes in society from the sixties and seventies, that these people didn't like sexual liberation, less uh scrupulous morality, the rise of women. I think, you know, the hatred of Hillary Clinton, which of course we saw come to fruition

in two thousand and sixteen. You know, that was a big part of why they hated Clinton, to the famous moment where she says, well, I could just stay at home and bake cookies. Um, they hated Cloton for that. They hated Hillary, they hated Bill and I think the the the hostility to Clinton that that that led to impeachment was much less based in any sort of policy matter.

I mean, Clinton's policies were hardly very radical. It was that Clinton was the embodiment of sort of the worst side of the baby boom in their view, that that the self indulgent, uh morally right. You know, dodged the draft,

most of his critics stoffs the draft two but that's okay. Um, all of that I think was why they hated Clinton much more than any sort of you know, police I knew everything that was wrong with Hillary Clinton, or I was familiar with the complaints about hill to be Clinton in where there was some strand of validity of that. But uh, you know, I and when I look back on it now, it's like the slow motions, like the

Titanic kidding the Iceberg. It never occurred to me that Donald Trump could become president of the United States, and he has been exactly what his critics claimed he would be as president. I mean, you know, I the thing that that really just I can't get over about the Trump presidency is not so much that he's conservative politically, and he puts someone very conservative on the Supreme Court, even though who knows what his actual politics really are.

I mean, the idea that Donald Trump is like somehow opposed to abortion is kind of comical, right, But but I mean, he has he has made his political alliance with the most conservative part of the Republican Party. And the thing that just kills me every time he does it is when he tweets or says, you know, why isn't Hillary Clinton being prosecuted? Why why aren't the FBI

agents being pro secuited. The idea that you can call for the imprisonment of your political rivals is precisely what happens in authoritarian countries, and his obvious affection for authoritarians like Putin, like Urdawan in Turkey. I mean, this is something I never thought would happen in the United States. I knew we'd have conservative president George W. Bush was was conservative, and I you know, I thought the Iraq War was a disaster. I thought the economy collapsed under him.

But I mean these were sort of within the normal range of American politics. The casual racism, the bigotry. You know, it's like Maxine Waters, the African American congressman from congressman from from Los Angeles, and he he says, you know, you know, she's very she's very low i Q. She's very low IQ. I mean, the idea that the president of the United States talks that way. How do we deal with that going forward? You know, do we you know,

the one line we you know, normalize it? I mean, when do we stop pointing out the racism, the ignorance, the the intolerance of the authoritarian tendant season I don't know. I mean I really don't know. And some people think, well, you should just ignore the tweets. How you can ignore the tweets. I mean, he's completely guilt guiltless either way. Uh, do you think we're going to see something from Mueller soon.

You know, the crucial question that of the Muller investigation, which has not been which which I don't know the answer to, is we now know there was this enormously elaborate Russian effort to get Donald Trump elected president. There was this extreme solicitude for Russia reflected throughout the Trump campaign and his campaign chairman um for a while Paul Mantiford was like literally in hock to Vladimir Putin's allies. What we have not seen clearly is the the joining

of those two, the the collusion as it were. I mean, there there are examples. There's the meeting in June of in sixteen and Trump Tower. There is Roger Stone talking about Wiki leaks uh in advance of those releases. But but the the clear proof of Trump's involvement with Russia's or Russia's effort to help him has not yet been made. And and that's what I'm waiting to see whether Mueller can do. Is this your next book? Yes? Yes, it

is like your pieces in the New Yorker. Now, yes, I I'm going to do a book about this investigation, and and and and you know I'm not in a hurry. This is not going to be over very soon, and you know, not least because no one from Mueller's office will talk to me while this is going on. I'm going to just wait and it's going to go through. Most of two is going to be a movie too. It looks like we're gonna sell the rights. Well, as you well know, just selling the rights doesn't mean that

it's gonna be a movie. But it looks like we're gonna sell. But what you're gonna need is a really good Trump control with God who knows where I can. It's not me. I'm the worst Trump impersonator. Apparently that's out there. It's incredible, incredible. Well, so you'd say that the through line, if there is a through line, I know your books, what is it? It's it's the law, the drama, the stakes, the importance of legal disputes and their resolution. We were saying, my producers are not before

we started with you. You're like the Steven Spielberg of legal books. I am exactly like Steven Spielberg, exactly the several zeros off everybody else Spielberg. But but but there a big, sprawling themes Clinton O. J. Patty story David Remny, the editor of The New Yorker. When he when he's when he's talking about story ideas, he always says, bring me big dumb ideas, like bring me like what people

really want to know about? Like And I remember I was kicking around story ideas with him once he says, well, what about the Chief Justice of the United States? So, I mean, I think, given how much this story has let our politics has you know, transfixed the country has really called into question the legitimacy of this entire presidential election, why shouldn't I write a book about it? I mean, I really do think of myself fundamentally as a legal journalist.

I mean, you asked me earlier than I did. I think Donald Trump was gonna win. You know, I know people like Ron Brownstein who are brilliant at analyzing polls and analyzing you know, trends and politics. That's not me. But what is the Supreme Court going to do on an issue that I'm that I'm good at and that I understand and that I care about? Um, How will a jury react to certain evidence that interests me that

I feel like I'm is in my Bailey Wick. So I just you know, I'm it's sort of like anchoring on television and news. You know, people have always asked me, you know, not always no one gives. No one really cares that much whether I'm an anchor or not. But you know, do I want to anchor? I really don't want to anchor? And it's like not, It's it's just not something I counting on you not to know I'm not. And also they all get fired for the most part.

It's and so, you know, I feel like I have found my niches in in uh, providing content, and I'm happy with them. I don't need more. One of the things that's emerged from the issues about the election was reflecting back on Obama and what Obama didn't do. When you look back on Obama through this prism of almost you know, a year and a half at least of Trump,

has your opinion of him changed at all? Not really? Um, you know, speaking of books, you could write a whole book exploring the decisions made under the two thousands in the two thousand sixteen election that we're based on the assumption Hillary was going to win anyway. So much of people's behavior was based on the idea that she was

going to win anyway. Obama didn't raise as big a stink as he might have about the Russians, which he knew about, because he thought she was going to win anyway, and the Republicans were not going to help him raise this alarm. You know, Jim call me. Thought she was gonna win anyway, so he blew up the you know, he put that stuff out there the week before the election. They didn't think it mattered, didn't think it mattered. And

how wrong they all were. A sobering thought from legal writer and analyst Jeffrey Tuban, who is as eager to write as I am to read the last chapter of his upcoming book on the Trump presidency. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the Thing