Hello, everyone, Welcome to a special edition of Your Wrong with Molly Hemingway and David Harsani. We thought we would record a little conversation on the Donald Trump indictments that came down yesterday. Yes, Molly, how are you? It looked like you were surprised we were doing this was your idea? I thought we were doing something else. But that's great, let'll do it. Yeah, ye, like I thought she came up with this idea. Anyway, last night, Donald Trump informed us that the Justice Department was going to indict him. I think it was a seven count indictment for for numerous things, but basically for having classified documents in his home. I think for obstructing justice is one, and you know, things related to it. So this is pretty you know. I think because of all the craziness that's gone on over the past seven eight years, we might forget or people might not realize how incredibly in saying this is and how unprecedented it is to have a Justice Department indite not the former just the former president, but the leading candidate for the Republican president, you know, in Republican primaries right now. There's there's no question there that was just the comment, Yeah, I will say so, I've had a few times in my life where I wake up and I forget, just for a moment, what had happened the previous day. So the one I remember most was, you know, September twelfth, two thousand and one, just for the briefest moment, I woke up and I had forgotten what had happened the previous stay, and then it happened, and then I remembered, and it all kind of came flooding back. And this was one of those mornings where I was just woke up and I'm thinking about getting my kid to school, and then I was like, oh yeah, And then there was that thing that happened last night, which, as we learned that they did go ahead and indict Donald Trump. And part of this is genuinely about Donald Trump, right, Like, like I get that this is affecting this man and that this persecution of this man has been going on for some time, or if you look at it the other way, this guy deserves to be in jail for some reason or the other. But just like from the perspective of what this means for our country, it is an incredibly depressing thing. This widespread Democrat plan to put political opponents in jail, which does affect people like Donald Trump, but it also affects pretty low level people. It's horrifying. I mean, it's just a horrific situation, the kind that I always associated with third world countries or the Soviet Union Russia, and not my country, where even if in campaign rhetoric people were like, oh, you ought to be in jail, then they wouldn't actually be put in jail, because we weren't that type of country to handle political disagreements through a weaponized law enforcement agency. So I know we should talk about the specifics of what's going on, but just the big picture, I'm really just really saddened and horrified, and I wish that as much as people hate this one man, that they wouldn't or you hate political opponents, that they wouldn't resort to the imprisonment approach we associate with third world countries. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to look at it. I don't. I'm not that invested in this. As far as Donald Trump goes, I think he does a lot of stupid things. Frankly, I think he could have handled this a lot better. From the beginning, but in the end, it's not only that they're indicting him on something that seems to me not to be the kind of thing that you would want to put a political opponent in jail for it because he was the president, he has these documents. Listen, I don't know what the documents are, so let's just shelve that for a second. But the thing is there's also this massive double standard. I am not against arresting political opponents if they break the law. I'm not against arresting politicians. If they're criminals, they should be arrested. They should be held to the same standard. But you can't have virtually the same case worse probably with Hillary Clinton. Let her go free, probably Joe Biden as well, and then go after Donald Trump. Okay, so this is where I am. I am completely open minded that maybe someone could convince me somehow that the former president having documents somehow violated some law. I'm open minded to that. But before I'm even going to get to the part where I listen to that, you have to explain to me why this, You know, all sorts of things like you have to start with the first living president who almost certainly has documents, like I don't even I don't think anyone's been looking into Jimmy Carter's stuff. And he was so incompetent as a president that who knows, But like start with him and then work your way to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, who has an ongoing paperwork dispute. We know that Joe Biden definitely has classified documents. He's admitted it, and they don't date to his time as president. You know, there's the do you have classified documents as a human, and then there's do you have classified documents as a president, And those are two very different things. And Joe Biden's document scandals go back to when he was in the Senate, when nobody thinks he had a right to hold any of those documents. So go ahead and prosecute the sitting president of the United States. Do it thoroughly, do it, you do it forcefully, And then once you've worked your way through all of those things, then then then I will listen to that this is like actually something very serious, And until that moment, I'm not even listening. And then not even on the paperwork dispute for presidents. You've got as the example, you cited Hillary Clinton, who was never president and who never will be president, orchestrating a whole scheme to run classified documents without detection. And we were told, we were told by the Department of Justice that no reasonable prosecutor, even though they had her dead to bleeping rights, would any way prosecute this. Okay, okay, sure, let's go with that. Then why would you do it with someone who does have the right to have these documents? You know what I mean? Like, she wasn't president, she was Secretary of State. She doesn't have the classification authorities that a president does. So also, when you're done executing and convicting Hillary Clinton then and all the presidents, then maybe I will listen. And then there's also that little issue though, that because the Department of Justice ran the most horrible scheme to falsely claim that Donald Trump was a trader, to try to destroy his life, to put everyone who knew him in prison, to rig multiple elections from twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen to twenty twenty, to never hold people accountable for it. I also am going to have a hard time listening to you about anything like as I think it was. Chuck Grassley said, this week, Department of Justice has no credibility, so we got I'm again open minded to some argument from some reasonable person, not none of which I've heard yet, but we are so far away from that at this point that it's just like anyone looking at this in any sense, like fairly about our political situation and what happens to other people versus this person, it's not even close. Let's just take a step back for a second. I've already noticed the that pundits and some people in the press are already trying to make the case that well, the Hillary things different and to what Trump has done is far worse. And basically their case revolves around the idea that Hillary Clinton a cooperated. Well, she didn't. She built a server specifically to circumvent oversight of government, and that in itself shows that she was a premeditated kind of thing that she was doing. And she had plenty of top secret documents and classified documents that she sent in those emails, and then she had her people like smashing phones and destroying you know, bleach bidding the server whatever or whatever, so she obviously also tried to hide it afterwards, she did not cooperate and call me let her off. Then the second thing we hear now and David French made this argument in the New York Times this morning that it's worse because we cannot prove Hillary's intentions and thus, and that was Comy's excuse for letting your go, which I want to mention is concocted. It is not in the law. It is completely extra legal. It is nothing that we have to live by. And that because Donald Trump is recorded talking about secret documents, because you know, because his intention was to take them. That thus it is much worse. Well the law, none of the laws governing classified documents say anything about intention. It is gross negligence. The very point of the whole law is that you're not supposed to treat documents in the way that Hillary did or Joe Biden did. And I think at least that Donald Trump has a far better excuse than they do, in that he was president when he got hold of these documents. No, he did not probably declassify them and maybe shouldn't have them, but the idea that what he did is any worse than what Joe Biden, like you mentioned, has a document from the seventies that was found in one of his office, they found stuff in his garage they who knows what is at the University of Delaware and his papers were not allowed to see those papers, speaking of lack of transparency. So, in any event, I think the American people and Trump fans have a very strong case to believe that there's a massive double standard in this country and that the government is targeting their people to be punished and letting other people go. And I don't care, you know if, like you can't exactly measure what's worse and what's not. But I do know that Trump was the president and he has you know that he probably has a far better case to make that he has a right to have these documents. Anyway, I don't even know. I'm just ranting now, But I will say this one thing about the incident thing before we move on from that. I remember that when President Obama was in office and Hillary Clinton was being investigated for her mishandling of classified information, he went out there publicly doing what if a Republican does, is called horrible obstruction, requiring impeachment immediately. And he said, I don't think Larry intended to do anything wrong. It was this loud signal to his Justice department, like, why don't you go down the intent path and let's let her get off on intent. And that's precisely what they did. And as you point, it has nothing. Not only did she clearly intend to hide this operation obviously, like that was the whole point. Just the angle of how Barack was intervening is annoying too. Sure, And I listen, I just I don't. I think Comey's a weak man, frankly, and so I think he was either worried about his own job. If I give him the benefit of the doubt, he just did want to deal with this kind of amazing situation of having an indicted candidate running for the presidency who probably who he thought was probably going to be president, who I thought it was going to be president. So you know, that's giving him the benefit of the doubt. But here, of course it is it is you know, it's it's just a targeted assault on this guy. This could be worked out, right, this could be worked out. Oh here's here's what I wanted to say. So another argument they make is, oh, look he is not, you know, just cooperating. He got a lawyer he's fighting who says that you have to cooperate with the government all the time. Why can't he have a lawyer and have a fight over it? That does Think about the insanity. Think about the insanity of this. This man has been targeted for destruction by the Department of Justice. There's no denial about that. Four years people have been running soft coups against him. They invented the Russia collusion hoax. They kept it going for years. They spied on him, they put human agents on him, they surveilled his campaign associates, They tried to put anyone who helped him in jail. They did all sorts of dastardly things. And they're like, and so when we come after him, if he has a lawyer, that means he's not cooperating. What does it even make sense. It's like totally opposed to everything we understand. And also, someone who didn't have a lawyer when dealing with our completely corrupt and evil Department of Justice would be even more of an idiot. Also, one last thing on the Biden documents, or maybe not last thing, but you know, one of the things I keep seeing is that he cooperated immediately. He found it that cooperated immediately, having documents for forty years or eight years is not immediate in any conception of the word. He did not cooperate immediately. I don't believe what he says. I don't have to believe that he just found those documents laying around in every office he had and then cooperated. Why did he have Why there's such a lack of it. Okay, again, though, David's people on his side had to deal with the unfortunate situation that he was blowing up their case against Trump, and they're like, and he cooperated with us. You're all on the same side. You're all working on the same team. It doesn't mean anything. We all know you're going to cover up his crimes and he's going to like help you do that. Who cares if you're I don't know. Just yeah, it's cooperating with your own administration, and even more than your own administration, your own people who are there through other administrations anyway, right, I mean, it's just ridiculous. So just the political dimensions of this. So now I think this helps Donald Trump in the sense that people are reminded of what happened with the Russia gatest Russia collusion stuff, and he is again the victim. I'm unhappy that this will be what people are going to talk about for them, you know, rather than any sort of policy or real debate among Republicans. I saw it DeSantis came. Almost everyone has come out supporting you know who matters, supporting Trump and stuff like that. How do you think this plays out politically? Like, I don't know, No, I mean, i'm I think there's the short term situation which might be different from the long term. And I actually don't mean by that that short term he's going to get a huge bump and long term he won't. It might actually work the other way. I do think. I saw something written by someone who's not an idiot. I forget his name is like a G. Hamilton on Twitter, definitely worth following, but a really remarkably stupid thing he wrote, which was like everyone says that Donald Trump is good at fighting the deep state, but has anyone who fights the deep state been less effective than Donald Trump? And it was like, Okay, let's start. And so the argument was like, well, we can have Donald Trump because he keeps getting persecuted by the deep state, and I think that fails to understand a bunch of different things. Number one who's in his class there that we're judging him by, Like who else has done what he's done, for instance, in foreign policy? I mean, I'm actually asking, is there anyone else that we can point to, like a president who has taken on the military industrial complex in the same way that Trump did? I don't know. I mean, that's really what this is all about. They don't like that he doesn't want to do their wars when they want to do their wars in the manner that they want to do their wars. That has always been what the Russia collusion hoax was about. Why he was supposedly a threat that couldn't be brought into office. And it's particularly bad because not only did he make it in contrary to how they said it would be like nuclear war would break out and the whole world situation would implode, he actually had four years in office where everybody saw that, in fact, the opposite happened, that we were getting out of wars, that we weren't starting new ones. Nuclear war definitely didn't break out. Sorry what we're saying, No, No, I just gonna say, if you remember all the way back to twenty fifteen, when I was you know, vigorously opposing Trump. You know, I never could understand why his opponents would talk about his position on Russia as if it was illegal or seditious to say, let's have peace with Russia, which never made sense to me, first of all, because the biggest appeasers, but you know, in a way that I think was backfired, and you know for US were Biden and Obama. They were appeasers of Russian in a way that even Donald Trump I don't think was any way. I don't really think he appeased Russia that much. He did plenty of things that I think the Russians probably viewed as antagonistic. So but but right away that I think you're right that, you know, his pro putent position, you know, in quotation marks was what lent would drove this anger and would drove the deep state to try to undermine him as much as they could. I think he was a good foreign policy president, not just the Russia thing, but he I mean, I don't know if people remember that in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, when he was saying China is a huge threat and they're an adversary, people were like, what are you talking about? They're our best and most wonderful trading partner. It was considered completely like crazy to say anything about China being bad. And I remember this because I was on TV and would have like people on left and right, and they'd be like, we have no idea what Donald Trump is talking about. And what's really amazing is in just a few short years that conversation is completely changed. A lot of people are recognizing problems by China, whether it's their own domestic problems or the threat they pose on a world stage. But it was a huge threat and it continues to be. We just saw, like, what was it last week when Elon Musk and every other billionaire CEO were over hat in hand in China trying to make sure everything was going to continue on as it had been. So back to this tweet saying like, of all the people who have taken on the regime, Donald Trump is the worst at it. I'm like, Okay, I'm willing to hear that argument. Who's who else are we comparing him too? Because it seems like, whether it's foreign policy or domestic policy, we don't really have a ton of people who've taken on this situation at this level. And I'm mentioning all this because I saw this other thing on Twitter last night where this guy was saying, I have no idea who this person was, but he was like, Yeah, at this point, I think the regime is so corrupt that I'm basically picking who to vote for based on who's been arrested the most, who's been indicted the most, who's been like who do they see as a threat? They signal it really clearly, and they're not thinking anyone else in the Republican field is a threat. And I think you'll see politically this all breakdown based on whether people recognize the dire situation the country is in, and so they want, you know, this type of person. And I'm not saying that it has to be Trump or anything, or whether they're like, gosh, it would be nice if we could go back to like how things were with George W. Bush. So that's like not a big part of the Republican Party, but it's a big part of the Republican Party punditry, and so that will affect the conversation as well. Yeah, but just looking at this neutrally in a way, I I disagree with a lot of foreign policy positions you have, let's say, or whatever, but we disagree on them. We don't view it as some sort of active sedition, which is what people view Donald Trump's, you know, rhetoric on Russia, which is I think again, you're right about all this. So I don't know. I guess that no one has really I was thinking about this question while you were speaking. I guess there is no president that's really taken on the Pentagon in or the Justice Department or any of these huge, really powerful bureaucracies anymore. I've said this, Yeah, you know, some people are going to say JFK did Yeah, I don't know enough about that. I don't think so. I don't think so. But but I will say I mean, occasionally the okay, you know, people will say, you know, people will say Nixon did too. Yeah, but I don't think Nixon did well. They'll say that Nixon was about to kind of reveal some stuff with the JFK assassination, and that's why they took him out. I mean, that's not a One of my favorite things to do is ask people about their favorite conspiracy theories that they think are actually true, and you get hilarious, wonderful responses and I'm just saying I get a lot on when I'm asking high level people like members of Congress or smart historians, and they have a lot of JFK or Nixon conspiracy theories that they think are true. It's all I'm saying. Now, I hear you. I am actually writing a book right now that has something to do with conspiracy theories and the paranoid politics of the left. And I will say that I think that the left is far more prone to believe these sorts of to believing that there are big conspiratorial forces that can make things happen left and right. I think it happens on the right as well, but the left is I think more prone to it. And starting with JFK, I mean a commy killed JFK. Who is anti commy. It's like, makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think you need any conspiracy to explain it, but I know people like it. So where was I? Oh? Yeah, so yeah, can I okay that I wanted to derail it for just a minute. Yeah, yeah, please derail this will take just a moment. I'm not saying I have a well fleshed out conspiracy theory in any way but I would like answers on do you remember the Boston bombers who bombed the marathon and they were known by the FBI, you know, like so many of these people are. But do you remember when they went to arrest an affiliate of one of the bombers and then like the FBI guy got shot and killed instead, you're saying that he was the You're saying he was in part of the I just said, I don't know. No, I do not have a well fleshed I'm just saying I'm just asking questions. Well, no, I'm just it never quite made sense to me, right, I think, Yeah, So, I think quite often there are big government agencies, the FBI, CIA that high things from us. They're not transparent, we don't know what happened. That's not the same as a conspiracy where or there are a bunch of people involved in something that you know is meant to trick the American people to believe something that has happened that hasn't. Wait, I'm always looking for a synonym for conspiracy theory, like there's no other good word for it, because it's not always a conspiracy. Sometimes it's just chicanery or you know Stella Morbido has written beautifully on how the term conspiracy theorist itself is used to disparage people for noticing conspiracies basically, but I do remember that the most negative male I ever got for a TV appearance was when I said something about how I hadn't seen evidence that Jeffrey Epstein hadn't committed suicide, and I got so much mail that was like I thought you were smart, but I guess you're stupid. It was great, Like everyone was like, you have to be an idiot to think that he killed a self. Basically, I know, I don't even wade into that because everyone seems to have really well dark thoughts about that. And my point is like I actually require evidence before believing in a conspiracy theory. But I also think we've seen a lot of conspiracies recently, so go on. Yeah. But but the thing is, I think about the Russia collusion thing, it was a conspiracy. It was it was exposed relatively quickly by a bunch of people, including yourself. We didn't you can have that many people involved in something and not not blow it and not let people know that it happened. That that is not that was not a good conspiracy theory. You know, that was not a good conspiracy. It was not like a tight conspiracy. People believed it because they want to believe it, not because it was plausible or rational or anything like that. I do you think that there's going to be fatigue with all the indictments, with all the outrage, with all the Trump century stuff. Do you think that that matters at all? I have no idea. I mean, I feel the same way. I'm not even a very political person, so I've been like completely exhausted by having to be political these these last many years. I did have a friend send me a meme this morning. It's one that I've seen before, and it's like a picture of Mel Gibson playing the part of like a family guy, and it says me voting for Trump in twenty sixteen, and then it has the blood dripping like, um, you know mel Gibson from Braveheart, and it's like me voting for Trump in twenty twenty four. Like what has happened to so radicalize Americans who care about America? It is just I mean it's like it's we've really we've really gone far. So I've written about sorry I've written about the fight not to be radicalized is a daily fight for me. Every day I am almost radicalized, and I am radicalizing, but to a different to a more like I want to be an anarchist, I think, more than like the fascist kind of radicalization. For me, it's obviously I'm like, I've already been like a pretty big churchgoer. But this morning I told Mark that I just needed to go to church. And we had church this morning for our children's school, and so I just went. And I was so glad I went. I mean, just to be able to hear God's word and not be focused on politics. Was it was and all the other beautiful things that happened with church. It was a wonderful, wonderful gift. I'll become a writer and talk about ideas and debate ideas and philosophy, and no, you won't. You're gonna be talking about Donald Trump every day. Well, like I was also, I was talking with Mark about it. I'm like, I'm not naive. I know that we've gone through bad things in our country's past before. You know, people always say, oh, the sixties were crazy. Everybody was getting assassinated, and it's like, yeah, but and it really really was horrible, but kind of like man manageable. That sounds horrible, and then you think about like we enslaved humans for a long period of time, and it's like, yeah, we got through that. The way we got through that was through the bloodiest war of our history and massive destruction. Like I don't want to go through that. I want people to stop. Oh sorry, this goes back to the people have fatigue. What I have fatigue about. And I say this as someone who never like, you know, going back to the eighties, I was not a huge Donald Trump fan. My fatigue is with the left. I am so exhausted that they will literally destroy the country rather than accept political elections. And knowing that they won't stop until they kill him, doesn't it means that like, even if he's not the nominee, they're not going to stop. They want him dead. They want people who voted for him dead. And so I'm not naive. I understand that you don't get out of this. It's kind of like what I was saying, there's that contingent of the Republican Party who's like, what, wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to invading small countries and keeping everybody happy. I just know it's not going to ever go back so long as people who vote for trum exist, Well, they jump the gun a little bit with the de Santis is worse than Trump stuff. You know that they started with the ad. They should have waited for this indictment and come back to it later. You know. The thing is, I think they're creating new norms for themselves that like, I'll give you an example. I was talking about that David French column. He has something and they're called the Komei rule. Like that's a real thing now that we have to abide by. So they create these new norms and they're going to use them onto Santis or Mike Lee or whoever in the future is going. It's not just Trump, they're just Trump is an easy target because he's easy too. Yeah, do you feel you're paid enough to be forced to read a David French column? Because I don't think you are listen, it is all I'm saying. I try my I think it's a problem that we're so siloed in a way. And I don't mean us personally, I just think society. Like sometimes I'm like I haven't even read like a left wing columnist all week, Like I don't know what are they even saying about this? And I try to go out there and I try to read these pieces, and I think David and struggles to keep being a nominally conservative ideologically, and he does this by triangulating every column to try to sort of cut between, you know, to sound conservative but yet make the liberal case. And that's what he's doing. Did today I think I saw that Gavin Newsom made a little bit of a firestorm by saying that he watches Fox News obsessively and his I think he's going to be on he is, and he is saying that his staff are always like, why are you watching that? I'm like that, dude is very smart and other people should likewise. So he's watching Fox News so he can understand how to position his arguments to win over non leftist voters. Right. The problem with people on the right who quote unquote watch CNN or NBC or read New York Times and Watchington Posts. They're not doing it to like figure out how the left thinks. They're doing it, because they actually want to be liked by those people, and they should follow the Gavin newsom approa coach of read read what your political opponents are reading for the purpose of fine tuning your arguments. It's getting a little difficult in a way. And this is not about David French so much as other more like full time, long time leftist columnists. They don't make arguments anymore. It's constantly just saying that these people are bigots, these people are fascists, they want to just take away your right to vote. There's no real argument there, there's nothing. It's like how long have you been beating your wife kind of thing. I don't know how to even say, oh, I'm not a fascist. Once you even own it in that way, it becomes ridiculous. So I don't know, but I do feel like the siloing effect of social media is not good for the country. And we're just on two different tracks, arguing about different things, looking at things differently. Obviously, I think I am right about these these issues, but it is problematic. Okay, I think we need to wrap it up. But I just want to say I misspoke earlier about the you know, I'm just asking questions about the Boston momb earth thing. It wasn't that an FBI agent got shot is that an FBI agent went to interrogate an associate, but somehow I ended up shooting and killing that person. And I just I've literally no idea about who that person was or who the FBI agent was, but always felt like we kind of like moved quickly past that storyline without figuring out what was going on. Yeah, I don't. I don't remember that. I was trying to think of any conspiracy theory I believe, and I think, are you the person who says we're allowed one or something like that? I just liked, if if there was one that you thought might be true, what is it? That's what I like to ask. I don't know, Okay, work on it. I don't. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about it later, and we will talk later. I want to Tilban. He loves a freedom of entrance, flattention.