Welcome to Plaidsave America, I'm John Favreau. I'm Unindicted Co-conspirator John Lovitt. Nice, I'm Tommy D. Thor. We have a bonus episode for you because Donald Trump has been indicted yet again.
And this is the big one. He has been charged with four counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. This is all related to his plot to overturn the 2020 election that began shortly after the election and went right through to January 6 when there was an attack on the Capitol. There were six unindicted co-conspirators in this indictment from Jack Smith. They have been identified by various reporters as co-conspirator number one, Rudy Giuliani.
Number two is John Eastman, number three is Sidney Powell, number four is Jeff Clark. He was the Department of Justice official that Donald Trump made acting Attorney General after bar left. You've last seen him being outside of his home while his search arm was being conducted and he was in his boxers. Correct. Number five is Kenneth Cheesebrow.
Great name. Great name. He's bringing that character back from the January 6 area. And then co-conspirator, an unindicted co-conspirator number six is an advisor to Trump that has not been identified yet. It's a mystery.
Mystery. Some people think maybe it's Bannon. Some people think maybe it's Boris Epstein. I've seen some Jimi Thomas rumors. I've got that one.
I know it's too good to be true. I can't have a picture of the hamburger. That's what I've got. John must have faces. It works.
So the judge that Trump will appear before on this Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern is Judge Tanya Chukin. She is an Obama appointee. She is one of the toughest sentences of the January 6 riders. She has previously rebuked Trump in a case where she decided that his records need to be turned over.
She delivered the line, President Sir Knott Kings and the plaintiff is not president. So lucky draw for him. And after the grand jury handed back the indictment, Jack Smith, special counsel Jack Smith gave a brief statement as is his usual. What it usually does, just a man of few words, here's a clip from his brief statement today. Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day.
This case is brought consistent with that commitment. And our investigation of other individuals continues. Alright, so we have a 45 page indictment that we have all combed through. Got our highlighters here. You guys have some initial reactions to this and I want to just dive into some of the highlights or lowlights, if you will.
Yeah, I mean, so we're just noting on balance, we knew a lot of this thanks to the January 6 hearings. There's not a ton of new sort of explosive facts. We'll do a few of them and we'll get to those. But the thrust of this, we already knew the fact that he was charged with them as the biggest newest item. Yeah, I think there's a lot of detail.
There's a lot more detail than we've had before about the machinations inside of the conspiracy between Trump and these lawyers and these campaign officials and a level of detail and evidence that we haven't seen before. There's conversations, there's texts, there's emails, there's contemporaneous notes from Mike Pence. Lots of Mike Pence notes in this. And, you know, this was, I think, the biggest and most important indictment. It was also the one I think that we didn't, that felt like, you know, the documents case, it's simple.
It's easy to understand, right? He stole these documents, he didn't give them back, he started justice to keep them. The question I think around this indictment was always going to be like, how do you spell out a case that isn't about stealing something and keeping it in your house? It's about fundamental American principles. It's about like the safety and security of our democracy.
It's about whether you uphold an election. And I'll say before, I'll say again, Jack Smith, the biggest scab in this writer strike, this guy, this guy does that tell a story. Yes, it is a compelling document. I mean, it's interesting to me how many times Jack Smith feels the need in this indictment to prove that Donald Trump knew that he had lost the election, that he knew he was lying. And even at the beginning, he sort of lays out in the opening of the indictment, he says the defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election, and even to claim falsely that there had been fraud and that he had won.
His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful. But then he also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results. And then he lays out the three criminal conspiracies. The conspiracy against rights probably sounds a little vague. It's conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted.
So like I was saying, like a bad rock American principle of our democracy. Yeah, and you've, you know, there was been reporting about this ever since this statute was mentioned in the target letter a week or so ago that this was a statute that was used to prosecute the KKK. And so it's a civil rights civil rights in this case in the sense that we all have the right to vote and to have a vote counted. And so that's the connection there. But it was interesting to me just how much this case rests upon proving that Donald Trump knew he was lying and knew that he had lost the election and still having known he had lost the election tried to obstruct the election.
Tried to obstruct the count in Congress, tried to overturn the election, tried to fraudulently claim things and force others in states to fraudulently send fake electors. Yeah, there's two runs of proof points. One of all the different people that told Trump that the claims were false. There's also a run of Donald Trump specifically using basically verbatim claims of fraud that he had been specifically been instructed weren't true. And yes, this is I think in this document, it is Jack Smith and the Department of Justice saying he knew these claims were false.
But you also don't need nobody is going to be able to hear. Even if Donald Trump continues to claim, well, that's what these people told me. Other people told me that these were legitimate claims. I was just going based on conflicting information. I just wanted to get to the bottom of it.
It lays it out in a way that just to know or no reasonable person could look at this and believe he was not. Just know what even if he keeps claiming it. He doesn't need to admit it. He can keep claiming whatever he wants. The evidence is there.
Yeah, so the people who told him in formal briefings and settings that there was no mass selection fraud include my Pence top DOJ leaders, the Director of National Intelligence, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, senior White House attorneys that were selected by Trump to be in those positions. And then there's an interesting anecdote where you know he knows they're right because there is a National Security Council meeting on January 3rd. Something happened overseas that they're briefing him on. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says to Trump, let's not take action on whatever this thing is because the inauguration is 17 days away. And Trump agrees and he says, yeah, you're right. It's too late for us.
We're going to give that one to the next guy. So he's whitting of the fact that he is lost. I think the other this is so there's a couple new parts of the indictment. Tommy's right that most of it, thanks to the January 6th Committee, we already know about the new parts of the indictment are one is the fact that Mike Pence kept the kept the journal, Dear Diary. And they have these conversations between Trump and Pence.
And at one point, Pence says to Trump, point blank, there is on page 33 for those following at home. Pence says there is no constitutional basis for him to overturn the election. And in response, Trump says, you're too honest. Mike so honest. And you know, I just noticed before we came in here on Twitter, like the AP stories lead with that line because that's not evidence that Trump knew he was full of shit and knew he had won the election and was still telling the Vice President to do something illegal.
I mean, I don't know what it's. One of my favorite moments in the document is on December 25th, when the Vice President called the defendant to wish him a Merry Christmas, the defendant quickly turned the conversation to January 6th and his request that the Vice President rejected electoral votes that day. The Vice President pushed back telling the defendant as the Vice President had already had a previous conversation. You know, I don't think I have the authority to change the outcome. He's just doing on Christmas, Pence is calling him calling the boss to wish him a Merry Christmas.
Incredible. Have you heard the good news? And then he just gets fucking broadsided through the Christmas. It was also readily apparent reading this, how comfortable a lot of senior Trump aides were with the prospect of violence. Deputy White House counsel tells Jeff Clark that there hadn't been a determined fraud that would change the outcome, but that if Trump stayed in office anyway, there would quote be riots in every major city in the United States to which Jeff Clark responded, well, that's why there's an insurrection act.
So they're ready to beat the shit out of us if we all protest it. The plan was to stage a coup and then use the US military to put down any protest by force. That was the plan. And then another advisor told John Eastman, you're going to cause riots in the streets and Eastman responded that there had previously been points in the nation's history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. So this brings up, because we read this and we were like, Jeff Clark should be in jail.
These people should all be in jail, right? They were not indicted. And I think the biggest surprise and what people are talking about right now is like, what's going on with the unindicted co-conspirators? There are, we don't know, is the short answer, but there are a few theories. One theory is that Jack Smith is laying this out there for them to try to get them to cooperate because if those unindicted co-conspirators can then testify, oh, yeah, Trump knew he didn't win this election, then that's more powerful evidence.
The other theory is they will be indicted at some point and that perhaps Jack Smith just wanted to bring this now because he wanted to get things going so that he can get a trial before the election because we know that if he doesn't get a trial before the election and Trump wins, the whole thing will go away. That was going to be a combination that he wants to turn some of them, use some of them. And I also think that the other important point here is naming, so four of the six unindicted co-conspirators are lawyers. Jeffery Clark was a Justice Department official. So naming these lawyers as co-conspirators, even if they're unindicted, really hurts Trump's advice of counsel defense, which they have preview that that's going to be there to be.
Oh, I was just doing what my lawyers told me while your lawyers are co-conspirators who committed a bunch of crimes along with you. Yeah, they're all referred to as attorneys and you just feel in this indictment the dripping fury and disdain the Department of Justice has for Eastman, for Clark, for Rudy Giuliani, for Powell. One question I think we've talked about at length is how sophisticated was this operation, how bumbling was it, how much was this just people trying things, how much of it was a concerted effort. And there's one thread that runs through this whole indictment that I think captures the way it was both. So early on in the indictment, the indictment makes the point that some fraudulent electors, so there's basically, you know, there's three parts of this game.
The first part is trying to get the legitimate elections thrown out and have Republican officials put in fake electors. When that fails, it's to have Pence in some way get these false electors to throw the election results, and when that fails, you go to your instruction. And early on, when they're starting to talk to potential fraudulent electors in the state, they're clearly leaving the conspiracy, the scam evolves. At first, it is a scam to just have backup electors in place in case we need them. Now, as a certification is getting closer, when the defendants' electors express concern about the signing certificates representing themselves as legitimate electors, Coke and Spirit are one, that's Rudy, falsely assured them that their certificates would only be used if the defendants succeed in litigation.
Coke and Spirit are six, the person we sold out, no, circulated proposed conditional language to that effect. So basically, some of these people that were about to be false electors said, hold on a second, you told me that I was doing this just in case, and none of this language does just in case you're telling me I'm a real elector. And so language was floated to change it so that it could sound more conditional. But a campaign official cautioned not to offer the conditional language to other states because the other states are signing what he prepared. If it gets out, we change the language for PA, it could snowball.
So like, in the middle of all this, they are well aware that they're coming up with a plan to overturn the election by using false electors. And when some of these electors balk at it and refuse to sign, they were discussing whether or not they should do conditional language anyway and said, we don't need to. We've got enough people on the hook and all these other states to go along with this plan. They're just in real time, very, they're aware of what they're doing and they're aware of how the plan evolved from just having a backup to trying to overturn the election. And you see that happen.
They're very dumb about putting in writing their knowledge of the fact that they're lying. John Eussmann emails the vice president's counsel. Remember, the vice president's not going along with all this. His staff has pissed about it. He says, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for ten days to allow the legislature to finish their investigations.
One more violation of the electoral count act. He's emailing him requesting a minor violation of the law. Also, John Eussmann wrote on October 11th that neither the Constitution nor the electoral count act provided the vice president discretion in the counting of electoral votes were permitted to make the determination on his own. Right before he launched this scheme to get pensed over turn the election, he had written that pensed in at the authority. He also acknowledged to the vice president's counsel the same person that he sent that email to that he hopes to prevent judicial review of this because he understood that what they were doing would be quote unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court.
That's a lot more faith in the Supreme Court than I have for the unanimous rule. I do think they would have blocked it, but I don't think it's on my 7-2. But I will say too that John Eussmann email Tommy, which said, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation of the law. I said 11-4-4 PM on January 6th. This is at night.
There was two other new parts of this indictment that did not come up in the January 6th hearing that are new. One is we learned that Trump called two senators at 6 PM on January 6th as the riots in some places were still going on to ask them to block certification. We know that Rudy was trying to call people and actually call him Michael Lee or whatever. And then Pat Zibiloni, he's back. He's a colonial member of him.
White House counsel. That night, as January 6th, as the Capitol had been cleared out and everything was going on, the White House counsel asked implored Trump to please call off the objections from the senators, and Trump refused even that. There's a moment where the campaign officials are saying to Rudy, here's the thing, the way this is morphed, it's a crazy play, so I don't know who wants to put their name on it. And the certiadivizer called it, and this is, quote, certifying illegal votes. Like they...
I'm trying to back it to what Trump knew and everything. I do think we heard this during the, this came out during the January 6th hearing, but they have Trump saying that Sidney Powell's Dominion voting vote. And then the House's Dominion voting machine claims were, quote, crazy. Yeah. And also, who's number two again, John Eastman, is calling officials in Arizona and being told by the Arizona House Speaker that the state investigated these allegations and uncovered no evidence of substantial fraud in the state.
Eastman says, look, I don't know enough about facts on the ground, but, you know, de-certify and let the courts sort of that. You know, they're knowingly advancing these lies. Which is similar to the line that we've all heard from Trump, but I still think it's one of the most damning lines of all, which is just say the election to Jeffrey Clark, to the Justice Department. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest of me and the Republican Congress. Yeah. What really comes through, and some of it we've known, I think some of it we're getting more detail, is the people that are saying no to this, and I think the people that are clearly being interviewed as part of this, these are Trump voters.
These are Trump supporters and Republicans. You have in Arizona, in Georgia, in Michigan, and you have these extraordinary comments from them basically saying, I voted for Trump, I wanted it to win, I'm not subverting my oath. There's nothing in my, there's nothing in our state constitution or in the law that gives me the power to do this. And over and over again, you know, there's, again, some of this we've, we've known, but now we're getting in more detail, the moment when Trump tries to make a vote. Trump tries to make a, a, a, a clark, a, a, acting attorney general and you have the acting attorney general, and the acting attorney general, the acting deputy attorney general saying, no, and if you do this we'll resign your white house counsel officer will resign.
It'll be a scandal. You see over and over again that this scheme got a lot further than we even understood at the time. It was more sophisticated than we understood at the time and the reason it didn't succeed. And by the way, of course, it was more and less sophisticated than we thought. Yes. It was more and less sophisticated than we thought.
But I do think it was more concerted than we realized and it was more coordinated than we realized that this event makes clear. And the reason it didn't succeed is not for lack of effort, it didn't succeed because at the time there were just enough people with just enough scruples left to stand in this group of consumers. stand in this group of conspiracy. It does highlight the amount of pressure that was put on Mike Pence. Because I think sometimes we assume Trump has a public facing demeanor and message where he lies in his full of shit.
You assume that he's in on the joke and tells the truth behind the scenes. No, he was in the vice president's face as late as December 29th saying that the Justice Department was finding major fraud and infractions. Pence knew that was a lie. Everyone had been briefed on the fact that that was a lie. And by the way, breaking news, Mike Pence just put out a statement about the indictment saying, today's indictment serves as an important reminder.
Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. So, I mean, that he, that's it. Yeah. It was his line when he said that line when he announced for office. But I'm glad that he did not go to the sort of weasily, I don't know if we should criminalize.
You know, I think he was in context of this indictment. Right. Well, I know. But I think what he decided was it's not on me to judge the legality of what the jury is going to do. The guy shouldn't be president again.
And that's enough, which, you know, is fine. And I think Hutchinson and her and Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson and Christie have come up with statements condemning him as well. There's one other meeting where Trump and Eastman and Pence and Pence and Chief of Staff and Council are all meeting. And basically, there was a sort of other proposal that was being floated that Pence has the ability to send the fake electors back to the States. And there's a moment where Pence is like, who says I can do that?
And Eastman says, well, it's never been tried before, basically. And Pence says, to Trump, did you hear that? Even your own counsel is not saying I have the authority. And Trump responded, that's okay. I prefer the others together.
The others are good. He just overturns the election and certifies Trump. Yeah. So, pretty damning. Pretty serious.
You guys have any questions you're looking forward to being answered in the coming days on this one? I'm kind of interested in the timing and whether they think that they can actually get a full trial in before the election on this one. Yeah. I'm curious about, like, we're all learning these terms, like speaking indictment and how much prosecutors decide to put or not put in these indictments. I'm curious to see how much evidence was withheld here.
We don't really know that. I don't know how we can know that. Yeah. And we talked about what's going on with the unaddicted co-conspirators. Jack Smith did have one line in his very brief statement where he said investigations of various individuals are ongoing.
So, we could expect we could see more indictments on this. This is a diamond doesn't read, though, that Rudy and Eastman and Clark were just dragged along. And I think it's more damning for them than even Trump in the way the indictment reads. For some of the stuff that Jeffrey Clark said about the insurrection, I mean, we all the stuff that we read. I think it's what Eastman and Clark seemed like very criminal.
What is it? Yeah. The part where that's why I was interested in the part where you see the evolution of the plan from just having backup electors to becoming a crazy plan to overturn the election, because that is five, Mr. She's broke. And he gets the least, he gets sort of the least damning attention throughout this as a six.
And you have to wonder, like, man, Rudy is dead to write in this thing. Eastman is dead to write in this thing. I wonder who they're actually going after to get the test. Yeah. I mean, to your point, Rudy, there was post-9-11, H.G.
ography, Rudy, whatever. America's mayor of that whole ship. But that image of Rudy, I think, has long gone. He's been a clown for a long time. So I wasn't surprised to read his comments.
And this, John Eastman is someone who's considered a pretty well respected scholar, constitutional scholar, but before this insanity at the end here and this whoever that he clearly was behind in knowingly putting forward lies and asking people to break the law. Might even call him a mastermind of this effort. I mean, it was really, Rudy just goes off the cuff, but Eastman here is, he's thought it out. He's thought it out. He knows it's illegal and he's been pushing the whole time.
We don't need to just get into the politics too much here. But this is one, and I felt like this during the January 6 committee, that I don't really care what the politics are. When I read this indictment, I'm like, if Donald Trump wins again, these unindicted co-conspirators are coming back to the White House, and next time they're not going to flack it up. No, they're going to have to have the medal to freedom hang around the next. I mean, it's like, you know what?
I don't know what other case you need to make to voters. Then, hey, all this shit that happened, they're threatening that if Donald Trump doesn't get to stand power for as long as he likes, they're going to use the insurrection act to get the military to put down any protest, that's going to be our future if you elect this guy, this president again. Well, not if he wins. Well, then what happens after that for those four years? Oh, the old.
What happens when we're debating the constitutional amendment to let Donald Trump serve as long as he wants, and he tells the senators and the husband, that's okay. You don't have to change it with a full majority. It's okay. Don't worry about it. There's also one part in this where you're talking at this point before I recorded that Sydney Powell's texts are as bunkers as her personality, that is half caps, half lowercase.
One sentence in the same sentence, there's just a run of all caps text followed by normal, but done on the political question, this indictment and all the news reports around it could certainly change the context. There was some polling, you got poll back in January where you had pretty strong majorities of American voters saying Trump bore responsibility for January 6. When you asked about whether they approved Congress referring Trump to for criminal indictment, it got a lot more partisan. It was 45 to 37 Americans approved of referring him to DOJ for criminal indictment. So we'll see if that more partisan split sticks once now that he's actually indicted.
The one that set of numbers that stuck out to me, I was reading last night, is like you said, it breaks down on partisan lines and the question is what independence do or how to end up in this. Mostly they're split on whether it was a crime, all that kind of stuff. If you ask the question, if Donald Trump is convicted of a crime, should he be able to serve as president? It's like 75% of independents don't think he should. And the majority of all voters don't think he should, like a healthy majority, pretty big majority.
So I do think that the only point here is as this goes on, the politics now and the polls we're looking at now are all sort of frozen in time and they're backward looking, right? We're about to head into a calendar season of like court dates and in-dite and extra indictments. We had a super-seeding one we didn't even expect in the Mar-a-Lago case and this is going to go on and on and on and be in the news over and over and over again. And right, like maybe it doesn't make a huge difference in an electorate that is very polarized, it's possible. But these elections are decided on the margins.
And is it, you know, do you want to put the guy back in the White House who did all this or do you want to keep Joe Biden for years? That's it. That's the choice. Yeah, I also, the point that Jackson makes the point when he gave the statement that he wants a speedy trial. And then he's going to give the message also to the judge.
The judge, as you pointed out, is not Nylin Cannon. And- She's the complete opposite. Like, she's Bizarro Eileen Cannon. You know, is this going to affect Trump's poll numbers? He may die in prison because of this.
Like, poll numbers are the least of his problems. Like, he is going to be in court day after day after day covered exclusively on his crimes. Like the- That's why he's running so hard for president. Something's don't end up being on the margins. We'll see.
But man, this is, you read this, you're like, I finally can see it now. I see the end. If you think yourself, maybe he's a little more disciplined and is running for president this time. So we can stay out of jail. We have a lot of legal bills to pay.
It's probably hurting. Yeah. All right. Well, that's our bonus episode. We'll come back with another bonus.
If there's more indictments, I think let's see, we're at 74 felony counts yesterday on the pod. We talked about 78. I was reading this- Is he 70- how old is 78? He's 78. He's got a felony.
He's got a felony. I remember a kid in here. Donald Trump. 78 years old, 78, I was reading this indictment almost on. I was like, wait, this is confusing.
And I realized, oh, I accidentally turned into the other indictment. It was too printed on the face. It was too many- Too many indictments. You have to file this thing. We'll talk to you on Thursday everyone.