Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sikes. It is August 29th, 2023. There's so much going on. But again, there's always so much going on. I mean, I am old enough to remember when in August, nothing happened. Everybody waited until Labor Day. And then like everything starts on Labor Day. That's no longer the case. It's sort of like, remember when we used to have news cycles. They were actually like, yes, you have to have the

news cycles, the morning paper and the afternoon paper. No, there's no more news cycles. It's like all the time. Every 10 second is a new news cycle. And there are no down times in August. So we are very fortunate to be joined again by our friend David French, who is a columnist for the New York Times. How are you, David? First of all, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me back, Charlie. I appreciate it. Well, we have so much to talk about. I want to talk about the 14th amendment, the belief that there's a Deus Ex Machina.

That the 14th amendment is going to save us from Donald Trump. I want to talk about that tragic shooting out in California. I want to talk about the left wing book banners and the reaction that we've gotten at the bulwark to a really good piece by Cathy Young. But can we just start off by just the top lines? Your thoughts about Mark Meadows decision to testify. I think that came as a surprise. Mark Meadows, of course, has been indicted down in Georgia. And he wants to remove the case to federal court.

And to the surprise of pretty much everybody, he actually took the witness stand yesterday. And he's basically offering the defense that, hey, you know, I was just trying to land the plane. And this is what I was doing is White House chief of staff, your reaction to Mark Meadows defenses.

It's a very interesting issue as to whether a chief of staff could have any kind of purely political role. But here's what's interesting to me, Charlie. So you've got the hatch act. Right. So the hatch act is something that prohibits a federal employee from essentially engaging and electioneering in their official capacity.

And so the question that I really have here is, okay, the Trump election challenge. This is Trump challenging the election as a private citizen. This is, so this is Trump in his capacity as a head of a campaign, not the head of the executive branch of the government.

So is Meadows helping him? And what capacity is Meadows helping him? What official capacity does Meadows have as chief of staff in connection with that Georgia election challenge idea with a state election challenge?

Yes, it's a state election.

What role does the federal government have in dealing with a state's election count?

Right. It's a state election count. It's a private entity is the Trump campaign. Now I could understand if he's saying, look, I'm trying to land the plane for the transition of power.

There's all kinds of things that chief of staff can do that's election adjacent, in other words, you know, working on the transition of power, et cetera.

I'm a little bit dubious of this claim that the chief of staff somehow becomes part of the law enforcement apparatus for the investigation of election fraud. Is that really what they do?

I'm much more skeptical of that.

Besides, part of this is kind of begging the question because the real question is here is where they just lying about all of this.

Right, Charlie. That's the allegation here. The allegation here is they were just lying about all of this that this that there was never any real foundation for the belief that they could win in Georgia, they would win in Georgia or all of this other stuff.

And so part of is that you kind of almost have to buy the defense premise in a way that says, oh, no, this was totally about election fraud and look, one of the hats, the president wears and one of the hats, the president see the White House wears is this law enforcement hat.

And we're just totally engaged in this really good faith effort to root out election fraud out of the American system, et cetera, et cetera.

No, that's not what was happening here. What was happening here was you had a candidate for president who was engaged in a berserk effort to overturn an election through an avalanche of lies.

No, that's not Mark Metz's job description. That's not what he's there to do. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the judge responds to this.

You know, interestingly enough, you know, in a vacuum, sort of the Jeff Clark DOJ piece of this, well, yeah, the DOJ does actually have a role in dealing with investigating potential claims of election fraud or other illegality that would violate federal law, but that wasn't actually his role really at the DOJ.

So there's going to be some interesting questions raised here of all of the people who have that sort of removal argument, Meadows and Clark probably are on the most solid ground, but it's still pretty shaky.

Well, this is why all of these episodes need to be seen in this larger context. You take one speech or one comment out of context, you can construct a kind of rationalization or defense.

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