Bill Barr’s American Carnage
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2020
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is Bill Barr doing, and why is he doing it? Donald Ayer, former U.S. attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush, on the attorney general’s ideology, how it predates Trumpism, and why it’s so dangerous.
In the Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern breaks down the latest voting breakdown in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, the latest Census case dead end, and the stupidity of Trump’s latest SCOTUS list.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The combination of Donald Trump as the president and Bill Barr as the head of the Justice Department, |
| 0:11.2 | this is a combination befitting a banana republic. |
| 0:14.4 | And you've got to scratch your head pretty hard and wonder how in the hell we got here. |
| 0:21.2 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:24.5 | This is Slate's podcast about the law, the courts, and the rule of law. |
| 0:28.9 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:30.0 | I write about some of that for Slate, and this week has been just about as rock'em-sockham as it gets in my world. |
| 0:37.5 | We've heard from whistleblowers, inspectors general, |
| 0:41.2 | we've heard from federal appellate courts, |
| 0:44.8 | and yes, we heard from the journalist |
| 0:46.6 | who brought down Richard Nixon himself |
| 0:49.2 | about malfeasance in the Trump administration. |
| 0:52.3 | Imagine. |
| 0:53.6 | Fires are raging on the West Coast. We're |
| 0:56.3 | thinking of you. Take care. Coronavirus continues to ravage parts of this country. We're thinking |
| 1:02.2 | of you. Take care. The president has doubts about his generals and didn't tell us the truth about |
| 1:09.3 | COVID. And if your children are anything like mine, they are at |
| 1:14.1 | quote unquote school in ways that exhaust them and me in just about equal measure. And oh, God bless you, |
| 1:22.8 | teachers and school people and school administrators, you are deserving of medals. |
| 1:28.4 | Now, later on in the show, Slate Plus members are going to get to hear our bonus check-in with |
| 1:33.5 | Mark Joseph Stern, my Confederate in covering the courts to talk about Donald Trump's very, very |
| 1:40.1 | long shortlist of Supreme Court candidates. If you're not a Slate Plus member, please consider |
... |
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