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Now & Then

Presidential Lawyer Problems

Now & Then

Vox Media Podcast Network

History, Society & Culture, News Commentary, News

4.93.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How can personal lawyers help and hurt embattled presidents? Heather and Joanne use the current chaos engulfing former President Trump’s legal team to explore the blurry roles of private presidential attorneys in American history. They explore conservative Unionist lawyer Reverdy Johnson’s effective role in helping President Lincoln to find legal rationale for escalations in the Civil War. And they compare Johnson’s role to the not-so-effective counsel of Nixon’s lawyer-fundraiser Herb Kalmbach. How did the popular culture surrounding the Watergate scandal affect Heather and Joanne? Join CAFE Insider to listen to “Backstage,” where Heather and Joanne chat each week about the anecdotes and ideas that formed the episode. Head to: cafe.com/history For references & supplemental materials, head to: cafe.com/now-and-then/presidential-lawyer-problems/ Now & Then is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Fox Creative.

0:08.0

Thousands of Afghans fled their homes when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021.

0:14.0

The government of the United Kingdom pledged to take in 20,000 of them as refugees, but in the first year only 22 Afghans had been approved for asylum in the United Kingdom.

0:25.0

So what happened? And what does this mean for the tens of thousands of people left behind?

0:31.0

Hear that story on the latest episode of Into the Mix.

0:39.0

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

0:47.0

I'm Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm Joanne Freeman.

0:50.0

Today we're going to be talking about a topic that very naturally and very obviously grows from all of the news about Donald Trump's federal indictment and arrangement in Florida in recent days.

1:04.0

Now there's been a lot of coverage of all of the legal and political implications and any variety of ways of approaching this by looking at the National Archives and the Presidential Records Act.

1:17.0

What we're interested in looking at today is something that is at the heart of this entire controversy and that doesn't only exist now, but that extends back in time.

1:28.0

And that is the question of a president's relationship with his or her lawyers.

1:35.0

Because that's some of what we're looking at now is the former president Trump has his own attorneys and actually has been someone who throughout his life has been very active, very litigious, very eager to promote his own interests and smack at and rip apart anybody who gets in his way to make sense of the way that Trump thinks about lawyers.

2:01.0

Even once he became president, it's useful to look back at his relationship with Roy Cohen in the early 1970s he very famously employed Roy Cohen, who was a lawyer and really a political fixer of sorts, who had been the top aid to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army McCarthy hearings.

2:22.0

And he began to represent Trump after Trump was sued by the Department of Justice for discriminating against black applicants in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

2:33.0

And there's Cohen coming forward, slashing, ripping and acting on behalf of Trump and Trump then said of Cohen in 1980 all I can tell you is he's been vicious to others in his protection of me. He's a genius.

2:48.0

So the question that we're interested in exploring today is what do presidential lawyers do? If you think about all of the complications and all of the implications and all of the wild charges bouncing around right now, it's very apparent that legal counsel will be vitally important both to whatever Trump does or doesn't do and to what the ultimate outcome is and it's that executive relationship between the national executive, the president and lawyers.

3:18.0

That we really want to explore.

3:20.0

First I'm over here making notes of the words, lawyerly figures, which seemed to me to be a fabulous name for a rock band.

3:28.0

So I'll be back in a couple hours.

3:31.0

One of the things that helps me to think about this is to think about the different categories of lawyers and the law that swirl around the presidency.

3:41.0

The way I think about it is that there is the law, the body of rules under which we live. There is the presidency, the office of the presidency, and then there is the president.

3:53.0

And we have the law, we have the office of the presidency defended by the White House Council.

...

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