S2 Ep147: Trump’s Face on DOJ Is a Big Deal—Here’s Why (w/ Elliot Williams)
The Illegal News with Sarah Longwell
The Bulwark
4.9 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sarah Longwell is joined by CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams to break down Trump’s latest legal battles—from the Supreme Court limiting his tariff plan to a judge holding ICE in contempt for ignoring court orders.
They also discuss the FCC targeting late-night shows, questions about DOJ independence after Trump put his face on the building, and new reporting on the Epstein files.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the illegal news. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark. And today I'm joined by Elliot Williams. One of our favorites is back to help us break down all the illegal news. Elliot is a CNN legal analyst and author of the book, Five Bullets, which I just got my hands on because I'm taking it on spring break. It's my spring break reading or I'm going to tell my kids, |
| 0:23.5 | don't talk to me. |
| 0:24.4 | I'm reading Elliot's book. |
| 0:26.3 | And they will ignore that directive the whole time. |
| 0:30.4 | No doubt. |
| 0:31.6 | All right, Elliot. |
| 0:33.3 | Yes, ma'am. |
| 0:33.7 | We're recording this on Tuesday, February 24th. |
| 0:38.6 | State of the Union is tonight. |
| 0:41.7 | And so I want to hit some of the big legal issues that I think are going to come up in Trump's speech. |
| 0:46.5 | And then I also want to talk about the tariffs Trump announced in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. |
| 0:50.8 | I jumped on with Weissman, Andrew Weissman, on Saturday to talk about |
| 0:55.4 | this, but I've got a few follow-up questions that have been nagging at me that I want to talk |
| 0:59.1 | about. And then I want to get your thoughts on a couple of issues related to agency independence, |
| 1:02.9 | including Trump's enormous face going up on DOJ. And then we're going to wrap with a couple of positive immigration stories. |
| 1:11.7 | Okay, so let's start with tariffs. Yeah. Like I said, we did talk about this weekend. So good episode. |
| 1:16.4 | Go check it out. If people didn't see it, he did a good job breaking it down. But basically, |
| 1:20.0 | immediately after we talked about it, he comes out, Trump, the president, says, well, the Supreme Court are a bunch of ugly jerks, and I don't like |
| 1:30.3 | their families and says a bunch of mean, crazy stuff. And then he says, but we're going to do 10% |
| 1:36.0 | tariffs just globally. And then he says, no, 15% tariffs. And then today we got the final |
| 1:41.0 | tariff number and it's 10%. So I think my first question is, |
| 1:44.7 | how did Trump get around the Supreme Court's decision? Well, he didn't get around the Supreme |
... |
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