S2 Ep159: Trump Built a System That Pays People to Break the Law (w/ Ben Wittes)
The Illegal News with Sarah Longwell
The Bulwark
4.9 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sarah Longwell and Ben Wittes discuss the Supreme Court mifepristone fight and why it could reshape abortion politics for years to come, then dig into Trump’s proposed $1.7 billion “weaponization” fund for Jan. 6 allies, the DOJ’s effort to protect Jeffrey Clark, and Kash Patel’s increasingly bizarre behavior as FBI director.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Jim Comey never gave me a branded bottle of bourbon. |
| 0:04.6 | And now I'm feeling like, like maybe we weren't as good friends as I thought. |
| 0:14.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to the illegal news. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bullwork. |
| 0:19.4 | And today I am joined by another |
| 0:22.5 | non-lawyer who pretends he is one just like me. Actually, I'm very upfront, Ben Wittes, |
| 0:29.2 | about... I'm pretty upfront about it, too. I always say I am not a lawyer, I'm a total |
| 0:35.8 | fraud, and people think I'm being modest or joking. And the truth is, |
| 0:42.3 | I'm not a lawyer. I just fake it. Yeah. Well, I don't even fake it. I do this show and I, I'm the |
| 0:49.9 | stand-in for all the novices who want to understand what is happening in our very active |
| 0:56.3 | news cycle around what is legal and illegal. And we need people to explain it to us. But |
| 1:02.1 | you're still good for that. I've known you a long time. You're still my go-to on a lot of this stuff. |
| 1:06.1 | It's almost like being a lawyer isn't that hard. |
| 1:12.7 | That's Ben Wittis, everyone, telling you your law degree is meaningless. |
| 1:17.1 | It's really more like telling you that if you can read and you can do the whole reading |
| 1:24.1 | comprehension thing, you can learn about the law just like you can learn about |
| 1:30.3 | molecular biology. |
| 1:32.1 | Okay. Well, neither of these things are things I think I can learn about. But, all right, listen, |
| 1:37.0 | before we jump into the show and we got a lot to talk about today, I want to talk about the |
| 1:40.0 | Mepha Pristone ruling. I want to talk about this $1.7 billion slush fund on weaponization that Trump |
| 1:46.0 | is floating and that seems like maybe it's going to happen. And I want to talk about cash Patel. |
| 1:50.1 | So we've got, and there's other some other sort of DOJ things I want to throw at you. But before we do |
... |
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