This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Why can't you sue a president or a presidential candidate who knowingly lies to the public?

After all, corporate executives can be sued for lying to shareholders. This question about our inability to legally hold politicians accountable for their speech, the threats that poses to our democracy, and what we can learn from how other countries deal with these lies, are the subjects of my guest Andrew Weissman's new book, Liar's Kingdom, How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America. During Trump's first term, the Washington Post tabulated over 30,000 false or misleading Trump public statements.

Andrew Weissman was a lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election

and whether the Russians colluded with candidate Donald Trump in his campaign.

Weissman also served as chief of the fraud section

and the Justice Department and General Counsel of the FBI when Robert Mueller was the FBI director.

Weissman was a leader of the Enron Task Force, which successfully prosecuted Enron executives

for knowingly lying to shareholders by inflating Enron's profits.

Earlier in his career, while working in the Eastern District of New York, he prosecuted

three of the five most powerful crime families in New York. He's now an MS Now legal analyst

and co-host of the podcast, Maine Justice. He's also a professor at the NYU Law School.

We're going to begin the interview with a settlement Trump reached with the Justice Department

over his lawsuit against the IRS pertaining to the leak of his tax filings. The details of that

settlement and the new fund it created were made public this week.

The judge in that case, who was considering dismissing the case, was not included in the discussions of the settlement.

Andrew Weissman, welcome to Fresh Air.

So let's talk about the IRS case.

So Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion. This was because his tax

filings were leaked to the New York Times and ProPublica, not by the IRS directly. They

were leaked by an employee of a contractor that the IRS had hired. And Trump claimed the IRS hadn't taken enough precautions to prevent that leak.

So the judge was concerned that since the IRS was being represented by the Justice Department,

and Trump himself oversees the IRS because it's part of the executive

...