What Next - Did Todd Blanche Try to Bribe the Senate?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Well, it wasn’t exactly “standing up to the president” but it’s telling that Congress decided to leave town rather than try to defend Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund and immunity for any past present or future IRS inquiries.
Guest: Liz Oyer, former Pardon Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Public Defender, author of the Lawyer Oyer substack.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline Ducharme, Patrick Fort, Rob Gunther and Paige Osburn.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Liz Oyer is pretty clear-eyed about how people inside the Trump administration see her. |
| 0:13.2 | I mean, some people would say I'm the swamp. |
| 0:26.8 | Lee, Liz has good reasons to feel like this. |
| 0:30.6 | She used to work at the Department of Justice, where she was a pardon attorney. |
| 0:36.7 | She got fired after refusing to sign off on actor Mel Gibson getting access to firearms, |
| 0:38.5 | which was something President Trump really wanted, apparently. |
| 0:41.0 | Anyway, what's funny about being seen as a swamp creature by the Trump administration right now |
| 0:45.1 | is watching, as Donald Trump and his cronies, make the D.C. swamp very much their own. |
| 0:53.2 | So if you had to rate this administration in terms of how corruptly it is behaving in this |
| 0:59.5 | moment, what kind of grade would you be giving it? |
| 1:03.1 | 10 plus. |
| 1:04.3 | 10 plus. |
| 1:05.5 | Yes, we've never seen anything like this before. |
| 1:11.7 | I wanted to talk to you now because I feel like last week was kind of a banner week |
| 1:17.1 | for this kind of corruption for a whole lot of reasons. |
| 1:21.6 | Like there were little things which shouldn't be little, but little things. |
| 1:26.8 | Like there was reporting that Trump's |
| 1:29.3 | Super PAC accepted a $5 million donation from Big Tobacco a few days before they deregulated big tobacco. |
| 1:36.7 | Okay. There's that. There's a disclosure that Donald Trump filed with the Office of Government |
| 1:41.8 | Ethics showing more than 3,000 trades between January |
| 1:46.3 | and March of this year, all involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted |
| 1:51.1 | by the administration. |
... |
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