WTH is Going On With Trump’s Trials? John Yoo Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2024
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
Former president Donald Trump is on trial in New York over hush money payments made before the 2016 election. The only problem? Hush money payments as part of non-disclosure agreements are not illegal. New York state prosecutor Alvin Bragg alleges that by improperly filing the payments in Trump’s business records he was trying to conceal “another crime” – campaign finance law violations. Here’s the problem: Bragg not only lacks authority to prosecute campaign finance violations, but even the Biden administration’s Justice Department did not pursue campaign finance violation charges against Trump. Is Bragg’s case against Trump constitutional? And how will such politically motivated cases eat away at America’s rule of law?
John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University. Yoo was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the general council of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. His most recent book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (Regnery, 2023) with Robert Delahunty.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell is talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's gone on? |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:29.2 | Hi, I'm Daniel Pletka. |
| 0:31.0 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.9 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.9 | Mark, what the hell is going on? What the hell is going on is |
| 0:39.3 | Donald Trump is in the courtroom in New York City. He is on trial by Alvin Bragg for supposed |
| 0:45.4 | campaign finance violations. This is one set of charges out of a set of 91 indictments, |
| 0:53.1 | I guess not 91 indictments, |
| 0:54.5 | 91 charges at the federal state and local level, |
| 0:57.9 | which compares to Charles Manson who had 10. |
| 1:00.3 | So if you want a sense of proportion. |
| 1:02.7 | But, you know, you are our resident, not Trump Republican on this podcast. |
| 1:07.7 | I'm a little bit more open to Trump than you are. |
| 1:10.0 | So I'd like your take on this. |
| 1:12.0 | You know, because I think you're as outraged by the, in many ways, by the legal, the lawfare |
| 1:18.2 | that's being waged here as, as I am. But, you know, rather than me rant, let's, let's hear |
| 1:25.5 | from the end of the reason. Let me rant. So it is really interesting, Mark, because I think that the phenomenon that's occurring with this trial is not what was intended by its prosecutors. |
| 1:40.3 | So no question that when Democrats thought about who they wanted to go up against |
| 1:46.2 | the weakest president in history, Joe Biden, they wanted Donald Trump, the second weakest |
... |
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