Michael Schmidt on Trump Indicting His ‘Political Opponents:’ ‘None of Those Prosecutions Turn into What He Wants Them To Be’
RUSH EXCERPT:
SCHMIDT: "Yeah. So the first term is Donald Trump jumping up and down on Twitter. And, you know, to the press and to his aides saying, I want people prosecuted. A lot of that happens not necessarily always publicly. It happens behind closed doors where he tries to get the department to do things. What emerges from that are a bunch of criminal investigations into his enemies. None of those prosecutions turn into what he wants them to be. His last meeting with Bill Barr. He’s still very mad at Bill Barr that James Comey is not going to be indicted. That is sort of the the pattern that emerged from from the first term that to appease him, it looks like some criminal investigations were done into his enemies, but they never led to prosecutions. What’s different now is that the Don McGahn’s and the John Kelly’s are not there. They are purposely not there because people like russ hoyt did not. You know, they have said we we don’t want the lawyers here to be slowing us down. And because of that, because of the fact that there aren’t guardrails there, you’re seeing an unshackled Trump who is able to do a lot of the things that he told John Kelly and Don McGahn he wanted to do, but were never done. And that is the difference between the first term and the second term. And that’s why we’re seeing the prosecutions we’re seeing. You know, I think someone like Bill Barr saw himself as someone that stood between Trump and the us attorneys and thought that the line prosecutors were ones that would hold the line and would would prevent these types of prosecutions from happening. And under Bill Barr, they didn’t happen. Now, you could say that it was wrong for the department to have gone out and investigate these people because Trump wanted them investigated or whatever."
WALLACE: "I mean, to be fair, Jeff berman writes in his book that they did happen. They didn’t happen under Jeff berman’s leadership at s.d.n.y, but there were political prosecutions that were moved from U.S. attorneys. I mean, Bill Barr. Didn’t protect All the U.S."
SCHMIDT: "No, no, no, no, no. And look, the point I’m making is that there are a lot of investigations that happened that Donald Trump wanted to have happened, and cases that were shopped around to different U.S. attorney’s offices. Those cases which were probably handled, you know, at the case level by career prosecutors, never turned into indictments, prosecutions. So you had a big body of investigations that had gone on. You know, a lot you know, all these people that Trump didn’t like got investigated, but they were never charged. What you’re seeing here is the charging. That is what’s different here. They are going out and getting charged. And they’re not just getting charged. In the case of the reporting on Comey and Letitia James, it looks like they’re getting charged. The career prosecutors don’t want to charge them. It is the hand-picked prosecutor that is doing it."
