Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 826： Trump's Power And The Rule Of Law

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.

00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.

00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.

00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.

00:00:17.000 The people have had a belly full of it.

00:00:19.000 I know you don't like hearing that.

00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,

00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.

00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.

00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?

00:00:27.000 Mega Media.

00:00:29.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.

00:00:34.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?

00:00:38.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

00:00:44.000 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann.

00:00:53.000 Okay, welcome to the War Room.

00:00:56.000 We're going to have a very special showing tonight.

00:00:59.000 Something that was so extraordinary and moved me so much.

00:01:03.000 I thought it was very important to share this with the War on Posse,

00:01:06.000 if you haven't already seen it.

00:01:07.000 I think most people have not.

00:01:09.000 It's PBS's renowned series called Frontline.

00:01:13.000 These are these documentaries they make.

00:01:15.000 They're of extraordinary quality, but obviously being Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS,

00:01:20.000 they're always slanted, very progressive.

00:01:23.000 Although, this one in particular, they try to give a balanced idea of what's going on.

00:01:30.000 This is at the heart of the Trump Revolution.

00:01:33.000 This is President Trump about his Article II powers.

00:01:36.000 Remember, we've talked about this, the theory of unified executive, right,

00:01:42.000 where he is both chief executive officer, commander in chief, and chief magistrate.

00:01:46.000 It all comes together in the office of the president.

00:01:48.000 And that is what's going to separate out not simply his second term from his first term,

00:01:53.000 but his second term really from any president we've had, I think, all the way back to General Washington.

00:01:59.000 They did an hour and 25-minute special documentary on this.

00:02:06.000 We're going to play this over two nights, both tonight and tomorrow night.

00:02:09.000 We'll break it down and I'll come in for a little bit of analysis.

00:02:14.000 This stars Megyn Kelly, Mike Davis, of course, a whole host of people on the left.

00:02:20.000 I think it has 15 or 20 major voices.

00:02:23.000 I'm also in the film.

00:02:25.000 As you know, I've put up, or Grace has put up and most put up over the last couple of weeks,

00:02:29.000 the full interview I did with PBS to put it out.

00:02:33.000 But now you're going to see it in actually the form of the documentary itself.

00:02:37.000 The title of it is Trump's Power in the Rule of Law.

00:02:41.000 And this gets back to these, you know, 175 to 200 lawsuits that the left has to try to slow President Trump down,

00:02:49.000 to try to slow his implementing of his plan down.

00:02:54.000 As we say, you know, power delayed is power denied.

00:02:58.000 And so that's what they're trying to do.

00:03:00.000 This explains, I think, very well from the very start of the administration and flashing back to the first term and flashing back to the interim period.

00:03:09.000 And you're going to see a lot of familiar faces from the war room on this, but done by a bunch of progressives.

00:03:15.000 But I think you'll find you will learn a lot, even those of you that have been watching the show every day.

00:03:20.000 And particularly, we always like to show different perspectives and perspectives on the progressive left.

00:03:25.000 So now a encore presentation of Trump's power in the rule of law from Public Bar Kissing.

00:03:32.000 Let's let it rip and I'll be back in a little while.

00:03:35.000 The United States Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with their cuts to the Department of Education.

00:03:41.000 The showdown over the power of the president.

00:03:44.000 The Constitution vests all of the executive power of the federal government in a single person, the president.

00:03:50.000 Do we have the rule of law or do we have royal decrees? That's what's at stake here.

00:03:54.000 You're not going to scare us and we're not going to stop.

00:03:57.000 Our constitutional structure is definitely stressed.

00:04:00.000 Now on Frontline, Trump's power and the rule of law.

00:04:11.000 President Trump is at the Capital One Arena for his inauguration parade.

00:04:22.000 He is expected to fire up that packed crowd there.

00:04:25.000 President Trump will sign in the arena from cheering crowds a number of executive orders.

00:04:30.000 Norms and institutions are a thing of the past.

00:04:34.000 The wrecking ball is back.

00:04:36.000 And this time, he and his supporters mean business.

00:04:41.000 Things are going to get wrecked because they need to be.

00:04:45.000 Why don't you say what I'm saying?

00:04:47.000 Sure. The first item that President Trump is signing is the rescission of 78 Biden-era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda and others.

00:05:02.000 For a lot of Americans, it just looks like change.

00:05:05.000 Donald Trump is someone who campaigned on saying he would test American institutions.

00:05:10.000 And it looks like Donald Trump is delivering on these promises to upend Washington, to drain the swamp, to do it completely differently.

00:05:21.000 It was as if he was sending thunderbolts out to the country.

00:05:24.000 And here is the withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty.

00:05:28.000 All I have to do is put my sharpie on the page and I can make law a reality.

00:05:40.000 And he did one after the next, after the next.

00:05:43.000 The next item, sir, is a freeze on all federal hiring.

00:05:46.000 There were so many things happening at once that it was very hard to focus on any single one thing.

00:05:51.000 We will address the cost of living crisis that has cost Americans so dearly.

00:05:56.000 Requirement that federal workers return to full-time in-person work.

00:06:01.000 Immediate restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship of free speech going forward.

00:06:07.000 Ending the weaponization of government against the political adversaries of the previous administration as we've seen.

00:06:14.000 That was what Steve Bannon used to call the flood the zone approach to politics.

00:06:28.000 Just drown them in it.

00:06:30.000 Could you imagine Biden doing this? I don't think so.

00:06:35.000 I don't think so.

00:06:38.000 That's President Trump. I mean, he's all about action.

00:06:41.000 You know, all gas, no brake.

00:06:44.000 I want to hit it and just overwhelm the system with action, action, action.

00:06:52.000 That's what we call a days of thunder.

00:07:00.000 President Trump ran on very specific campaign promises.

00:07:04.000 He's going to reform our government to make our governments work for real Americans instead of the other way around. 0.84

00:07:13.000 He's going to secure our border.

00:07:15.000 He's going to get illegal immigrants, including dangerous terrorists the hell out of our country. 1.00

00:07:21.000 And President Trump is doing the unthinkable in Washington, D.C.

00:07:27.000 And he's actually delivering on his campaign promises to the American people.

00:07:33.000 And he's doing it very fast.

00:07:42.000 What he's saying in that day is, I'm going to be a man of action.

00:07:46.000 That's a phrase he likes, a man of action.

00:07:48.000 And he's going to do it with the stroke of a pen.

00:07:53.000 We saw a president using his power from the very first moment in very expansive ways to put his fingerprints on all sorts of areas of the government and society.

00:08:06.000 He signed more executive orders on day one than any of his predecessors ever did in their early days.

00:08:16.000 And they stretched the power and the authority of the presidency beyond what any previous president had done.

00:08:36.000 President Trump leaving the White House for the last time as president.

00:08:46.000 Just how quickly and how fast things fell apart from this president.

00:08:50.000 He is leaving the White House with much fewer people standing by his side in the wake of the January 6th riot.

00:08:57.000 After January 6th and what happened on the Capitol that day, it was universally terrible.

00:09:03.000 There wasn't even the most ardent Trump fan defending it.

00:09:09.000 He had been entirely ruled out.

00:09:11.000 He leaves office in disgrace, the only ever president to be impeached twice.

00:09:16.000 Trump leaves Washington seemingly for four years of exile, maybe a lifetime of exile.

00:09:23.000 Just utter bottom.

00:09:25.000 After President Trump left in January 2021, your audience should understand that President Trump and the core team around him, we were deplatformed by big tech.

00:09:43.000 We were debanked.

00:09:45.000 Steve Bannon was Trump's 2016 campaign CEO, his White House chief strategist.

00:09:50.000 He was charged with fraud and went to prison rather than testify about Trump's role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

00:09:59.000 In those years of 21 and 22, when the entire world was against President Trump and his team, it looked like the odds were so incredibly long.

00:10:08.000 It was a very lonely time around Mar-a-Lago.

00:10:15.000 President Trump was essentially a dead political body left on the side of the road.

00:10:22.000 In isolation, that is Florida's state.

00:10:25.000 More trouble for the former president.

00:10:27.000 The FBI raided the former president's Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, unannounced, breaking into the home.

00:10:34.000 Former U.S. President Donald Trump once again found himself the target of an investigation.

00:10:39.000 A cascade of other legal problems, multiple civil trials.

00:10:43.000 Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.

00:10:48.000 Business fraud.

00:10:49.000 He was guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels Hush Money case.

00:10:55.000 A federal grand jury here has indicted former President Donald Trump on four counts.

00:11:00.000 Indictment after indictment.

00:11:02.000 Charged with pleading a criminal organization that worked to overturn the results.

00:11:08.000 The most serious charges?

00:11:09.000 That he'd worked to overturn the 2020 election, culminating with a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol on January 6th, while Congress was trying to certify the results.

00:11:22.000 An indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States,

00:11:30.000 conspiring to disenfranchise voters,

00:11:33.000 and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.

00:11:36.000 Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day.

00:11:48.000 Special counsel Jack Smith had prosecuted Democrats and Republicans.

00:11:53.000 But Trump's supporters saw this case as politically motivated.

00:11:57.000 What they were doing was so wrong and so destructive to the presidency.

00:12:00.000 That you can have a president throw his predecessor in prison for non-crimes.

00:12:10.000 And that's how we destroy our country.

00:12:12.000 That's how we become a third world Marxist hellhole.

00:12:16.000 Mike Davis is one of Trump's trusted advisors, known in Trump's circle as the Viceroy.

00:12:21.000 A Washington insider, a former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

00:12:28.000 I was the only person, it seems, who would go on Fox News every day and defend President Trump.

00:12:36.000 We've seen that they have weaponized, they have politicized law enforcement repeatedly to get Trump.

00:12:41.000 I've done over 4,500 media hits supporting and defending President Trump.

00:12:48.000 They have completely politicized the Justice Department.

00:12:50.000 This Justice Department is rotten to the core.

00:12:53.000 A lot of what they're trying to do is recast the narrative of what happened to him during his impeachments.

00:12:58.000 To recast the narrative of what happened on January 6th.

00:13:02.000 To suggest it was a day of peaceful protest and not a violent attack on democracy.

00:13:06.000 I think the public record in the investigations would show otherwise.

00:13:11.000 This is lawless, this is Democrat lawfare, this is election interference.

00:13:16.000 He has presidential immunity for his acts as the President of the United States.

00:13:21.000 Trump has come right up to the edge of saying, you don't get to tell me what the law says, I get to say what the law says.

00:13:28.000 He believes, as he once said, that Article 2 of the Constitution means that he could do whatever he wants.

00:13:35.000 He believes that if the President does it, it can't be illegal.

00:13:40.000 It was a familiar argument that a President was above the law.

00:13:45.000 It went back more than 50 years to another President dogged by legal problems.

00:13:50.000 So what, in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations where the President can decide that it's in the best interest of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

00:14:06.000 Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

00:14:10.000 By definition.

00:14:11.000 Exactly.

00:14:13.000 If you think back to Richard Nixon's period, people called Richard Nixon an imperial president.

00:14:23.000 He violated the laws, and his administration was corrupt.

00:14:29.000 Nixon was accused of weaponizing the FBI and IRS against his political enemies.

00:14:34.000 The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.

00:14:42.000 Of covering up the break-in at the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate complex.

00:14:47.000 What did the President know, and when did he know it, about the cover-up?

00:14:53.000 And refusing to comply with court orders to turn over Oval Office recordings.

00:14:57.000 President Nixon announced that he will neither appeal nor comply with a federal court order to turn over the Watergate tapes.

00:15:04.000 The news has caused a storm in Washington, and some of Mr. Nixon's most loyal supporters are calling for his resignation.

00:15:11.000 When the Supreme Court weighed in, Nixon relented, turning over the tapes and resigning the presidency in disgrace.

00:15:18.000 The President now at the door. A final wave.

00:15:21.000 After Watergate, there was an effort to reform the presidency and to put some constraints on it.

00:15:28.000 A lot of ethics laws were passed. Independent agencies were safeguarded.

00:15:35.000 The whole effort was to fight corruption, to fight tyranny, to make sure that the president didn't become a tyrant.

00:15:42.000 Congress tried to take some power back.

00:15:44.000 One way to think of it is, you know, Gulliver is the president.

00:15:49.000 And then after Watergate, what Congress did is they tried to tie him down, just like the Lilliputians tried to tie down Gulliver.

00:15:57.000 Inspector generals, special counsels, these efforts to reduce the president's ability to control the Cabinet agencies.

00:16:05.000 That was an effort to fragment the executive branch. 0.83

00:16:08.000 I think that was the mistake, to try to solve the Nixon problem by making the executive branch less effective.

00:16:16.000 Law professor John Yoo has long been an advocate for strong presidential power,

00:16:21.000 and a controversial doctrine called the Unitary Executive Theory.

00:16:26.000 It is the idea that the Constitution vests all of the executive power of the federal government in a single person.

00:16:35.000 The president.

00:16:38.000 It was a fringe theory that had been rejected by the Supreme Court.

00:16:42.000 And in those years after Nixon, president after president would find their power constrained.

00:16:48.000 The power of the presidency was probably at its weakest in the post-Watergate years.

00:16:56.000 I don't think it really picked up steam until, you know, the post-911 era.

00:17:02.000 You know, 9-11 obviously was a significant event that required strong executive action.

00:17:09.000 The Twin Towers, the New York landmarks, have collapsed and are gone.

00:17:14.000 9-11. Thousands of Americans dead. A nation in crisis.

00:17:19.000 I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

00:17:26.000 A presidential administration wanting to respond forcefully, exercise its power without constraints.

00:17:36.000 We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will.

00:17:39.000 We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.

00:17:43.000 A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion,

00:17:47.000 using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful.

00:17:54.000 Alexander Hamilton had said the definition of good government is an energetic executive.

00:17:59.000 You want someone who can act with speed, decisiveness, energy.

00:18:04.000 But you could see the presidency is trying to reassert itself to break free from these bonds that have been with us since Watergate.

00:18:11.000 John Yoo was at the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel at the time.

00:18:17.000 The Bush administration relied on Yoo more than any other lawyer in government to justify what they were doing.

00:18:25.000 We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad and increased vigilance at home.

00:18:32.000 Yoo is on the extreme of legal debate over presidential power.

00:18:38.000 That the law allowed the president to do extraordinary things after 9-11.

00:18:45.000 Including secret rendition to black sites.

00:18:50.000 Including torture.

00:18:52.000 Including spying on Americans with the NSA.

00:18:56.000 Those things were nearly all repudiated, either by his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel,

00:19:04.000 or by courts, who said, that's not legal.

00:19:09.000 But in the years that followed, the Supreme Court was ready to enhance executive power.

00:19:15.000 Justice by justice, the conservatives were taking over the Supreme Court.

00:19:22.000 And the theory of the unitary executive was becoming more widespread.

00:19:28.000 And finally, this came to a head, really, in the final session of the 2024 Supreme Court.

00:19:35.000 It was that Trump case about his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

00:19:41.000 It had gone all the way to the Supreme Court.

00:19:44.000 Trump's lawyers made the Nixon argument.

00:19:48.000 If the president does it, it's not illegal.

00:19:50.000 It's not illegal.

00:19:52.000 And in large part, the court agreed.

00:19:55.000 In Trump versus the United States, the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing,

00:19:59.000 says the president is the chief of the executive branch.

00:20:03.000 And the president is also in charge of executing the laws.

00:20:07.000 And for this reason, must have immunity from presidents later on prosecuting him or her for those decisions.

00:20:14.000 The president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers.

00:20:21.000 One of the reasons the chief justice gives is so that the president can fully run the executive branch

00:20:29.000 without having to worry about his criminal liability or civil liability after.

00:20:33.000 The immunity decision was arguably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, legal victory that Donald Trump has had in his entire time in public life.

00:20:46.000 It essentially spelled the meaningful end of the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump.

00:20:53.000 That immunity decision, you could say that was like the precursor event to Trump 2.0 in almost every respect.

00:21:00.000 It was hugely important.

00:21:04.000 It was the difference between President Trump going to prison versus going back to the White House.

00:21:10.000 It was hugely consequential.

00:21:11.000 It was one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in our history.

00:21:15.000 Trump won the presidency and a get-out-of-jail-free card.

00:21:20.000 He has now been gifted legal immunity.

00:21:23.000 After winning an election, the federal cases all go away.

00:21:26.000 In his hush money case, unconditional discharge covering all 34 counts.

00:21:32.000 No prison time, no fine.

00:21:34.000 Psychologically, it was a big stamp of approval for the sense that the president is kind of above the law.

00:21:41.000 I mean, literally above the law. That's what the immunity decision found.

00:21:44.000 You can't find, he's immune from a normal legal challenge.

00:21:48.000 You got a pretty powerful feeling that you're kind of unconstrained.

00:21:51.000 I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will...

00:21:55.000 Now, that sense of power would fuel his presidency.

00:21:59.000 It signals a very different kind of president, and a president who doesn't want to be bound by either the Constitution or statutory law.

00:22:10.000 He believes he has literally unrestricted power.

00:22:14.000 So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations, Mr. President.

00:22:17.000 The strategy is to flood the zone, to overwhelm the opposition, and stun people who are used to the legal constitutional order and the rule of law.

00:22:31.000 Donald Trump immediately getting to work with a remarkable show of the use of executive power.

00:22:37.000 We're going to see a president pardoning people who participated in this erection that he supported.

00:22:43.000 So this is January 6th. These are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon.

00:22:52.000 Full pardon.

00:22:54.000 Full pardon or commutations?

00:22:56.000 Full pardon.

00:22:57.000 He issues pardons and commutations to everybody who had been convicted of crimes in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

00:23:07.000 We hope they come out tonight, frankly.

00:23:10.000 He said it was a grave national injustice, in his view, that they had been convicted and prosecuted.

00:23:18.000 And he called them hostages.

00:23:19.000 Peter Keisler, a prominent voice in the conservative legal world, was acting attorney general for George W. Bush.

00:23:27.000 He has become a critic of President Trump.

00:23:30.000 There's really no way to understand that decision, except as an effort to protect people who had committed serious crimes,

00:23:39.000 simply because they committed those crimes in the course of supporting the president's effort to stay in power.

00:23:47.000 Free justice!

00:23:49.000 With the stroke of a pen, the legal consequences virtually undone.

00:23:54.000 The largest criminal prosecution in U.S. history is abruptly over.

00:23:59.000 The prosecutions, persecutions of these January 6th defendants were so politicized, made it illegitimate.

00:24:07.000 They went through years of suffering, they had their lives destroyed, bankrupted, lost family members, some people killed themselves.

00:24:17.000 So I have no problem with President Trump pardoning almost all of those January 6th defendants because they've suffered enough.

00:24:26.000 People who attacked Congress, people who used violence to spread their political message,

00:24:32.000 people who had no regard for our institutions and our democracy.

00:24:39.000 That's who he was issuing pardons for.

00:24:42.000 This was a day of violence. This was a day in which 140 police officers were injured, and we cannot rewrite the history of that day.

00:24:50.000 Property was destroyed. People were injured. Police officers trying to defend the democratic process. Die.

00:24:56.000 We stood up against a stolen election. We will be vindicated in the pages of history as patriots and freedom fighters.

00:25:05.000 He's put my family back together again. Without him, I wouldn't be out right now.

00:25:16.000 We don't condone violence, but we're also not the insurrectionists here.

00:25:26.000 I feel, I feel, I feel, yes, I feel vindicated and validated. Yes, absolutely.

00:25:39.000 It really sends the signal that people can engage in violence on his behalf, and he's got that pardon power there for them.

00:25:46.000 He wants people who are on his side to think, you know what, if I go a little bit too far, you know, they got a president there who's kind of watching out for you.

00:25:57.000 It really puts us on a road that goes pretty far from the neutral rule of law and pretty, and pretty far, unfortunately, towards a kind of personalized use of government to go after your enemies and to forgive those on your side who break the law.

00:26:14.000 Trump and his advisors were pushing to go further, exact retribution for what they called lawfare.

00:26:23.000 I think retribution is a very important component of justice.

00:26:27.000 It serves as a powerful deterrent to people who may commit crimes in the future that there are going to be consequences.

00:26:33.000 The president and his Justice Department team should hold accountable those who wage this unprecedented Republican lawfare against President Trump.

00:26:44.000 The first target, the Department of Justice itself.

00:26:47.000 This July, there is a global summit of BRICS nations in Rio de Janeiro, the block of emerging superpowers, including China, Russia, India and Persia, are meeting with the goal of displacing the United States dollar as the global currency.

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00:31:11.940 What I'm really happy about in seeing this, obviously, a slanted, because it's done by PBS documentary, but the Frontline series, I think, has overall been pretty good over the years.

00:31:32.560 It's done things that I'm familiar with, and what I'm really proud about is how engaged this audience has been in this from the beginning.

00:31:42.180 I mean, when you look at this and see the detail, they go back to the beginning and think about all the shows and then all the phone calls you made and all the various situations, like on confirmations early on, and you're fighting nonstop for these to support President Trump.

00:31:57.860 You see how historic it has been, and that's why I wanted to play over the two nights is actually to play the documentary itself because I think it gives you a chance to see how we're viewed by the other side and how we're viewed historically.

00:32:11.500 And this is a historic fight, we said from the beginning, and remember, for those of you who have been with us for a number of years, you go back to 21.

00:32:19.120 When I say those dark months of the first part of 2021, it's been pretty extraordinary about how the issues we talked about at the time, and we'd had the Russ votes on, and it's the beginning of Project 2025 and beginning of CRA and America First Policy Institute and Stephen Miller's America First Law.

00:32:38.480 But these issues, and a lot of it revolved around as the Mike Davises of the world started coming on the show and getting to know him, this whole concept that we had not executed on in the first Trump term, and that is this unified executive, right?

00:32:53.580 The unified executive where he is the chief executive officer of the U.S. government, that he is the commander-in-chief of the United States military, and that he is the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer.

00:33:05.900 Go back and see that, and it just warmed the cockles of my heart to see about President Trump going to the Justice Department, which remember, back at the shows, we were advocating that every day, and then President Trump went over there, and what did we say?

00:33:20.900 Oh my gosh, he's gone, he soiled the temple, because that was the railhead, post-Watergate, that was actually the railhead of how they ran the deal.

00:33:28.060 They ran it through both the CIA, but really the Justice Department, so to see President Trump go over there.

00:33:32.440 And then the voices, the voices that PBS had, I think it was Judge Lustig and others that are sitting there going, oh, he soiled the temple.

00:33:43.920 Exactly what we told you they were going to say.

00:33:46.420 So really want to, I think they've done an extraordinary job, and I believe, and if you look at the chats, that you guys, understanding it is from a left-wing perspective,

00:33:54.900 and this is what's essentially been defunded, PBS and NPR have had a billion dollars cut of their funding, the Democrats did not put it back in, which I think is pretty extraordinary, so just incredible.

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00:36:03.540 Okay.

00:36:03.860 We're going to be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time when you'll be in the War Room.

00:36:10.840 We're going to leave you now with the music from The Right Stuff, my favorite to take us out.

00:36:15.140 We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

00:36:16.440 The Department of Justice itself.

00:36:20.060 They fired more than two dozen career prosecutors, people who had worked either on the investigations and cases against Donald Trump himself or against the people who had stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

00:36:36.780 The message that I took out of it was if you persecute Americans as a Justice Department prosecutor or agent, you're going to lose your job, and you should.

00:36:47.080 When you try to throw President Trump in prison for the rest of his life, when you try to bankrupt him, when you throw his supporters in prison after January 6th, when you do these things, there are consequences.

00:37:08.160 They also forced out about half a dozen or so of the senior career leaders at the FBI.

00:37:15.060 They were fired as a group because they were not deemed to be sufficiently politically reliable.

00:37:25.440 The message that sends is your job may depend on you being perceived as supporting the president's personal and political interests.

00:37:35.120 And that sets the stage for turning law enforcement into another instrumentality of politics, where if you're the subject or a target of an investigation, how you're treated may depend on what your politics are.

00:37:55.000 And that's the opposite of what the system should be doing.

00:38:01.160 It was time for Trump to deploy his own team to the Justice Department, one he could depend on.

00:38:08.660 At this stage of his presidency and what he wants to accomplish, he really only values loyalty and virtually nothing else.

00:38:16.880 Criminal defense attorney Ty Cobb was part of Trump's legal team during the first term.

00:38:23.500 Now he's a critic.

00:38:25.420 He's not looking for them to tell him what to do. He's looking for them to do what he tells them to do.

00:38:32.560 He learned a lot the first time around, I think, in terms of how far he could go.

00:38:37.700 Trump's first attorney general was Jeff Sessions.

00:38:40.620 Sessions was a constant object of desire, in part because of the recusal, without consultation with the White House.

00:38:51.240 I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.

00:39:03.760 Trump saw Sessions' decision as disloyal, not protecting him from a DOJ investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

00:39:13.520 The Justice Department naming the former FBI director, Robert Mueller, special counsel to take over the investigation.

00:39:20.480 That rubbed the president the wrong way, and he never got over it.

00:39:23.840 Time and again, during Trump's first term, it was the lawyers who got in his way.

00:39:28.860 There were people in the first Trump administration, the so-called grown-ups in the room, more traditional conservatives,

00:39:39.080 federalist society lawyers who were very conservative ideologically, but were also very serious lawyers as well,

00:39:46.500 who were occasionally willing to say no to ideas that they thought were outside the bounds of legitimate legal interpretation or just simply bad ideas,

00:39:55.120 to raise objections, to slow things down.

00:40:02.720 One of the lessons learned for the people who stuck with Trump after the events of January 6th was that one of their mistakes was having too many people like that around the president.

00:40:12.200 And there was a very deliberate effort to vet people to ensure that they would be more in the MAGA mold,

00:40:20.800 more permissive lawyers, people who were not going to be obstacles, slowing down ideas coming out of the White House, but accelerators.

00:40:29.680 His new attorney general this time would be Pam Bondi. 0.98

00:40:35.400 I think she's going to be as impartial as you can possibly be.

00:40:38.500 I know I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats,

00:40:43.360 and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be.

00:40:46.900 I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally, but she's going to be as total as you can get. 0.92

00:40:51.440 They were friends. They've known each other a long time.

00:40:56.040 Part of this with Trump, yes, it is loyalty, and part of it is personal.

00:40:59.780 She has served as his personal lawyer.

00:41:02.260 I think he just really likes her.

00:41:04.360 The top deputies, Todd Blanche and Emil Bovet,

00:41:09.220 had both served as Trump's personal criminal defense attorneys.

00:41:12.900 The truism that he's treating the Justice Department as a personal law firm

00:41:16.440 is almost literally true in the second term here,

00:41:20.460 where he has filled its upper ranks with people who previously had been his personal lawyers.

00:41:27.440 Defense lawyers for him have abruptly gone from trying to counter federal prosecutors and FBI agents

00:41:33.480 to being the bosses of those people

00:41:37.800 and being the instruments of his revenge against that institution.

00:41:42.640 It was breaking a barrier that had been erected after Watergate.

00:41:50.560 The Justice Department was not always as independent as it has been in my adult lifetime.

00:41:59.680 John F. Kennedy did name his brother as Attorney General,

00:42:03.380 but post-Nixon, because of who Nixon was and what he did

00:42:08.900 and how the Justice Department abetted what he did,

00:42:13.180 it has been separate.

00:42:15.540 Since Watergate, the norm, and it's been a healthy norm, 0.99

00:42:18.760 has been really to keep hands off the Justice Department, hands off the FBI.

00:42:24.060 I was in the White House many years ago.

00:42:25.900 I actually went to the Justice Department very rarely when I was the Vice President's Chief of Staff.

00:42:32.120 And partly that was because we were really not just encouraged,

00:42:34.980 but required not to deal directly with the Justice Department.

00:42:38.680 It was just considered a terrible abuse of power

00:42:41.260 to try to use the Justice Department for your own personal purposes or political purposes.

00:42:46.900 But Trump wasn't going to follow those rules.

00:42:49.600 He's the Chief Magistrate and the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States.

00:42:55.080 And the Attorney General reports directly to him.

00:42:57.680 The FBI Director reports to him.

00:43:00.600 That's one of the keys to the Unitary Theory of the Executive,

00:43:04.400 that in the office of the President is executive power,

00:43:08.200 which has really been lost since Watergate.

00:43:12.040 Trump decided to make a statement.

00:43:15.340 He would go to the Department of Justice,

00:43:17.040 make it clear he was in charge.

00:43:21.960 By going to speak at the Justice Department,

00:43:23.880 he is reasserting the President actually is,

00:43:26.980 under the Constitution,

00:43:28.180 ultimately responsible for the execution of federal law,

00:43:31.980 for federal law enforcement, all of it.

00:43:35.140 The Justice Department is not independent of the President.

00:43:39.140 Others who had worked in the Justice Department saw it differently.

00:43:42.200 Presidents only infrequently go to the Department of Justice at all.

00:43:49.460 And for good reason.

00:43:51.820 J. Michael Lutig was a lawyer in the Reagan White House,

00:43:54.780 a veteran of the DOJ under George H.W. Bush,

00:43:57.980 and a prominent conservative appeals court judge.

00:44:01.500 After January 6th, he became a vocal Trump critic.

00:44:04.660 There's every reason in the world under our constitutional order

00:44:11.740 for the President of the United States to keep his distance.

00:44:18.440 The President's political rally at the Department of Justice

00:44:33.360 was reprehensible,

00:44:35.160 and of course, it was unprecedented in all of American history.

00:44:42.220 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome

00:44:44.960 Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

00:44:47.420 Hi. Please, please be seated.

00:44:52.040 Welcome to the Department of Justice.

00:44:55.360 It is an institution whose goals have uniformly been revered

00:45:00.480 as a place where you try to at least achieve

00:45:04.000 your vision of equal justice,

00:45:08.180 unbiased justice, and depoliticized justice.

00:45:11.540 Bondi didn't even try to talk about those things.

00:45:15.440 And we all work for the greatest president

00:45:18.380 in the history of our country.

00:45:20.060 We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.

00:45:24.820 It is, um, he will never...

00:45:28.300 She made a plan that they were all there for him

00:45:30.300 and devoted to him.

00:45:33.080 That's just not, that's just not the way it's supposed to work.

00:45:37.140 They're supposed to preserve and protect the Constitution,

00:45:40.140 and, um, they're not there to preserve and protect the presidency.

00:45:47.680 During the previous couple years, while Trump was being prosecuted

00:45:51.480 and convicted for crimes,

00:45:53.300 he must have been seething and just waiting until he could take his revenge,

00:46:00.360 because that's basically what he announced he was going to do

00:46:03.140 when he walked into that Justice Department that day.

00:46:05.780 So now, as the chief law enforcement officer in our country,

00:46:09.600 I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability

00:46:14.480 for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.

00:46:17.720 There's a new sheriff in town.

00:46:19.860 The American people elected President Trump back into the White House,

00:46:23.840 and that Justice Department works for President Trump.

00:46:27.860 Unfortunately, in recent years,

00:46:29.580 a corrupt group of hacks and radicals weaponized the vast powers

00:46:33.460 of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

00:46:37.040 And there's going to be much-needed accountability in this second term. 0.99

00:46:41.140 It's a campaign, and it's by the same scum 1.00

00:46:43.660 that you have been dealing with for years, 1.00

00:46:46.220 like guys like Andrew Weissman.

00:46:48.320 The message, to me at least, was,

00:46:50.920 this is going to be the Department of Justice

00:46:53.100 that is basically the right hand of the White House.

00:46:58.360 Andrew Weissman was a federal prosecutor

00:47:00.760 who worked for Robert Mueller

00:47:02.020 investigating Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

00:47:06.880 In the years since,

00:47:08.120 he's become a legal analyst and outspoken Trump critic.

00:47:11.660 If you are thinking about the attack on the rule of law,

00:47:14.900 having a Justice Department that is not making decisions

00:47:18.220 based on the political party,

00:47:20.660 or whether you're an opponent or a supporter of the president,

00:47:24.580 is absolutely central.

00:47:27.220 There's a guy named Norm Eisen.

00:47:28.420 I don't even know what he looks like.

00:47:29.980 His name is Norm Eisen of Crewe.

00:47:32.020 He's been after me for nine years.

00:47:34.800 He's singling me out as an example.

00:47:37.540 Hey, all you other lawyers,

00:47:40.060 I'm going to make a target of you as well.

00:47:43.700 Attorney Norm Eisen was a White House counsel

00:47:46.640 under President Obama and helped Democrats build an impeachment case

00:47:50.820 against Trump in 2019.

00:47:53.420 And he filed numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration.

00:47:57.640 His sole life is to get Donald Trump,

00:48:00.380 and he's been vicious and violent.

00:48:03.180 When I see Donald Trump lashing out against the legal profession, 0.97

00:48:08.900 I see a loser acting out of rage at the institution rule of law 0.89

00:48:17.160 that he thinks is, he's right, is holding him back. 0.69

00:48:22.560 They're not legitimate people. 0.98

00:48:23.920 They're horrible people. 1.00

00:48:25.620 They're scum. 1.00

00:48:26.260 It is the unambiguous declaration of an enemy's list, 1.00

00:48:31.600 people to become the targets of retribution

00:48:34.960 from the federal government under his command.

00:48:40.600 I want these Democrat prosecutors and agents and judges 0.90

00:48:46.080 and other operatives to understand

00:48:48.780 there are still going to be severe legal, political,

00:48:51.980 and financial consequences.

00:48:53.260 The only way this will stop is if we give them

00:48:57.200 very severe consequences.

00:49:00.380 Trump expected results

00:49:01.960 and delivered a message directly

00:49:03.860 to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

00:49:06.760 And the reason I'm saying this, Todd,

00:49:08.620 is I'm only going to get one chance to say this,

00:49:11.300 but these are bad people.

00:49:13.540 When he said Todd, referring to Todd Blanche,

00:49:16.920 who's now the number two person at the Justice Department,

00:49:19.840 Todd, this is the only chance I'll get.

00:49:24.960 He means Todd Blanche, use the Justice Department

00:49:28.740 and the weight of the power of the American government

00:49:33.200 against Norm Eisen.

00:49:38.500 He puts his arm around the Justice Department

00:49:42.460 and essentially recruits them into his mission

00:49:46.120 to take control.

00:49:50.300 And in the kind of Orwellian guise

00:49:54.180 of ending weaponization of the Justice Department,

00:49:57.840 actually weaponizing it.

00:49:59.400 We will bring back faith in our justice system for the citizens.

00:50:02.740 I was shocked beyond words.

00:50:04.780 Even after all that we've seen from the president

00:50:09.860 over the past eight years,

00:50:12.000 to watch him stand

00:50:14.440 in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice,

00:50:18.780 a sacred place in America,

00:50:23.720 and claim that now he was going to get even

00:50:29.480 by politicizing and weaponizing

00:50:32.760 the Department of Justice and the FBI

00:50:35.520 against his political enemies

00:50:38.280 was a travesty in all of American history.

00:50:43.640 I happen to think President Trump

00:50:51.020 should go there every week.

00:50:53.600 They are shocked that he's in the sacred temple

00:50:56.480 of the Justice Department.

00:50:57.440 them, right?

00:50:59.500 This is what democracy is about.

00:51:01.940 These are anti-democratic forces.

00:51:03.660 They have to be broken.

00:51:06.260 They are shocked because the president

00:51:08.620 of the United States,

00:51:09.500 and worst of all, Donald Trump,

00:51:10.980 actually soiled their temple by going in there. 0.79

00:51:16.640 you.

00:51:17.740 He's president of the United States.

00:51:19.400 He's the chief magistrate

00:51:20.440 and the chief law enforcement officer

00:51:21.900 by the Constitution.

00:51:24.920 The message could not have been clearer.

00:51:27.540 Donald Trump is now in charge at justice.

00:51:40.980 The.

00:51:45.340 The.

00:51:46.640 The.

00:51:49.520 Dean.

00:51:59.680 The.

00:52:01.640 The.

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Bannon's War Room - August 11, 2025

WarRoom Battleground EP 826： Trump's Power And The Rule Of Law

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Transcript