Stefan Passantino: Liz Cheney’s J6 Crimes & Mission to Destroy Any Lawyer Who Dares Represent Trump
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 41 minutes
Words per Minute
183.54382
Summary
In the wake of the Jan. 6th hearings, former White House lawyer Liz Cheney was one of the most powerful people in Washington, D. She was also one of her husband's closest confidants, and she served as his chief ethics lawyer for years. And then, in 2016, she was asked by President Donald Trump to serve as the White House's chief White House counsel. And it was her turn to become one of his most powerful lawyers. And in the process, she found herself in the crosshairs of a congressional committee investigating whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the hearings. And, as it turns out, she wasn t the only one with a stake in what happened that day. She was the one with the power to make sure it all went as it was supposed to go. In this episode, she tells the story of how she became a key witness in the hearings, and the role she played in bringing them to the attention of the FBI, and how she ended up in the middle of a scandal that would change the landscape of American politics forever. And she tells us how she got to where she is today, and what she did to fight for the president s ethics lawyer, Peter Thiel. Welcome to The Tucker Carlson Show, where Tucker and Tucker are here to tell you what you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercox.co/thetucker/tuckercox Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Tucker's newest podcast, The Tucker's new book, "Tucker Carlson's New York Times bestselling novel, "The Devil Next Door" out on the road? Learn about his new novel, The Devil Next door? Subscribe for a chance to become a supporter of Tucker Carlson's newest novel "The Dark Side of New York? Tucker's latest novel, New York's "The White House," out now on the streets, out on Craigslist, and much more! Subscribe to his new podcast, "New York's Most Influenomenon" is out there! Thank you for listening to Tucker's Alyssa's newest episode on Tucker's Instapod? Subscribe to our new episode on the show, "Curiouser and Curiouser & Curiouser? by clicking here? and more! "The People Who Know What Tucker's New Book?
Transcript
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welcome to the tucker carlson show we bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else
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and they're not censored of course because we're not gatekeepers we are honest brokers
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here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly check out all of our content
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at tucker carlson.com here's the episode okay so i think a lot of us who were watching the um
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the january 6th committee hearings etc particularly those of us who knew liz cheney very well um began
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to suspect that wow this is not unfolding um in a way that's recognizable and then you begin to think
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well this could be completely illegitimate and then by the end i'm thinking and i'm texting this to
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cheney by the way as it's happening um this seems like police state stuff uh you were in the middle
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of it so just if you wouldn't mind setting the the story for us what what was your involvement in the
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january 6th aftermath yeah so on the aftermath side i'm a lawyer and i'd represented a number of
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witnesses who were giving testimony before the january 6th committee mostly uneventful things i
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hid what kind of lawyer were you so i'm a political lawyer if you can call such a thing i i'm sort of
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the the living embodiment of a lot of the sort of dysfunction of washington dc that you need to have
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such a thing as a political lawyer fair of dealing with all of the sort of regulatory world of if you
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want to engage with politicians if you want to give them money if you want to lobby them if you want to
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give them gifts if you want to advocate there's a whole myriad of regulations that surround that which
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create professions for people like me to help people navigate what are the rules of the road if
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i want to communicate and that includes interfacing with government investigations oversight hearings
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all of those various activities and so for 30 years i've been a relatively anonymous lawyer whose job
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it's been to help people just follow the rules so that they can be heard they have their opportunity
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to petition government that's been my background i had a sort of career transforming moment where i went
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from running the political law compliance shop for one of the largest law firms in the world a big
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major international law firm that had massive offices on k street heading up that political office
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to being asked by president trump to be his deputy white house counsel so for the first two years of
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his presidency they decided that they were going to need someone who had been around the block for a
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little while yeah to help them navigate because remember unlike most incoming governments which are
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staffed by people who have been in government their entire lives and they just continue perpetuating
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the machine of being government people who are now working in the white house that's how we do things
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in dc except in 2016 when president trump comes in and is not only bringing in people who really don't come
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from the government background they come from successful business backgrounds and traditionally
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not even so much from public companies just not used to the fact that there's myriad washington rules
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that are foreign to anyone who's not been part of that they think that because voters chose trump they have
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power but they don't realize voters have no power correct without a doubt and my job was to be the person
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who came in and really helped orient people to how do you navigate this bureaucracy that's called
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washington dc how do you deal with all of the rules that regulate getting the job done that you were
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elected for so i was the deputy white house counsel whose job it was to make sure that people understood
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and followed the rules now of course fast forwarding it became entirely too delicious if you have the
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opportunity to make ethics allegations against trump's ethics lawyer that's a story that's too good to check
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and so i became known after having gone into that work and having worked for the president i did that
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for two years and then i moved effectively to the other side of the gates i helped represent the
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companies that were in the crosshairs i did a lot of work for the trump organization and i did a lot of
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work for companies that wanted to interact and engage with the government but i was no longer a
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government worker i went back to being a practicing lawyer in washington dc and one of the things that
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that came along as the january 6 investigation comes along and that committee blanketed washington dc
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with subpoenas you you see a lot of the very big names all having been called in to testify but there
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were some 2 000 people that were called before the january 6 committee including very low-level staffers
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very low-level campaign workers all of whom got knocks on the door from the fbi handing them subpoenas
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and all of whom were saying hey well since i'm here handing you the subpoena you want to just talk a
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little bit about your role as a junior campaign person or a junior staffer or xyz within the white
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house they were all getting brought in before this it's much uh the scale was much larger than anything
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that happened during 1950s in the huac period um and the number of people went to prison much greater
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than during the mccarthy hearings i mean if you're looking for the emergence of fascism in the united
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states like we just saw it right if i can just say sorry i can't control myself um so what role did
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liz cheney play in this so liz cheney who was i guess technically the vice chair of the january 6
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committee which is i don't think actually technically a constitutional role but she was one of the people
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who was running the january 6 committee and as they had been blanketing washington dc with subpoenas
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lots and lots of very very young people would come back into talking to the folks which colloquially
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occured in trump world hey i just got contacted by the fbi they want me to come testify i have no idea
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what to do and so there was a process for some of the younger lawyers to say well let's try to find
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lawyers for these people who will just help them navigate this investigation getting brought before
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the january are these people who smashed windows in the capitol or assaulted cops no no absolutely
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these are the people who happen to have been working in the trump campaign in 2020 or had been
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working in the white house in 2020 or in some way had something to offer with respect to some of them
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not at january 6 the protest oh yeah nobody who i was representing was at a protest everyone who i was
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representing were people who had either worked in the white house or had worked for they had nothing
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to do with the january 6th demonstration no the okay just i just want to be clear on that was to
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create a narrative of what was happening inside the white house what was happening inside the campaign
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from the election in 2020 through january 6th and afterwards and to try to create a political narrative
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of what was happening and sort of one of the 101 investigative rules is always start with the
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junior youngest most people intimidate them get them to say things that you can then use to create
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a political narrative or whatever the narrative was and i was i'd represented a few of those fairly
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significant folks but mostly i was being asked to help these very very young people who were just
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getting hailed before this committee to try to give testimony and it was they're using the fbi
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for this just to be clear oh yes i no question i literally they would hand subpoenas and i had one
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very young she was working in the campaign office couldn't have been more than 23 24 years old
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who told me the story not only did the fbi show up unannounced at her door but when she answered the
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door the fbi said well while we're here you mind if we just ask you some questions about what you were
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doing what was president trump doing what was the campaign doing with respect to messaging about january
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6th which message as a lawyer correct there there was a was this girl at january 6th this girl
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was a campaign worker so she was helping to put out doing junior research of what was now colloquially
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called the stop the steal effort that they were going after these younger folks trying to find out
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what it was that they were talking about and to me as a lawyer in order for the system to work
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full transparency also requires that people's rights be protected and that includes the right
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that you have somebody there who's protecting your interests if you are a junior person who might have
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something to offer with respect to what happened in january 6th query to me whether the january 6th
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even served a legislative function at all but stipulating that it was there for some legislative
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purpose people who are providing information under subpoena and under oath and under penalty of
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being found liable for false statements should have somebody there to protect their interests
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so you make a point that people might not be aware of so the congress is the legislative branch of
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government and so the purpose of committee hearings in the congress is to craft legislation
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correct right there's no other purpose correct committees don't in the congress do not exist
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to use the fbi to hound their political opponents into prison correct correct and not only that but
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the the framers of the constitution made it very very clear there are to be three branches of
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government there is a legislative branch that is only supposed to be making the laws it's up to the
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executive branch to execute those laws and then the judiciary to actually enforce those laws that's a
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very clear standard and when you have a legislative body and this is what happened to me and i'm sure
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we're going to get into it that decides that they are going to drift beyond their legislative function
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their fact-finding function in support of passing legislation and they're going to move into a law
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enforcement method we don't like this person this person presents a narrative to us that we don't like
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we are going to use the full weight and power of the united states government to try and execute that
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person without any due process of law that is completely unconstitutional and that is ultimately
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where i found myself at the end of this road so that's just that's a police state function that's
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exactly and that is that is in fact exactly what what ended up happening to me so um you
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discovered in the course of this i was going to say you believe but it's not a question of what you
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believe it's a fact that liz cheney broke the law during the course of of this investigation yeah i mean
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the the nice thing i think is there's nothing that i'm going to tell you today that's not written out
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under oath in testimony that's in black and white for anyone to see i've just been trying to get
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people to pay attention and look at it but as a and i have filed a lawsuit against the federal
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government on this point saying that the federal government abused its power and in this case against
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me by incorporating and taking certain information distributing them out obviously there's a number
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of things that the government lets you sue them for there are a lot of things they don't let you
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sue them for but one of the things that they did was they really invaded my privacy and they did that in
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a way to deny me my civil rights because it was all in further and stuff but you're just the lawyer
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represent i mean our our system affords every accused person accused of a serious crime
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legal representation right correct so you didn't you weren't at january 6th i was not at january
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have you ever planned an insurrection of any kind i did not plan any insurrection right so i just want
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to be clear on this like you're not the defendant here correct you're representing low level staffers
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who were not at january 6th not accused of any crime on january 6th who had nothing to do with
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january 6th and you're just their lawyer because they need a lawyer because the people conducting
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these investigations are so unscrupulous they can't go in without legal representation correct
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am i characterizing you are exactly and where i found myself in the wood shipper was that one of
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those people who i represented who had given some 15 hours of testimony under oath before the committee
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then terminated her relationship with me and gave diametrically different testimony
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to what had been said before that's a crime well some would say but it's a hold on no just without
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even getting into the specifics of this which i hope you'll explain to us but it is not legal to
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commit perjury correct correct okay and and it certainly presents something of a conundrum when a
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witness has presented one set of testimony under oath and then provides testimony under oath which
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could be seen as contradictory to the former testimony and both of those elements of testimony
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were under oath yeah that presents a significant try that in a deposition correct you go to jail
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correct well it's one of the lawyer's greatest sort of matlock cross-examination that everyone
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dreams of is were you lying then or were you lying now i've been there in depositions you know they
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have the previous transcript i mean this is but i'm only making the point that everyone knows this
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this is like really simple you can't do that you can't lie under oath correct correct so who is this
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person and so she say so this is cassidy hutchinson that we're talking about who who famously testified
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live before the committee and that it became extraordinarily well known that she was an
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extremely powerful witness when she testified live before the committee and as one of the elements
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of providing that testimony there was significant discussion of the fact that she had previously had
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this trump lawyer who had effectively coached her not to tell the truth had coached her to say
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i don't recall when in fact she did recall all of those things were being accused of me as the
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lawyer who was cassidy hutchinson so cassidy hutchinson we i don't know that we actually
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overlapped in in the white house together and if we did i i didn't know her but she came in as
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i believe started as an intern i think she was 25 years old at the time and ultimately rose to a
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very prominent position with mark meadows in the chief of staff office in that she had
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proximity and access to a great deal that was happening in the white house and so she was one
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of these myriad of witnesses not to my mind unlike a number of the other witnesses who i had been
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bringing before the committee who might have observed things and might have seen things had provided
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her testimony i thought it was over it only happened subsequently that i learned that while i was
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representing her liz cheney was communicating with her behind my back while i was her lawyer now
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that's a lawyer 101 thing that you're just not allowed to do one of the things that's set up within
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our legal rules of ethics in order to prevent an unscrupulous lawyer from manipulating the client is there
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is a very clear bar rule that says if somebody is represented by a lawyer with respect to a
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particular matter you the lawyer on the other side don't have the right to communicate directly to
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that client except through the lawyer and that's rules in place to prevent people from circumventing
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the lawyer and is this a brand new rule or is it long-standing this is a long-standing this is one
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of those 101 rules okay this is a core rule that any attorney would be aware of clearly a core rule that
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and it's also a core rule that you can't do knowingly indirectly which you can't do directly
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you can't and this happened here from all the things that i've seen like i said you don't have
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to believe a word i'm saying it's right in the testimony that her staffers which were lawyers
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were also communicating and she was working through what i would call a cutout which was alissa farrah
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griffin was effectively operating as cassidy's friend who started the process as a go-between
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alissa farrah griffin is like some tv girl she is a a prominent uh tv personality and also famously
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uh not just on the view but also was a i think a contributor for cnn which right a lot of folks and
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i just feel duty bound to report that she's tremendously stupid i i just want to say that
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because uh i'm aware of her yes so we were in a meeting here at tcn the other day and i looked
00:16:29.460
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so okay so cassie hutchinson is while you're representing her is communicating with the other
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correct and and what that resulted in and we've now learned through some fantastic work that has
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been done by the house chairman laudermilk of the house admin oversight committee uncovered documents
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that i just would not have believed still existed or would have been turned over to the government
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which effectively prove that there was this back channel of conversation between liz cheney and her
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staff both of whom are lawyers and others effectively to say we have more we want to say we have more
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testimony that cassidy hutchinson wants to provide whether that's because she chose to provide different
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testimony or because she felt gee i just wasn't asked the right questions whatever the reason was
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there was this backline communication that was created completely unbeknownst to me that there was going to be
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an opportunity for another investigation of cassidy hutchinson but most importantly to me it was a
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parallel element of well not only hey i want to change my story and i want to say a lot of really
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inflammatory things about donald trump that i didn't testify to under the previous times when i was before you
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but also we're not going to tell my lawyer this trump lawyer that we're having this conversation and we are
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going to bombard both of you with questions that they had already communicated what those questions
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were going to be with an effort to try to get me to obstruct congress in the face of this deposition it
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was effectively a law enforcement sting operation to get me to effectively block her drag her out of
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there silence her stop her from testifying in this third interview it was a it was they were they were
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setting you up as her lawyer correct and the idea was that they were going to not only get these very
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inflammatory facts new facts out of cassidy hutchinson but in the process of doing that we're setting up a
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third interview that i was going to be in attendance at and at which time liz cheney was going to ask
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cassidy hutchinson certain questions that cassidy had already fed her saying these are things i want to say
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and she talks about in her testimony that they knew that i was going to be extremely upset that
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these questions were being asked and the expectation was that i was going to obstruct her that i was going
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to drag her out of i was going to do something and they did this on purpose clearly on purpose they
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testified so anyone who's willing to i mean most normal people's brains don't even go to places like
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that you just don't think that way these are the people who and you don't have to comment but
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they set up january 6th itself was a was effectively uh it was fake um and so it it's the same way of
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thinking yeah it's not straightforward it's totally deceptive it's stealthy and and and with respect to
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this it was explicitly an off the records operation by liz cheney i had this conversation with her staff
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afterwards so you can imagine we had in the course of it was in february and march we had gone through
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we'd done her testimony we'd done her depositions she'd given the testimony those transcripts were
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out there and then almost two months later i get a follow-up phone call saying liz cheney wants to do
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a special interview with cassidy hutchinson one-on-one in-purpose person in the capitol building
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which was all of which was highly unusual because all every other investigation conducted by the
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january 6th committee was being done either by zoom or in person with numerous representatives from the
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committee their staff members if they wanted to attend could attend this one i was told must be
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in person it's going to be just liz cheney just her staffer just me just cassidy hutchinson and the way
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that they set this up you'll remember this is in 2022 when all of the federal government was completely
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in lockdown because of covet there was no public access to the to the people's house you couldn't get
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in but we were going to be afforded access for the purpose of this special interview that was going to
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be conducted and it was very surreal because as we were led into this deposition and we walk in it
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was the top floor of the canon office building there's a a little antechamber off of one of the
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elevators that was completely closed to the public and as we were walking through there me and cassie
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hutchinson there were capitol police everywhere i was and i remember remarking to myself at the time this
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is surreal how in a closed office building there are all of these capitol police for this interview that
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i'm conducting with liz cheney i said she it's really surprising she has so much protection in
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a closed building what what i didn't realize is they were there for me they were there because the
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expectation was that when cassidy hutchinson testified to the things that she had already
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pre-organized she was going to testify with liz cheney that i might get violent i might be the one
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who does something to her and they're going to get violent that was the expectation i'm not i am
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surmising that by the fact that in a closed office building as i walk into this interview which was
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literally only me cassidy hutchinson liz cheney and dan george her staff and then there was a
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videographer and a court reporter who were there it was just us and there were capital you're a physical
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threat this is like this weird feminized passive aggression that rules all of our relationships now
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and it comes from people like liz cheney like she's out of the closet fascist but you're the threat
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but the thing that was really interesting and and and the part that i i found particularly unusual is
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that coming out of that it it was a phenomenon in every one of our interviews that every time after
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cassidy hutchinson had testified while i was representing her there would suddenly be leaks in real
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time about the fact she had testified what a great witness she was and my obvious initial
00:24:57.360
assumptions this committee is leaking on me immediately as soon as my client goes in and it
00:25:02.640
was my job to protect her my job she was somebody who had presented to me as saying i don't want to
00:25:09.260
testify i don't like the january 6 committee i don't want to do any of this how do i get through
00:25:14.600
this process and be able to have a job on the back end that was the mission as it was presented to
00:25:19.000
me i will testify if i have to but i want to be able to get through it but these leaks kept
00:25:24.260
happening and and i kept assuming that it was the january 6 committee so after this third interview
00:25:29.500
the one that i'm describing to you which was there was only four of us in the room literally as cassidy
00:25:35.480
and i are in the cab driving out together i have on my phone a text message that had clearly come
00:25:44.040
while we were testifying asking me about her testimony and i was livid about that that in fact
00:25:51.380
in real time somebody's leaking to the press so i took a screenshot of that and i sent it to dan
00:25:57.080
george the staffer and i was really upset i sent him a text and i still have all these texts and i
00:26:01.260
said well that was really fast you guys did that and i had a subsequent conversation i said why are
00:26:06.540
you destroying this poor girl's life by every time she testifies you are leaking about it and now you're
00:26:14.440
leaking about this third interview you're destroying any career opportunities she might have had and what
00:26:19.500
dan george told me he says i assure you this was not us who leaked nobody on the committee knew we
00:26:25.780
were doing this interview it was only liz cheney and i and that dan george said to me and in fact
00:26:31.700
the other committee members would probably be upset if they knew that liz cheney had done that and he
00:26:37.200
told me all of that in the context of trying to assure me that they weren't the ones who had leaked in
00:26:42.760
real time the fact that we had gone in but it was extraordinarily unusual to me that so who did it
00:26:48.360
who did the leaking yeah well um i can speculate as they as they say in the uh in the horror movies
00:26:55.500
uh the call might have come from inside the house yeah uh it might have been my client who is and in
00:27:00.820
fact one of the things that you think it was cassie hutchinson did that i have no way of knowing of
00:27:06.200
course but what i do know is that in real time when all of the allegations against me broke i was
00:27:12.300
reached out to by former friends of cassidy hutchinson saying i can't believe what they're
00:27:16.900
doing to you i have text messages in real time between me the friend and cassidy in which cassidy
00:27:24.160
is saying the diametrically opposite stefan wants me to cooperate the committee i don't want to
00:27:28.620
cooperate with the committee and also saying stefan assures me that the committee's not going to leak
00:27:34.720
but i don't trust that i and this is cassidy hutchinson texting to her friend i'm going to run my
00:27:41.640
own parallel operation i'm and she identifies i'm going to have a line of communication with the
00:27:47.260
new york times and politico and she's already talking at the very outset of our representation
00:27:53.020
that she doesn't trust that this will stay quiet and that she wanted to run her own investigation
00:27:58.420
i filed a defamation lawsuit against uh weissman a msnbc person i included all of these
00:28:07.240
who as you can imagine when all these stories came out i had just unending scorn but one of the
00:28:14.260
things that cassie hutchinson had testified to in her deposition when she was talking about me
00:28:19.120
among all of the negative and bad things that she said about me some of which i think were just not
00:28:25.660
true but largely a lot of which and it sounds a little weird coming for me can be explained as
00:28:31.980
a somewhat impressionable person coming in thinking she's going into an adversarial relationship but
00:28:36.680
but one of the things that came out of that was cassidy was very very clear stefan never told me to
00:28:42.880
lie never told me to lie and that when andrew weissman and others literally tweeted well her new
00:28:49.200
lawyers are the good lawyers unlike the lawyer that told her to lie well i just had had enough at that
00:28:53.900
point it's like i'm just not going to be a victim anymore we have defamation laws for a purpose
00:28:58.260
i'm going to avail myself of them and in that complaint the text messages that i've just described
00:29:03.120
to you i've screenshotted and they're in they're in the complaint but it was somewhat clear to me
00:29:09.220
from text messages that i've seen that there appears to have been from the very outset a messaging
00:29:15.460
operation that was being run by my own client completely unbeknownst to me now i'm basing that
00:29:21.420
on just text messages that i've seen and basing it on the fact that liz cheney's staffers assured me
00:29:26.240
nobody else knew that this was happening and they would never leak it because they wouldn't have
00:29:31.800
wanted their own committee to know and it's it's ironic i'm a little almost embarrassed about it
00:29:36.940
now but in the context of that conversation that i had with dan george i had this i was sort of i was
00:29:43.860
i was still at that point sort of a naive institutionalist washington lawyer i had grown up
00:29:48.860
in washington my whole life i'd been around that i had incredible respect for the institutions of
00:29:53.620
washington for congress for the media for when walter cronkite said something it was a fact
00:29:58.680
incredible respect for the agencies the state department the intelligence and so i was still
00:30:04.160
somewhat in in that world where i had this respect and as i'm having this conversation with dan
00:30:09.720
george the staffer i'm saying i cannot believe you guys were leaking literally while we're in there
00:30:15.660
and he was assuring me he hadn't i had a conversation with dan george i said dan george dan
00:30:20.060
you and i are going to work in this town far too long to be playing games with any leaking to the
00:30:25.680
press and i said i assure you i've practiced law for 30 years this is not how i do business and i
00:30:32.600
have too much respect for the congress and i said and i have too much respect for liz cheney to ever
00:30:37.840
leak and i and i asked him at the time i said i want you to please go and tell liz cheney how much
00:30:43.400
respect i have for her and that i would never leak something that came out of the committee now dan
00:30:48.140
george tells me he had that conversation with cheney i don't know if they actually did but all
00:30:53.200
of these are reasons why to me i was confronted with a highly highly unusual scenario whereby there
00:31:01.200
was this small operation that was done this small interview lots of security but i didn't think
00:31:08.840
anything of it at the time it was unusual but it moved on it was only later after i had been fired as
00:31:17.940
cassidy's lawyer and after she had testified live on tv that she subsequently provided lots of
00:31:25.720
testimony describing in detail the nature of our interaction together and it was in that september
00:31:31.820
transcript that i learned all of these back channel things i learned the degree to which
00:31:37.480
there had been communications that had been going on how they had set up this interview
00:31:41.480
how they had expected me to block her from testifying how they had sort of laughed about
00:31:47.480
how surprised i was that a lot of these new facts were coming out and she literally testifies in that
00:31:54.740
interview that as as we're walking out of the canon office building the two of us we've completed
00:31:59.860
this interview i didn't obstruct her the transcripts are there i never blocked her from
00:32:03.500
testifying i never told her i never created objections to coach her i didn't do any of those
00:32:09.560
things but she literally describes in her testimony as we're walking out the door she turns around to
00:32:16.060
dan george literally behind my back saying something to the effect of mouthing i'm so screwed and the
00:32:21.740
dan george mouths back to her i'm sorry now when i'm reading this in the transcript and it's all there
00:32:26.240
for anyone who wants to read it i realize this whole thing had been a setup and if it was simply a
00:32:32.640
question of well we just want to get the truth from cassidy well then just fire me get a new lawyer let
00:32:37.820
her testify no this was very important that i be sitting next to her while she provided this new
00:32:44.340
inflammatory testimony with the eye towards having me obstruct her in some way why were they so intent
00:32:51.140
on hurting you you're just a lawyer well i'm speculating on on that um but but one could infer
00:32:57.740
that you need to have a reason why testimony changed why was it that somebody who provided testimony
00:33:04.320
one way asked open-ended questions where the lawyer didn't obstruct didn't block the person
00:33:10.280
in fact in the first two interviews the only objections i ever raised was when dan george was
00:33:15.800
asking really incoherent questions and i would say do you mean this and he would literally thank me
00:33:20.640
it's all on the record you don't have to believe me those are the only times i interrupted um
00:33:26.760
but now you have to say well now the person who was asked hey what happened on the ellipse
00:33:31.520
and tells one story now wants to tell a very diametrically different story about strangling the
00:33:37.420
president strangling secret service or lots of things grabbing the wheel of the limousine these all
00:33:43.060
came out as new evidence so let's just can we get specific about some of some of the allegations
00:33:47.880
that she made in her subsequent interview which you say contradicts previous testimony yeah so
00:33:53.500
so she am i misremembering or did is she the one who said that trump was such a lunatic that he tried
00:34:00.260
to steer the beast the presidential limousine from the back that that testimony came for the first time
00:34:05.820
i believe in her live testimony that was the sort of very dramatic testimony where she says i you know
00:34:11.920
they grabbed the clavicle and all of those that testimony came out live the two things that she ever
00:34:18.040
told you that before no now and i want to be fair to cassidy which might might seem odd that i'm saying
00:34:25.780
that but i want to be fair to her because she testifies that in our first meetings she started to
00:34:31.680
describe to me this traumatic thing that she had heard second or third hand about some incident that
00:34:38.080
had happened in the drive back from the ellipse and how i had been cutting her off now i don't have
00:34:44.860
any recollection of that conversation happening between us but i can also say if she had raised
00:34:51.060
oh i'm very concerned that i heard third hand about a thing that i would have cut her i said look that's
00:34:56.800
not what you're here for you're a fact witness your job is to testify to the facts that you know you're
00:35:03.100
not an expert witness you're not a speculation witness you're not a i'm guessing witness you talk
00:35:09.180
about the facts they're going to interview every single person who had anything to do with the
00:35:15.400
january 6 incidents they're going to talk to the drivers talk to secret service it's not your job
00:35:20.780
to go and talk about things that you think might have happened i could have had that out there and on
00:35:27.140
television it's quite a lurid story it was everywhere and okay so now two years later do we know if that
00:35:35.500
was true did anyone ever come forward and say i saw trump grab the wheel of or assault a secret
00:35:41.260
service agent i mean well here's what we do know um we do know that in real time immediately after
00:35:48.020
that live testimony tony or nato who was the secret service detailee i think he was working the um chief
00:35:54.920
of staff's office i think he's like a deputy of operations he testified immediately or at least said
00:36:00.520
publicly that's not true and and there was another really interesting and cassie udginson never claimed
00:36:06.640
that she saw oh she was never this was this was a second or third hand and then when are you allowed
00:36:11.000
to throw that out in a hearing just like i heard that yeah it's not it's not hearsay rules which okay
00:36:18.120
you're thinking it's like well you can't talk about it out of court statement the rules are a little
00:36:23.280
more wide open than that you can talk about hearsay and and i would allow witnesses to describe
00:36:28.960
i heard fred say xyz happened well that's something you heard you are absolutely entitled
00:36:34.580
to testify to all of those things but what happened in this case is she testified about i had heard that
00:36:41.460
this happened well the people who would have told her that said i didn't talk to cassidy and that
00:36:47.940
didn't happen and and i i knew i was in trouble i want to back up a little when i knew that i would
00:36:53.640
just sort of gone from this was just another client and just sort of an unusual set of circumstances
00:36:58.060
i had been fired i had been very publicly fired because i was a trump lawyer and she had put out
00:37:03.920
very publicly i want to testify i don't feel comfortable having this trump lawyer all fair i
00:37:09.900
mean that's perfectly her right to do after all and then she had given this very dramatic testimony
00:37:15.960
that had been refuted by people who were physically there i was representing another witness another very
00:37:21.440
junior witness who had been working in the white house on january 6th who had been very closely
00:37:29.100
interrelated inter relating with the operations people this is in so you imagine those that
00:37:34.900
testimony happened in say june that she testified live on tv in july a month after this had happened
00:37:41.620
i'm still representing witnesses before the committee one of these witnesses who had been working in the
00:37:46.500
white house had been asking and we went through an entire deposition and the deposition ends in a
00:37:52.700
very standard way where the investigator says hey have you had any other conversations with any
00:37:57.600
witnesses about your testimony today have you ever talked to trump about your no i've never done that's
00:38:02.780
a very standard set of questions have you talked to anyone about your witness other than your lawyer
00:38:06.740
and he says no no no he's oh wait he says actually i did talk to someone he says immediately
00:38:12.640
immediately after cassidy hutchinson testified live on tv tony ornato called me and said this makes no
00:38:20.460
sense to me i don't understand why is she doing this what have we missed he testified and this is all in
00:38:26.720
a transcript it's all out there but i'm sitting there as now the lawyer that the committee knows used to
00:38:34.300
represent cassidy hutchinson was fired because i'm a trump lawyer i'm now representing a different witness
00:38:42.040
who is testifying i had no knowledge that he was going to provide that testimony but he is now testifying
00:38:48.500
that in real time either while cassidy was on tv or in the immediate aftermath the fact witness with
00:38:55.420
knowledge had called this young person and said this isn't true now you can imagine for me as i'm sitting
00:39:03.700
representing this witness all of the eyes in the zoom come to me and that was when i realized i'm in trouble
00:39:10.940
here because i heard my witness give a story that's inconsistent with the star witness she had
00:39:17.600
already testified on tv she was already the star witness for the committee i knew they can't bury
00:39:23.360
that nugget the way they could have buried everything else because i heard it and when i saw all of the eyes
00:39:29.300
on that zoom turned to me was when i knew i am now an inconvenient truth for this because i heard him
00:39:37.840
testify coincidence or not within a month i received a doj subpoena criminal subpoena i'm the subject of a
00:39:47.140
criminal investigation i also received this is insane i yes and i and i received an email of course that i
00:39:54.040
still have uh from dan george again saying we're really concerned that you've been sharing information
00:40:03.140
between clients we think you have a conflict of interest and i responded to him i said
00:40:08.320
a lawyers who represent witnesses would have the ability to share information there's no secret about
00:40:15.560
that i said but here dan i'm telling you i did not tell this young person to say that story he said that
00:40:23.520
story i'm telling you it didn't happen who is dan george exactly can you so dan george is a lawyer i
00:40:29.500
think i think that he um i mean he was he was one of the senior lead investigators i worked with him on
00:40:35.180
a number of witnesses the part that was a little shocking to me is he's a congressional staffer
00:40:39.880
congressional staffer uh who then went to the department of justice after this i think he might
00:40:45.240
i don't know for sure i think he was working with jack smith i think he might be now in the u.s
00:40:50.160
attorney's office he might be an assistant u.s attorney in connecticut or somewhere i don't
00:40:53.420
know but he he was in department of justice before he was then he sounds dishonest we had a very good
00:40:59.800
rapport um i was surprised by what was happening and and he and i had worked together on some very
00:41:06.940
sensitive things and i thought we had something of a level of trust i just know what i just know the
00:41:12.180
things that happened i know that right after this young witness gave that testimony that directly
00:41:19.120
contradicted the star witness that i received a phone call from dan george basically saying they
00:41:24.620
were very concerned that i had been feeding this information and then i got a confirming email from
00:41:30.560
him saying we had this conversation you denied that you've shared it that's all fair enough um but that
00:41:37.240
was when i knew that i was in trouble and then out of the blue i start getting doj criminal subpoenas
00:41:42.940
that i'm suddenly under criminal investigation i have no idea what for i clearly had been part of
00:41:49.360
doing a lot of work representing a lot of trump aligned committees i'd done a lot of work for the
00:41:54.320
super PACs there was a lot of talk of how was money flow happening it was in my mind still a legitimate
00:42:01.340
area of inquiry for the department of justice i didn't really think a lot of it at the time clearly
00:42:06.560
i'd never been the subject of a criminal investigation in my life i don't hope to be
00:42:10.420
again um but that conversation then happened i then had to hire a lawyer to start providing all of
00:42:19.060
the information one of the things that was really interesting is the subpoena from the doj you know
00:42:24.860
we want we want to know all of your communications with tony or nato which i'd never had any and we
00:42:30.320
want all of your text messages and signal messages and everything with cassidy hutchinson and all of
00:42:34.860
your other witnesses that you would write i was clearly getting a forensic criminal audit from
00:42:39.840
the department of justice was responding that but still didn't have super high blood pressure i just
00:42:44.760
thought that's just a cost of life of working in washington and being a trump lawyer if you haven't
00:42:48.980
been subpoenaed i guess you haven't really practiced law in washington dc i guess but it was only
00:42:54.380
later when out of the blue i learned that i was effectively going to be made the fall guy for
00:43:03.100
obstruction all of the obstruction that had happened for cassidy hutchinson and that that
00:43:08.620
happened right as a way to explain why her testimony changed correct we did an interview with a woman
00:43:16.260
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00:43:23.260
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00:43:32.160
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00:43:40.320
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00:43:47.260
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00:44:18.660
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00:45:46.960
and so unless they blamed you for that they would have to explain like how exactly did she
00:46:07.360
testify to something completely different one could infer that that was in fact the the purpose and and
00:46:12.440
what what what had happened which was shocking the part that really just sort of upended my world and
00:46:17.640
and made me then realize the degree to which the institutions were all aligned to create a narrative
00:46:25.060
to further a political purpose as opposed to anything else was i think this was by december of 2022
00:46:33.000
i get a phone call from pam brown of cnn who i had known previously saying hey the committee has been
00:46:40.040
talking that they are going to out the various people who are obstructing congress obstructing
00:46:45.320
cassidy hutchinson we are going to identify those people i said well that's great but i didn't have
00:46:51.180
anything to do with that and she says no we cnn are in possession of a transcript that cassidy hutchinson
00:46:58.260
gave 150 page transcript that she gave on september 14th in which she identifies you stefan as the person
00:47:06.780
who told her to lie who couched her to say i don't recall when i do all of these things we're going to run
00:47:13.800
with that story and i said well i'm telling you i know nothing of these allegations i've never heard these
00:47:20.420
allegations the january 6 committee never called me as a witness they called 2 000 people they never called
00:47:26.700
me in if this is a fact-finding mission you would think that perhaps i would be called at a minimum to be
00:47:33.040
told especially since you're being accused of a crime literally a crime two crimes a felony of
00:47:37.900
obstruction witness tampering these are these are felonies and cnn tells me we're going to run a
00:47:43.580
story tomorrow in which we are going to identify you as the person who obstructed this witness we're
00:47:50.060
going to accuse you of a crime of course i was shocked i said i've never heard this i can't really
00:47:54.700
provide a lot of comment well on that monday as the story world is collapsing my world has not yet
00:48:00.940
collapsed i at that point have now received notice from cnn that tomorrow tuesday they're going to
00:48:08.160
identify me as the person on that day on monday i receive a phone call from one of cassie hutchinson's
00:48:16.380
former friends saying this is outrageous what they're doing to you i have text messages that i have
00:48:22.220
previously provided to cnn and other news networks and these text messages make clear that you stefan were
00:48:30.360
telling cassidy to cooperate and she didn't want to cooperate now i have a conversation at that point
00:48:35.920
with caitlin polance at cnn who's the cnn reporter who's running this story before it had come out and
00:48:43.120
i called caitlin myself i said caitlin i am aware that you're going to run this story that is going to
00:48:48.900
literally accuse me of a crime and i'm aware that you have a transcript that i have never seen before
00:48:54.400
that is going to make these accusations but i'm also aware that you are in possession of text messages
00:49:00.280
that directly contradict that narrative you have cassidy's text messages saying stefan wants me to
00:49:07.040
cooperate i don't want to cooperate i am going to be the one who's going to do this media narrative
00:49:12.920
on my own behind his back and so i said caitlin i said i'm not asking you to exonerate me but if cnn
00:49:19.920
is going to run a story identifying me as a criminal and you are in possession of additional
00:49:27.540
facts that create exculpatory documents you have an obligation to run that and caitlin polance's
00:49:35.360
direct quote to me was that's not newsworthy i said how is that not newsworthy this is directly
00:49:42.600
relevant she said that she said that to me caitlin polance caitlin polance of cnn who is still there
00:49:48.640
at cnn and i then had my lawyer communicate and have numerous conversations where i say i know and
00:49:54.300
those text messages we're referring to are the ones that i put in the in the she didn't didn't caitlin
00:49:58.660
polance did not deny having those text messages correct did not deny said it was not newsworthy so
00:50:04.420
then at that point i know this is just crazy so cnn just for to state the obvious cnn is participating
00:50:12.700
they're not covering news they're participating as you know a part of the machine to destroy you
00:50:18.580
correct and it is clear to me that cnn has received confidential congressional documents pertaining to
00:50:24.520
me that i have never seen cnn had had for however long it was cnn had had this transcript to work on the
00:50:31.680
story i had no idea of these allegations so corrupt it's hard to believe well it gets worse for me
00:50:36.820
unfortunately which is that story then comes out the next day and you can imagine what a bombshell it
00:50:43.640
is did they include the exculpatory text messages oh never to this day never and in fact the things
00:50:50.080
that that i beg what liars what corrupt liars cnn is yeah i i begged cnn i said you're going to release
00:50:58.540
a transcript in which a witness is saying that i coached her to lie while i was representing you have
00:51:05.200
in your possession the actual transcripts of me representing her at a minimum post those two so
00:51:11.680
that the public can see well let me actually read the transcript of stefan representing cassidy hutchinson
00:51:17.840
and let me judge for myself whether he did the things he was accused of doing i have text messages
00:51:24.080
with pamela brown saying please i'm begging you if you're going to destroy my career and you're going
00:51:30.840
to put up this transcript accusing me at least put up the others to this day i don't think that they
00:51:36.580
have to what if pam brown's pam brown is the she was a producer i think that she's she's moved on i
00:51:42.820
she might have been the one who reached out because she had known me previously she's not an on-air
00:51:48.660
person she was she was not she is an on-air person right okay so i thought pamela brown yeah she she has
00:51:54.500
a news program and i think she she took a hiatus because she was having uh a child or children but i think
00:51:59.400
she's back on the air and but i think her involvement might have only been that she was
00:52:03.300
the one who was calling me to just let me know that this was coming and then saying but you need
00:52:08.200
to call caitlin because she's running this so i begged them please put this up i don't i think if
00:52:15.120
you go on cnn today and you say cassie hutchinson transcript the only thing that comes up is the
00:52:20.220
september transcript accusing me i don't think i don't think you could even find those here but
00:52:25.200
this is where it became clear that there was this interplay not only did i realize that on the day
00:52:30.920
these allegations came out cnn had all of this already and it was not lost on me that a lot of the
00:52:38.540
people who were on the january 6 committee who might potentially have had reason to give this to
00:52:43.460
cnn are now all contributors kinziger is over there elissa fair griffin is now a contributor over
00:52:49.460
there some of these they're all being paid by cnn some would yes clearly being paid but what was
00:52:55.020
what was particularly painful for me was two hours after that story breaks i then get a notification
00:53:02.240
from the district of columbia bar saying this is to notify you that we have an open bar investigation
00:53:07.740
relating to all of this content within three hours the dc bar does not operate within three hours based
00:53:14.380
on seeing something on cnn for the first time it is clear that in addition to working with cnn before
00:53:20.200
breaking this story the january 6 committee or somebody was also working with the various bar
00:53:26.620
organizations that i'm a member of to set this story up i literally received bar complaints
00:53:32.680
created on their own accord within hours of this story breaking that does not happen unless they have
00:53:40.300
been forewarned that all of this is coming and as you can imagine you can see why trump has trouble
00:53:45.900
getting lawyers well i mean represent trump or people around trump that destroy your life and that
00:53:51.480
is that is the real core concern that it is fundamental to this democracy that everyone have effective
00:54:00.120
assistance of counsel everyone has the right it does not matter if you are a guantanamo detainee
00:54:06.300
or if you're a republican you are entitled to counsel even if you might be out of favor with the
00:54:14.920
establishment elite and as shakespeare said in henry the sixth if you want to destroy a society the first
00:54:21.000
thing you do is kill all the lawyers well that's what's happening now one within i would say within a
00:54:28.160
few months i started getting bar complaints filed against me by the various institutional organizations
00:54:34.300
set up there's a group called the 65 project which filed bar complaints and the 65 project is named
00:54:41.020
because these are the 65 lawyers that they originally filed bar complaints who had been working with
00:54:46.940
president trump out of 2020 they advertise to this day if you go on the 65 project website you will see
00:54:53.960
they proudly advertise a six-figure ad buy that's running right now in the six swing states destined for
00:55:01.360
republican lawyers saying do not rep resent president trump we you will be disbarred do not represent
00:55:08.920
any of these conservatives we are watching you that is on their website right now any idea who's behind
00:55:14.420
that group uh yeah it's a it's a group there's a lawyer out of utah i i'm actually i filed a bar
00:55:20.940
complaint against him just recently for for this but but these are groups that are designed to intimidate
00:55:29.040
republicans against representing conservatives and the whole idea is it is extraordinarily difficult
00:55:35.980
to get a big law lawyer to represent a republican it's just we can't get those people you can't be a
00:55:43.540
lawyer in a white shoe or a major law firm and represent a republican and this is explicitly advertised
00:55:49.900
within maybe a month after i received this 65 project bar complaint i get a phone call at 7 30 in the morning
00:55:57.860
from the new york times saying we're going to run a story about a group called lawyers defending
00:56:04.520
american democracy that has filed this very very in-depth bar complaint against you would you care
00:56:12.840
to comment that was at 7 30 in the morning by 8 30 in the morning the new york times was running
00:56:17.160
this multiple page complaint uh alleging accusing me of numerous crimes lots of bar violations say
00:56:24.980
very proudly we filed these bar complaints and this is signed and you can imagine i've been an
00:56:29.700
established lawyer my whole life i i revere these institutions they got more signatories on that
00:56:35.220
complaint and it's all online i don't particularly want anyone to read it but it's there the the bar
00:56:39.940
complaint was signed by i think they got more than the 51 former intel officers it was filed by
00:56:45.820
former attorneys general former deans of various law schools multiple past presidents of various bars
00:56:54.540
this who's who of the glitterati of of the legal profession all of whom sign on to this letter
00:57:01.100
like i said law professors former state senators former attorneys general and what was of course
00:57:06.840
most concerning to me was four past presidents of the dc bar had signed on to a letter knowing nothing
00:57:13.060
about me other than what had been fed to them accusing me of crimes to take my license away well
00:57:18.880
for me i imagine now really i have to now defend my bar license before the dc bar against a complaint
00:57:25.720
signed by 60 some luminaries including four past presidents of the very bar that i'm going to be
00:57:31.180
defending myself against it's pretty easy to feel like the entire world is arrayed against you you have
00:57:36.440
no chance whatsoever now i have to say in all fairness i was pleasantly surprised at how professional
00:57:44.360
the dc bar and the georgia bar were they conducted a thorough investigation of me and all of these
00:57:50.260
facts and even in light of all of this happening the dc bar dismissed my cases with no discipline i was
00:57:56.380
shocked because i was too cynical at that point to believe well it's also i mean considering the number
00:58:01.340
of actual criminal lawyers i know you know who behaved in a criminal way i mean most lawyers i know
00:58:07.060
i would classify as criminals and none of them ever get their bar licenses pulled i mean it doesn't
00:58:12.080
this is not a self-policing profession and just it's just not no and but they're and yet but they're
00:58:16.980
going after you but if you represent trump then that that does trigger the enforcement and they are
00:58:21.320
explicitly messaging today as we're talking right now on the 65 project they have proudly we are running
00:58:29.800
this campaign in the swing states geared where big law lawyers and the partners at these law firms and
00:58:36.420
these lawyers are going to see it threatening them do not represent trump in any post-election challenge
00:58:43.480
because we will come after your license and that is clearly an effort to intimidate lawyers against
00:58:50.000
defending anyone's rights clearly president trump's rights it's running in the swing states they're proudly
00:58:55.640
doing it right now you it's not speculation why they're doing it they're they're proudly doing it
00:59:01.400
and it's having the desired effect it's very difficult now to get a lawyer who's willing to do election
00:59:07.920
integrity work for republicans because you know you're putting yourself in the crosshair of this
00:59:13.400
institutional machine now when you know clearly cnn breathlessly reported how i was subject to all of
00:59:23.760
these bar complaints they never reported that i was cleared of those claims or that my bar was never
00:59:31.520
in jeopardy and that i never received they never wanted to report any of those things it's only the
00:59:35.900
story and then move on but for me the damage was incalculable i for me it was impossible to have
00:59:43.440
faith and trust in clients uh and all but it's it's a concerted effort and and it was one that can the cost
00:59:50.240
must have been real too oh a very i mean that as you can imagine i had criminal complaints against
00:59:56.200
me i've had bar complaints against me i have also i also filed my own lawsuit against the federal
01:00:02.680
government for all of these things and it was it's unusual i filed that lawsuit 18 months ago against
01:00:08.540
the federal government it takes a long time to do this i made a lot of factual allegations in that
01:00:14.040
complaint because i knew them to be true in my head i had lived that experience but i had no
01:00:19.800
expectations i was going to be able to prove it it was basically one person's word against
01:00:23.520
an entire industry's word as to what had happened i was shocked at and i filed that complaint anyway
01:00:30.680
i made all of these allegations that i'm describing here i made those allegations in writing 18 months ago
01:00:35.460
well chairman ladder milk i have no idea how doggedly conducted investigation
01:00:41.780
and he actually produced all of the text messages between liz cheney and cassie describing
01:00:48.180
everything that i had put in my complaint i never thought it would happen why would i assume that
01:00:54.120
cassie hutchinson while she's doing this is screenshotting signaled encrypted communications
01:00:58.720
from cass from liz cheney and turning them over to congress like i had no expectation that she would
01:01:04.860
do that but she did well i'm glad she doesn't sound like a genius either but i'm thankful that she did
01:01:09.900
so to liz cheney what crimes do you believe she committed well so what i firmly believe happened
01:01:16.560
and i've filed a bar complaint against liz cheney on this and this is all spelled out the um
01:01:22.240
this prohibition now there if you're a member of congress and you write the laws of the country
01:01:29.780
you have the privilege of shielding yourself from a lot of the consequences of your own actions
01:01:36.280
it's built right into the constitution a speech and debate clause you cannot go after a sitting
01:01:41.680
member of congress for anything they do in furtherance of a legitimate legislative purpose
01:01:46.120
i don't think this was that but put that as it may but it's also very very difficult to go after a
01:01:53.380
member of congress for things that they have done and that's probably appropriate that that's the
01:01:56.780
case but she is a member of the bar and i have black and white evidence that in fact she acted in a way
01:02:03.460
that's contrary to her professional obligations we have filed the america first legal uh it's done a
01:02:10.120
fantastic job it's all up on their website you can read all of it uh articulating all of the various
01:02:16.440
ways that the various lawyers who were involved were clearly violating their fiduciary obligations to
01:02:25.420
the bar but to me it's not even so much that what what i am most concerned with is it was clear to me
01:02:33.920
that it became politically expedient it became necessary in order for the political narrative
01:02:40.900
to be presented to the united states that this witness is presenting this bombshell testimony and
01:02:46.860
is unimpeachable in the face of all of the other evidence that might make it impeachable
01:02:51.960
it became politically expedient to destroy me and the united states congress and all of the mechanisms
01:03:01.260
of this legislative not law enforcement body was working with cnn and bar groups to bring all and
01:03:09.100
all of the media attention that they had the ability to bring and i didn't even know there were allegations
01:03:13.760
all of the might of the federal government was brought to bear to deny me life liberty and property
01:03:20.840
with no due process of law whatsoever even putting aside this constitutional separation of powers that
01:03:27.700
you had talked about before which was the legislative branch is supposed to legislate
01:03:32.200
the department of justice if they had simply just done a referral and of course both cassidy
01:03:38.300
hutchinson testifies that she did a criminal referral liz cheney told abc news that she had done a
01:03:44.800
criminal referral on me fair enough that's the job because the department of justice has 250 years
01:03:51.780
of regulations that are designed to protect the due process rights of the accused the doj will never
01:03:57.860
comment on or confirm that there's an ongoing investigation pre-indictment and that's designed
01:04:04.980
to protect the rights of the innocent of course and those rules are there because the department of
01:04:10.660
justice's job is to enforce the law well congress circumvented all of that with regard to me they
01:04:16.120
went right from we need to present a narrative we need to destroy this person we are going to use and
01:04:24.220
literally they highlighted the day before that this was going to come out they had been rolling out
01:04:30.060
transcripts of all of the various testimony on that tuesday whatever that was the 22nd or whatever
01:04:36.700
of december it was right before christmas it was it was it was horrifying um the the hate mail that
01:04:42.580
one receives on christmas um from i i received um so many beyond like just death threats but so many
01:04:51.060
lawyers emailing me saying you're a disgrace to the legal profession i'm thinking to myself
01:04:56.100
you're a lawyer you just tried convicted executed me without ever hearing from me without affording me
01:05:04.360
any due process or a right to confront my accuser and you're accusing me of being the disgrace to
01:05:09.080
the bar you're the one who is circumventing all of these things that you were trained in law school
01:05:14.420
and that's effectively what congress did as well it was a concerted effort to create a political
01:05:21.080
narrative and i was a very inconvenient truth to that and the fact that the united states congress a
01:05:26.680
legislative body was able to marshal all of those resources in an unconstitutional way
01:05:32.000
to destroy me there's i've been in practice a long time i have a lot of very influential clients
01:05:39.580
i'm a relatively connected person if congress can destroy me at a whim they could do that to anyone
01:05:47.520
and nobody would want to live in a world where either a single member of congress or a single
01:05:53.220
committee of congress could select an individual citizen and say we select this person for execution
01:05:59.440
and we are going to marshal all of the legislative resources we have in conjunction with outside bar
01:06:05.540
groups and in conjunction with media organizations and we are going to create a narrative that is
01:06:09.900
unrecoverable no one would listen to me of course for an entire week after that i couldn't even turn
01:06:17.640
on the television it was panel discussions of well stefan broke the law and he's a lawyer should he be
01:06:24.520
disbarred before he goes to the to jail or should he go to jail and then be disbarred that was the
01:06:28.700
panel discussion the give and take was which should happen mostly cnn uh well i mean certainly msnbc and
01:06:35.440
but it was there was a lot of omission to me i i had fairly good relationships with a lot of reporters
01:06:42.540
a lot of print from new york times and washington post and who knew that this story they knew me
01:06:47.580
but just i can't report my producers will never get this past the editors um i i somewhat
01:06:54.340
tuned out and and you can imagine it's not just me who's going through this i've i've been married
01:07:01.260
for 30 years i have grown children i have children who are just about cassidy's age and i have to sit
01:07:09.540
and and i lived this experience i knew what happened between us imagine the faith that it takes and the
01:07:17.340
loyalty that it takes for my wife and for my children to sit and watch on tv these accusations
01:07:22.640
this is the criminal thing that your dad did or your husband did and and i'll tell you another
01:07:28.020
another anecdote which is i don't know i mean it was one of the sort of most traumatic parts of this
01:07:33.340
whole been there yes traumatic experience so i go through all that and and at the time that all of
01:07:39.220
this is coming out i am an active subject of a criminal investigation i'm clearly anticipating that
01:07:45.040
there are going to be litigation is going to be happening i'm actively pursuing my own lawsuit
01:07:49.820
i can't speak at that point and i know if i do it's my word against an entire world's word and i have
01:07:57.380
no doubt that at the end of our relationship cassidy hutchinson was taping me i have no doubt that
01:08:03.380
they have the ability to pull out snippets now what happened was now that all these text messages
01:08:08.700
come out that completely track everything that i said that the text messages that chairman
01:08:14.100
loudermilk has produced exactly track the conversations that i was having with cassidy
01:08:19.920
where she was saying oh stefan's telling me this it's exactly the things that i was telling her it's
01:08:25.660
in real time it was only later after i'd been fired that all of this changed but this all happens
01:08:32.020
and on and i'll and i'll remember that i said well i'm not going to say anything i'm just going to
01:08:35.880
lay low i'm anonymous i'm just going to lay low fast forward perhaps a year on on the day that my
01:08:42.880
dad died i get a notification cassie hutchinson's coming out with a book and the teaser of the book
01:08:48.160
is explicitly says and she's going to talk about her interplay with the trump lawyer who told her
01:08:53.140
lie so all of a sudden i realize and of course it's on the day that my father passed away i'm going to
01:08:57.920
have to relive this entire experience again and a book tour again and all of this is and i am powerless
01:09:04.620
and i remember that it was extraordinarily traumatic i think her first was she goes on rachel maddow the
01:09:12.620
first time uh is like sort of the first launch of from this from this book tour and i'm sitting there
01:09:18.100
on the sofa with my wife and i know whatever words come out of her mouth with rachel maddow
01:09:26.120
in this live interview i'm going to own my wife is going to own my children are going to own for the
01:09:32.360
rest of their lives whatever allegations are made i'm going to own and she went through and she told
01:09:37.420
the story now at this point this the story that she told in the original september transcript got
01:09:43.900
watered down a little bit for the book and the book was still pretty horrific but it was watered
01:09:47.920
down version of the september but i remember watching this with my wife and and it's just an act
01:09:52.600
of faith for my wife to sit here with me and just stay with me for this but i remember at the end of
01:09:59.880
that first commercial break and i'm sitting on the sofa with my wife watching the rachel maddow thing
01:10:05.080
and rachel maddow says and when we come back from break cassie is going to discuss the seven men who
01:10:10.520
sexually assaulted her in the course of her interaction with the trump world cut to break
01:10:15.700
come back seven men the seven men or five men or whatever it was it's what it's what's on the tape
01:10:20.940
where they say that's the topic of conversation the men who sexually assaulted her and i'm sitting here
01:10:26.340
and i'm looking at my wife and i say i promise you i never touched her i promise you and but but the
01:10:36.380
trauma of it was if she had chosen to identify me as one of the people who had i was defenseless i
01:10:45.160
would have i couldn't have denied it if she had said we'd had a relationship or that i had done
01:10:50.340
something unto i was helpless there was nothing that i could have done unfortunately she never said
01:10:55.080
any of those things she said that about other people but it highlights the trauma of going from
01:11:00.840
a fairly well-respected lawyer who doesn't mind going to the grocery store and being seen by their
01:11:05.560
friends to having everyone did he do these things is he really a criminal and you know all faith and
01:11:11.540
credit to her for sticking by me and to my kids and it's i was somewhat shocking to me the degree to
01:11:17.340
which millennials now they don't have the same reverence for no media no i remember sitting down saying
01:11:23.800
hey some some really bad stuff is going to come out about dad and uh it's not true and i'm and
01:11:28.920
they're like we don't believe that don't worry about it and i remember them making the joke to me
01:11:32.800
it's like we didn't think you were cool enough to get canceled and i was like yeah well i i guess i did
01:11:36.900
get canceled but what what she said is so true that is so true people under 30 wouldn't even occur to
01:11:42.300
them to believe cnn they don't and and that and can i just ask about cassidy hutchinson i'm sure you're
01:11:47.900
prohibited from saying things because i'm sounds like you're still involved um in these suits but
01:11:53.360
what is her motivation do you think so okay now this might shock you it's very possible to take a
01:12:00.640
pretty charitable view of the circumstance that surrounded cassidy and she testifies at length about a
01:12:06.960
very conflicted trouble things that i had no knowledge of at the time when i was representing her
01:12:12.680
but when she gave her september transcript what she describes is this traumatic fear of having been a
01:12:19.580
trump person who thought she was going to go down and work in the office of the former president down
01:12:24.540
in mar-a-lago didn't get that job had difficulty finding a job because anyone who comes with the trump
01:12:30.120
labels it's very difficult time getting a job and then she gets wind that she's going to be receiving
01:12:35.820
this subpoena and i didn't know any of this but she testifies to it that she's traumatized about
01:12:41.040
the consequence of and that she talks about how she went to all these different lawyers trying to
01:12:45.580
find a lawyer who would represent her and how these lawyers for what should have been a one-day
01:12:49.580
deposition were asking a hundred and fifty thousand dollar retain just this traumatic experience of
01:12:55.360
finding a lawyer she's totally alone exactly and she also testifies how she's having these conflicted
01:13:01.900
conversations with her mother with a former member of congress saying don't sell out don't let trump
01:13:08.180
people represent you once you sell your soul to the trump people they're going to own you and she
01:13:14.160
testifies that she brought to our relationship this baggage that she had finally given up she couldn't
01:13:19.800
afford to hire her own lawyer she finally had to sort of let the devil into the house and hire me to
01:13:26.500
represent have me represent her and that she was extraordinarily conflicted she came into our relationship
01:13:33.100
with an adversarial mindset that i was completely unaware of she thought everything she told me
01:13:39.940
i was going to turn right around and tell trump so of course you're going to go and tell that person
01:13:45.080
everything you think trump wants to hear i don't want to testify i just want to be loyal i just want to
01:13:50.420
get through this i just want to have a good job those are all things she said to me and they're all things
01:13:54.380
she put in text messages to all of her friends those text messages are all out there now but it's very
01:13:59.340
easy to see how someone would come into the relationship not trusting their own lawyer right
01:14:04.780
and she testifies of course she testifies numerous times about all the different times she lied to me
01:14:11.420
during the relationship but i was shocked to learn that while i was representing her the degree of the
01:14:17.320
conflict was such that when i would stand up and go to the men's room while we were doing a prep session
01:14:22.140
she testifies she went onto my computer to look up all of my emails to see who my clients are like
01:14:28.700
she was running an investigation on me literally behind my back now i'm not making that up that's
01:14:34.420
in her testimony i had no knowledge that there was this adversary relationship and for me
01:14:40.540
she comes in my job like i had for numerous other people a single message i come in i tell what i know
01:14:47.540
i don't speculate every lawyer gives the same advice anyone who's ever been deposed gets the same advice
01:14:53.100
your job is to tell the facts as you know you don't speculate you don't guess you wait for the
01:14:58.940
next question to be asked you're not to go and find new facts you wait for their question you answer
01:15:05.900
honestly that question you wait for the next question if you don't know the answer to a question it's
01:15:10.640
perfectly appropriate to say i don't know the answer to that question every lawyer gives some version
01:15:16.840
of that admonition of course just like i did but if you come into a relationship with this hostile
01:15:22.860
mindset that this person is not my lawyer this person is somebody else's lawyer and i'm forced
01:15:28.760
to work with them when the lawyer gives that same admonition to say i don't want you to go and seek
01:15:34.560
out facts i literally said to her because she wanted to like put together calendars she wanted to do
01:15:39.200
internet research i literally said ironically it's not your job to write the book on january 6th i literally
01:15:45.520
said that to her i said they're going to interview thousands of witnesses and those thousands of
01:15:50.320
witnesses are all going to tell their version of facts and create the mosaic you only tell the facts
01:15:55.160
that you know you don't guess but if you are coming in to say expecting to be misled in furtherance
01:16:02.800
of somebody else's objective and you're a 25 year old who's never been through this i guess it's
01:16:08.780
possible that you could feel like oh he's wink wink telling me well exactly what to do exactly so it's
01:16:14.900
possible to now clearly and and when you look at the text messages between cassidy and elissa as
01:16:22.000
they're describing the back channel all of the things that chairman loudermilk has now uncovered
01:16:26.320
you can see they're having that exact conversation stefan says well if they're going to bring you in for
01:16:33.160
a third interview we can't make it look like you're eager to do a third you'll never get a job so
01:16:37.880
stefan's going to tell dan george we're only going to comply with subpoena we're ultimately going to
01:16:43.540
comply but i want you to have a subpoena so you can tell people later you went they described this
01:16:48.420
whole conversation entirely accurately those were the conversations we were having sometime between
01:16:54.800
that june 6th when all these text messages happened june 8th or 9th whenever i got fired
01:16:59.740
and thereafter things became dramatically different by september she was giving testimony to liz cheney
01:17:07.680
accusing me of crimes and accusing me of telling her to lie things that just as chairman loudermilk
01:17:13.960
just don't hold up right so she's weak and afraid and so she winds up in which rachel maddow here's
01:17:19.160
something you may not have known back in 2015 the congress of the united states repealed something
01:17:23.860
called the country of origin labeling act now why is this relevant to you well it means among other
01:17:30.020
things that when you buy beef at the supermarket that says made in the usa it may not actually be in
01:17:35.980
fact it could be likely is from a foreign country it means that repackaging foreign meat can be enough
01:17:44.880
to get the made in usa designation it's a lie it's an absolute lie most people don't even know what's
01:17:49.340
happening so how can you be sure that the meat you're eating is from the united states and has been
01:17:54.280
raised with the highest quality standards and is the tastiest it's truly made here well it's simple
01:17:59.220
you can go to our friends at meriwether farms meriwether farms is an american small business it's based
01:18:04.420
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01:18:09.320
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01:19:00.020
okay so your experience your experience suggests such a level of sinister corruption that it's it's
01:19:10.720
kind of it's going to be thinking about this all week um but let's zoom out a little bit and try to
01:19:15.580
understand what this kind of behavior from liz cheney and the professional staff on the committee
01:19:20.080
means for the investigation itself i'm now convinced that they had no interest in finding out what
01:19:26.620
happened on sip on september september january 6th september 11th all these dates to keep track of
01:19:33.420
um we don't have you know they they're hiding the videos they can't they won't answer basic
01:19:38.420
questions about how many undercover law enforcement were there on that day etc etc etc but just
01:19:42.380
to your conclusions tell me what they are do you think this was a good faith effort to find out what
01:19:46.780
happened that day well no uh and and i'm guided to a great extent by again chairman ladder milk
01:19:53.860
the the whole ladder milk the house admin oversight committee investigation to some extent and he'll
01:20:01.100
have to speak for himself i might have started some of that in that when all these allegations came out
01:20:06.640
about me alleging that when i was representing cassidy i was doing all of these coaching it i said well
01:20:12.600
there's videotape all i need to do is get the videotape and show it and that will exonerate me
01:20:17.600
and i was having trouble getting that videotape so i called up chairman ladder milk i said look
01:20:22.960
i just need some help on this there are documents that i need for a matter that's personal to me that
01:20:28.360
i'm working on can you get me the videotapes of my representation of cassie because that will
01:20:34.040
to my extent to a large extent vindicate me and he's okay sure we'll get that and he realized he's like
01:20:39.980
they're all destroyed like he realized not only were the documents these videotapes all destroyed and
01:20:46.080
this is not speculation he has letters from benny thompson saying we destroyed the videotapes
01:20:52.980
because we got advice we didn't have to keep videotapes of what of all the witnesses who were
01:20:58.060
deposed right so when i was sitting next to all of the witnesses who provided why would you destroy
01:21:04.060
those videotapes well you would wonder why they're not what the committee says well we've saved the
01:21:09.500
transcript so we didn't need to keep the video well that was it expensive to keep video exactly the
01:21:14.640
opposite in fact as a as a legal matter more technical it's the videotape that's the evidence
01:21:20.800
the transcripts just simply an aid to that because lots of so they destroyed all the evidence well
01:21:25.460
that's what chairman ladder milk has made his mission and he has been dogged in that and it is
01:21:29.240
chairman ladder milk if i can speak for him firm conclusion that in fact the evidence was
01:21:35.280
man chairman louder milk i mean the house is in republican hands they have a speaker who's third from
01:21:40.460
the presidency his name is mike johnson louisiana he could instantly reveal all of this stuff to the
01:21:47.220
public to whom it belongs including the many tens of thousands of hours of videotape from january 6th
01:21:53.220
but they're not doing that why is speaker johnson allowing this stuff to remain secret at the very
01:22:01.060
moment when kamala harris and the rest of the democratic party is campaigning for president on
01:22:05.460
lies about january 6th why not release it all and let the public know it's their house it's their
01:22:11.080
property they own it they own this government i'm totally confused as to why speaker mike johnson is
01:22:16.280
doing that yeah well i mean that's perhaps an issue above my pay grade but at the same time things
01:22:21.700
were destroyed in fact as i recall perhaps even this is insane your offices had an opportunity to look
01:22:27.640
at a lot of the videotape and a lot of the videotape but you know one tenth of one percent of the
01:22:31.980
existing classified videotape and it showed that there was peace inside the capitol and that
01:22:38.200
uniformed law enforcement were allowing people into the senate chamber at the same moment they're
01:22:42.880
telling us it's an insurrection so like it the videotape that we got which is a tiny percentage
01:22:48.040
of the existing classified videotape showed that their story about january 6th is a complete lie it's
01:22:53.600
totally made up yeah well i heard a rumor and you can tell me if it's not true that when some of your
01:22:58.300
producers first started looking through the videotape there were all sorts of annotations
01:23:02.100
and there were all sorts of cross references to allow it to be searched nobody knew that it was
01:23:06.780
someone affiliated with you was looking at it and that then subsequently when it was learned that
01:23:11.980
perhaps an outside force associated with you was looking at the videotape all those annotations
01:23:15.860
disappeared yes that might be false but that's what i heard that's correct and i got fired uh shortly
01:23:20.140
after um and was attacked you know by people i i worked with at fox news for daring to air
01:23:26.060
videotape that belongs to the public that shows an unexpurgated account of what actually happened so
01:23:32.240
like the the complicity of institutions in washington and maintaining the lie that january 6th was the
01:23:38.020
insurrection by trumpists is complete like everyone was involved in the conspiracy actually from what i
01:23:43.500
can tell yeah i think one of the lessons to take from this is that never again should there be a
01:23:49.440
congressional committee that's not bipartisan now if there was an error that was made the fact you
01:23:54.280
cannot have congress running a what is quasi criminal investigation like this ever again did we ever
01:24:01.420
find out how many um undercover law enforcement agents were at january 6th do we know that i i don't know
01:24:07.320
i again i'm just reading the newspaper like everyone else at this point on on those issues that's a core
01:24:11.760
question though like if we're trying to understand what happened just as an attorney who was involved
01:24:16.500
and i and i know you were you know involved in trying to help witnesses you know um but
01:24:23.320
big picture why wouldn't the public be allowed to know that yeah no clearly that clearly anything
01:24:30.240
that's conducted in the name of the people belongs to the people just like the building in which that
01:24:34.780
investigation is conducted oh the people's house yeah exactly and the investigation belongs and i mean
01:24:39.660
again i don't know for sure but certainly what i had heard was that as congress was turning over
01:24:45.640
there were a number of documents that were in the possession of congress that were going to be
01:24:52.160
shipped off to the archives but they knew that when the new incoming speaker mccarthy took power that he
01:24:58.080
was just going to call those documents back from the archives and so what happened and again i don't know
01:25:03.620
this firsthand but what i'd heard was that a lot of these documents were then shipped over to the
01:25:07.800
executive branch to allow the executive branch to give them to the archives so that when mccarthy
01:25:13.180
comes into power and says hey i want my documents back the archivist says no no this came from the
01:25:18.200
executive branch you have no power you don't get these documents we gave them all over to secret
01:25:22.060
service or whomever and that that's been really thwarting congressional inquiry into it's so corrupt
01:25:27.680
it's hard to believe this is our government it's it certainly had it certainly had a corrupting
01:25:34.280
impact on on me in terms of what happened how government abused power in a way that should not
01:25:40.980
happen but it also you cannot have an ostensible truth-finding organized operation that has a political
01:25:47.920
objective the two are not compatible if you're going to be searching for the truth it cannot be
01:25:53.040
well and also i mean look the truth is the capitol hill police used deadly force against an unarmed
01:25:59.800
woman on january 6th there was never any investigation into why they murdered ashley
01:26:04.600
babbitt which they did um michael bird uh who had demonstrated reckless behavior with a loaded firearm
01:26:10.880
leaving a loaded glock in the men's room of the capitol he murdered murdered ashley babbitt that's my view
01:26:17.320
but we we can't speak authoritatively because there was no investigation into shooting an unarmed
01:26:23.700
woman in the capitol um the whole thing like that's insane were there any republicans do you know
01:26:32.480
in the congress who like demanded an answer to these questions it doesn't seem like there were
01:26:39.260
it seems bipartisan right it's been hard pressed and i know as part of my efforts i i was seek i said
01:26:46.880
well i want to have all the internal staff emails let me see the emails that were going on while all
01:26:53.740
of the things that i was interested in were happening and i'm getting a lot of resistance
01:26:58.300
well we really don't want to we don't think it's appropriate to turn over staff emails it's like
01:27:03.480
why it we're the public if there were emails about me that were being sent by official staff there
01:27:10.060
shouldn't be some proprietary reason or there shouldn't be some queensberry rules that says well
01:27:15.500
we don't think it's couth for us to be turning over the private emails of our staffers well when i was
01:27:22.040
working in the white house every single document that we it was all presidential records everything
01:27:27.120
was searchable everything can be has obligated to be turned over why is congress not subject to those
01:27:33.200
same rules why why do we not have that same transparency why are we clinging to some esoteric notion
01:27:41.080
that well it just wouldn't be gentlemanly or it wouldn't be couth for us to reveal staff emails
01:27:47.640
uh because then maybe they might do that to us i was like no how about you guys only do things in
01:27:53.420
the name of the people that you're willing to stand behind how about that being the rule but that doesn't
01:27:58.700
seem to be so how is this um we're just talking about this off camera but maybe you would like to
01:28:04.820
talk about it on camera as the product of washington son of someone who worked for the government i mean
01:28:09.680
exactly the same position um how has this changed your view of how the city operates in its institutions
01:28:15.920
yeah well i mean it's it's shocking of course sort of the psychic break of all of that as we had talked
01:28:20.900
we had almost the same my upbringing washington dc private schools everyone who was my friend were
01:28:26.880
the children of people who were either in the private sector or public sector working in these revered
01:28:33.060
institutions and i grew up and until extremely recently had nothing but the highest respect for
01:28:38.820
our agencies and the media i mean as i said if if walter cronkite said it was true if the state
01:28:45.120
what year in high school were you i was class of 1984 so i'm a little older than you three years and
01:28:50.040
but same world same exact world all of my friends and grew up having a dad who was from that world
01:28:55.780
doing work that i really respected that was what i believed and and even while working in the white house
01:29:03.060
never had a concept that there was any sort of conflict between the institutional sort of
01:29:11.680
intelligence world and us in the white house one of my jobs as i said i was the compliance person when
01:29:17.820
i came in and so we did all of the onboarding i brought all of these folks in and it was my job
01:29:23.420
to do here the rules of washington briefing for all of the white house staff well i was also the
01:29:29.060
adjunct to the national security council so it's sort of like a intel arm advisors to the president
01:29:35.960
which are career staffers primarily and i thought well we're all on the same team now trump we've just
01:29:41.680
come in i had no idea that comey was having interviews with mike flynn you know at the same
01:29:47.540
time i had no idea this was happening but i thought but we're all on the same team let me just invite
01:29:53.040
all of the nsc folks in for the same briefing that i'm doing for the staff because we're all on the same
01:29:58.160
team and i just naively it's only been eight years but it's it seems crazy to even think something
01:30:03.520
naive and so literally i do these briefings and i get phone calls two days later from the washington
01:30:09.340
post saying we have three people who are in your briefing who all said you said x and that this is
01:30:15.520
this horrible thing for for john i said that's a not true why would three people randomly select
01:30:23.220
you washington post reporter to tell the exact same story to this kind of sounds like an op against
01:30:28.920
the trump administration it was going to highlight it was something that was not going to paint trump
01:30:33.380
in a fair light that the ethics lawyer had said whatever the rules were and that's when i realized
01:30:38.020
we're not all on the same team here that there's this operation that's going on and and there's a real
01:30:45.680
sort of psychic disconnect for me because i had tremendous respect for these and i had tremendous
01:30:52.840
respect for the fbi and the doj and i and i have to say in all candor with respect to me as far as i can
01:30:59.160
tell they've they've been honorable and everything they've done with respect to me but what you see on
01:31:04.860
tv um there's a lack of trust and my children my children's friends have zero institutional faith in
01:31:13.780
these organizations that i grew up revering and one of the things did your children grow up in the
01:31:18.680
area dc uh no they were outside of the dc bubble i i left dc you know sometime after i after i graduated
01:31:28.660
high school but still sort of keep up and i practice out of dc that's where i live i go there
01:31:32.600
that's that's where i work that's my life but it's a much different core philosophy it's a different view
01:31:39.920
of how these institutions operate and one of the things that if trump were to win that really needs
01:31:45.720
to happen is we need to restore these institutions the faith in these institutions that if state
01:31:52.020
department is doing something if the intel agencies are doing something that they're doing in the
01:31:56.580
interest of the public we can't have the 51 intel officers suppressing we can't have that happening
01:32:03.880
anymore i mean that's one of the things that just you know for me what's changed me is i'm a lawyer
01:32:10.460
the legal institution is is of prime importance to me we cannot be subjecting lawyers to attack because
01:32:19.480
of who they represent that's undemocratic that's unconstitutional we can't have a philosophy where
01:32:25.000
you kill all of the lawyers for one side this whole notion of legal warfare that we are going to
01:32:30.420
intimidate people against representing disfavored political parties under threat of disbarment that
01:32:37.700
has to change and that's something that i'm pretty passionate about and that's something that's sort of
01:32:42.440
my life mission now to the extent i'm surviving all of this uh we just have to fix these institutions
01:32:49.920
we have to return them to what they had so you've decided to fight back i i know a bunch of other
01:32:55.200
lawyers who i don't think i know anyone who's uh quite been subjected to what you went through but
01:33:01.300
um i know a bunch of people have been hassled and most of them decided i just i just want to get away
01:33:06.020
from this i don't want anything to do with this it doesn't help me in any way it doesn't help my kids
01:33:10.860
my wife doesn't care for it you know etc you've decided to fight um what are you going to be doing
01:33:17.160
to fix this system so i mean you are the first person who's wanted to hear my story so just
01:33:24.620
getting the facts out i mean this has been two years and i have spoken to so many reporters and i
01:33:29.660
said you don't have to believe a word i say just read the transcript it's all sitting right there
01:33:34.460
nobody wants to touch it nobody's ever wanted to report it well in the words of cnn it's not newsworthy
01:33:39.540
it's not newsworthy exactly and so getting the word out is important but um i've been really blessed to
01:33:45.920
be working with the america first legal which are they recognize we can't have a functioning democracy
01:33:51.320
if lawyers are operating under this culture of fear i think you're the ones who coined the phrase
01:33:55.560
it's it's a culture of fear that nobody wants to raise their head above the waterline for fear that
01:34:02.000
they're going to be the one who get popped off and it's very disconcerting knowing that we have an
01:34:09.200
election coming up where everyone is determined to have rule of law enforced and the only way rule of
01:34:14.900
law is enforced and people have faith in democracy faith in the integrity of our elections is if they
01:34:19.700
know that there's going to be true accountability on both sides of the aisle that the rules are going
01:34:24.980
to be followed and you cannot have rules in democracy being followed unless you have lawyers to help
01:34:30.080
navigate and today as we speak there's an active ongoing effort to intimidate republican lawyers
01:34:36.840
from engaging in any of this conduct for fear of getting disbarred for fear of getting kicked out of
01:34:42.100
their law firms for fear of being banished from polite society in the legal circles i mean i certainly
01:34:47.680
received a bar complaint by 60 some prominent members of the bar and prominent members of legal
01:34:54.460
academia have you ever seen any of them since oh i've never met any of them ever i mean this this was
01:35:00.960
no but but i am now filing bar complaints um i'm doing what little i can do to create some
01:35:08.740
accountability and transparency clearly if it's just me i will be squished again as quickly and easily as
01:35:14.740
i was squished the first time but i have a little window to maybe try to create some awareness that we
01:35:20.880
can't go on as a society where not everybody has the right to effective lawyers and i have to say
01:35:26.340
one of the things that's been really gratifying of this whole experience i mean i have a lot of
01:35:30.520
clients and a lot of clients who i represent would have had every opportunity to distance themselves
01:35:37.960
from me for their own personal gain i mean i've i've represented newton calista gingrich
01:35:43.440
since 1998 i've represented a number senator kelly leffler herschel walker a lot of a lot of
01:35:51.660
corporate groups i won't name because if i name them that'll cause them harm just the fact that
01:35:55.160
they're associated with me but they could have left me out of political experience and you learn
01:35:59.720
who your friends are none of them did they stuck with me said we know you we know your core even
01:36:04.880
though there's a there's a risk to us in associating with you as our lawyer we're going to stand by you
01:36:10.100
now there are a lot of people who didn't do that a lot of people said this is you're too hot we're
01:36:14.420
going to termin our relationship with you but the one gratifying thing out of all is you learn who
01:36:19.200
your friends are you learn who will stick with you through thick and thin and like i said it
01:36:23.900
you you can't go through something like this without learning how strong your relationship
01:36:28.600
is with your spouse how strong your relationship is with your children how strong your relationship
01:36:32.340
is with your god amen like if we didn't have those pillars and if those pillars weren't tested every
01:36:38.380
now and then you never know how strong they are so the one good thing that comes out of this
01:36:42.680
is that those pillars of faith and family and professional relationships have been stress test for me
01:36:49.180
to an extent that i wouldn't wish on anyone but withstood that now we'll see what the repercussions
01:36:55.240
are of this but that said that's my mission now is if i can sort of contribute back to
01:37:01.620
rebalancing our legal institution or having some small role in rebalancing our government institutions
01:37:09.060
to the respect that they used to have i think that's a pretty noble mission at least it makes what
01:37:14.060
i went through potentially worth it if you can say that well i do think i mean i can relate to a lot
01:37:19.280
of what you're saying um i can empathize and i i do think learning who your friends are and finding
01:37:25.480
out that your family really does love you no matter what i mean that is a massive upside like that's a
01:37:31.700
beautiful thing i personally feel privileged to have gone through events that have proved that everyone
01:37:38.200
i love really loves me back i know that for a fact right i'm not guessing right not just hoping
01:37:42.960
like they had an opportunity yes they had an opportunity to go the other way no and they chose not to
01:37:48.160
take that i mean i'll speak for myself i haven't gone through anything like you've gone through but
01:37:51.300
you know i'm knocked around a little bit it's well worth it right just to find out that your kids
01:37:55.720
really do love you you know it's pretty great well my mission in life is to make this worth it
01:37:58.980
and i'm still figuring that path so last question what do you think what do you think when
01:38:03.240
you know you flip on the tube and you see liz cheney and cassidy hutchinson campaigning with
01:38:10.440
kamala harris yeah well i mean what's what's particularly painful for me is that the the
01:38:18.120
basis of that conversation is to highlight the importance of ethics and the importance of
01:38:23.140
government norms like that's the message that's being conveyed it's like we're the party that reveres
01:38:28.940
ethical behavior and by us being here together we show which side we're on um that's a very tough
01:38:36.800
message for me to take it's so nuts i mean i just think big picture there's no place more unethical
01:38:44.500
than washington i mean they never apologized for the iraq war you know it's like that's not hard
01:38:50.240
you know if you can't even apologize for the iraq war then you know you're truly rotten and you know
01:38:55.560
that you are does it drive you crazy when you see them well sure because this is all fairly post
01:39:01.220
traumatic stress disorder for me i mean everything is i mean obviously my life has changed my psychology
01:39:06.700
has changed i am not the same person i was i am more difficult to be around i i do not trust clients
01:39:13.080
i am a very hard person to talk to at times because of this balance to me your kind that's it's being in
01:39:20.040
your presence uh i'm happy to do but it's it's very difficult um it's very very difficult to trust
01:39:26.280
clients um but it is one of those things where you have to make good come of bad things you have to
01:39:33.380
and that's my mission don't you find that there you know there are a lot of people who will betray
01:39:39.480
you and who are cruel and hollow and serving evil but they're also some just absolutely wonderful
01:39:45.520
people and don't you see them more clearly yeah now than you did before yeah well and you learn and
01:39:50.700
i mean clearly it's easy for someone to feel sorry for themselves it's easy for me to feel sorry but
01:39:56.000
there are people in prison right now who did nothing more than walk through escorted through the grounds
01:40:02.740
of the capital there are people who are subjected to much worse than what i've been subjected to
01:40:07.500
and so you have to have a perspective in a lot of respects i'm very fortunate i i have resources i have
01:40:14.040
means i have contacts i have very good friends who have the ability to make things happen i'm not
01:40:19.460
helpless in all of this and this all happened to me it makes me much more concerned for people who
01:40:24.900
don't have access to all of those resources and it's my mission in life like it's a lot of people's
01:40:30.840
mission in life to take care of those people they can't do this i can have some small say in that and
01:40:36.400
that's what i'm gonna do bless you thank you for telling your story i really appreciate it thank you
01:40:40.560
for having me i'm really grateful for oh my gosh it's i can't say it enough it's a corrupt system
01:40:45.380
that has no claim on our allegiance at all that's my view thank you thank you
01:40:50.720
thanks for listening to tucker carlson show if you enjoyed it you can go to tucker carlson.com
01:40:56.980
to see everything that we have made the complete library tucker carlson.com