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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the revelations revealed in the court filings of Jack Smith in Donald Trump's Jan 6th case - with more insights into Trump's state of mind that prove legally damning. There's more fallout from the debate as JD Vance has been able to rehab his image in the wake of nice guy Tim Walz not going after him aggressively. And they finish on the latest with Israel's aggression towards Hezbollah and the striking dock workers who are putting pressure on the Presidential Race.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the weekend edition of the Macraig podcast. I'm Jerry Dade Sexton. I am here with my good friend Nick Hausman, celebrating Rosh Hashanah by driving in this car. How's it going bud? I am transporting brisket. So it's a very important task. We get very excited at the Macraig podcast when Nick makes brisket. You have yet to have any of my famous brisket, right? I have not had your brisket. I've had your cooking. It's very good. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Well, this is a special thing I do every, you know, once or twice a year and that's an old world recipe. And I'm very excited to get it to the people's mouths. Well, fantastic. Well, everybody, we are going to get to a whole slew of things. I just want to say, first of all, thank you, everybody, for coming out for our VP post debate analysis on Tuesday night. That was awesome of you. It's always good to get to hang out with our community. A reminder, if you want to listen to that, or if you want to come to future events, including election night and others, or if you just want to listen to the full episode of the weekend, which we're currently recording, go over to patreon.com/macraigpodcast. Nick, we're going to get into the debate and the fallout from it here in a minute. But we've had a pretty big development on Wednesday. And we're taping this, by the way, on Thursday, on Wednesday, Judge Tonya Chutkin unsealed a 165 page motion by special counsel Jack Smith and the election air fairness case against Donald Trump. Included in this motion is evidence that Donald Trump planned to claim victory even if he lost the 2020 election. He knew that he lost the election. He believed conspiracy theories. He posted were quote unquote crazy shit. There was a plan to create a riot on January 6 after being warned that that was going to happen. It turns out people within his orbit wanted that to occur. There's a whole slew of things in this motion, Nick. This could be an October surprise. It could be almost nothing. How are you feeling about this as you've started to digest the news? You know, it's like, we've studied this when you're political sicko, right? And you read every little thing that comes out. It's contemporaneously. This kind of sounds like a rehashed some degree, right? Like, it doesn't necessarily feel that surprising. It's always in the prism of well, this isn't written for me or for you. It's like, or the people that are following Trump that will actually have assimilate this into any kind of, you know, decision about their vote. And I have to imagine it's probably not many. Yeah, so here are a couple of issues and I'm glad you you broached it like that, Nick. First of all, there's a question of whether or not this will affect the election next month. And I personally don't think it will. I think basically at this point, the electorate is almost baked in. You're not going to suddenly, I have a hard time imagining that there will be a voter in a Pennsylvania or a Michigan who was going to vote for Donald Trump. They read about this thing and they are like, no, man, I'm completely wrong about this guy. But then there's the other question, which is, will this somehow or another whole Donald Trump accountable? You said this is a rehash, which it is, but this is also trying to circumvent the presidential immunity decision by the Supreme Court. It goes ahead and claims that Donald Trump was a candidate, which makes him a citizen, as opposed to the president. I on one hand find it disturbing that Jack Smith has to somehow or another try and go around this decision. We've talked about how doing that actually validates it sometimes. But also, I don't know, again, if this is something that is actually going to go all the way into fruition and hold Donald Trump accountable. We've seen this movie before. And when you've seen the movie enough times, you kind of know how the movie ends. Well, the other part of the process that's frustrating for me is that it's going to put it in Judge Chuckin's lap to decide whether this is official or unofficial business of the president. But we know that it's going to be moot regardless, because let's just say that she says that he's prosecutable for this. They're just going to send it to the Supreme Court anyway. And so we're going to do this dance for really no reason in my mind at this point. I mean, maybe it's nice to have a little what we call precedent, even though clearly the Supreme Court doesn't give a shit about that. Now that's not again to give a shit about that. No, and then we've also heard in their questioning, and excuse me, when I say there, I mean, Alito and Thomas, in their questioning of the of the unity case, we already know that at least for those two, they think that this is all part of the presidential his authority to be questioning whether there was fraud in the election. And so the only question is, can that mindset infect Kavanaugh and Coney Brown and all the others and and Roberts? It probably could. Well, okay. So what you just brought up is really, really interesting, which is Jack Smith has more or less now written this against Donald Trump, conforming to what the Supreme Court handed down, one of the most damning Supreme Court decisions, I would argue, of all time, it is now trying to persuade them to look at this case through another lens. So is there a possibility that the Supreme Court might move on this thing? Possibly. It kind of it kind of depends on what the Supreme Court and these ideologues think that Donald Trump means to them, whether or not he's outlived his usefulness. It also depends also on whether or not he wins the election, right? Like whether or not like a president who's getting ready to come in and could possibly appoint more Supreme Court justices or create law or destroy law, whether or not he's useful to them. We don't know with this point, but I'll tell you what I do know, Nick, I do know that there is a depreciating meaning to all of this. Like, this actually is pretty big. And I just want to go through a couple of things very quickly, Nick, that are are established in this thing. Donald Trump apparently told his family it really doesn't matter if he wins or loses the election. You have to try and fight to keep power. That's telling. It has also been verified that him and the people around him knew that there were only roughly 12 illegal votes while they were claiming for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions. We also now know based on this and a lawsuit against Fox that Trump, the Republicans and Fox all knew that the the the big lie of 2020 was a lie. We also know Ron and McDaniel, the RNC chair, thought that this was quote unquote fucking nuts. So what we have been revealed to us, unfortunately, is a lot of stuff that we already knew that's now in black and white, and it has lessening lessening impact because we already know this stuff and on top of it, like all we had to do was really pay attention. All of this was out in the open. For sure. I mean, some of the new stuff was all the testimony from Mike Pence. And that's actually a little bit illuminating because you're talking to a kid who's like having a meltdown. He's like, let's say, six years old and and you got to like take different texts to try to figure out how to communicate and getting the calm down and reason to get you away. That's basically what it sounded like. It sounded like Mike Pence talking to a six-year-old who was carrying on. And he's like, come on, like, let's just take the win. We'll take a bow. This will be great. Like, you know, we'll celebrate what we did. We can we can run it back in four years, just now, whatever. And and nothing he obviously nothing he tried would work to play kid in at all. And so, you know, obviously those these are the the words we were missing in the in the committee when that Liz Cheney ran in terms of like the he never testified for them. So we got that. But it's it really is discussing how it's gotten to be so normative now that we don't even it doesn't even like phase us like the JD advancing at the bay, which we'll talk about a little bit too. You know, him basically not acknowledging that they lost or jump lost. You know, it doesn't it's going to be gone and it didn't have any resonance. I don't think even though everyone's trying to make it have a residence. Well, and I do want to point out that even in for the record, we've talked about this way too long without saying something that needs said, which is this should disqualify Donald Trump from running for president. Like what has now been represented? He should not be allowed. The Republican party, if they had even the beginnings of scruples or ethics or morals or responsibility, they would replace him as their candidate. This should get rid of him. It doesn't. Nick, it barely made the front page of the New York Times. Like it, you know, this is something. I mean, MSNBC has made an entire business of going over this. The internet community has made an entire business of going over these things. But I do want to point out as a milestone that something this large and let's make it clear again, that Donald Trump tried to carry out a coup to keep power in 2020 or in 2021. I guess it would be in January. It was from 2020 into 2021. The fact that this has now become so normalized and that we are almost numb to this thing like this thing dropped and there are bombshells in it, but I felt so hollow from it. I don't know how you felt from it, but I think it's important to point out that that's how this feels now. Well, let me just make something clear, Jared. He didn't disqualify himself from being president. He disqualified himself from being a fucking citizen in the United States. That's right. You know, he shouldn't be allowed to be in this country anymore doing what he's doing and how he's treated people. So that that on the is should be established here. Now, the one thing I did want to make a point about with the Supreme Court and the immunity ruling is that like, first of all, you are a better student of history than I am. Did the word immunity exist back when the founding fathers were writing the Constitution? Yeah, I happened to think so. So they had this notion, they understood what that meant, and they made a decision not to put it into the Constitution in with respect to the president, right? So that was one of their greatest fears was that the president would become completely immune for prosecution and become a despot. That was like one of their men. If you go back and read the notes on the constitutional convention, this was one of the biggest standing points among everybody at the convention. Well, you know, I'm listening to this new book that came out from some of the guys on the Mueller team and or listening to they were on a pod. And you know, basically what this decision does for the immunity is what the dirty secret we've all forgotten about was that the most prosecutable thing he did when he was president was obstruction of justice. They laid out 10 very clear things. Well, guess what? Going forward, none of that is illegal anymore. Nope, totally legal. Yeah, that would be all be under the purview of the official duties. And so, you know, Merrick Garland never even pretended to look into that or prosecute that instead of what they're doing now. So the whole thing is completely backwards, because at the very least, and we understood that there was some, you know, gentlemen's agreement about what the president can do that might be a little bit illegal for national security, yada yada. But we always knew that he certainly couldn't obstruct justice. And that's what Nixon taught us, right? And they've now made that part of evil. And that's probably the more frightening thing than anything else. 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