“Having watched all of her testimony and seeing her, she’s 26 years old, and I thought she showed more poise, composure, and grit and integrity than so many of the senior men in the White House who just didn’t display any of that.”
That was how Andrew Weissmann described the testimony that Mark Meadow’s former top aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered to the Jan. 6th Committee in June 2022.
Her account of Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election made her a target of a failed prosecution effort that a grand jury rejected on Tuesday.
In a Substack Live, we discussed the latest humiliation for the prosecutorial arm of Trump’s government — for whom “no true bills” are no longer a rarity but a routine occurrence.
That kicked off a broader conversation about how the agency that Andrew Weissmann served for decades no longer looks, sounds, or acts like the “Justice Department.” Lawrence O’Donnell has aptly called it Trump’s “Department of Revenge,” and it’s increasingly described in pro-democracy circles as the Trump regime. Trump’s lawyers are increasingly facing a legitimacy problem, as a growing number have been disqualified by federal courts.
Bilal “Bill” Essayli, the face of Trump’s election interference campaign in California, was disqualified for a second time on Tuesday.
The hourlong conversation ran the gamut, culminating in a discussion about reporting in The New York Times concerning an alleged dirty tricks campaign in Alaska to sow confusion about the candidacy of Dan Sullivan. It’s an embarrassing story for Mary Peltola and one that Trump has been trying to seize upon to gin up doubt about a critical Senate race that Republicans seem poised to lose.
“Of course, I think it’s an absolutely terrible idea,” Weissmann said. “By the same token, do I think that the Republicans and Democrats routinely engage in hardball politics where they get spoiler candidates to run where there’s no chance that that person would ever run, but the whole idea is to siphon off votes? It happens all the time, and the law does not prohibit it.”
Watch the full conversation at the top of this newsletter.
