White House INSIDER EXPOSES Trump's MIDTERM SECRETS

[00:00:00]Welcome to the Court of History. I'm Sidney Blumenthal. I'm here with my co-host Sean Wollenz.

[00:00:04]The court is now in session. Please subscribe to the Legal AF. Get this podcast wherever you get podcasts.

[00:00:12]Um Sean, um Donald Trump delivered a major prime-time address last week um in which um he failed to um elucidate any facts, but but um did try to scare people into not voting and laid out a whole pattern of um fictitious uh claims about uh interference with the election of 2020 and going forward.

[00:00:45]Um In the commentary on that, um very few people mentioned um what had happened to Chris Krebs or mentioned his name. He was the former election security official in the first Trump term who determined the 2020 was a free and fair election.

[00:01:10]And then Trump issued an executive order revoking his security clearance and ordering the Department of Justice to investigate his past tenure.

[00:01:24]What are we to make of this?

[00:01:25]>> Well, I mean it's retribution um a one I suppose in retribution four or five by now. But um look, I mean one of the ironies of all of this is that Donald Trump gave that speech saying that we're in terrible shape uh regarding election security uh neglecting to to mention that he had done everything he can to get rid of every safeguard we had around election security.

[00:01:50]Um including the gentleman you just mentioned. I mean, this was insane. Um it's his fault if things are as bad as you say that things are nowhere near as bad as he says they are. But if they are, it's his fault. So, you know, it's it's typical Trumpian, you know, double talk.

[00:02:06]>> What I I would say it's not only not as bad as he says it is, it's not anything he says it is.

[00:02:12]>> No. No.

[00:02:14]Um, no, not not not as bad as not the way to put it, exactly. It's not it's fine. It's great. It's It's as good as it's ever been.

[00:02:21]>> Yeah. So, um, in that same executive order, one of his first acts of retribution in naming Chris Krebs, he also named Miles Taylor, who was the former Homeland Security Aid, and, um, uh, applied the same uh, strictures against Miles Taylor. Um, and his crime was to criticize Donald Trump. That's all. That was his his crime against the state. He made him an enemy of the state.

[00:02:59]And, as it happens, we have Miles with us right now.

[00:03:04]And, uh, we have a lot to discuss with Miles. Um, for those who don't know Miles, we had him early on on the Court of History.

[00:03:14]Miles is National Security Expert. He wrote a number one New York Times best-selling book.

[00:03:20]He has served in a variety of national security posts. He was Chief of Staff of the US Department of Homeland Security, uh, in the first Trump term.

[00:03:31]He worked at Google. He was the head of Advanced Technology and Security Strategy. Previously, he worked in the US House of Representatives on Homeland Security Committee Appropriations and in the Speaker's Office.

[00:03:44]And, as we well know, in 2018 he published a bombshell piece in The Times as, quote, anonymous, unquote blowing the whistle on Trump's misconduct. Welcome to the court of history, Miles.

[00:03:58]>> It's great to be with you, friends.

[00:04:01]>> So, undoubtedly, you tracked this um speech from Donald Trump.

[00:04:09]Uh and what what did you take away from it? What was your analysis?

[00:04:16]>> Uh well, look. [clears throat] He set out to do a series of things.

[00:04:22]He set out to name the boogeyman who stole the 2020 election. President has spent 6 years, by the way, trying to figure out who stole the 2020 election. Finally, he thinks he's found that person or persons.

[00:04:36]>> This is a long-running series TV series.

[00:04:38]>> Yeah. Long-running series. Yeah. We're we're in season six. We finally know who's pulling the strings. Apparently, it's China.

[00:04:46]Uh that was one goal.

[00:04:48]Uh another goal was the president wanted to make clear that the deep state has been out to get him, and that's why it took us so long to know who the enemy was. And then, finally, the president wanted to make the case that our elections are very insecure to lay the predicate for him taking over the elections. If you boiled it down into those three goals, every single one of those goals, Donald Trump did the opposite with his speech and the declassification of documents that followed. I personally I think it was one of the biggest self-owns in presidential speech making history because he did the opposite of each of those things. He released documents that showed yeah, the Chinese had an intent, potentially, to meddle in the 2020 election, but that far and away the more significant actor in meddling in those elections was the Russians.

[00:05:44]All the way to the highest levels. And he declassifies that information, including the possibility that the Russians were interacting with people in Trump's own movement to try to make that possible. So, piece piece number one, total fail, points the finger one direction, the documents he releases point in another direction. In fact, he says in his speech that there was extraordinary interference from China and that they quote fought like hell to beat him. Then the documents that come out literally say the Chinese may have engaged in low-level interference, and even the confidence level in that is just low to medium, right? Just complete complete dissonance in those things. All right, so goal number one, total fail, backfires on the president.

[00:06:33]Goal number two, he points at the deep state and says, "The reason I didn't know about this is these people."

[00:06:40]Donald Trump then owns himself again, releases documents showing that his in his own presidential daily brief, he was briefed on the fact that the Chinese might try to meddle. In the documents he released, there's information that the full scope of the intelligence and analysis about what happened in the 2020 election was then again delivered to him on January 7th after the election.

[00:07:06]Granted, he may have been busy on January 7th, maybe he didn't read it, but the day after the insurrection, Donald Trump is delivered this full report from the intelligence community that says, "Here are all the actors that tried to meddle in the election." We didn't hear anything about it. And then, on top of it, folks like me who had briefed Donald Trump about these threats were able to come forward and say, "Well, the president's wrong. We did, as far back as 2018, we made the president aware, in person I can tell you, we made the president aware that the Chinese might try to meddle in 2020, but that we also didn't think that was the most significant threat actor. We told the president we thought Russia's efforts were vastly more serious. And what did he do with that information? Well, he can't claim he didn't know.

[00:07:52]Because weeks after we briefed him, he went and spoke publicly in New York City at the United Nations and he talked about how the Chinese were planning to meddle in our elections. Right? So, the Donald Trump we heard last week who said, "I had no idea and I blame the deep deep state eight years ago." He went and spoke publicly about it after he was briefed. Okay, so that second point he's trying to make that the deep state didn't tell me also backfires on him because the document >> Let me just ask you one question about this second point, which is this so-called deep state consists of people at the top who were his appointees.

[00:08:32]>> That's correct.

[00:08:33]I was one of Donald Trump's appointees.

[00:08:35]Chris Krebs, my colleague who you mentioned, he and I started a day apart from each other at the Department of Homeland Security, also a Trump appointee. Um we're not even talking about the civil servants that he claims are against him. His own people. We were briefing him on these threats. He was aware of these threats. None of this was new. So, of course that backfires on him, Sid. And then the third point that the president wanted to use these bombshell revelations to make the case that our elections are insecure were once again disproven by the documents he released. Any sober-minded person who goes and reads those declassified documents comes away with a pretty remarkable perspective that one, the US intelligence community was on top of it, was tracking all of these threats. Two, that it successfully defended the United States against multiple nations trying to interfere in our elections. And three, that it's the assessment of those combined brains across the US government that our election systems and machines are actually quite resilient against interference and it's very hard to meddle. Again, a remarkable cell phone.

[00:09:48]Every single goal Trump had going into this speech was disproven not by his critics but by himself and the documents he released.

[00:09:57]>> Yeah, and you know, and the one case one example that he gave about [clears throat] votes being flipped and I'm talking to you a third point now, Miles. About he didn't even say there he couldn't prove anything about anything that happened in the United States.

[00:10:11]He ended up talking about Venezuela.

[00:10:14]Venezuela was the one place where this all happened, which leads me to some sort of, you know, certain conspiracy theories of my own and what what Mr. Maduro is going to be asked to do between now and the election regarding Dominion and so forth. What kinds of confession he might want to make down the line. But but that was another example where, you know, America's going to fall and Mary the the example was from Venezuela. I mean, really. This was outrageous.

[00:10:37]>> Well, and I think Sean, you're right in that even if the president and his team try to get Maduro to flip and say he meddled, they've already made that so much less believable from this presentation. Because remember, Donald Trump just pointed the finger at China.

[00:10:54]He basically said China stole the 2020 election from me. So now, if he goes back and says, "Actually, it was Venezuela." Even to his own people, it looks more and more ridiculous and they also know that he can't have possibly been serious about any of this because if he really did think China stole the election from him, Donald Trump, the most retributive person we know in American politics, he's not going to get any sort of revenge against China. He's not going to announce a single sanction, a single diplomatic expulsion, a single consequence for China stealing the election from him? That's because he doesn't even believe it really happened.

[00:11:30]All he was trying to do is tell a story that he thinks might help him take over the 2026 midterm elections and interfere. If it was really about China, he would have done something about it.

[00:11:43]It was not.

[00:11:45]>> Well, of course he took a trip to China.

[00:11:47]He met with Xi. He was very happy to to wander around there in front of all the cameras, and his White House never released any information about any of this information or disinformation that was in his speech. He never brought it up on his China trip.

[00:12:08]>> Some might say a missed opportunity. And And And you know, keep in mind, folks, people forget this. In the first Trump administration, we expelled Russian intelligence operatives, we levied sanctions against the Russians, we delivered consequences for their 2016 meddling. Now, unfortunately, that was not because of Donald Trump. That was despite him. Is we brought these recommendations to the president. He was obviously resistant. He obviously didn't want to deliver consequences against our adversaries. But ultimately, by his own team, by a Republican Congress, he was pressured, "You have to do something."

[00:12:50]If we want to deter bad guys from meddling in our elections, we have to send a strong signal. Now, unfortunately, time and again, as the administration wore on, the president did not have an interest in election security. He did not have an interest in threatening our adversaries. Why?

[00:13:09]Because he viewed our adversaries as our allies. That's why he didn't want to deter them. And the only exception to that is China, because he saw that the Chinese might try to interfere to hurt him. And so, he called it out at the United Nations. You should have seen our jaws hit the floor in September of 2018, when we had briefed Trump on all the threats to our elections, and the only one he seemed to key in on is, wait, the Chinese might not support me? I'm going to go call them out. Instead of calling out the other threat actors we said who might meddle. That was very revealing to his own team.

[00:13:45]>> Yeah, well, um so how do you see this as a template, as a plan going forward, not about 2020, and not about his inability to let go of losing that election, but um in manipulating the midterm elections in 2022?

[00:14:08]>> Well, I see it as Look, the speech itself is a pretty plan for him to lay the predicate to meddle. I you know, I think even folks on the Republican side sort of had a hard time buying what the president was selling. Members of Congress put out obligatory tweets, election security's important, we've got to do something. But look, you're you're seeing very few of them continue the messaging from Donald Trump's speech into this week. If they were, you would see sweeping bills on sanctions against China and actions and consequences. They all knew this was a PR exercise. And so, uh I think from that standpoint, it's really failed to mobilize even Donald Trump's own side to do the things he wanted, like pass the Save America Act and embrace his voter suppression uh schemes, you know, codifying his voter suppression schemes. So, from that standpoint, it doesn't work. From the broader standpoint of signaling that he intends to take further actions to compromise the midterms, well, that is something we should pay attention to. The smoke is there. The smoke is there and the fire is probably below it, that this White House is continuing to scheme up ways that will likely align with the things the president said. What do I mean by that?

[00:15:21]Well, when he talks about voting machines specifically being unsecure, he gives us the best potential preview possible last week that he's going to do something on voting machines. Is he going to declare them insecure? Is he going to target certain districts where, you know, Democratic states have refused to turn over their voter rolls and say, "Well, because we can't be sure there wasn't fraud, we've got to go take those machines." I mean, he's he's pointing to the fact that he's going to do something with these machines. But, that doesn't mean we're helpless. It's actually he's giving us months to prepare, especially state and local election officials and states attorneys general. They now know the president of the United States, who doesn't have the authority to run their elections, is probably coming for their machines. He talked about it in January.

[00:16:07]He spoke to the New York Times and said his big regret from 2020 is that he didn't send the National Guard to seize the machines. So, if you're a state or a local election official and you're not preparing for the possibility that you need to sue the federal government to prevent them from seizing your machines, you probably are engaged in dereliction of duty. The president just told you very clearly as loudly as he could, "I'm going to come for your machines if you're in a place where I don't want uh the political opposition to win the election." Fortunately, that is something folks are preparing for around the country. Prosecutors are preparing, states attorneys general, secretaries of state. They now see the meddling, the writings on the wall, and Trump has given them time to ramp up their defenses.

[00:16:48]>> Yeah, what happens if he decides to seize machines? They can um how do they can can they protect the vote?

[00:16:58]>> Well, look. I mean, I hope that we're seeing uh explosive warfare in the places where the federal government tries to do this.

[00:17:07]I mean, literally, these jurisdictions need to have their legal briefs pre-written and ready to go. And they should use Fulton County as the template. What would Fulton County have done differently if they could? They probably would have filed some sort of emergency appeal and refused to hand over their ballots when the FBI came knocking. Because all the FBI did was go to a magistrate judge where they thought they could get approval and say we've got these tenuous accusations of fraud and use that to seize those ballots.

[00:17:41]That district if they'd had more of a heads-up, if they had anticipated this coming, could have been prepared to escalate an appeal and say this is a fundamental infringement on our constitutional right to run our elections and take it straight into the courts. Pause it, freeze it. That is something people are going to need to be prepared to do in this election. It's not conspiracy theory anymore. The president's already done it and he's probably going to do it again. I have more confidence now that those localities will be prepared to fight back than I did a few months ago.

[00:18:15]And you know, that's just one example.

[00:18:17]But look, another example is those election officials need to focus on procedures they already have in place, which is the redundancies. You know, voting systems don't just even electronic voting systems typically don't just record the vote and then there it is, one vote on a hard drive. You tend to get a paper receipt yourself, a paper receipt gets kicked out the other side for them to file, and then there's the digital record. There are three opportunities there to make sure the vote is as it said it was. If the federal government is coming in and trying to steal ballots and machines from these localities, well, they better make sure that they've got their records backed up. They better make sure they're organized, that they're keeping their backup paper ballots where they need to, and that there is redundancy so that we don't lose public confidence in what the actual tally was if Donald sends henchmen illegally and unconstitutionally to go get those ballots.

[00:19:15]>> This require, you know, you talk about the mobilization of law, that's true. I mean there's going to be force here, I think.

[00:19:24]I mean, you know, this is not just a matter of suing people. This is a matter of protecting these machines from being seized, physically being seized.

[00:19:31]And you know, this is the thing that I think I mean I'll ask you. I mean, is this something the governors and state attorneys general ought to be thinking about? Because this becomes, you know, a true confrontation.

[00:19:45]>> They should be, and I know many of them are.

[00:19:48]Um but then all the way down to the local level. I mean, there's an effort that we announced at my organization, um defiance.org, earlier this year we announced something called FAFO, the fight against federal overreach. Uh it has a pithy name that also means something else.

[00:20:07]The project for the fight against federal overreach, FAFO, was initially stood up to stitch together prosecutors around the country to sue the federal government if federal agents come in and break the law on immigration. And we saw this after Alex Pretty and Renee Good were killed in the streets of Minneapolis.

[00:20:29]We launched this effort to make sure that local prosecutors know how to take on these cases.

[00:20:35]And they're not used to that because most of them are used to if a federal agent comes in and commits a crime, kills someone unlawfully, then the other part of the federal government does the investigation. The FBI comes in and investigates the ICE agent, right? The locals don't have to do that. Well, we can't trust that anymore, especially in light of news last week that the FBI has said they're no longer going to be investigating these ICE killings and cases. And so FAFO was launched so the prosecutors would know legally how to take on these complex cases. I'm thrilled to say some of those founding members of FAFO have now already done that. Mary Moriarty is the prosecutor in Minneapolis. She's brought cases against these ICE agents saying, "We're not going to wait for the federal government. We're going to charge these people with crimes." Similar things are happening in Houston and other places around the country. Now, that group FAFO is turning to focus on elections for exactly the reason you point to, Sean, is we may literally see federal agents attempt to lawlessly go seize ballots.

[00:21:32]If Trump does what he said in January he wishes he'd done in 2020. That would be unconstitutional. It would be unconstitutional to send the National Guard to seize these ballots. Well, in that case, FAFO member Larry Krasner, the prosecutor in Philadelphia, this is his quote, not mine, said, "If they do that, I'm going to lock their asses up."

[00:21:53]He is the local prosecutor. He's got the ability to go send these folks to jail if they're violating the Constitution and the rights of people in their districts. This is not a confrontation any of us want between the federal government and the states. But this is what we're going to expect our local prosecutors and our states to be doing to protect our right to vote. So, that's another effort underway is, you know, you've got local prosecutors around the country rising up and saying, "All right, we may have to take these people to jail if they are obviously breaking the law to get their hands on America's private ballots."

[00:22:28]>> Well, it may be something that Trump wants and he has talked about the Insurrection Act and people around him have Um Cleta Mitchell, who was one of the theorists for January 6th, a right-wing activist, has said that while the president has no constitutional role in elections, uh that they belong to the states properly.

[00:22:53]On the other hand, if there's an emergency, he can intervene. And so, um it's up to Trump now to provoke the emergency.

[00:23:05]>> Well, and this is what folks were worried about in Washington D.C., Portland, Minneapolis, Los Angeles. All of these places you saw troop deployments in the first year of the second Trump administration. Uh, people were worried that the reason was to try to go to reaction to do something like invoke the Insurrection Act. I can tell you firsthand that was the point. That was the point. That's why they picked liberal cities that they thought would become flashpoints. Was to taunt them.

[00:23:36]Was to hope the protests would turn violent and to hope that the violence could be used to justify the Insurrection Act. Now, what they didn't count on is that the violence would be coming from their own agents and it would have the opposite public narrative that Trump hoped to create. They knew they could not take this into the courts that the Insurrection Act would get challenged and the only way a judge would dare defy the executive branches presumption on the Insurrection Act would be if the optics so flew in the face of those claims. Because in general, I think our expectation is the courts will defer to the executive on whether an insurrection's happening. Unless it's just so manifestly opposite that that's not the case. And what we saw in Minneapolis was the opposite. It wasn't the protesters who were being violent and burning cars and killing ICE agents.

[00:24:24]It was ICE agents killing people. And I think that's one of the reasons you saw them draw down. I think that's why you saw them get to the brink of invoking the Insurrection Act to the point that we had leaks out of the White House about invoking it and then deciding not to because the optics weren't there.

[00:24:37]They were going to lose in court if they tried to do that.

[00:24:42]Will Donald Trump try to create a similar situation with the midterms? I think it's a very reasonable thing to forecast. I mean, if I as just one person have been on the receiving end of at least two Trump requests to invoke the Insurrection Act all the way back in the first term, You've got to imagine he's talking about this with a lot more people a lot more frequently and I would think it's something that's on the table for the midterm elections. Now, here's the question. Does it actually allow the president a backdoor to take over elections? I mean, I'm not a lawyer but good lawyers tell me ultimately that you know, the courts would likely strike that down, right? The president trying to use the Insurrection Act as a way to say I will now administer the elections is something that cuts so fundamentally to the heart of the US Constitution that it would require extraordinary judicial Twister for judges at the high court to get themselves into that position. That said, you know, many of them lack spinal cords and so they find it easier to play games of Twister. So, I don't want to >> We do not We do not like Twisters on the Supreme Court of the United States right now. Let us pray.

[00:25:49]>> But you know, I I think we saw with some of the decisions this last term that you know, the court would like to find an exit ramp rather than say yes, Donald Trump has the ability to sign his name on a piece of paper and take over elections. I think we can have reasonable confidence in that but he may try to declare other emergencies. I mean, one of the flags that I've made over the course of the past few years has been something we were worried about in the first term which is what's called the presidential emergency action documents, the Padds. This is known in the national security community as the president's Doomsday book. Now, I had to get permission a few years ago from the Department of Homeland Security to go out and even talk publicly about the Doomsday book and I sought that permission because I said look, the American people should know that we were worried that Trump was going to take this emergency manual for what to do if America's invaded or destroyed by nuclear war and try to use those emergency powers illegitimately in an election. Now, that's something that a number of folks are publicly flagging. Former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt has now been out there very regularly talking about the Doomsday Book. Former Senator Tim Wirth uh there's a number of non-profit organizations that are quietly talking to and working with state governments to brief them up, make them aware of some of the emergency powers that a president might try to invoke, and basically what their rights are and what their defenses should be in a court of law. Um so, that defensive work is happening. Again, it doesn't I think make anyone more comfortable uh because we are having to talk about this not as if it's a B plot in a C movie, but as uh a a possible scenario that we end up in later this year.

[00:27:38]>> Yeah, we'll we'll find out what kind of dystopian movie we're in um soon, but um and we have a lot more to talk about. Um but for now, let's end part one of our discussion. Um we have a lot to talk about and the role of Stephen Miller, uh the possible role of ICE and what it's been up to, and the use of violence in the streets right now. Um but for now, this session of the Court of History is adjourned. Um thank you, Miles Taylor, for joining us on behalf of myself and my co-host Shawn Mulllenz.

[00:28:13]Um we want you to please subscribe to Legal AF, get this podcast wherever you get podcasts. Thank you.

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