America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, Episode 91

All right, welcome to America This Week. I'm Matt Taibbi.

And I'm Walter Kern.

Walter, how are, where are you? Which is always the first question.

I know. We call it America This Week because I am the America Correspondent. And I, I moved quickly across the landscape. And today I'm back in Las Vegas, which is kind of my perch for understanding the whole place, because 40 million people arrive here every year and then depart. And then 39 million depart poorer.

Yeah, that's a little bit much.

Yeah, it's, it's getting bad. So I'll be back in Montana next week. I'm retreating, you know, from this listening post.

Yeah, you're kind of like this mythological character who sort of permanently roams the landscape. You know, like, like an ethereal sort of modern day, right? Bogeyman or Baba Yaga or something like that.

Yeah. Oh, look, I just got a message from Carole King, the singer up in the corner of my screen for the Democrat Party. I am dude, here's my big problem. And why I want to go back to Montana. I am getting so many emails and messages per day from political candidates.

Oh, we'll get to him. Unfortunately, we have to, but yeah,

I get message, at least two messages from him per day.

De Niro should just do the thing that he did to Maury and goodfellas, like get her, get behind everybody and put a telephone cord around their necks. I want you to vote for Biden today. Today.

First, he has to climb up on his platform shoes, though, if he wants to reach my neck,

and I'm not very tall.

Okay, good. Good question. First of all, you can't watch it. You know, you can't go inside the courtroom. All you can see are these sketches.

whatever you think about the case, and I have kind of complicated feelings about it. But indisputably, it's happening that somebody who's going to be the major party nominee is possibly about to be politically, criminally sentenced, essentially by his opponent in the race. I mean, not exactly, but for the crime of being a playboy. Right? Yeah.

let's see what he has to say. Doing their closing arguments for the defendant, and they finished, I could tell you the scene outside court was more raucous than usual. There were Trump family members, there was Robert De Niro. And I was back downtown with our team of reporters and lawyers at the court today. So we were out there, I made some videos, we kept an eye on it, we're all working together to closing arguments, give jurors the pivotal final last material.

October. They needed Stormy Daniels. quiet. All right, so that's like one example, right? So here's another one.

Welcome back to CBS News. I'm Lana Zak, and the jury in Donald Trump's criminal trial out of New York has returned to the courtroom, and so has the former president. I want to get back over to Jessica Levinson. She has been following all of this for us. So, Jessica, explain to us what's going on at the courthouse right now.

David Packer, who ran American Media. All right, and you get the idea. But I'm not sure that that is getting to the heart of the matter, is deciding whether or not there was a catch-and-kill agreement.

going to speak from first principles here and get myself in a lot of trouble. I don't think presidential candidates for major parties who are ahead in the polls should be on trial in the spring of an election year for things that aren't really, really serious. I agree with you. Because everything flows in a democracy from our choice of a chief executive, and the choice should be as free as possible. Other parts of government, and not parts of the federal government either, state governments, like the one that is carrying out this prosecution, should lay their hands off the choice of the American people as to how they're going to run world affairs, domestic affairs, their economy, and so on.

I agree. If somebody like Donald Trump does a kidnapping or steals $1 million, $20 million, let's say, or commits a really egregious, beyond the pale crime, then yeah, okay, then you have to do it. But anything else immediately raises these questions. This case is so far in the direction of. we're not even really sure this is a crime that it automatically makes you uncomfortable.

go ahead. So, Matt, I mean, you've covered presidential campaigns. How common is it that there are lovers, or women, because our leading candidates have been men mostly, who need to be shut up in advance of someone running for president? I've heard those rumors with every major candidate. Every time.

or we shouldn't have, for good reasons, as it turned out. But anyway. Right. No, it's always.

a rumor. But we can't even establish in this case, except for the she said part of it, that they had sex. Right? Right. I mean, that's not legally at issue here, whether they had sex.

Well, I definitely don't want to see the key piece of evidence there.

We've had descriptions of Trump's genitals and so on, but still. And then that there was a meeting to suppress negative information. before the vote. Well, wow, I'm shocked. How about the meetings at the Aspen Institute, to suppress the Biden laptop, you know, and the zillion crimes that were, you know, superficially, at least, perhaps, indicated there?

you know, for people who haven't read the indictment, this case is a bizarre sort of Frankensteinian legal construction where they're asserting something that basically isn't illegal, you are allowed to pay off a mistress to be quiet. But what they've done is they've essentially said, well, they committed a business records offense by, you know, registering that payment, as, you know, I forget what it is, legal fees, or whatever it is, as opposed to pay off. And then, in addition, we're going to take this state records offense, and convert it into and tie it to a federal, you know, a conspiracy to commit a federal elections crime, right? You know, by suppressing information, but there is no federal elections crime here, you would need the underlying state offense to be a first, it just doesn't, it's, there's a reason why they declined to bring this case for a long time, because it's not really against the law that you have to create the idea behind it, in order to, in order to, you know, go forward with it. But you see the way they report it, as if, oh, if there is a catch and kill agreement, and he did, and he did approve it, then he's guilty.

by the way? What's the what's, they love? the ominous language of that. So the idea is that.

you're buying up a story so that it will not be reported. Which is exactly, by the way, you know, you brought up the Aspen Institute, that's exactly what they did at the Aspen Institute, they got through, they got together and had a tabletop exercise on how to not cover the Hunter Biden story. If that isn't catch and kill, I don't know what it is. But, and I, you know, I guess you could maybe make an argument that there was some kind of offense there, but nobody's arguing that, you know, the suppression of that story, which really was suppressed, was illegal, even though that certainly had an impact on the 2020 election. I disagree with people who say it would have been decisive, but I think it probably would have had an impact.

the people involved with covering this thing. Because, because, skip ahead, if this ends with the image of Trump behind bars, led off to Rikers Island by guards for a crime that is hard to understand, according to a legal theory that was sort of put together for a one-time use against this guy, then everything else is obviated. as far as I'm concerned. The rest of their, the rest of their legal proceedings can all go to hell, because you've skipped to the ultimate image of a campaigning president in jail. Okay?

Right.

So, so, so, whatever the terminus was of all these other things, you have reached prematurely, with the worst case, perhaps, you know. And at that point, America has a decision to make. Is this how it's going to be, or not?

Yeah. And it is how it's going to be. Yeah. I mean, do we think that the, that there won't be, Republican states that will go, will go forward with this kind of thing in the future?

It will have to happen. Game theory, game theory requires it. If politics is at all really still an adversarial enterprise, and not just some masquerade in which people, you know, total kayfabe pretend to have fights, then actual conflict and the desire to win it necessitates fighting fire with fire.

So, you and I have been talking for weeks, sort of behind the scenes, about this theory that we have, about something called the retreat, where there, there appears to be a growing perception among people in the political and the media world that maybe we've gone a little far with some things. And we got to maybe step back because we're way off the deep end in terms of what the rest of the country thinks. And maybe some of these things even have consequences that we don't necessarily like. And we'll get to some of those examples. But with this case, we're seeing it.

This is complicated. This is lengthy stuff. It took the judge over an hour to read it,

but guess what? The jury doesn't get this in the room. during deliberations. They have to write questions, write notes. They don't get these instructions.

Would we have seen this apparent ambivalence on the part of some of the reporters for the more usually partisan outlets? Yeah, no, no, we wouldn't have. Because last year, it was still considered likely that, with this great slate of legal problems ahead of him, Donald Trump would be way down in the polls right now. And I think the resilience of the American populist movement, whether it's behind RFK Jr. or Donald Trump or whatever, has shocked these people to a certain extent.

MIKE GREEN Right. I mean, yeah, there was that weird, during the Trump years, essentially, the press was an organ of a government in exile.

They represented the money. They represented the military industrial complex. They represented the pharmaceutical industry. They represented all these big powers. So construing themselves as the resistance got a little old for people, I think.

MIKE GREEN, Yeah. And I think you brought up the key element to this whole thing has been the loss of audience. So when Trump first became president, normally, in a presidential election year, news companies do wonderfully. They actually make money. in many cases.

is, you can't force somebody to say something. I mean, come on, that's the most disingenuous thing I've seen. Everything in the last few years has been about making people say things and criticizing them if they fail to say things, you know, voluntarily. In other words, we've got more complex speech codes than ever in my lifetime. And we've got penalties attached to failing to live up to them, sometimes legal penalties, but certainly institutional and social penalties all over the board.

Absolutely, absolutely. But most of it has been informal, right? Like it's been unspoken. When you actually put it in black and white, you must do this.

Well, they won't regain anything with Walter Kern, because you don't get your virtue back once you've sold it. And the problem here is that, how can I put it, when 80s televangelists were revealed as adulterers, who made trysts in motels with their secretaries, they never got to be, they never get, you know, be up in the pulpit with the same authority again. Okay, right. So when newspapers take what, to me, is the bedrock morality of American journalism, that you're free to speak, you allow others to speak, and you don't spend your time patrolling violations of speech in your stories. You know, you don't actually make yourself into an affirmative enforcement body against free speech, which they also did.

I remember ages ago, remember, remember the movie, the Michael Mann movie, The Insider? Oh, yeah. Yeah, terrific movie, right? I watched that movie. And for those of you who haven't seen it, it's about the whistleblower, the tobacco whistleblower, Jeffrey Weigand, and his relationship with the 60 Minutes producer, Lowell Bergman, who was a terrific investigative reporter, among other things, played by Al Pacino in the movie.