Maddow on the unlikely institution holding Trump’s coup plotters to account

I’m joined now by Rachel Maddow, host of the Rachel Maddow Show, airing Mondays right here on MSNBC. Rachel, I of course thought of you when I saw this Segretti shout out in in the in the Eastman decision as a as a a huge Watergate nerd and obsessive. But but the other thing that always makes me chuckle morbidly when I go back there is like those people. A bunch of them went to prison like they didn’t just, like get disbarred. There were also criminal consequences for a number of them. Yeah. And I mean, and thank you for pointing that out and putting it right next to the way in which the Segretti case was name checked in, the John Eastman disbarment recommendation. The, as you pointed out, the way Segretti was brought up was, oh, and by the way, what John Eastman did is way worse than what Donald Sacretti did. And Donald Sacretti of course, went to prison. I mean, John Eastman may yet go to prison. I mean, it is to see Trump lawyers here. We’ve got Giuliani with his license suspended. I still don’t really understand what happened to the criminal or the the federal investigation of of of Rudy Giuliani and how that exactly went away. There’s still unanswered questions there. He’s not currently a defendant anywhere. He’s is facing a a ruinous defamation judgment and his law license is suspended. We’ve got Eastman now with a recommendation that he’d be disbarred. He’s barred from practicing life. Suspended right now. Ken Chesbro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis have all pled guilty. We’ve got you know, I mean all of them, right. Stephanie Lambert in Michigan just got arrested last week. The the there’s one of the takeaways from this is that the bar associations are holding up as an American institution, and who would have picked them as the institution that was going to be really important here? But they tried to construct a sort of legal tissue around this coup effort, this violent coup effort to take over the government. And the lawyers thus far have really been the only ones that have paid. It’s been the rioters and the lawyers, and the reason the lawyers have paid is because the bar associations have stood up as an institution said we’re going to do our part here. That’s such an important point because part of what was so insidious about the coup attempt, particularly as channeled through Chesbro and Eastman and sort of less so Powell, honestly, who was sort of doing PR more than actual law, was that it was. It was there were what they said were colorable legal claims, Jeffrey Clark as well, Right? That like, they were trying to cloak all of this in the language not of open insurrection against the United States of America, not an attempt to topple democracy, which is what they were trying to do, but in a bunch of sort of procedural mechanics about how the electoral count Act worsened all this. And so in that respect it does strike me as very important. The Bar Association, the Guild of Lawyers, is actually saying these arguments aren’t just like arguments of the margin that are sort of interesting. They’re actually not doing. They’re doing something else that violates the kind of ethical duty you have as a lawyer. Yes. And I mean people who study the way that democracies turn into authoritarian systems of government, talk about civil society and talk about professional associations and talk about the different types of institutions that we have as a country that you don’t necessarily think of as being close to like the electoral process and the other things that we think of as politics. But they end up having a really important role in policing essentially what you’re allowed to do and stay in good standing. So like when we’ve talked about or when I, you know, I’ve been obsessed with the American fascist and and and would be fascist leaders in the 1930s, the Catholic Church ended up being really, really important. You know, they did a lot of bad things in the lead up to World War 2 and during World War 2. But they also took Charles Coughlin off the air when Coughlin was organizing his listeners in America into paramilitary cells. Yeah. And telling them to prepare for violent revolution against the US government. It was the church that came in and took him off, took him off the air with George Van Horn Mosley, who was bornstorming the country saying he was going to be the American Fuhrer. He’d been deputy chief of staff of the US Army. the US Army came in and said we’re going to take your pension if you keep talking about being, if you keep talking about being America’s Fuhrer. And he decided he’d he’d keep the money and and and and ditch the ditch the dictatorship. Institutions of all different kinds are called upon in different ways to do this. And the Bar Association, there’s been a concerted effort within the legal profession to say not in our name and not with our skills and not with our profession. We self regulate as a profession and we’re not going to do this. So, so there’s another aspect to this too. So there’s the institutional aspect in civil society sort of holding up in the Bar Association, which is really important to me. But but last night we talked about Kerry Lake and the fact that she’s basically waved the white flag on the a definition suit filed against her for the lie she told about her own loss in 2022. A kind of like you know big lie to like her own sort of knockoff sequel that was as ridiculous and luckily not as violent. What what strikes me as important and I I want to say this because I think people think like oh the libs want Donald Trump to be tried for this sort of retribution. Or I honestly the thing that is most important to me is like the epistemic aspect which is we don’t in this country have a lot of mechanisms to focus people on establishing consensus facts. And I think the January 6th committee did that to some point but it was it was tarnished in lots of ways. And what’s striking is whether it’s in the defamation cases, the many we’ve seen, or in these other adjudicative processes like bar, you know, bar state bars, when you get into that realm, there is nothing there. The the facts are plain as day. The intentions are plain as day. And to fix that for the American League, that’s why I feel it’s so important, not even about retribution or justice or accountability. It’s actually just establishing what happened. Yes. And and part of it, I mean, because, you know, part of me is forever 8 years old and constantly needs to be entertained. Part of it is just the hilarity of it, right in the Jeff Clark disbarment trial. One of the things that we learned from a senior Justice Department official who just testified on that trial is that Jeff Clark’s belief about what was going on with the election was tied to his fantasy that smart thermostats had stolen the election. Like, OK, I want to, I want to know more about that. Like, please give me all of that. I want to hear. But the the more, the more serious point is that you’re exactly right, Chris. I mean the the the criminal justice system, for all its faults, it makes evidence public, it tests evidence, it tests facts. It’s an adversarial fair process. And when you lie, your lie is exposed and then that is inadmissible or it is punished. And pouting doesn’t count and yelling doesn’t count. And threats are illegal and it’s a compulsory process. And the truth gets proven and it’s done in a fair way that everybody can see. You get to put your best foot forward. You get to make your best case with joke lawyers or with real lawyers if you can afford them. And that process is something that can prove reality can bring Earth One and Earth Two crashing together in a way that really makes all the myth lose its power. If it doesn’t make it disappear, but it it exposes it in a way that is unimpeachable. And we’ve seen, we’ve seen small versions of that time and time and time again in all these different areas, but but not the big one yet. Rachel Maddow, what a pleasure to have you this evening. Thank you very much.