“Boy, that escalated quickly,” our producer messaged me. And indeed it does, but in a fully amiable manner! My friend Adam Baldwin and I spent the next two episodes debating the various controversies around Donald Trump, the special counsel indictment, politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice, and the Bidens’ free ride thus far through all of it. The same debate we’re having on all of these issues in the posts and comments takes place with a passionate Adam for the defense — to a point — and me for the prosecution — to a point. It’s no spoiler that we agree in the end on why we’re seeing this prosecution, and its inevitable erosion of the credibility of the DoJ.
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Welcome back to our VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
To offer a spoiler, we’re still friends, of course! It’s a great conversation and debate, and I think both of us gave it our best. This episode focuses mainly on the Trump indictment and the legal basis for it, as well as the politicization that largely neuters its impact. Part 2 of this debate is less contentious and more of a discussion of the Bidens and the weaponization of the DoJ, and that will come on Monday.
It’s difficult to get good pull quotes in this episode due to the rapid back-and-forth of the debate. I’ll offer a couple here, though, as an appetizer:
- “I’m not a lawyer, you’re not a lawyer,” Adam says in a discussion of the Presidential Records Act. “That’s not the way I read it and that’s not the way Mark Levin reads it, and he is a lawyer and he’s a really smart guy.” [No argument from me about Levin!] “I’m going with Mark Levin’s argument that that it’s absolutely outrageous and despicable that they would pull this section [18 USC] 793(e) and use that as a test case, a constitutional test case, against an Article II president.”
- “What Amy Berman Jackson ruled” on the Judicial Watch case cited by Levin and others, I say, “was that the courts couldn’t order National Archives to reclassify those as presidential records, even if the court thought they were presidential records and should have been in the National Archives. The court didn’t have the authority to tell the National Archives to do that because of the way that the Presidential Records act as is constructed. But she does say in that, and I read that decision, she does say in that that if the National Archives decided that those were presidential records and they wanted to get them back, then they could refer the matter to the Attorney General and have them subpoenaed to get them back, regardless of what Clinton thought about them.”
- Later in the episode, however, Adam and I found common ground on the DoJ. “James Comey set a standard in 2016,” I argue, “that unless you were intending to injure the United States that you couldn’t charge [18 USC] 793. “Now,” I continue, “that’s the first time anybody’s ever posited that that was the policy at the Department of Justice. James Comey said it, Loretta Lynch endorsed it, and Barack Obama endorsed it.”
- “And it’s a clear demonstration of the weaponization of the Department of Justice, of Biden himself, of the Oval Office,” Adam replies.
So who got the better of the debate? (Well, our producer sides with Adam.) Who do you think had the winning argument? Watch the whole episode, and join us in the comments!
