U.S. allies fear a faithless America under Trump in thrall to Putin
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Thanks, June Home, for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here. There's so much going on in the news right now, so much going on in the news just today. I do feel like it's one of those times, one of those news days, when it seems like the world is trying to make us feel like we're not alone.

In the nation of Panama, for example, they have a rich conservative businessman who is a former president. Since leaving the presidency recently, he has faced multiple criminal charges. He beat some of those charges, but not all of them. When he was convicted on money laundering charges recently, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now, the country's Supreme Court recently denied his appeal of that conviction. But then in a dramatic move—

Another country, Nicaragua, stepped in and offered him amnesty. And this other country, Nicaragua, is apparently trying to protect him from going to jail. This former president of Panama, who again has been convicted, who is due in prison, he has not gone to prison. Instead, he has moved into the Nicaraguan embassy in his country.

because Nicaragua has offered him asylum. He moved in with his desk and his sofa and his dog, who is named Bruno. And there's Bruno. From that exile, from that other country's embassy, while he is hiding out from his 10-year prison sentence, he is now running for president of Panama again.

And he's winning. According to the New York Times, recent polls show him running in first place. This convicted, fugitive, right-wing businessman, former president, now trying to rally his countrymen, saying online, quote, you have to be very cowardly to disqualify a presidential candidate who's first in the polls. Yes, if I can win votes, who cares that I am a convicted felon? Spring me out of here.

That is happening right now in Panama. The convict, now a fugitive, he has taken his dog and moved into the foreign embassy of a country that has granted him asylum, and he may win the election from there. So we're not alone in some weird way. That's Panama. Also Pakistan. There they've got a former prime minister who was ousted from being prime minister in 2022. He's now in prison, campaigning from prison.

His party won this weekend's elections in Pakistan. His party didn't exactly know how to deal with the logistics of him proclaiming victory while he's in prison, so they had AI generate a fake victory speech in what sounded like his voice, even though it wasn't really his voice because he's in prison, so he couldn't actually give the speech. Now they have to figure out how to try to form a government with him in jail, but with his party having won.

And all of the headlines about this turn of events in Pakistan are predicting some version of the same thing. All of the headlines using the same word. Chaos, chaos, chaos, chaos. Nobody wants to be a country where the election news and the prison news are kind of the same thing. Nobody wants to be that.

That said, if you elect someone to be president who's been committing crimes and/or you elect someone president and then when they're president they do some crimes, maybe to try to stay in office once they've been voted out, then honestly you have no choice. Congratulations, you have joined the community of nations where sometimes people, you know, run for president from prison and they sometimes win. And there's no easy way out of that. In Brazil,

The so-called Tropical Trump, right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, he was just named officially as a target in a federal criminal investigation in Brazil as to whether he plotted a military coup to try to stay in power. You will remember that Bolsonaro lost re-election in 2022. He claimed he was robbed, that the election was rigged and it was stolen. He made those claims about the election being rigged even before people started voting in that election. So when he lost, his supporters were, of course, preoccupied

primed to protest and to disbelieve the result. Why does that sound familiar? Then on January 6th, I mean 8th, after the election, his supporters gathered for a protest at the Capitol, which quickly turned into a violent mob attack on the Capitol and the Supreme Court as they tried to use a riot. They tried to use mob violence to keep Bolsonaro in power rather than allow for the peaceful transition of power to the new guy who had actually beaten Bolsonaro in the election.

Well, now it looks like Bolsonaro is going to be federally prosecuted in Brazil for his effort to overthrow the government and stay in power. The courts in Brazil have already barred him from standing for election again anytime in the near future, but now it looks like they're going to charge him. Within the past few days, four of his aides were arrested. He was also made to hand over his passport, so he cannot leave the country to try to avoid being prosecuted.

Who knows, though? Maybe he'll try to get asylum somewhere. Maybe he'll try to sneak back to South Florida again. If you see him in South Florida, which is where he went right after he lost re-election, or even if you see him in Brazil, hey, if you see him walking his dog toward the embassy of Nicaragua, call somebody. It's news.

I mean, all things considered, it is better to not be a country where presidents and prime ministers go to prison. We had that for a we had the sort of the luxury of not being that for a very long time. Right. The closest we got was Nixon. Right. And everybody was furious when Gerald Ford gave Nixon a pardon.

rather than waiting for Nixon to probably inevitably get indicted. Before Nixon could be indicted, and he was probably going to get indicted, Ford gave him that pardon, and everybody was so mad. You know, maybe if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, we would have learned our lesson then.

We would have learned that the consequences of putting a criminal in the White House are absolutely terrible for the country. Terrible for the criminal himself, sure, right? But way worse for the country that has then and forever thereafter to jam up its politics irretrievably with accountability under the criminal law. Politics news and the prison news always having, from that point forward, to go together.

But now here we are. We have lost the luxury that we used to have. We are definitely not alone in the world on this score anymore.

And so, yes, tonight on this broadcast, we are going to be talking about former President Donald Trump's filing that he just made in the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming to be immune from prosecution for any crimes he might have committed while serving as president. We'll be talking about efforts to disqualify the prosecutor who's brought him up on RICO charges for his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in the state of Georgia. We'll be talking about the timing of his criminal trial for alleged illegal hush money payments to a mistress, a trial we might get a start date for by the end of this week.

We'll be talking about the expected civil judgment against him and his business, which may total hundreds of millions of dollars. That judgment's also expected to come by the end of the week. And, and, and, and, and, and that's only some of them. That's leaving some of them out. But this is what covering politics is like now in America. Here, like so many countries all around the world, covering politics now has to include a lot of the prison side of things too. And the inherent drama of all that courtroom confrontation

does make covering politics feel different. I mean, sometimes I think it makes it hard to remember that we're not just running a steeplechase of unprecedented legal challenges and hurdles and hazards that we've never had to deal with before as a country. I mean, yes, we are now, right now, in our generation, in our lifetime, in this year, we are trying to avoid becoming a fundamentally different kind of country.

Right. By having to do all this. Yes, we are caught up in this incredible and frustrating drama of trying to use democratic means to save our democracy from people who are not using democratic means because they want to end democracy and just seize power by force. We are trying to defeat those forces as a country while holding on to our democracy itself and using democratic means to save the democracy we're fighting for.

And that's really hard. And there is so much procedural drama in this whole process that we're in the middle of that it is sometimes easy to forget that through this messed up, fraught, upsetting, unprecedented process we are in, we are also picking a candidate. We're also picking a president with all of the high stakes that that means. Have you ever heard of the Chippendale Building in New York City? That's its nickname, the Chippendale Building.

It's in New York, Midtown Manhattan on Madison Avenue. From the ground, it kind of looks like a normal New York office building. But then up top, it's weird looking.

The top of the building kind of looks like it's visiting from another object, right? Like the top looks like maybe a piece of furniture. That's where the nickname came from, the Chippendale building. It's like this building version. It's the building version of a mullet. Business building downstairs, some kind of weird uninviting party happening upstairs. The Chippendale building in New York. Some people love it. Some people hate it.

But if you want to see the critic's point of view, that this really is just a building with a whole other idea for a whole separate building plopped awkwardly on top of it, if you want to see the point of view of the people who really don't like this and who think this has got kind of a hat-on-a-horse element to it, I think you can see the critic's perspective really clearly if you see it alongside another building that was made by the same architect where he seemed to be pursuing the same kind of idea.

So here's that other building. Same guy made both of these. And you can see the idea carry through from one to the other, right? In both cases, what you've got is a normal building, maybe even kind of an attractive building, with a whole other building just plooped on top of it like an afterthought. Or like a joke.

The one on the left is the Chippendale building in New York. The one on the right is at the University of Houston. That's their architecture school there, sadly. Both designed by the same guy, a man named Philip Johnson.

And poor Houston. Houston's a great American city, one of my favorite cities in the country. But Houston has lots of Philip Johnson buildings around, way more than their quota, I think, way more than Houston deserves. Philip Johnson buildings are kind of the iconic buildings of the Houston skyline and their soulless office parks.

I mean, and, you know, this is a matter of taste. Don't get me wrong. There are definitely lots of people who love Philip Johnson as an architect. People like vodka martinis, too, you know, to each his own. No accounting for taste. But it does remain one of the great skeletons, not quite in the closet of American architecture, that this guy, Philip Johnson, probably the most famous and well-known and prolific American modernist architect, Philip Johnson, was also a raging,

fascist. Philip Johnson wrote admiring reviews of Mein Kampf. Philip Johnson went to Germany in 1932 to attend a giant Hitler Youth Rally in Potsdam.

Philip Johnson tried to start his own fascist political party in the United States, which he wanted to be an armed faction that would become the single party in a one-party fascist state. Philip Johnson tried to form a paramilitary group in addition to the fascist political party. It was modeled explicitly on Hitler's brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts. Philip Johnson called his group the "Grey Shirts," and they met in Philip Johnson's apartment.

Philip Johnson personally bankrolled fascist intellectuals in the United States in the lead up to World War II. He put them on his personal payroll and paid their living expenses so they could continue their work as fascist intellectuals and writers. Philip Johnson wrote eugenics-based essays about how the white race was dying and needed to be rescued. Philip Johnson, very famous American architect, was a world-class American fascist.

And in 1939, when German troops invaded Poland and started World War II, Philip Johnson was invited along to Poland to cover the fun. He was invited by the German government.

Reporters and correspondents for major news organizations were covering the invasion and its aftermath. That was not unusual. But it was unusual that Philip Johnson was invited to be there, too, because he really wasn't a journalist. He was an American pro-Nazi fascist activist and would be architect soon. But he was nevertheless invited along by the Germans to cover their magnificent invasion.

And he filed articles about it for the pro-fascist newsletter that was put out in America by Father Charles Coughlin. And what Philip Johnson wrote about

the Nazis starting World War II, what he wrote about it was that Poland really was asking for it. That Poland had given Hitler no choice. That sure, it might look to the world like Hitler and the Nazis had just invaded Poland and thereby started World War II, but really, Poland made Hitler do it. They had cooperated with Hitler up to a point, but then they stopped cooperating with him the way he wanted, and so he had to invade, and it was their fault. And really, Philip Johnson further explained it, it kind of seemed like Hitler should have invaded Poland.

Philip Johnson wrote up that invasion as if Hitler had done Poland a real favor, because among other things, Poland was really full of Jews. Philip Johnson was not a very reliable observer of what was going on in that invasion that started World War II, but he was a great stenographer of exactly what Hitler and the Nazis themselves wanted the world to think about what they did. He did a great job conveying their absolutely ridiculous, self-exculpatory cover story.

In no world, in no contemporary journalism, in no history since then, did Poland start World War II. In no world did Poland force Hitler to invade Poland.

I mean, not since Hitler and the Nazis cooked that up as a ridiculous joke in 1939 and committed American fascists like the guy who made this monstrosity, wrote it down for them, and tried to spread it around to the American public. Not in 85 years has anybody tried to sell that kind of horse hockey fairy tale of who started World War II to the American people. Until now. Now it's back.

Thursday night, a new interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin with a former Fox News host was posted online. And if you heard anything about it, I'm going to guess that you probably read news articles about it that described the interview as boring. You might have read that it started with Putin giving a long, inexplicable and boring history lecture that went on and on and on and on and didn't seem to have a point and that definitely lost most of its American audience.

True, all true. Except for the part of the history lecture where Putin got to 1939, at which point he then claimed in this interview that it was Poland who started World War II. Poland did it, because even though Poland had cooperated with Hitler up to a point, they stopped cooperating with Hitler when Hitler really wanted them to cooperate more, and once that happened, Hitler had no choice, he just had to invade, and by the way, it was kind of doing Poland a favor.

Exact same line. We haven't had someone trying to sell this line to an American audience since it happened the first time in 1939, right? With Philip Johnson's quote-unquote reporting, right? When with him, we had a committed American fascist allied with the Nazis, openly rooting for them, trying to sell us this bill of goods. That happened in 1939. It hasn't happened since until now. And the reason Putin is trying to sell us, the American public, this bizarre line now...

is more worrying than it is interesting. It might be boring, but it is worrying. Here's Russian journalist Masha Gessen explaining it for an American audience in The New Yorker, in a piece that I really highly recommend that you take a look at if you can in The New Yorker. Gessen says this,

Quote, I can't get one passage out of my mind. In the history lecture portion of the interview, when Putin got to 1939, he said, Poland cooperated with Germany, but then it refused to comply with Hitler's demands. Poles forced him. They overplayed their hand. And they forced Hitler to start the Second World War by attacking Poland. Poland forced Hitler to invade them. The idea, Geschen says, that the idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator.

By forcing the hand of the aggressor, that is central to all of Putin's explanations for Russia's war in Ukraine. Gessen says, though, to my knowledge, this is the first time Putin described Hitler's aggression in these same terms. Quote, the way Putin described the beginning of the Second World War in this interview suggests that in his mind, he might see himself as Hitler, but perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United States and create an alliance with its presumed future president.

It's telling too, Gessen continues, that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler's aggression. As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he's positioning Poland as the heir to Nazism. Putin mentioned Poland more than 30 times in this conversation with Mr. Carlson. If I were Poland, I'd be scared, end quote. Vladimir Putin is selling a new line to Americans.

He's saying that Poland is the real aggressor that we should blame for World War II. And he's starting to use the same language, starting to cite the same weird reasons he used to justify invading Ukraine when he talks about Poland. And what's really, really important to understand about that is that Poland is a NATO country. They have been for 25 years now. And we're a NATO country, too.

And if Putin decides that he doesn't just want to invade Ukraine, which he's done twice now since 2014, and he doesn't just want to invade Georgia and Moldova as well, which he has also invaded, if he decides, as he is sort of threatening here, if he decides that he's going to start shooting at Poland now, too, or trying to take land in Poland, that would be Putin and Russia attacking NATO.

which would oblige the other 30 NATO countries in the world, including us, to come to their rescue against Russia. Or maybe not. Less than 48 hours after that interview posted online, former President Donald Trump

At a rally, said if he's president again, basically, he would not honor that commitment. He appears to have made up a conversation with what he called the leader of a, quote, large NATO country, in which he says he told this leader that if that country were attacked by Russia, quote, no, I would not protect you. He said, quote, in fact, I would encourage them, meaning Russia, to do whatever the hell they want.

As David Sanger wrote in The New York Times today, quote, the larger implication of his statement is that he, Trump, might invite President Vladimir Putin of Russia to pick off a NATO nation as a warning and a lesson to the 30 or so others in NATO about heeding Mr. Trump's demands. I have to stress here that Trump really did use the word encourage here.

He did not say that the United States would sit idly by in case Russia invaded a NATO ally. He said he would encourage Russia to go after one of our allies. He would encourage them. In other words, he would tell Russia to go take out one of our allies with the assurance that we do nothing to help. This is happening within 48 hours of Putin telling a hand-picked interviewer which countries he thinks really have had it coming. And he's got one of them in NATO at the top of his list.

But don't forget, President Biden is three years older than that guy. So obviously there's equally enormous risk in picking either of these candidates to be president of the United States. One is obviously old. One is also old and facing 91 felony charges and saying he will literally encourage Russia to expand its war to hit our allies. While Russia's dictator is signaling to an American audience that he plans to do just that.

Lots of other countries, I'm sad to say it, but lots of other countries have to deal with former presidents and prime ministers facing criminal charges. It is awful and complicated and fraught and nobody in this country wishes that we had to deal with that, but now we do.

That said, take comfort in the fact that lots of other countries have had to deal with that one way or another. Maybe we can learn something from the lessons of how they've done it well or poorly. Lots of other countries have had to deal with criminal charges against leaders and would-be return leaders. But nobody is dealing with a would-be return president telling a dictator who's just invaded one of our allies to please go on and invade another. Pick one. Go on. Do it. For that one, that's us alone.

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NATO has been a success story for the last 75 years. But what bothers me about this is don't take the side of a thug who kills his opponents. Don't take the side of someone who has gone in and invaded a country and half a million people have died or been wounded because of Putin.

Amid all of the other political drama and legal drama that we are contending with right now as a country, including the drama that our legal stuff and our political stuff is intermingled from here on out, the leading Republican presidential candidate and former president, Donald Trump, this weekend promised that if he is elected president again,

The United States will no longer pledge to defend American NATO allies if any of them are attacked by Russia. And in fact, he said he would, quote, encourage Russia. That was the word he used, encourage Russia to do, quote, whatever the hell they wanted.

Joining us now is former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Ambassador McFaul was recently in Lithuania where he had the opportunity to speak with some of that country's leaders. It has a little bit of insight into how this may be playing in our allies who are very much at the pointy end of the spear here in discussions like this. Ambassador McFaul, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

Let me first ask you if you feel like any of the reaction to what President Trump said this weekend, the interpretation of what it means, its implications, if you feel like any of it's being misconstrued, or you feel like people are getting it the wrong way around, or do you feel like this is getting the right kind of response? I'm shocked by how muted the response is. You said it several times tonight, Rachel. It is just completely shocking what he said.

And the fact that we're not all thank you, by the way, for devoting so much time in your program tonight on it. And thank you for making the connections to the 1930s, because this is a 1930s vibe. And when I was in Lithuania meeting with leaders, not just from Lithuania, but Poland, Latvia, Estonia, that's the metaphor they're using and talking about these terms. What's shocking to me is that we're all not shocked by it.

We've become so used to Mr. Trump saying these outrageous things and then it's just, oh, that's just Trump being Trump.

But the fact that he said Russia, Putin should invade one of our allies and he would encourage it is just outrageous, extraordinary. So that's the reaction that I think is strange to me, that there's not more people saying that, especially national security officials, former officials in the Republican Party, because I know that they agree with me and I'm shocked that they're so silent tonight.

In Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, in Poland, in those countries, is there a sense that this is more than just uncouth, that this is something that there's a real threat here, that Putin is actually sort of testing whether or not he can cross yet another border, that he can start military action against yet another country? Without question.

publicly leaders from those countries have said it behind closed doors. They say it with even more emotion in their voice. And here's the scenario they worry about. Right now, Russia is stuck behind

fighting a difficult, you know, stalemated war in Ukraine. Thank goodness that they haven't achieved greater objectives and we need to help them so that the Ukrainians so that they don't. But they worry what happens two years from now, three years from now, four years from now when Russia has greater capability and we, because Mr. Trump comes to power, are no longer interested in defending our our NATO allies. And they talk very openly about what

what will we have to do if the United States is not there to help us? They talk very openly about how the Soviet Union was weak in 1941 when Hitler invaded, but came back roaring in 1943, 44, 45. And they talk very explicitly about will the United States recognize the Article 5 commitment that we have in NATO to defend them? And if we don't, which coalition of countries will have to do it on their own? Now,

I hope they're wrong. And I think it's important to understand and underscore that so far, Russia and the Soviet Union has never attacked a NATO country. That's the good news. But the fact that they're having these conversations is deeply troubling, exacerbated then by what Mr. Trump just said a few days ago.

And I mean, some of the response has been sort of leavened on the Republican side. And I'm thinking principally here about Senator Marco Rubio, but also some other Republicans who have said, hey, listen, you know, we passed a law that says the Senate has to give permission if a president ever wants to get us out of NATO in the future. You know, this is like you said, Trump just being Trump. This isn't this isn't a real risk. I feel like

That may be true on paper, but the risk is that the green light is given once an American commitment is questioned on American soil by a would-be American leader, that legally it doesn't necessarily matter, that the green light has been given, that the signal has been given, that the security umbrella has been removed, regardless of legalistically whatever happens as a consequence of Trump's remarks. Is that a fair assessment?

That's exactly right, Rachel, which is to say, yeah, the law is there. We're not going to withdraw from NATO. But if a NATO country is attacked, especially if it's an ambiguous attack, right, not tanks rolling to Tallinn, but something strange. And then Trump says, I don't care because they didn't pay us. That's when NATO begins to crumble with or without that law in place.

Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, sir. It's really good to see you. Thanks for your time this evening. I really, really appreciate it. All right. We've got lots more to come tonight. Stay with us. A new election matchup with new energy surrounding the race. There is an electricity on the ground. Join your favorite MSNBC hosts at our premier live audience event to break down all that's at stake in this historic election. The election of 2024 was always going to be a big,

freaking deal. MSNBC Live Democracy 2024, Saturday, September 7th in Brooklyn, New York. Visit msnbc.com slash democracy 2024 to buy your tickets today. So this week is going to be kind of nuts. I think we can all agree.

Former President Donald Trump started the week today at a courthouse in Florida, federal courthouse. It was for a hearing in the federal criminal case against him related to his allegedly hiding classified documents at his Florida golf club and refusing to turn them over when he was asked for them. That's how his week started in the federal court in Florida. His week could end with a New York judge ousting him from running his family business and ordering him to pay hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's the punishment New York's attorney general is asking for in her fraud case against Trump and the Trump organization. The New York Times reports today that the judge in that fraud case is expected to issue his verdict on Friday of this week. Again, that is just New York Times reporting. We have not confirmed that, but we're watching that as well, Judge. And Gorin could rule whenever he feels like it.

Friday is also the deadline for Trump to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to get the justices to throw out lawsuits against him from Capitol Police officers who were injured on January 6th.

On Thursday, in New York, there will be a pivotal hearing in the Hush Money criminal case, in which the judge is expected to officially schedule the start of that New York state criminal trial. That trial could start as soon as next month. That could be the first criminal trial that Trump is actually in the courtroom for.

Also on Thursday, Georgia prosecutor Fannie Willis will be appearing at a hearing about whether or not she should be disqualified from her RICO case against Donald Trump in Georgia. Trump and some of his 14 co-defendants in Fannie Willis's case in Georgia argue that she should be disqualified because she and one of the top prosecutors she hired for the case are involved in a personal romantic relationship. Now,

Now, Fannie Willis has argued that nothing about that personal relationship is disqualifying. She's argued that Trump and his co-defendants are just using these allegations essentially as salacious distractions to try to muddy the waters and scuttle the case against them by creating a lot of public relations nonsense about this issue that has no legal consequence.

That said, there was a hearing today on these allegations, and the judge in this case in Georgia said that these allegations against District Attorney Willis could result in Willis being disqualified from the case. And as such, he said he definitely wants to hear evidence on these allegations on Thursday of this week.

So it all makes for a very, very busy week in terms of the legal part of our political news now. But it also puts District Attorney Fannie Willis in quite a spot. I mean, regardless of what you or anybody else might think about Willis's personal relationship with this prosecutor and whether she did anything legally wrong here,

The only person whose opinion really matters on that right now is the judge. And today in court, he did make clear, he did say explicitly that he thinks she might be disqualified from this case because of these allegations. Now, the key dynamic at work around this is that if Fannie Willis is disqualified, fairly or unfairly,

Her whole office, the whole district attorney's office, is disqualified from working on that case. Which would mean, in all likelihood, that whole case would go away. And that is why Georgia State University law professor Clark Cunningham argued in the New York Times last month that the best thing Fannie Willis could do to protect her case against Trump and his RICO defendants in Georgia

would be for her to take a leave of absence, for her to take a personal leave of absence from the district attorney's office to turn over the case to a deputy district attorney. That would end these proceedings against her effectively, and it would leave her office in charge of the case, and the case could still go forward. We contacted Professor Cunningham about this today, these new developments. He told us, quote,

This action, meaning a personal leave by District Attorney Willis, should be looked at strategically as the best option she has to make this enormously distracting controversy go away and to put the case back on track, still in the control of the Fulton County DA's office. If Judge McAfee grants any of the motions to disqualify Willis at the hearing Thursday this week, then her option to take leave probably disappears at that point.

Now, I should also mention the Washington Post is reporting tonight that Trump plans to attend that Thursday hearing in Georgia so he can be there in the courtroom as the details of this personal relationship between Fannie Willis and this other prosecutor are laid out in open court. That should make it all the more of a circus. There will also, I believe, be cameras in that court proceeding. Don't quote me on that. But of course, Trump would like to be there regardless. All of that, all of that legal drama that makes up Donald Trump's week

Everything I just explained there doesn't even make up the biggest legal development of just today. Trump, as of tonight, is once again asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in on one of the cases against him. He's asked the court to step in on the immunity case in a way that not many observers predicted. We've got the details on that and much more still to come.

A three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C., released a unanimous opinion last week saying that Donald Trump is not immune from criminal prosecution for his attempt to stay in power after he lost re-election.

And when they issued that ruling, they also tried to box him in to what he could do next. They tried to box him into appealing straight to the U.S. Supreme Court. They said the way they ruled, they said that if Trump tried to come back to that same appeals court, if he tried to make that same court take another turn with that same case, Trump would risk the whole process speeding up, which is the last thing he wants.

They said if he came back to the appeals court instead of just going straight to the Supremes, his trial on this issue would effectively be unfrozen. It would get put back on the calendar, all systems go, he might end up in court sooner than he wants to. Well, today Donald Trump did go to the Supreme Court, but he asked them to overrule that part of the appeals court ruling where they were trying to get him to speed up the process.

He's asking the Supreme Court to allow him additional review from that same appeals court. He wants to be able to go to all 11 judges on that D.C. appeals court instead of just the three judge panel that gave him the ruling thus far. And he wants to be able to do that before he appeals to the Supreme Court without risking his trial starting up as punishment.

He argued in his filing with the court tonight that this court should stay this unprecedented and unacceptable departure from ordinary appellate procedures and allow President Trump's claim of immunity to be decided in the ordinary course of justice. This presumably, this filing tonight from Trump and his lawyers,

seems to be their way of trying kind of a bank shot. They're insisting that he should get yet more review in the appeals court in D.C. before he inevitably appeals to the United States Supreme Court. He's always playing for more delay, always playing for more procedure, always playing for more time.

Well, how strong is this play? How strong is his case for this? And if the Supreme Court does grant him what he's asking, what would that mean for the timing of his big federal criminal trial for trying to stay in office after he was voted out? Joining us now is Chuck Rosenberg, former U.S. attorney, senior FBI official. Chuck, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for being here tonight. My pleasure, Rachel.

Did I explain the basics of that correctly, that he is trying to effectively get the Supreme Court to take away that rushing tactic, that tactic by which the appeals court was trying to tell him, you got to end this appeals process at some point and get to trial?

Yes, good description. I mean, think of it conceptually this way. Three-step ladder. You know, step one would be the trial court. That's where the prosecutors want to be. That's where a jury would be seated, the trial would be conducted, and the verdict rendered. Prosecutors want to be there, and Mr. Trump does not. Step two on that ladder would be the appellate court, where he recently lost unanimously on his claim of absolute immunity. And what he'd like to do now is either be on rung number three, step three, the Supreme Court,

We're back in the appellate court, but by all means, Rachel, to avoid step one, the trial court. What do you make of the strength of his argument and the strength of this filing overall and this approach? Well, there are different arguments. So, the underlying argument that he has absolute immunity, I think, is a weak argument. It's been heard twice now, once at the district court level, once at the appellate court level. A total of four judges have ruled on it. All four have agreed there is no merit to it whatsoever.

Procedurally, however, that's like you say, a bank shot. He wants to try and have another shot at the appellate court en banc with all of the judges sit together, all 11, and hear his appeal yet again. And if he loses there, not to go back down to the trial court, but then to go up to the Supreme Court.

What do I make of it? I don't think it's very compelling. I think everyone understands what you outlined, that in the ordinary course of justice, as the Trump team wrote, means as slow as possible. And I hope the Supreme Court does not grant that portion of his request.

In terms of—I know it's always folly to predict any court's decision, particularly the Supreme Court, but do you think that there's anything that we saw at work in their consideration of his ballot eligibility case, the oral arguments that we saw on Thursday? Is there anything to extrapolate from in those arguments and what we saw of the justices and their approach to these Trump matters that might help us predict how they're going to handle this part of it?

You know, I think so, Rachel. I hope so. The case you mentioned on the 14th Amendment was put on an expedited schedule. Briefing occurred quickly. Argument occurred quickly. And I imagine we'll have a relatively quick decision. So, if the Supreme Court adheres to that philosophy, they could move this absolute immunity claim quickly, too, such that I still think it's possible, I'm somewhat bullish, that he could be tried

at rung one of the latter in trial court, district court, before the election. But that turns on a lot of ifs. Chuck Rosenberg, former U.S. attorney, former senior FBI official, and excellent explainer of hard things. Chuck, as always, thank you so much for being with us. It's always great to have you here. My pleasure, Rachel. Thank you. We'll be right back. Stay with us. You can get all hung up in a prickly perch, and your gang will fly on. You'll be left in a lurch.

You'll come down from the lurch with an unpleasant bump, and the chances are then that you'll be in a slump. And when you're in a slump, you're not in for much fun. Unslumping yourself is not easily done. You know it's going to be a long night when dudes start reading Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor. That was Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance tonight.

unslimping himself. At this hour, the United States Senate has just managed to advance a bill that includes funding for both Ukraine and Israel after spending a whole day of, I guess we call it deliberation. By deliberation, I mean mostly grandstanding and also trying to run out the clock. That's the only way really to describe J.D. Vance annoying the ghost of Theodore Geisel and Josh Hawley talking about the Super Bowl on the Senate floor all evening.

The bill they nevertheless passed this hour would send over $60 billion to Ukraine. It would send over $14 billion to Israel. Once the Senate gives final approval to this thing, it'll go over to the House. Tonight, Speaker Mike Johnson has released a statement effectively saying he doesn't want it to go anywhere in the House. His statement said in part, quote, "...the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters."

It's not at all clear that Mike Johnson and House Republicans have anything approaching a unified will or that Republican leadership is in any position to know what that will might be. There is even some talk among House Republicans of circumventing Speaker Mike Johnson entirely on this matter and doing it without him. But honestly, with these guys, who knows?

Watch this space. That's going to do it for us tonight.

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