Heart & Soul Conversations

A former federal prosecutor warned on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is hiding the enormous cost of his most heinous scandal right under the noses of Americans.

Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump's "[lurching] from scandal to scandal like a drunken sailor" had effectively distracted the American public from his intensified bombing campaigns in South America. He added that the strikes have not only killed close to 200 people, but also "violate the law and bring our country into disrepute."

"We are already giving this tinpot dictator far more attention than he deserves, and yet not nearly enough to keep vigil over the enormous costs of his lawlessness," Litman wrote.

Litman noted scandals like Signalgate — when multiple top Trump officials leaked sensitive military operation plans to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, through a private encrypted messaging platform not approved for government use — and the heavily redacted Jeffrey Epstein files have been largely swept under the rug by Trump's repeated lawlessness.

Litman added that the bombing campaign carries an enormous cost and highlights the need for a more wide-ranging oversight regime once the Trump administration is out of office.

"Two hundred people killed in secret, in international waters, without legal authority, without evidence of effect, at a cost of nearly five billion dollars. It is still happening, under our noses as it were, but we’re focused on other things," he wrote.

Several of President Donald Trump's recent judicial nominees have displayed a "disqualifying" pattern of behavior that has alarmed a legal expert.

In hearing after hearing, Democrats have asked Trump's judicial nominees: Who won the 2020 general election? Yet several nominees have refused to explicitly say that former President Joe Biden won the election, and have instead deflected, according to Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor.

Weissmann said on a new episode of the "Court of History" podcast on Wednesday that the nominees' refusal to say Biden won the election should be "disqualifying" at least.

"There is no credible evidence," Weissmann said. "There's right-wing conspiracy talk, but there is no credible evidence of any material fraud in the 2020 election. And that to me would have been a perfectly legitimate thing to say."

Trump has routinely claimed that the election was rigged against him, even though his lawyers failed to prove that in more than 60 court cases, and some of whom have been disbarred for their involvement in Trump's efforts to overturn the results.

Weissmann noted that the nominees who refuse to acknowledge that there was no material evidence of fraud in the 2020 general election pose a significant danger to the American judiciary going forward.

"This is so dangerous that you have people who have lifetime appointments, if they are confirmed, who are going to be operating if they're consistent with how they're behaving in their confirmation hearing, as they will be on the bench. That is corrupting one of the few checks and balances that are still functioning in this country right now."