Elie Honig on His New Book, Trump’s Second Term, And Kash Patel’s ‘Humiliating’ Failures at FBI
CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig didn’t mince words on Press Club this week. The former federal prosecutor lit into FBI Director Kash Patel for botching the aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Patel has faced intense criticism from inside and outside the administration for his handling of the high-profile case — including for his announcement that authorities had a suspect in custody in the early hours after the shooting on Wednesday, only to later walk that back. The alleged gunman, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was in custody late Thursday night.
“He’s such an amateur,” Honig told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin in a wide-ranging interview. “To announce it and then take it back is humiliating… He’s in over his head.” For Honig, it was a vivid example of the “cost to sacrificing real expertise,” which he says is a recurring theme of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
Honig’s warning that Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists dovetails with the focus of his riveting new book, When You Come at the King, which traces half a century of independent investigations into presidents, from Watergate to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Trump probe. The title of the book, borrowed from Omar Little’s famous line in HBO’s The Wire, underscores the stakes of taking on a sitting president.
Honig sees Trump’s second term as proof of even higher stakes than his first. In the first term, Robert Mueller “was permitted to finish his work,” Honig said. Now, “can you imagine if someone at DOJ even mentioned the word ‘special counsel’? They’d be immediately fired by [Attorney General] Pam Bondi.”
Honig argued that Trump 2.0 isn’t just more combative, but less constrained. In the past, he said, figures like former Attorney General Bill Barr or former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly sometimes acted as guardrails, “like a parent with a toddler.”
“Now,” Honig said, Trump “has Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. And they’ll do it.” Honig pointed to the administration’s chaotic handling of the so-called Epstein files, saying the saga — with its initial promise of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list, to the FBI announcing no more information would be made public, followed by the release of a crude letter allegedly sent by Trump to Epstein — “couldn’t have been more mishandled.”
Honig is an increasingly pervasive presence on CNN, where his clear-eyed legal analysis sets him apart from the reliably partisan takes of the cable news analyst class.
That reputation for playing it straight sometimes gets Honig in trouble. He recalled being criticized for saying the 14th Amendment would not remove Trump from Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot, a prediction later vindicated by a 9–0 Supreme Court decision.
“Sometimes he’s right, often he’s wrong,” Honig said of Trump. But, “if you are constantly beating that drum,” he said of Trump critics in the media predicting he would die in prison when he faced a raft of cases before his re-election, “why do you think your audience ends up so disappointed, so misled when it doesn’t come to be?”
Honig’s book, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump, is out on September 16.
Subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Aidan McLaughlin: Let’s start with the book. When You Come at the King. It’s fascinating. For people who don’t know the premise, could you give us a broad look at what the book is about and how you came up with the idea to write it?
Elie Honig: So I will tell you openly, I modeled the structure of this book on George Stephanopoulos’ book about the Situation Room, because I read it — it’s great. What I loved about it is that the structure made so much sense. He takes this important governmental institution, the White House Situation Room, and takes us through all these major chapters of history, from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, up until Covid. And I thought, ooh, that would work really well if I take a look at all the big special counsel cases. They’ve been called different things — special counsel, independent prosecutor — really from Watergate on. So basically, what I have in this book is a chapter or more on Watergate, Iran-Contra, Clinton and Ken Starr, all the way up through Jack Smith, with inside reporting on all of it. And I will tell you, this is my third book, and this was the most fun to put together just because I spoke to so many people who lived this stuff. So it’s much more of a reported book. It’s much more insider, and it was a blast. It came together beautifully.
How did you come up with the title?
I don’t know how other people do it. I don’t think I’ve had the title for any of my three books when I started. Definitely did not have this title. I was thinking of something justice-y, like one of those James Comey books — A Higher Loyalty, Justice, whatever. But Eric Nelson, who’s my editor at HarperCollins, doesn’t like bland titles.
Smart man.
Right? Yes, this is an homage, a quote, or a paraphrase from Omar from The Wire. If you watch The Wire, he famously says, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” That sentiment actually goes back to Machiavelli, Emerson, and others. But I love that, because first of all, it’s a nice show about the high stakes of these cases. I talked to prosecutors, defense lawyers, people who were prosecuted, White House officials, and they all basically said this was essentially life or death for us. They all understand that whatever they do here is going to be in their obituary. I did normal trials, and it felt like the end of the world, but when you have the whole world looking at you, it’s that much more intense. The other thing is the retribution angle. “When you come at the king, you best not miss.” It’s about retribution, essentially. And now what we’re seeing, especially with Trump 2.0, is that he has made clear how he’s using DOJ. He’s going after people whom he believes wronged him, and he’s using prosecutorial power to do that.
This is a deeply reported book. You interviewed a lot of people, and you got a lot of people to speak on the record who wouldn’t normally talk publicly about these kinds of things. Did you have to learn how to be a reporter, or is it a skill to ones that you’ve used throughout your career?
I think both of those things. It is similar to digging into a criminal case. The difference is I don’t have subpoena power now. I wish I did.
If they gave journalists subpoena power, it would be —
Could you imagine?
The Daily Mail would be a very powerful operation.
So you have to learn different methods, and I will say, I learned from a lot of my colleagues and talked to my colleagues at CNN about how do you do this. My initial intent was —
Who gave you the best advice?
I’ll give you an example. Kate Bolduan told me, “If you have multiple people involved in a transaction or meeting, which you always will, and you get one piece of information from one of them, let other people know that.” ‘Well, I already know this happened.’ A, that’ll ease them up, and B, that might incentivize them, right? So I remember Kate giving me that bit of advice back when I started. And so, my initial intent was to add a little flavor with the firsthand stuff, but I never thought it would develop. I have 36 or 37 people on record by name. I didn’t do anonymous. I had some people who wanted to go anonymous, and I said no.
What was the thinking there?
Again, I don’t remember which colleague, but somebody at CNN, or maybe multiple people, basically said it’s not fair to have some people on record and other people responding anonymously. And so I basically said to people, I’ll take you with your name or I won’t take you at all. And most of those people gave me their names. A couple of people said, Well, then I’m out. But fine, I’d rather not have anonymous. Nothing wrong with anonymous, I just didn’t want it in this book. But it just sort of — there are some people I know. I know Andy McCabe personally from the FBI; he’s in here. I know Carl Bernstein from CNN. Other people I sort of went through folks at CNN. Other people I just blind called, or I didn’t call but emailed or texted, and got a lot of yeses. I’ll tell you one fun story. Judy Miller is in this book. Judy Miller was a famous New York Times reporter who went to prison for almost three months because she wouldn’t give up her source in one of these cases. And I can’t say who, but an anchor at CNN said, “She’s really tough to get, and she’s not warm and fuzzy, but good luck.” And I emailed her, and this is so self-aggrandizing, but it’s true. She responded and said, “I know who you are, I watch you on CNN, you’re a straight shooter, I’ll talk.” And she gave me three hours of fantastic stuff that’s in here, including what it’s like in prison for her. What it was like. She’s out now.
So the key to good reporting is to be beloved widely by an audience.
Honestly, I do think — I’ll give you another example. Rod Rosenstein is here. He was very important in the Mueller case, has been on TV a couple times. I didn’t know him, and I just found his law firm address. He had a similar response. I think people are more likely to speak with you if they think you’re gonna give them a fair shake. And I think in this book, people were trying to, in a way, speak to history. Some of these histories have been told — Watergate and Clinton in particular — but not recently and not in an updated way. And I have new stuff in there, especially the more recent cases. Mueller, Durham, Robert Herr, Jack Smith, all those people. Not everyone was willing to go on the record, but this may be the only definitive account written of those cases.
Rod Rosenstein — correct me if I’m wrong — not a big public speaker about his cases at all.
No, not at all.
But the incentive for him is that this is the book that’s going to be written about these cases. For posterity, you want your side shown in them. I would imagine that was your pitch.
For sure. I didn’t even — I rarely even had to say that. I think people understood. But you also have to take that into account as the writer and as the reader. Everyone has a self-interest here. Although I will say some of my favorite moments are when people owned up to things. I’ll give you one example. There was a long, simmering dispute within the Clinton team. I talked to Bill Clinton’s lawyers, a White House lawyer from back then, and Ken Starr’s team about who was leaking. They both accused each other, although it’s not really leaking if defense lawyers do it, technically. I asked the lawyer I spoke to from Starr’s team — he was essentially the number two guy — I said, “I’ve got to just ask you straight up, did your team leak?” And I was expecting the old “no” or “they did.” He goes, “Oh, hell yeah, we did.” He goes, “And it made me nuts because I hated it, it was bad for us.” It’s cool when you see an admission like that.
And that’s the first time that’s ever been revealed?
I believe so. There was also another point where I’m pressing him on how much sexual detail they included in the infamous Starr report.
Again, a very big deal at the time.
Very big deal at the time, and he admitted that some of it went too far, which I think is the first time — certainly Ken Starr, who passed away a few years ago, never gave an inch there.
Did he specify what exactly crossed the line, or you didn’t get that graphic?
OK, I’ll tell you. So the back and forth was, of course, Clinton’s people said this was crazy, and it was salacious. It was intended to hurt him. And of course, I knew that Starr’s team was going to respond by saying, “Well, it was a perjury case. So who touched whom where was relevant to the definition of perjury.” There was — twice in the Starr report — Starr’s team writes that after Clinton had his encounters with Monica, he masturbated into the sink of the Oval Office. That’s in the report. And so I asked Saul Wisenberg, the prosecutor, “But how would that have been relevant to the jury?”
Right, surely not.
He goes, “Yeah, probably not that.”
I can’t fathom the argument that you would make that it would be pertinent.
I was eager to hear what he had to say, but he just owned up.
You could get a little creative with it. I don’t want to speculate on that.
Let’s not.
Allow me to get a little Paris Review on you. What’s your writing process?
So this is my third book. One of my rules — I work quickly, especially if I’m super engaged in this. And one of my rules is I like to get it on the page and then edit, edit, craft, move. One of the luxuries of this, that we don’t have on live TV, is that you can go back and fix things, up to a certain point. So I’m a relentless editor of myself. The other thing is, early on, I had a rule: I had to write 500 words a day. No matter what. If it was a Sunday and I wanted to watch football, I would take halftime of a game and knock out 500 words. Now, maybe none of them would make it into the book, maybe 480 of them, but it’s intimidating. You’re looking at a blank screen. This is, I think, 100,000 words. But honestly, this one — I don’t want to say easy — but this one flowed very naturally.
In the book, you lay out the history of independent investigations in three phases. What are those eras, and why did you choose to lay it out like that?
So there’s what I call the Wild West era, before we had any rules. People may not realize this — there were no rules when Watergate happened. They were just making it up as they went along. Archibald Cox, the famous independent prosecutor, they just chose him. They basically understood intuitively that we needed an outsider, and they brought him in. After and because of Watergate, everyone — both sides — basically agreed we needed a law. And so they passed the Independent Counsel Act. That goes from the late ’70s up to ’99. The most famous one was Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, but there were 20 in all, including some interesting ones that I have in here. I have a guy, Mike Espy, who was a cabinet secretary, who got prosecuted and acquitted. He talks to me about how that case destroyed his life, even though he was acquitted. And then we have the modern special counsel regulations, which were written in ’99. The law lapsed — both sides, Republicans and Democrats, agreed it needed to go, it died — and then DOJ itself wrote its own regulations, which have been on the books since ’99. I actually argue that every 25 years or so, we sort of clean it up a little, and I think it’s time for that again.
What do you think needs to be done to fix the process?
The big thing is, look, Trump’s not going to use this.
No.
Let’s be real. If anything, maybe to go after his opponents, but not in the traditional sense. And every president up to Trump has — they don’t like it, but they’ve abided. Even Nixon — he fired everyone in the Saturday Night Massacre, but he left the team in place. Even Trump 1, right? He obstructed, but he let Mueller stay in place; he didn’t fire everybody.
I can’t fathom that happening in this term.
Totally different. I say in the book, it’s a miracle when you look back and even consider that Mueller was appointed, and it lasted. But I do argue that whoever comes next in the Oval Office needs to restore this, needs to allow DOJ to restore it. And I have a bunch of policy proposals in there. The gist of it is we need a semi-permanent special counsel who serves a set term of years — five years, 10 years, whatever — like the FBI director, who can go across presidential administrations. You have to vet his people for political bias. He needs stronger protection against being fired — sort of a whole set of regs that I think builds on what we have. What we have now is pretty good, but I think there are things we can tweak.
What surprised you the most when you were reporting out this book?
That’s a good one. Well, beyond the Clinton things that I told you — Bob Bauer is Joe Biden’s lawyer, right? He represented him, maybe to this day still represents him, in the whole Robert Herr case. I talk in the book about Robert Herr — this is the classified documents case — when Herr’s report came out, saying, “He’s an elderly man with a faulty memory,” politicians went crazy on him. I quote Adam Schiff and all these Democrats saying, “Herr is a political hitman.”
If anything, he was generous.
So I asked Bob Bauer, the lawyer for Biden, and I was expecting him to pile on. And what Bob Bauer said to me — I’m paraphrasing, but the quote’s in the book — he said, “I very much take issue with the fact that Robert Herr wrote what he wrote in his report. And I completely object to that and think he got things wrong in his reports. However, I do not think he did it because of political motivations. Contrary to what a lot of Democratic politicians say, I don’t think he’s a political partisan. I don’t think he was trying to hurt Biden or help Trump.” He said — and I thought this was a really sharp observation — “Because of the system, the pressures that get put on a special counsel, where if you’re not going to indict, you feel pressure to show something, to produce.” And hence this 300-plus-page report that Bauer took issue with. But I thought that was an interesting — I don’t even know if I would say concession — but almost a more informed viewpoint than you hear from politicians.
Which is a similar dynamic to the James Comey–Hillary Clinton case in 2016, where there was pressure to have an announcement without actually bringing any charges.
So I use that case as the example of why we need rules, because Comey did that outside the rules, right? There was no special counsel. He just made that up as he went along. Comey comes in for quite a bit of criticism in this book for that case and a few other things. He declined to talk to me. We know how shy James Comey is about talking to the media. For whatever reason, he chose not to speak with me, which is very much his prerogative.
Do you think he knew that you were going to be tough on him?
I don’t know. I don’t know him. It’s funny — I started at SDNY months after he left. But I say in the book, when I started there, everyone worshiped the guy. Everyone had photos of him. It was funny — it kind of looked almost like a gag photo, because Comey’s 6’7. Everyone had their swearing-in photos, and he’s 14 inches taller than them. So I say he was worshiped, and there was a time when he was the best of the best of young prosecutors. He had been a mob prosecutor, a terrorism prosecutor. But I think, starting with the Hillary Clinton debacle that he caused by grabbing power, he really undermined his own legacy. And by the way, DOJ did a report afterward where three different AGs of both parties said the same thing, basically.
I want to ask about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He was shot and killed at an event in Utah. There’s still a lot we don’t know about this case, obviously, as we record right now [Editor’s note: This episode was recorded last Thursday, before the suspected shooter was turned in]. But I want to get your take on the gunman’s escape. Take us behind the scenes of how law enforcement responds to something like this, and how someone can get away from an event like that after committing such a crime.
So first of all, I don’t know — I guess I do know what it is about this — but this one hits so hard, doesn’t it? It’s devastating. I really don’t care who you are; it’s so horrifying what was done to him. And what was he doing? He was talking in public to people who disagreed. That’s what the First Amendment is about. Anyway, I said to someone right when this happened — I was in transit, I was on flights the whole time — there are three things that you’re going to want, and they need one of them in order to catch this guy: the firearm, a vehicle, and an image of the guy. And now it looks like they at least have two of those. So I’m confident that they’ll be able to use that and that they’ll be able to get him. That’s how you make your links. I was nervous for a second. I thought, well, if he took the gun with him, one shot, if you scoop the shell, there’s gonna be no remnant. You can’t tell anything from the slug. And if they didn’t use a vehicle, or they don’t have a vehicle, and they don’t have surveillance, but it looks like they at least have two of the three. So let’s hope.
What do you make of Kash Patel, the FBI director, coming under criticism because of how he’s been live-tweeting this?
He’s such an amateur.
How abnormal is it for the FBI director to be commenting on this live on Twitter?
You could tell by my reaction when you started that question — I’m disgusted by it. Yes, in a case like this, you have an obligation to inform the world what’s happening. But you have to hold your horses, you have to make sure you’re buttoned up. You don’t announce, “We have a suspect, a person of interest in custody,” until you’re sure that’s the guy. And to announce it and then take it back is humiliating — it undermines him in a way that he will not recover from. I’m not saying he’s going to get fired or resign, but his credibility, which I think was already fairly questionable, really took a hit. It shows — look, he’s over his head. This is why people — I know a million FBI agents, past and present — and even the ones who really like Trump were like, “This guy’s a pretender. He is not a legitimate law enforcement agent.”
Ken Dilanian of NBC News pointed out that Kash Patel fired the “highly regarded head of the FBI field office in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago for reasons that are not clear.” What do you make of arguments that the weakening of the FBI under this administration could have anything to do with the aftermath of this?
It’s tough to draw a direct causal link — a ‘but for’ link like we would say in the law. But there’s a cost to this. There’s a cost to sacrificing real expertise, whether it’s in economic areas or health areas, but in prosecution and law enforcement as well.
What kind of case is this going forward? What can we expect to happen after the gunman is caught?
He will certainly be prosecuted for first-degree murder under Utah law. You have to show aggravating factors in order to get it up to the death penalty. I think one of them is if you endanger other people, which I think you can argue — firing a shot, bullets can fragment, whatever. So I think you’ll see first-degree, death-eligible charges in Utah. I think we’ll see federal charges. It’s going to depend a little bit on whether he crossed the state line, whether he used an interstate means, what the status of the firearm was. Was he legally or illegally in possession of it? Was it doctored? Was it altered? Was the serial number rubbed off? I think they will probably find a federal hook as well. I think this is the rare case where we will see a doubling up of charges. The feds are not really — there’s policy at DOJ saying you’re not supposed to add on a charge if the state has it — but in a case like this, I think they should and will.
There’s been some fairly deranged commentary coming out in the wake of this, both on cable news and social media. Matthew Dowd got fired by MSNBC.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I saw what he said, but I didn’t realize he’d been fired.
He suggested that Kirk’s own rhetoric was to blame for his killing. Every time I open up Twitter, it’s major, major figures — including Elon Musk, who said “the left is the party of murder” — posting the most incendiary stuff imaginable. Are you alarmed by the climate right now?
Can I offer a word of advice to people in public life and media figures?
Shut up?
Yes. If you knew the person and want to post a remembrance, please do. If you are a public office holder of some relevance, fine — you’ve been elected to represent us. Everyone else can shut up, right? If you’re a legal analyst on CNN, we don’t need your opinion on the reasons. There’ll come a time when we will know and be analyzing court cases. Look, I got off of Twitter, or X, for the most part, except for just posting clips, a couple of years ago. It was hard to withdraw. I was once on it, and again, I can’t say who, but one of our anchors saw me on it and said, “I told you, Twitter will only make you stupid and stressed.” And he was right.
Yeah. But when you stop using it, you get the shakes.
But then it goes away, and it’s beautiful. I will say, I was looking at it yesterday, because when something breaks like this, I want to know. But then it was just the disgusting videos.
I think it’s safe to say political violence is escalating.
Yes.
Just this summer, we had the killing of two employees of Israel’s D.C. Embassy, the June shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their families. In August, there was a shooting outside the Centers for Disease Control. How do you think we got here? And do you think we’re at a time of fairly unprecedented political violence in America?
I don’t know how we got here, and yes, I do think this is — I can’t — I guess you could point to the ’60s, with the various assassinations of RFK, JFK, Martin Luther King. I don’t know if it’s a reflection of our polarized politics or polarized media. I wish I had good answers, but it’s undeniable that we are in — this is more than a blip. This is more than a fluke. There are others. You can go back farther than what you said, and there’s more and more of these. And the way the Charlie Kirk killing happened is just so brazen and so out in the open and so gruesome that it’s — I don’t know. I don’t know. There was a poll question today. Michael Smerconish has his daily poll, and it was like, “Will this bring down the temperature in America?” And I thought, well, that’s going to be a no. And 95% said no, unfortunately. I wish it were not the case.
I don’t think we have the right elected leaders for that. It feels like the 1960s plus social media, which is a cocktail. I saw one prominent MAGA account saying, “It’s not enough to want the National Guard in Democrat cities anymore — I want the Air Force.” Do you fear that this horrible tragedy might be used as a pretext for government overreach?
I think that’s a valid concern. I do think, though — again, I’m a believer, and I don’t think they’re perfect, but I do believe in our guardrails. The courts have pushed back and rejected some of Donald Trump’s emergency declarations, the way he has deployed the Guard. I’ve written about this and spoken about it. I think his ability to deploy the military is going to be severely limited from here on out. D.C. is a different scenario. He’s not gonna have a national emergency like he had with the riots that he was able to point to in California. So I do have some faith that he will be restricted in that, but I don’t doubt that it might motivate him to try to do stuff.
He hinted at that in his speech right after. You’ve made the argument, which I find very interesting, that D.C. and California are very different cases from his attempts — or at least the threat — to send the National Guard into Chicago or New York. Lay out that argument for us. Why is that different?
Yeah, so legally, when we’re talking about the National Guard, the president controls D.C. So that’s easy. That’s a no-brainer. California — he used this emergency law that says, if necessary, to enforce federal law. And he was allowed to deploy them by the Court of Appeals, which basically said, “Look, there is evidence in the record that these protests have at times gotten violent toward federal agents and federal property. Therefore, he’s OK under that law.” But then what do you do when there is no protest? Chicago doesn’t have protests going on right now. New York doesn’t have protests. I think what Trump’s going to say is, “Well, there’s crime, and the crime’s really bad and it’s scary and dangerous.” And I’m sort of sympathetic to that. I don’t have a problem with surging law enforcement resources, but I don’t think that’s going to be enough to trigger the emergency statute that he’s used so far in California.
Right, so he’s not going to be able to use this to send the National Guard into New York.
No, I don’t think so.
You write a column for New York Magazine and for Café Media. I read every one. I feel like a lot of it these days falls into a particular genre, which is: Can Trump do this legally?
Yes, that’s a good catch-all.
What differences do you see between Trump’s first term — in the sense of what he was doing and how it rubbed up against the limits of the law — and how he’s operating now?
So let me answer that with an analogy from the book, actually. In the first term, Mueller was appointed — on Trump’s watch, right? His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused; Rod Rosenstein takes over, appoints Mueller, and Trump spends the next two years undermining, attacking, demeaning Robert Mueller and his team. But Mueller is permitted to finish his work and put out his 300-page report. Now, in Trump 2.0 — forget it, right? Can you imagine if someone at DOJ even mentioned the word ‘special counsel’? They’d be immediately fired by Pam Bondi, and Trump would be all for it. And then they would probably launch some sort of retribution at that person. And again, it goes to the title of the book: “When you come at the King, you better not miss.” And even — I’ve been critical of Letitia James. I’ve written about how I think her lawsuit was bogus. Most of it just got thrown out the other day. But the way he’s now digging through mortgage files, having Bill Pulte — this guy — digging through mortgage files looking for contradictory claims, I think, is completely inappropriate, dangerous, and it needs to be called out. That’s an example of what’s changed from one to two. In part two now, he cares much less than he ever did about guardrails or norms.
There’s also a key difference where, in the first term, members of the cabinet were all fairly traditional establishment Republicans, and now they’re all loyalists.
Look at Bill Barr on the one hand — I criticized him in my first book, but he did have his line he wouldn’t cross. He would not go along with the election fraud claims, although he did earlier. We forget that. But at the end, he would not go along with the election fraud claims. And there were times when Trump said, “I want John Kerry indicted. I want Obama.” And Barr would just ignore that — like a parent with a toddler, like, all right, just cry yourself out.
Speaking of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, what did you make of the whole handling of the so-called Epstein Files?
Disastrous. They should have done one of two things. One is the actual correct answer from Pam Bondi: “We don’t turn this stuff over. It’s a closed case. If we’re going to turn over the Epstein files, then we can turn over the Jack Smith–Trump files, the Joe Biden–Herr files, go back in time. DOJ policy says we don’t do that.” And would you and I in the media have said this is outrageous? Of course. But she could have said, “Sorry, folks, it’s the rules. If you subpoena it, maybe we’ll fight you out in court.” Option one would have just been: sorry, fall back on the rule, shut it down. Option two would have been actual disclosure: “We’ve put up a link, here it is, you can page through, we took out victims’ names.” Instead, it’s this mishmash of promising the client — she was asked about the client list — and then she said, “Well, I have documents on my desk, stuff’s coming tomorrow, phase one, phase two.” But then the FBI memo says, “Nothing more is coming out, there’s nothing more to see here.” And now everything’s slowly dripping out. It couldn’t have been more mishandled.
You have been following Trump’s case against The Wall Street Journal quite closely. He sued The Journal because they reported on the letter that he had sent Jeffrey Epstein for his birthday. The letter has been released now — we’ve all seen the drawing and, I guess, you could call it, a poem. How do you see that case progressing? Does it stand a chance?
No, I don’t think it does. I never thought it did from the start, and especially now that we know the letter is real. Not only have we seen the letter, but we know it came from Epstein’s estate, which is where it would be if it were given to Jeffrey Epstein.
I’ve still seen people doubt the signature, and say, “Oh, the tail is different,” or whatever.
The thing is, first of all, I know that they’re all going to get out their magnifying glasses and become handwriting experts now. But here’s the thing: if the letter did not exist, that would be a problem for The Wall Street Journal, right? Because they definitely did say it exists. But now it exists — we know that. And that leaves Trump to pick at the margins: “It’s not my signature,” or, “It’s someone else’s.” If you look at what The Wall Street Journal reported, this is an example where media lawyers — and I’m a lawyer in media, but not a media lawyer — can perform an important function. It was obvious when you read that piece that it had been lawyered to within an inch of its life. What they say is something like, “The circumstances around the creation of the letter remain uncertain.” They don’t say that’s his signature. They don’t say he wrote the poem or the script or whatever. So I think they’re covered, because remember, Trump has to show, one, that it’s false, and two, that they knew it was false or were reckless. I just don’t think there’s enough. But here’s the thing you should be rooting for as the editor-in-chief of Mediaite: if it survives a motion to dismiss — and I think that’s iffy — if it does, we’re gonna get into depositions of The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch probably, Donald Trump for sure under oath. I’ve said before, was he thinking about this? He’s not only going to get deposed under oath — it’s going to be about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.
Cable news analysts are often criticized for being reflexively partisan. Do you think there is a tendency among analysts — legal or otherwise — to play to a certain audience and let that cloud their judgment?
There certainly are some people who — that’s their job, right? Scott Jennings, Van Jones. That’s their job. They’re there to voice what conservatives are saying, what liberals are saying. The way I have always approached this job from the day I started — and by the way, every boss at CNN, from Jeff Zucker on through Mark Thompson and other executives I admire, has always said — “You can only call it straight.” First of all, if you don’t — if you decide that everything Trump does is legal and fine, or everything bad done to him is fine because it’s against him — you’re going to do a crappy job as an analyst because you can’t call it straight. There’s no possible way that everything Trump has ever done is all good or all bad. Sometimes he’s right, often he’s wrong. But if you’re not willing to call that out, you are doing a lousy job as an analyst. And more importantly, you’re undeserving two important groups. First of all, the people you’re covering. We have an obligation to go hard at people in power, but you also have an obligation to be fair to them. And the other group, even more important, is your audience. If you are telling your audience constantly, “He’s going to get thrown off the ballot under the 14th Amendment,” that was ridiculous.
“The walls are closing in.”
How many times have people said, “He’s going to prison. He’s gonna die in prison. Nail in the coffin”? And if you are constantly beating that drum, first of all, I don’t view it as my job to make bold predictions like that. Second of all, your audience — how do you think your audience ends up so disappointed, so misled when it doesn’t come to be? My second book — I wrote it right before the Trump indictments landed, so this is 2022-ish. We knew they were coming; we didn’t know exactly what they’d be. But if I had to boil down the theme of part of that second book, it’s: “You’re being told, everybody, that Trump’s out of here, he’s going to die in prison. It’s going to be much harder than you think, and here is why.” So I take that responsibility really seriously. The people I’ve looked up to in this world have always said, “You’re not going to be any good at this if you don’t call it straight.” And that’s what I’ve done.
I think the last time you were on this show, I asked you whether Trump would ever end up going to prison.
I hope I said no.
Your answer was that it just wasn’t going to happen, which at the time was somewhat controversial.
A quick story on that. I went on The View — not really. So Alyssa Farah Griffin, who’s my friend on The View, picked that last book as one of her recommended books or whatever. She said, “You want to come to the show?” I said, “Yeah.” They sit me right in front. And when they get to the first break, the guy comes over and mics me up. Now, I know what’s happening here — they’re going to want me to say something. And at one point — there’s a clip of this somewhere — Joy Behar turns to me and goes, “Elie, Elie, is he going to jail or not?” Now, I’m on The View, OK, so there’s 300 people behind me. You generally know what their political persuasion is, right? And you can find the clip, but I said something like, “Definitely not before the election, Joy, and probably not ever.” And there was just this — I don’t know if it was an audible groan behind me, but I could feel it in the room. I knew what they wanted to hear, but I’m not gonna pander. I’m just not gonna tell people what they want to hear, just because they want to hear it.
I know you sometimes get criticism — particularly from people who hate Trump — for saying that he has legal grounds to do something. What has gotten you the most hate?
That’s a great one. Yes. I think the 14th Amendment thing really did. A lot of people were sure this was the effort to throw him off the ballot because he engaged in insurrection or whatever. I’ve never said anything other than that what he did on and around January 6th was horrible. He should have been prosecuted for it. But there were reasons that was never going to work. And I was alone on an island, in saying that, and getting yelled at.
People can’t separate those two.
Exactly. There are procedural reasons, there are legal reasons. If you understand the way the law works, it was never going to work. And of course, how did that come out? Nine–zero Supreme Court. Even the liberals said it doesn’t work. Also, I was critical of Jack Smith — not across the board, but on some things. And some of that’s in this book. I thought Jack Smith went over the top, overboard with some of the things he did. And there was this code in certain portions of the media that whatever Jack Smith does is automatically gold. I was raised as a prosecutor. I was raised to do things a certain way, not another way. And so that got me blowback — but it’s fine. I can take it. I’m thick-skinned.
