The legal expert helps us sort through the complexities.

Jeffrey Toobin is a lawyer, author, and the chief legal analyst at CNN, after a long run at The New Yorker. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call, and two others — The Run of His Life and A Vast Conspiracy — were adapted for television as seasons of “American Crime Story” on the FX channel.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — why the Bragg conviction helped Trump, and the origins of lawfare with Bill Clinton — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in NYC as the only child of two journos; his mom was a pioneering TV correspondent; his dad was one of founding fathers of public television; Jeffrey at the Harvard Crimson and then Harvard Law; how Marty Peretz mentored us both; the conservative backlash after Nixon and rebuilding executive power; Ford’s pardon; Jeffrey on the team investigating Oliver North; the Boland Amendment and the limits of law; Cheney’s role during Iran-Contra; how Congress hasn’t declared war since WWII; Whitewater to Lewinsky; Ken Starr and zealous prosecutors; Trump extorting Ukraine over the Bidens; Russiagate; the Mueller Report and Barr’s dithering; how such investigations can help presidents; the Bragg indictment; the media environment of Trump compared to Nixon; Fox News coverage of Covid; Trump’s pardons; hiding Biden; the immunity case; SEAL Team Six and other hypotheticals; Jack Smith and fake electors; the documents case; the check of impeachment; the state of SCOTUS and ethics scandals; Thomas and the appearance of corruption; the wives of Thomas and Alito; the Chevron doctrine; reproductive rights; the Southern border and asylum; Jeffrey’s main worry about a second Trump term; and his upcoming book on presidential pardons.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Eric Kaufmann on liberal extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones’ PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a fan of last week’s episode with Anne Applebaum:

I loved your freewheeling interview with Applebaum. Just like the last time she was on, each of you gave as good as you got.

I tend to agree more with her, because I fear that sometimes you come off as what Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “blame America first crowd” — not that we haven’t committed our sins. But if we didn’t exist, Putin would still be evil and want to recreate the Warsaw Pact, and the mullahs in Iran would still be fanatics despite our CIA involvement. It’s complicated.

Another on foreign policy:

I despise Putin, my sympathies are totally with the Ukrainians, and I get angry when people like Rod Dreher and Tucker Carlson imply that the Russians were forced by the West to invade Ukraine. But, so what! You hit the nail on the head with the Obama quote — that Ukraine is never going to mean as much to us as it does to them (the Russians). You also made another very good point that the Russians can’t even conquer Ukraine, but we’re supposed to fear they will march West? How they going to do that?!

Another took issue with several things from Anne:

You raised the immigration issue, and Applebaum completely dismissed it:

Hungary doesn’t have a migrant crisis. … Because it’s a useful symbol [to] create fear and anxiety. … This is the oldest political trick in the book, and the creation of an imaginary culture war is one of the ways in which you build support among a more fearful part of the population.

WTF? Are Hungarians not allowed to see what is happening in every other European country that has allowed mass migration and see the problems it has caused and proactively decide to prevent this?! Are they not allowed to be concerned until Budapest has the banlieues of Paris, the car bombing gangs of Sweden, and the grooming gangs of England?! And in Germany, it has been recently reported that almost half of people receiving social payments are migrants.

Applebaum followed that up with an even bigger gobsmacker about Biden’s cognitive decline: “This is another road I don’t want to go down, but I know people who met with Joe Biden a couple months ago, and he was fine” (meaning I just want to make my statement but will not allow you a rebuttal). And then:

I’ve met [Harris] a few times, mostly in the context of conversations about foreign policy and about Russia and Ukraine and other things. And she’s an intelligent conversationalist. … I was impressed with her. And these are way off-the-record conversations… And I was always more impressed with how she was off the record. And then I would sometimes see her in public. And I thought, she seems very stiff and nervous. … You’d like her if you met her in real life.

Translation of both of these excerpts: “You plebes who aren’t insiders just don’t understand, but trust me — the connected insider — instead of your lying eyes.”

Another adds:

I think for the next few months, you’re going to have to push people like Anne Applebaum to be more open to criticizing the Biden-Harris record. She’s a smart person with important things to say, but she clearly dared not criticize the current administration, lest she be seen as helping Trump.

And another:

She says, unironically, that autocrats rig court systems with exotic new lawfare to attack their political enemies to seize or cling to power. I wonder what that makes Alvin Bragg and Merrick Garland.

This Dishhead listened to the episode with his teenage son:

The notion that Trump supporters want a dictator is beyond ridiculous. They are among the most individualistic and freedom-loving people in America. They are the Jacksonians, the Scots-Irish heart of this country. They are ornery as hell, and if Trump tried to force them into anything, he’d have another thing coming.  Just look how he tried to get them to take “his” vaccine. That didn’t work out so well, did it?

The truth is, they view people like Anne as the ones who are taking away their rights and freedoms through their absolute dominance of the media and all cultural institutions. Now maybe Trump will deliver them from that and maybe he won’t, but that is what they are seeking — not a dictator, but someone who will break the hideous grip that the liberal elite has on the culture.

My son is 18 years old and was also listening to the episode. He is highly engaged in national and world affairs, and he also thought Anne was way off track. He’s already announced to his mother (much to her chagrin) that he will be casting his first vote for Trump. And get this: he’s going to Oberlin College this fall. I can assure you he’s not looking for a dictator. He’s looking to say “eff you” to a system that has no use for upper-class, normal white boys like him. The elites hate him and his friends.

But I’m glad you have a diversity of views on the Dishcast. It really is the best. I look forward to listening to it every week.

I can’t back Trump, but I do think your son is onto something. On a few other episodes:

Lionel Shriver — I love her! I wished you’d talked more about her novel, Mania. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.

On the Stephen Fry pod, I was resistant! He’s irritated me at times. But I loved it when you two started doing Larkin! I shouldn’t admit this, but “Aubade” could be my autobiography. I think one or both of you misinterpret “Church Going.” Larkin doesn’t wish he had faith. I don’t think that’s relevant to him. Fry talked about how he liked everything about Anglicanism except for the detail about God (and I always suspect that for Anglicans, God is a somewhat troubling detail). I’m probably just guessing, but I don’t think that’s Larkin. Larkin didn’t wish he had faith. He was elegiac about the past in which there was faith. I think you’ll see this sensibility in “An Arundel Tomb.”

Agreed. Another on Shriver:

She seems to think that “liberals” are mistaken in believing that everyone can be equal, but I think she is mistaken in thinking that is what they believe — at least those I know. Liberals do think that 1) expectations play a role in what people achieve; and 2) given the right circumstances, many people find they can achieve more than was expected. Low expectations do lead to low outcomes (and yes, there is research to support that statement). Does that mean everyone can do anything they wish? No. Neither you nor I will ever be a concert pianist, but let us not condemn everyone to the garbage heap based on false expectations.

Thanks as always for your provocative discussions.

Here’s a guest rec:

Musa Al Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook, has written for Compact, American Affairs, and The Liberal Patriot. His forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital to analyze the ascendant symbolic capitalists — those who work in law, technology, nonprofits, academia, journalism and media, finance, civil service and the like — and how the ideology known as “wokeness” exists to entrench economic inequality and preserve the hegemony of this class. I have preordered the book, and it should be a timely read for an election in which class (education), not race, has become the preeminent dividing line in our politics.

Here’s a guest rec with pecs:

I have a recommendation that may sound bonkers, but hear me out: Alan Ritchson, the actor whose career has taken off thanks to playing Jack Reacher on Reacher.

(Jamie McCarthy/WireImage)

The fact that he’s really, really, really ridiculously good-looking is the least interesting thing about him. I’d love to hear a conversation between you and him for a few reasons. First, he’s bipolar and speaks openly about it. Second, he started taking testosterone supplements after his body broke down from working out for Reacher, and he speaks openly about that too. Third, he’s a devout evangelical Christian who speaks openly about his faith — and about his disgust with Christian nationalism and the hijacking of Christianity by many Trump supporters. Fourth, he posted what read to me as a thoughtful, sane critique of bad cops, thereby angering certain denizens of the Very Online Right.

Thus, he could speak to a number of major Dishcast themes: mental illness, masculinity, and Christianity. To me, he manages to come across as a guy’s guy whose comments on political matters sound like the result of actual reflection, rather than reflexively following a progressive script, which is how most celebrities come across. He’s articulate, and the way he’s navigating this cultural and political moment is fascinating.

And if you do snag him, you should supplement the audio with video.

Haha. But seriously, we’re trying to keep the podcast fresh and this is a great out-of-the-box recommendation.

Next up, the dissents over my views on Harris continue from the main page. A reader writes:

I have no particular attachment to Kamala Harris, and share some of your concerns, but your latest column reads more like a Fox News hit piece than a real assessment. The main problem is that you seem to be judging Harris almost exclusively on the basis of statements she made in 2020, at the height of the Democrats’ woke mania because of George Floyd. Do you not remember that she was destroyed in the primary because she was a prosecutor, and was to the right of almost everyone else in the primary, except for Biden and Sanders? That’s why she lost: she wasn’t woke enough.

So as VP, of course she pivoted to shore up her appeal to the base, like any good politician would. It’s terribly unfortunate that she had to tack hard left precisely as the country was moving back to the center and rejecting wokism, but that doesn’t mean she’s the “wokest candidate,” as you say. It just means she’s a politician.

My criticism also extended to her management and campaigning skills in the past. And look: I don’t think it’s fair to compare my attempt to review the evidence of her record with a Fox News hit-piece. It’s important to understand her vulnerabilities as well as he core ideas, if she has any. This next reader thinks she is off to a good, non-woke start:

I agree with your criticisms of Harris, at least some of them. We need to have stronger border enforcement, we can’t have riots in cities, and racism is real but DEI excesses are also bad. And it’s troubling that she has a history of being a bad boss. I can only hope that she has learned from her mistakes.

But I take heart from her campaign speech in Wisconsin: she said not a word about DEI, nothing about “vote for me to show that you’re not sexist/racist, because I’m a woman of color,” and not much about “Trump is a threat to democracy.” It was all, “I have experience dealing with sleazy crooks and sex offenders like Trump, and I want to help middle-class Americans and protect health care and a woman’s right to choose.” Sounds like a popular message!

You also say, “She is not a serious person.” Bro, have you *seen* the other party’s candidate?

If I could wave a magic wand and replace Kamala with another presidential candidate without hurting anyone’s feelings, I would. There are lots of other candidates, and I like Secretary Pete and would love to see him in the White House. But, in game theory parlance, Kamala is our Schelling Point — the obvious one to coalesce around. I’m with her.

Fair enough. But I’m not sure emphasizing her ability to tackle the criminal Trump as a prosecutor is such a winning line. It appeals to her base, but alienates those who believe, as I do, that the Bragg prosecution was nakedly political. Lawfare has patently failed to counter Trump’s appeal, and has sometimes helped him.

Another reader dissents over an omission:

How can you do an entire column on Harris and her career without mentioning how she got her political start — which even Wikipedia acknowledges? “In 1994, California Assembly speaker Willie Brown (with whom Harris was in a relationship) appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later the California Medical Assistance Commission.”

I honestly don’t give a damn about the Willie Brown connection. And if you’re trying to prevent political favoritism, good luck. Another clarifies part of her record:

Not to dispute your basic take on Kamala, but I must contest your assertion that she “imprisoned cannabis users” — a canard spread by criminal justice warriors like Tulsi Gabbard. As an activist in California’s cannabis movement, I had the opportunity to observe Kamala close at hand from her early years as a prosecutor in San Francisco, and never knew her to prosecute marijuana users.

To begin with, let it be noted that no one has been imprisoned for using marijuana in our state since 1976 — only for cultivating or trying to sell it. That said, there were indeed numerous felony arrests and convictions for marijuana trafficking during her tenure as AG; however, they were none of her doing. The California AG doesn’t prosecute marijuana crimes; locally-elected county DAs do.

Now, Kamala did serve as DA of San Francisco before becoming AG. There she extended the city’s traditional tolerance toward marijuana, protecting the city’s medical marijuana clubs from prosecution even though their legality was highly suspect under state law and the federal government was hot to bust them.   Admittedly, when Harris was AG she did oppose a 2010 ballot measure to legalize marijuana; however, any responsible AG would have done so, since the measure was poorly written in a manner that would have seriously muddled state law enforcement.

This next reader is just happy to get on with it:

Harris was my least favorite candidate from among the early seekers of the Democratic nomination, but I’m elated that the decision is over and done. Now we don’t have to see a bunch of Democrats airing internal discord at some kind of circus of a convention and wind up alienating a whole segment of the base by throwing the black woman overboard.

Another turns to the current president:

In your latest column, I would have hoped for a bit of appreciation and praise for President Biden, who, however slowly and grudgingly, did the right thing — the thing that very, very few people would have done in his place: relinquish power. Could you not have spared a single sentence on “Yay Joe Biden, thank you for doing the right and selfless and patriotic thing”?

But if you believe that Biden is a selfish, stubborn man who quit only because Nancy Pelosi’s Mafia friends deposited a severed horse’s head in his bed, you still could have uttered some praise for the Democratic Party for having self-corrected and for not being a personality cult, unlike some other political parties I could mention. And speculating that Biden endorsed Kamala as an FU to the Dem officials who pushed him out, because he expects her to lose, is beneath you. Can you not accept that Biden is a flawed but decent man who genuinely cares about our country?

File this whole episode under “the Democrats have to be the adults in the room while getting zero credit for it.”

It’s hard to congratulate someone for something he didn’t do. If he’d withdrawn even a week before he did, maybe. But I’m perfectly happy to congratulate him when appropriate. His work in securing the release of so many hostages yesterday was inspiring.

Another reader writes, “Congratulations on the spot-on piece regarding VP Harris”:

One point that’s being underplayed is the effect her candidacy may have on down-ballot races. Dave McCormick has a new ad up against Senator Casey in Pennsylvania that I think will be devastating. It starts with 10 seconds of Casey supporting Harris for president, followed by almost 90 seconds of clips of Harris’ most woke/extreme positions:

I would expect similar efforts by other Republican challengers to be up shortly and be very effective, especially in the Rust Belt. Such an ad puts Harris in a lose-lose position: if she doubles down on those positions, she will show just how radical she is; but if she tried to run them back (as she is already trying to do with fracking), she looks inauthentic to independents and risks riling her base. I truly think that after the VP choice/convention bounce, her numbers will start to sag, and if she starts panicking at that time (which is her usual default), the doom loop will open up.

We’ll see, won’t we? So far, she’s been in a virtual bunker. Speaking of ads, another reader:

Wesley Yang just flagged a 2016 Trump ad, writing, “I didn’t see this back then. It’s a striking speech by [Michael] Moore, worth watching in the present.” The X user that Yang retweeted wrote, “This was the best Trump ad of the 2016 election, and Michael Moore did this completely by accident, until their staff picked it up. This is the energy that carried Trump, and it’s up to him to carry it again, or neglect it at his own peril.” Like Yang, it’s the first time I’ve seen it, and it’s quite stirring:

The fuller context of Moore’s speech is here.

Another reader flags a NYT piece:

They published an article this week about the growing number of Americans who do not want children, featuring a 25-year-old woman who is having trouble finding a doctor to sterilize her. It brought to mind a fact you have written about, concerning medical care administered to trans children that will result in permanent sterility. Stating the obvious, it seems absurd for physicians to refuse to sterilize a 25-year-old woman, but not to flinch from effectively doing the same to children. But of course, the NYT writer did not point that out …

Another reader on the media:

You wrote that the news media and social media swinging support toward Harris in the wake of Biden’s endorsement reflected “amnesia.” Certainly amnesia towards Harris’ pre-2020 career is not the only example of media amnesia. For instance, the fact that the media successfully leveraged Biden into quitting the race because he is visibly aging begs the question of why no one in the media or the Republican Party OR the Democratic Party is seriously questioning the state of Donald Trump, who is also visibly aging and increasingly incoherent.

Indeed, the age contrast between Harris and Trump is a real problem for Republicans. Democrats could switch horses because they had other options. Members of the Party of Trump, though, cannot switch because they have no other options, because no one else in the party would be seen as credible (with the possible exception of Nikki Haley, but not enough people voted for her).

Here’s a dissent over a recent Dish, “Regime Change In America?”:

Andrew, you have an unfortunate habit of overreacting to events. I remember your comments after the first Obama-Romney debate in 2012. You thought all was lost. You were wrong.

You also fall into the trap of thinking Trump is some historical, world-changing figure. As we can see from his acceptance speech, he is not. He rambles and goes on and on. The speech indicates he’s deteriorating. He is no unifier; he just wants vengeance.

What most disgusts me about your Dissents of the Week is your casual dismissal of deporting 11 million illegal immigrants. I have many friends in that community. All work hard, save, and strive to be Americans. One has two daughters in college, with a third on the way. I guarantee Trump’s deportation plans will disrupt millions of lives, lead to the arrest and detention of thousands of US citizens, and cause violent disruption of the economy. (When police come to arrest a houseful of immigrants, how will they tell who is legal and who is not? Trump has no explanation.) It may be that millions of Americans distrust or hate immigration (legal or illegal), but that is no justification for the greatest crime since the Japanese internment. Surely you see this.

Please. Japanese Americans had done nothing wrong, let alone illegal. People who have broken the law and jumped the immigration line by overwhelming a largely vulnerable border should face real consequences — or the immigration laws are meaningless. Of course what Trump is proposing is nightmarish in its authoritarian potential. That’s why I’d prefer passing a mandatory federal e-Verify bill that would simply require employers to prove their workers are legal, and provide resources to enforce it.

Another reader:

Not exactly a dissent, but I feel the exact same way about Kamala Harris as I did Mitt Romney in 2012. Are we getting the man who ran for governor of Massachusetts, or the flip flopper who changed every position to be acceptable to the GOP in 2012? I feel like today I have a good grasp of the true Romney, and I have changed my views of him considerably. Either Harris has a true center, a core, and actual convictions, or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, she’ll be toast, because at least people know what they are getting with Trump. But we’ll see. I’m prepared to like her, but she has address who she is. Time will tell.

This reader is also hopeful:

Your latest column was a classic “turd in the punch bowl”:

I disagree heartily on many of your points, but it’s important to not get too blinkered by euphoria of an energized party and underestimate the task before us of persuading the persuadable. My hunch is that undecideds have little notion of Kamala’s purported baggage and that she can run convincingly as the straight shooting prosecutor … that is, if some of the more petulant elements of the party will let her.

One more reader on Harris:

I agree with everything you wrote. She is *not* a serious person. But one other point: she was directly complicit in the coverup of Biden’s health for over two years. As a direct result, we were denied the right to a primary. Whether or not this was technically illegal, it was morally dubious and shady as fuck-all. How can anyone ever trust anything that falls out of her mouth? (I’ll just be over here in the corner, voting for Chase Oliver.)

Also, I wanted to bring this to your attention. It’s a Substack piece describing a hypothetical system that incorporates a method of selection called sortition — a sorting of lots, replacing elections with lottery selections from qualified pools. As ideas go, it is a hope and a dream and a prayer for a saner, more civil world.

Thank you for everything on the Dish! You are a voice of sanity and reason in a sea of disinfo and chaos. Even when we disagree, I always appreciate your perspective. Hope you are having a lovely summer, despite all of the calamity and chaos. Interesting times, indeed.

One more email for the week:

I’m glad you have Truman as a source of unconditional love and companionship as you grieve for your mother and your friend. Here’s a recent VFYW with our rescue, Speck, who I think is about the same age (and similar mix — border collie, cattle dog, McNab) as Truman; along with his 8-year-old Yellow Lab brother, Bodhi:

Truman, meanwhile, is beginning to figure out the sea:

Thanks for all the dissents and other emails, and the in-tray is always open: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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