Tristan Snell: Trump’s Legal Strategy

Tristan Snell:

There's this whole world that they won't let you in on. “I'm going to tell you what it is. And I'm here to share all of that with you if you'll just share with me your credit card number.” And that with the Trump brand around it, people couldn't resist. They did very well for a while.

So, this had all happened. And we needed to then go talk to some of the people that had really attended these things and find out like what did they think?

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guest today is Tristan Snell, who as Assistant Attorney General of New York, prosecuted Trump University, the Trump organization, and Donald Trump himself.

His new book, Taking Down Trump talks about that case and lays out the 12 rules for prosecuting Donald Trump.

Tristan, welcome to the show.

Tristan Snell:

Thanks for having me.

Ken Harbaugh:

You recently referred to the behavior of Trump's legal team as, and I'm quoting, “Total clown car insanity.” I want to start there. Why are Donald Trump's lawyers so bad?

Tristan Snell:

A lot of it is because, here's a couple of things. One, Donald Trump loves to do things on the cheap.

Number two, is that he has a really bad reputation now, for not paying his lawyers, not paying his vendors generally, although that can be used against him. So, there's a lot of lawyers out there that won’t work for him.

And I think the pool of lawyers that he is willing to hire and that are willing to work with him just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And that's not exactly getting us what he would refer to as the best people.

So, we're now, seeing how that plays out with, “Oh, we forgot to check off the box on the form that would've gotten us a jury, then we get stuck with a bench trial. The judge who already was off at us because we didn't comply with the subpoenas in the case earlier. Fun.”

And also, that he probably always wants a jury because he wants to be able to peel off and manipulate one or two of the people on the jury. Just lots of fun things like that.

So, there's a story I tell in the book about how when Fred Trump was building these apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens when Trump was a kid. And that was really where the Trump fortune came from. Not from Trump.

But Fred's thing was, he would make the lobby really fancy, make the lobby really cool, really glitzy, it would look amazing. But then the units inside the complex would be like very bare bones, no expense was made. They'd be very kept up on a shoestring budget.

And that's pretty much like the Trump MO in a nutshell, is that it has this sort of veneer of looking maybe good on the outside, although increasingly that's not true for Trump. But for long days, “Oh, it's a fancy building. Oh, it's got big gold letters out front.”

And then when you actually dig in, it's like, no, he's being's cutting every single quarter. He is pinching every single penny. And Fred did it to make money. Donald does it because he is broke and he's not making money, but the net result is not very good for him, for his legal cases.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think that Trump apartments are an apt metaphor for another reason, which is that so much of the Trump legal defense is pure showmanship, it's pure theater.

And it suggests that in some of these cases, he has given up on making the legal argument and is simply appealing to public opinion. And let's translate that, appealing to voters.

Tristan Snell:

Yeah. So, the key here is that he's no longer … there's one thing he's doing in these cases that is still theatrical, but has kind of a legal angle to it. And that is he's trying to provoke the judges into overreacting, making a mistake, creating an issue that can be used on appeal to maybe get a new trial.

That did not work with Judge Engoron in New York, in the New York AG civil fraud trial. They tried, they failed. Engoron got grumpy occasionally. But he never crossed the line over into something that I think is going to create a problem on appeal.

He's trying to do the same thing with Judge Kaplan in New York for the E. Jean Carroll case. He's getting nowhere there. He's going to try doing it with Judge Chutkan, and he is going to try doing it with all these judges.

I don't think it's going to work. These people are pros and they're not going to get goaded into making a mistake.

The rest of it though, yeah, it's pure just playing to the crowd. He is trying to see if he can get in the heads — some of it, he's trying to get into the heads of the other side. I don't think that's going to work either.

And the rest of it's just this like martyrdom act where he is like you're running around being like, “Oh, well, it's me. I'm in this courthouse. They're persecuting me. Here's my hat in my hand. Please give me some money.” Like it's pathetic is really what it is.

But this is how he's funding everything now, because I think that his cash, his liquidity is going to be a problem, I think it already is. That he's going to be living hand to mouth on the donations that he gets from the supporters that he has conned.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can we go back to his attempts to provoke the judges? Because I don't think most people who don't spend time in courtrooms appreciate how strange that is, how almost unprecedented it is from someone like Donald Trump supposedly wealthy businessman.

I mean, if you can point specifically to what he's doing in the E. Jean Carroll case, it's crazy for anyone who has seen the inside of a courtroom to hear what's coming from the defendant's bench.

Tristan Snell:

Yeah. They're basically seeing how much they can get away with really castigating the opposing counsel as well as the opposing party. They did the same thing with the AGs office case. They're going to do the same thing with a lot of these things.

But they're not really arguing facts, evidence, law. They're really arguing, “The other side's terrible. They're bias. It's a witch hunt. They're coming after me. You are coming after me.”

And then they're doing the same thing when he goes out to the courthouse steps or he goes out into the atrium inside the courthouse. Because half the time with these, I think he's not wanted to get too chilly. So, he is been doing his little pressors inside the courthouse rather than out in the courthouse steps per tradition.

The fact that they've let him turn the inside of those courthouses into bully pulpits, in my view, shouldn't be done.

That alone, you almost never see. They don't let you record like trust stuff and self-serving garbage inside the courthouse. That's a total breaching of decorum, and quiet, and respect for the court and all sorts of other things.

You do that crap outside the courthouse. That's usually how that works. 99% of the time when you see defense counsel railing and ranting and whatever, it's going to be outside the courthouse steps, but whatever.

Here it's the defendant himself a lot of the time. But yeah, this is highly unusual. Where do you find it? You do find it in criminal defense cases where they're just going no holds barred and they're just going to grab at every little thing they can to try to get an edge because they're going to lose if it's on the merits.

And the playbook for this comes from Roy Cohn who was Trump's lawyer back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and he represented a lot of — he worked for Joseph McCarthy and he worked for a lot of mob bosses back then.

And that's the playbook. The playbook is more akin to what we saw from like John Gotti back in the ‘80s and ‘90s than it is with what you would expect from a former president of the United States.

Ken Harbaugh:

Behind all these theatrics, though, there is an element of strategy in terms of his turning the system against itself. He knows he is doomed on the merits, but the system has some inherent protections for defendants that he is exploiting to like an infinite degree.

Can you talk about his ability to manipulate the legal system and its protections for defendants and just how he's been able to draw that out for literally decades to put off justice.

Tristan Snell:

And actually, I probably should write a piece about this, but it's akin to, it's almost like it's causing an allergic reaction. It's like an allergen or some other kind of thorn entering the body and then causing an overblown immune response of some kind. That's what it's akin to.

He is able to basically fake … and the people who really know like medicine and biochemistry could probably chime in in the comments and say exactly what I really need to say here that's more technically, scientifically correct.

But it's basically he's able to think like it's a real argument that the system needs to take seriously.

And then our due process kicks in. And that’s like the immune response. That's just like, “We need to process this argument, we need to do briefing, we need to do oral arguments.”

But he's able to kind of fake that. He comes up with a argument that then the system has to treat as real and he's able to use the system against itself.

The immunity issue right now, is a great example of that. That is an absolutely cockamamie legal theory that would pretty much just undo our entire system of law in this country. The whole notion that it's equal justice under law, that there's no privileges for certain classes of people.

It was basically having a system where it was truly based on your status. You had privileges and immunities that carried you above the law. That was the English system at the time of the revolution.

If you were nobility, you didn't have the same legal consequences facing you, and certainly you didn't if you were the monarch. That was a lot of what we were trying to get away from.

It's a cockamamie legal theory, but the system has to treat it like it treats all arguments and tries to treat all of them like, “Okay, I don't know what argument this is, I don't know where it's coming from, but I'm going to treat it fairly.”

And then all of a sudden, we have to go through all this rigmarole of like the DC circuit is probably working on like 150 page opinion to get rid of an argument that's complete and utter bullshit. And then SCOTUS is probably going to do the same.

So, he's using the due process against itself to generate diversions, distractions, and delays. I don't think it's going to succeed in delaying the DC J6 case very long, if at all.

But it's really annoying that all this work is having to be done just because he was like, “Boop, I'm going to throw this argument in here and see what happens.” He's just throwing a monkey wrench in there and then the whole system's just like, “Ah,” trying to like process his argument.

Ken Harbaugh:

Occasionally, those frivolous arguments backfire. There's the example, I believe of the defamation suit involving Hillary Clinton and the judge just handed it to him. Can you give us the backstory on that?

Tristan Snell:

That was next level. Yeah, so, for those who may not remember, the thing was there, Trump sued Hillary Clinton and James Comey and like a whole bunch of other people in this big giant mess of a defamation case or purported defamation case in federal court down in Florida.

And the judge ended up not just dismissing it, but actually dropping a sanctions award on them to fine Trump and Alina Habba for almost a million dollars for such a frivolous lawsuit that was clearly concocted to carry out a political vendetta, that were basically the judge's words.

So, yeah, these things can really, really backfire and it ties back in. It's another example of how Alina Habba has not exactly been ringing up the best track record on these cases.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think that is just more proof that his entire team is built to amplify the theatrical aspects of it. I don't want to pick too much on Alina Habba, but she said this herself, she would rather be attractive than competent as a lawyer, which is so on brand for Trump. It's all about the appearance and the showmanship.

Tristan Snell:

It's all about that. And here's the thing, that is not how our legal system functions. Anybody who has spent time in it knows this.

If you had to name one place in our society in which appearances don't really matter and attractiveness is kind of beside the point, go spend a day in court and then come back to me. It's not exactly a place that's flashy or attractive. It's not a photogenic kind of place. It's not supposed to be.

There's nothing about law done right and seriously, that is sexy. Nothing. It is dusty, it is paper cuts, it is carpal tunnel syndrome. It's losing your voice from practicing your argument too many times. It's a lot of coffee and sleepless nights. It's not sexy.

It can be cruel in the right light, especially in retrospect. Like I can talk about the Trump University case now and make it sound pretty awesome. At the time, it was just a lot of hard work.

And if you're going to court, no, there's nothing flashy or cool or whatever about that unless you're a really, really, really big government nerd. But that's the thing, it's a place where nerdiness, and hard work, and dust, and paper cuts reign supreme.

And that is not Donald Trump. And to quote one of my favorite movies, he's out of his element. He's not going to get very far. This is not working for him.

Ken Harbaugh:

It's not Donald Trump, and it's certainly not the team he is assembled around him. I want to talk about the Trump University case because it is so illustrative of how we need to approach Donald Trump and his crimes.

But I want to cut to this clip of Alina Habba first because those who aren't familiar with her representation of Trump are going to find it unbelievable here. She says, if she had to choose between looks and competence, she would choose looks.

Alina Habba [CLIP]:

Someone said to me, “Alina, would you rather be smart or pretty?” And I said “Oh easy. Pretty. You can fake being smart.” [Laughter]

Podcast Host [CLIP]:

I meet them all the time Alina.

Alina Habba [CLIP]:

I mean that’s the honest truth, and it’s gonna make me… you know I’m sure there will be some Washington Post article about it tomorrow- Daily Beast, my favorite. But listen, you’ve got to be honest: It doesn’t hurt to be good looking in this world.

Ken Harbaugh:

So, Tristan, let's move on. We've got the Trump University, one of the few standout examples of a successful prosecution of Donald Trump himself and his web of lies and co-conspirators. Give us the story of how you took down Trump U.

Tristan Snell:

So, I think one thing that's very important is there was not this like preconceived notion that we're going to go get Trump. It was part of a series of cases that we brought against for-profit education institutions where there had been credible accusations of fraudulent behavior, deceptions, misrepresentations, bait and switches, et cetera.

When I got to the AGs office, which was in October of 2011, these investigations were about eight months old. The Trump case was the one of the five of them that was nowhere.

And it was because Trump and his team had stonewalled us. They had not given us hardly any documents. And so, it made it hard to like get a grip on what had happened.

So, one of the things that we wanted to do, but we knew it would be a lot of hard work, was go start calling a bunch of the people that had attended Trump University and attended these seminars.

What were they? These were basically wealth creation, motivational speaker seminars in hotel ballrooms. These things happen all the time. The entire industry is problematic, to say the least.

There may be some things like that that are legit. I think there are some, but I think it's an area in which it's rife with fraud with a lot of upsells, and bait and switches.

The fundamental way that these things work is, “Hey, people aren't telling you the real secrets to making money, but we're going to give you those secrets. You just have to pay me another $10,000 and I'll tell you everything that your experts won't tell you.”

It's that whole thing. It's the like, “You'd be shocked to learn what the elites are hiding from you.”

Like that's part of why it ties into the right wing culture so much. Like they fumed together that like huckster conman culture in America and the far right politics have kind of fused together. And not kind of, they really have in the last like 15 years.

And that's something I'm probably going to write about more coming up, but.

Ken Harbaugh:

This is an insight I haven't heard before. When you talk about the far right culture, you're really talking about the conspiracy theory element and the idea that there is so much wealth out there that you're walled off from because-

Tristan Snell:

Yep. Yeah, there's this whole world that they won't let you in on. “And I'm going to tell you what it is. And I'm here to share all of that with you if you'll just share with me your credit card number.” And that with the Trump brand around it, people couldn't resist. They did very well for a while.

So, this had all happened. We needed to then go talk to some of the people that had really attended these things and find out like what did they think? Did they think they'd been ripped off? We had like five consumer complaints. We needed more to run on.

So, I get handed this case on my second day at the office. I'm still kind of a newbie. I'm like, “I don't know what I'm doing.” I'd come off of working for a federal judge for a year, which is a great job and a lot of fun. And I felt very comfortable there and knew what I was doing.

I come here and I'm like, “I don't know.” They hand me this case. I lock myself in my office basically for six weeks and just do nothing but call people. And then I just get like tears, I get rage, I get ranting, I get shame, and embarrassment.

And all I had to do was say who I was, what I was calling about, and could you please tell me what happened? What was your experience? That's it. I didn't need to say anything else. No leading questions. No Like, “Are you sure you weren't ripped off?” Like I didn't have to leading the witness. I didn't have to do any of that.

And I didn't need to ask a lot of follow up questions except like I was checking names, and dates, and places, and details. Just to make sure I had my chronology right.

I just really had to ask them what happened. And all of this came pouring out of these people. They had been ripped off. They'd been scammed. The whole thing was a bait and switch.

They lost their life savings, they lost their retirement money. They'd lost their homes in some cases. They'd gone into horrible credit card debt.

A bunch of these people had spent anywhere from 10 to $35,000 each on Trump University. They had spent what you would spend on a real university except they got bupkis.

And so, we had to first start there, like start with the victims and a much deeper dive into what they had done.

And why me? I don't know. I think it's because I was the new guy. It was just like, “Well, this is going to be a really annoying, laborious task. Oh, this new guy is here. Let's go give it to him.” I really think that's what happened.

So, I think it was probably me drawing the short straw, but I guess it goes to show that sometimes the short straw works out in the end because that was just a lucky break. Like why did I get to work on that case? I think it was just dumb luck. I was in the right place at the right time.

I have a like really annoyingly stubborn, obsessive streak in me. So, once I got my teeth into this case, I just did not let go for years. I just wouldn't stop. And that probably served me pretty well.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you describe the victims? Because these weren't fellow bankers. There was a specific target set that Trump and the people around him identified as the most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

Tristan Snell:

Yes, we actually found this in their documents in the case. They were specifically purposely targeting folks who were between I think it was like 45 and 70 years old and who were making and had an income of 35 to $65,000 a year. So, they were going through for middle-aged, middle-class folks.

Mind you remember also, this was back in 2007, ‘8, ‘9, ‘10. This was during the crash and post crash. These were people who had lost a lot of money.

If they owned a home, the value of their home might have declined by 25%, did for a lot of us. If they had a 401(k) or an IRA or something, that had gone down a whole bunch. People felt very economically insecure. And they were promising, “Ooh, we'll help you figure out how to …”

And what were they doing? This is a detail that if you keep peeling away the layers is actually interesting to share. And I don't think I managed to make it into the book. What were they doing? They were actually teaching people how to try to make money off foreclosures.

So, it was A, “Hey, you feel insecure. We're going to teach you how to these secrets that other people won't tell you to be wealthy by teaching you how to prey on other people's misfortune. Snap up their houses for less than they're worth. You're going to flip them using somebody else's money and then you're going to make a bunch of money.”

Which is something that people do, but it's not easy to do. And it's really risky and done in a certain way, can be extremely predatory. And that's what they were actually advocating for people to do.

Mind you, at least two that we know of the of the instructors at Trump University had just come to Trump University after being real estate investors and going into personal bankruptcy because they had failed so badly at being real estate investors. It's actually a very, very, very risky thing to do that.

It was another thing too. It was like, “Oh, we're going to give you access to capital, to lenders that they won't tell you about, that they won't tell you about.”

And then when they finally got that list of hard money lenders, it was xeroxed from a magazine. So, these people had paid thousands and thousands of dollars to be there, and they got a fricking printout from the magazine that cost eight bucks.

So, that was it in a nutshell, in a lot of ways.

Ken Harbaugh:

That demographic targeting sounds eerily familiar. I'm picturing one of these conference halls, honestly looking like a Trump rally.

Tristan Snell:

I think that minus all of the like over the top like screaming eagle clothing and red hats, take that part away, put people in just sort of like regular normal clothes … and probably yes, these were his super fans, I think is the main thing to drive home.

And look, the ones in New York that I interviewed, these were folks who lived in and near New York City. They were retirees, they were accountants, they were teachers. They were just regular folks, doing their jobs.

And I was in the same boat then as a not very well paid government lawyer working in a office with stained carpet and a 35-year-old telephone, sitting above a restaurant with an onion fryer that turned on at 11:00 AM and made my whole office smell like onion rings all day.

It was not, again, not sexy. Like I say in the book, it was less like working on TV and more like working at the DMV. That's how that AGs office felt at the time.

They have a different office now, maybe it's nicer. But most governing servants do not work in particularly fancy environments. As I think a lot of folks could attest.

Ken Harbaugh:

The deep state is not where most people want to go to get rich.

Tristan Snell:

No, you don't go there to get rich and you don't go there to feel fancy. Far from it. On the service member side, or on the civilian side, and state, and federal, local, whatever. No, no, no, no, no, no. It is a place of peeling paint and crack ceiling tiles, and you just keep moving.

Ken Harbaugh:

You described his victims as super fans. I think that can be very instructive for understanding MAGA today because even some of his most damaged victims, not all of them, but some of them continue to defend him.

And that is such a window into victim psychology and what we see amongst the aggrieved and disenchanted supporters of Donald Trump today.

Tristan Snell:

Yeah, it very much is. I mean, I think that in that case, he conned about 6,000 people that were like the paying customers of Trump U. roughly $42 million. He made a profit of about 5 million himself personally.

So, he picked their pockets completely. And more than that, I mean, he cleaned them out in a lot of these cases. There’s a lot of people that paid only 1,500 bucks and they went to one seminar and then they didn't go to anymore. That was like the introductory one.

But a lot of people, and the bulk of the money they made was from the people who really shelled out. They fell for the upsell and they really got cleaned out.

Now, he's doing it with political donations. He's doing it with these rallies. He's doing it to get people to go to the polls. It's still ultimately just a big giant con.

I believe very firmly that he doesn't believe half the crap that comes out of his mouth. Or maybe he's come to believe it, but I don't think he believed it initially.

I think that there is a strong racist streak within him the whole way through that he didn't really need to put on in starting in 2015 or earlier with the birther stuff. I think that was there.

You go back to his infamous full page ad regarding The Central Park Five and the comments that he would make about crime back then were really, really racist.

That's been a through line for him. But a lot of this other stuff, like he'll pick up a policy and drop a policy depending … it doesn't matter to him. It's all show.

And there's that great quote to him from about 25 years ago where he actually said the quiet part out loud, he said to a reporter that if he ever ran for office, he would run as a conservative Republican because those people were super dumb and they would believe anything. He said exactly what he set out to do.

Now, here's the thing, I don't believe those people are dumb. I don't think that's the right thing to say. I know a lot of other folks that are where I am politically would disagree with that. I don't feel that way. I grew up in a lot of the red state parts of the country and I don't believe that.

I do believe people have been completely conned and fooled by one of the more diabolical con men ever. And that ultimately, it may take 10, 20 years, but I think people are going to look back on what happened in this era, even the ones who supported him.

And I think a lot of those folks, maybe not everybody are going to be like (it's going to be like the folks I talked to about Trump University), “I can't believe I fell for that.” People say literally the quotes, “I can't believe I was so stupid. I'm so embarrassed. Like I'm a smart person. I don't know how I fell for it.”

And a lot of these people were like, “We make fun of the people that attended Trump University.” We think to ourselves, there's a shot intruder about fraud. We think, “I would never fall for that.”

And that is something I wish people would let go of because there were a lot of educated, professional folks that I talked to that fell for the Trump University fraud.

And I think there's a lot of educated, professional folks who are MAGA supporters today, and I think they've been conned. And I mean, that's kind of a Stockholm syndrome where they're going to hang on as long as they can even when they get contrary information.

And it's going to take a lot for them to let go. And it may not happen anytime soon. It may be something they only realize in retrospect or maybe never.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, in the case of Trump University, desperation, especially financial desperation will lead otherwise reasonable people to do unreasonable things. And they are the vast majority of them victims not co-conspirators, they're victims.

One of the key elements of your case though, were the contractors, the people that Trump brought in to help them perpetrate this fraud, some of them unwittingly. But some of them turned against Trump and joined, or at least provided evidence that made for a successful case.

Tristan Snell:

Yeah, that's right. So, we had, there were some larger companies … so, Trump stole all those. He wouldn't give us hardly any documents. He did give us some, which I'll get to, that ended up being key. But there was a lot we didn't have.

We didn't have any HR records, we didn't have a lot of financial records. We didn't have all these instructors that supposedly gone through background checks. We didn't have those. We'd asked for that, we didn't have them.

Critically, there had been tapes. There were recordings made of a bunch of the Trump University seminars. Now, why were they recording their seminars? And yet again, it's one war case in which like, “Ah, there are tapes.”

They had tapes because of, it was for optimizing the sales conversion rates. So, they wanted to record at least part of some of these motivational speaker things.

It was the instructor supposedly talking about real estate, but a big chunk of what they were doing was trying to manipulate the audience into an upsell.

So, the way that it ended up working was people were getting enticed to come to this $1,500 event, being told, “You're going to learn everything you need to know to start investing in real estate at this three day, $1,500 event.”

Then you'd come to the $1,500 event and then they would tell you, “You're going to get killed out there, you need a mentor. We're going to hook you up. We're going to do all of this other stuff for you. You just need to buy one of the Trump elite packages.”

And so, those would cost 10,000, 25,000, or $35,000. The Trump Gold Elite plan was $35,000. And that was the big ticket item that they talked a lot of these people into.

So, the key here was you had all of these folks there and that they were taped. There were transcriptions of the tapes. We had to figure out who transcribed them.

Thankfully, Trump outsourced everything. So, we were able to go to vendors for a whole bunch of these things. Some of these vendors were big companies where it was a routine thing to say, “Oh, we we're getting subpoenaed, we're going to respond.”

And then others of them, we really had to track down. But there was one in particular where we had to track him down. He didn't want to cooperate, but I had been able to find that he himself had been stiffed by Trump University when it went under.

When Trump unplumbed it, rather than just pay the bills that were due and owing at the time the business was being shut down, he just stiffed everybody or gave them 30 cents on the dollar.

And I pointed that out to this guy. I asked him like, “Hey, whatever happened to that?” And all of a sudden, he did a 180 and we were able to get him to give us the transcripts because he too had been a victim. It actually contributed to his business failing.

Once I kind of unlocked that upset, and anger, and embarrassment around all of that, he too had been a victim, like then he was willing to help. Before that he was not because he had actually been friends with one of the guys who ran Trump U. and I think that he just didn't want to get involved.

He's hearing like, “Oh, somebody from the New York AGs office is calling me.” Like his first response was to clam up until I brought up that he hadn't been paid and then that changed everything.

And it went for other things too in the parallel civil class action that was occurring with private litigants, and that case was pending out in San Diego. That was also part of the $25 million settlement. They did a lot of great work in their case too in parallel with ours.

At one point in their case, they actually managed to get some of the former speakers, some of the former instructors that they had tracked down. And I think almost every single one of them was a man. I think they only had one or two instructors out of like a hundred that were female.

And these guys, we had one of them in for a deposition. He comes in in this like suit that's like expensive but doesn't fit him. He's got this watch that he didn't take the links out of, so it's like hanging down all the better to like wave it around. It's like, “Here's my gold watch.” And it's like flopping.

And it was like cloudish, but it was very, very Trump. And I'm like, “Okay, I can see why you ended up working for him.”

But these guys, some of them the other folks managed to track down. A bunch of them hadn't gotten paid at the end. A bunch of them had been screwed out of their money when Trump University was shut down. So, boom.

So, that's why I have a whole rule of my 12 rules in the book that's about go after these vendors and former business partners, they can be allies who can break open your case.

And we've seen it now in the Mar-a-Lago case, we saw it in the New York AG civil fraud case where they were like, “Fine, Trump's stonewalling us. We're going to go to his accountants, we're going to go to the insurance company, we're going to go to the appraisers.”

“We're going to huddle up all the rest of this other evidence from these third parties, and we're going to get …”

And in a lot of cases with the Mazars people, the accountants, they actually really seemed to get them on the side of the government where Mazars cut Trump loose as a client and then disclaimed, they basically said, “We're no longer vouching for these financial statements.” And you saw testimony as part of this case that was very damning for the Trump organization.

Ken Harbaugh:

There are so many lessons in what you were able to pull off that can apply to the political moment we're living in right now.

I'm thinking about the contractors who found the backbone to stand up to tell the truth. And then comparing it to just the army of psycho politicians around Trump that have been maybe not equally damaged, in some cases, worse. Let's look at Ted Cruz, right?

Tristan Snell:

If we can, let's not look at Ted Cruz. Well, I would prefer not to.

Ken Harbaugh:

The Trump Gold Elite plan for mentorship is just such a perfect metaphor for Cruz. I mean, he keeps buying into this losing hand. He keeps being humiliated.

Tristan Snell:

He is Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and Trump as Lucy just keep pulling away. You'll get there someday, Ted.

Ken Harbaugh:

And yet the political courage, there's no example in the Republican party today of those individuals that you found in Trump's business orbit who decided to stick up for themselves.

Tristan Snell:

Well, they did, but they got kicked out basically. They got excommunicated from the church, so to speak. Like Liz Cheney's gone, Adam Kinzinger’s gone.

Like the few people that were willing to stand up and do something about this have been pushed out. And then obviously there's a lot more. Those are really the two most prominent politicians.

But now, obviously there's a lot of folks that are commentators that have picked up the sort of constitutional conservative drumbeat. And God bless.

But yeah, the elected folks, mostly not. Or they got pushed out. And then only after they get pushed out … like Chris Christie, he got basically drummed out. So, now, he's been willing to stand up and do it. And I'm glad that he is. I'm not a huge fan, but I'm glad that he's doing that.

But Christie was in the … who else was in the Trump Gold Elite where they were just like, “If I get close enough to him, maybe he'll pick me.” And war was like the apprentice. It was just like, “Can I suck up to him enough that I keep progressing in this competition and I don't get fired?”

Who was in that sycophantic club? He had Cruz, Lindsey Graham, now Tim Scott, clearly after that performance the other night, that's just like, “But I love you.” It's just like, “Oh my God, what is wrong with you? You guys have it bad.”

Christie was in there but has managed to like find his senses and leave. Mitch McConnell, I don't know what to make of him. That's just a sad situation. But it just describes a huge chunk of these folks.

It's really, really, really bad what he has done to these people who had their own ambitions and their own possible strengths maybe. And they've just completely debased to themselves at the altar of this man. It's just absolutely sickening to watch.

Ken Harbaugh:

In some cases, for the same, at least deep psychological reasons that drew people to Trump U., a sense of desperation. I think-

Tristan Snell:

I think a sense of a combination of like desperation and aspiration. It was like, “Well, he beat me, so if I can't beat him, join him.” That's the politician thing. It doesn't really apply to the consumers.

For the consumer, it was like, “Oh, I'm financially like not feeling good, so I'm going to go try to cast my lot with this rich guy who's going to tell me his secrets.”

For the politician, it was like, “Wow, this guy beat me soundly. I better go try to get into his inner circle so that I can try to get some crumbs from the royal table.” And then it's the aspiration of like, “What if he picks me? Maybe I'll get to be one of those people.”

Mitt Romney, same thing, that like sickening thing of watching him go to Jean-Georges in New York and have dinner with Trump in the hopes that maybe Trump would pick him to be Secretary of State.

Trump arranges for the photographers to come take a picture. It's all over the place. There's Romney sucking up the Trump after criticizing him. And then like a day or two later, it's like, “You're not it. You weren't even on the list.” Awful. Just absolutely terrible.

But he did that to humiliate Romney. He did it on purpose. But Romney was starting to fall through it. Romney was showing up to be part of Trump whole league. And then Trump was like, “Hehe.”

Ken Harbaugh:

Right. Has our legal system ever encountered someone like Trump? We of course, have experienced conmen in the past. We've also experienced people adept at manipulating the weaknesses in our legal system.

But has it ever encountered someone who combines those two talents in a presidential bid with the idea of delaying justice long enough that he can pardon the people who might testify against him, that he arguably might pardon himself?

I feel like this is unprecedented, and I'm not sure the system is up to it.

Tristan Snell:

The system is, this is very much uncharted territory. The combination of all these things, as you just said, is like you can't find another analog to it. It's just not there. This is basically Aaron Burr multiplied by 10, combined with like Al Capone and John Gotti.

Ken Harbaugh:

In a hundred years, the musical is going to be incredible. I can't wait to get there, but-

Tristan Snell:

Probably. But like if we get there first, either that or the musical will be a totalitarian two step of like, “Oh, our lead, or he was so wonderful.” And anybody who disagrees with him will be either dead, or in prison, or in exile. Like as Emperor Don II is in there, Donny Jr. is like Yujiro on the throne. Like basically controlling every thought that we have.

Those are like the thoughts that either yeah, we're going to have like a Hamilton thought satire. But yeah, the treatment of Aaron Durham Hamilton musical or we're going to have like, oh, it's actually just all for show and a totalitarian nightmare state. That'll be fun.

Hopefully we can just turn it into … like this is basically what Aaron Burr wishes he had managed to be.

And then I think at some point he was just happy to just go home in a way that Trump just isn't. Like Trump could've, by the way … let's just be clear. This is actually something I haven't really talked about. Let's just think about this.

If Donald Trump had just been like, “Screw you guys. I'm going home,” after the 2020 election, he would be fine. He'd be fine. I think there maybe some of this other stuff would be happening. Maybe the New York AG civil fraud case would still be happening. Everything else, nothing. He would be having no criminal trials whatsoever.

Most of the crimes that he's up for now, were committed between November of 2020 and January of 2021, including the beginning of the classified document case, because that was when he took them with him. That we have to think of all of this. This is all of a piece.

Because they tried J6, it failed. Two weeks later, he's out of office. And then his attitude clearly upon leaving the White House is, “You know what, if I'm leaving, I'm taking all of this stuff with me. It was basically like, “I'm taking my baseball and I'm going home.” But that was a crime, and all these other things were crimes.

Then he continues to commit more crimes with those classified documents. But he wouldn't be in all this trouble. So, he just couldn't let well enough alone in the way that a lot of other people would've passed a certain point here.

But in the book, I talk about the Gotti cases a good bit because I think that's actually a pretty good, and not that long ago analog for how to handle Trump. A lot of what Gotti did will feel very familiar.

There's also a great book about all of this that was very informative for me, that I really recommend for everybody called The Gotti Wars by John Gleason. Judge Gleason, he went on to be, and now he's a retired judge in private legal practice that he was the lead prosecutor on the case that took Gotti down.

He was also the number two prosecutor on one of the cases where Gotti got acquitted. He had a front row seat to all of this and gives it in really wonderful detail that that was very illuminating for me because I was able to see a lot of analogs there.

And I do think that DNA is common because of Roy Cohn. He's sort of the common ancestor of both the Gotti legal strategy and the Trump legal strategy basically have Cohn as the common link.

Ken Harbaugh:

How important is public opinion in driving cases like this forward? I mean, you refer to the Gotti prosecution that had quite a bit of momentum behind it, and you talk in the book about Alvin Bragg's change of heart based on a shift in public opinion.

I'll just put my priors on the table. I do worry a little bit about public opinion influencing prosecutorial decisions, but I think you have a slightly different take.

Tristan Snell:

My take is that it's a thing you have to do very delicately, because really what you're doing is you're taking … there's two big things that have got to happen for a case like this to go forward. One of them is the merits.

You actually have to have the evidence and the evidence has to fit the offenses that you're charging, or other frauds or illegalities if you're talking about a civil prosecution like the one we did with Trump U. That has to be there.

To me, that's obviously like if you do that, then you do have like just unhinged going after people. Like it has to be grounded in real evidence, real fact hit the law. If you've got the merits though, that's not enough. You also have to have basically courage.

You have to have the merits and you have to have the courage to go forward. And there is a institutional timidity that I think creeps in in a lot of these offices. I think some of it's inherent to the elected positions. I think sometimes it can be there for the appointed prosecutorial positions as well.

And that is something that has to be managed and overcome in order for some of these cases to go forward. Because otherwise, the natural human nature of this is going to be to follow the path of least resistance, to go after prosecutions where you can't lose, where you're almost certainly going to win.

And you have to occasionally take on these big cases that are going to be wars of attrition where you may not win. But then you've got to really try your hardest and best to make the case as good as possible and try to go get that big difficult, might take you 5 to 10 years conviction or finding of liability.

You've got to be able to do it, but it has to be grounded in the real evidence and real law. But you can't use a worry about the insufficiency of the merits. You could always go get more. Like that's the thing. You can easily use a lack of courage, take a lack of courage and twist it in your head to say, “Oh, we don't have enough evidence.”

What's really going on is actually that you don't want to bring the case because this guy that you're going after is going to counter attack. You have to be able to separate out those two things. Do you really not have enough evidence or do you not have enough courage?

And I think what's happened in a number of these cases in the last couple of years is that (I have a op-ed in Time magazine that just came out on this point) I think in a lot of these cases, the public came in where the prosecutors were fearing to tread, the prosecutors were hesitating.

The public opinion has been so strong that there needs to be an accountability. Not necessarily that Trump is going to be guilty, but that he should stand trial, that he's not immune, that he should face accountability. That is the key here.

And I think that prosecutors have had to sometimes follow where that public opinion has been going. The good news is it gives us a role as citizens. We have a role to play in this system to insist upon accountability. And it's important that we carry it out.

Ken Harbaugh:

I think that is a crucial point. We also have to acknowledge that elected DAs are politicians.

Tristan Snell:

They’re politicians.

Ken Harbaugh:

Their first duty has to be to the law, but they also answer to the voters. And that is a balancing act. In terms of-

Tristan Snell:

They serve two bosses and it's a difficult thing for them to pull off. I mean, I definitely feel for everybody who's in that role, I think it's a very difficult role.

I write about this in the book, that like if you're a politician, you've got to be able to show some wins. You've got to be able to declare mission accomplished every now and then. If you can't do that in any political role, not just a DA or AG …

If you can't occasionally get up in front of a press conference and take the DA, AG example, you got to be able to get up in front of those reporters and say, “Justice has been served today, blah, blah, blah.”

And you either have all the drugs and guns on the table, or you've got the guy doing the perp walk. Or you can talk about how much money you recovered for consumers. Something. You got something, you got a W. Congratulations.

If you can't do that every now and then you are going to lose. You're not going to win reelection. You've got to balance those Ws with the ones that are going to be like, nope, this is trench warfare and you might be at it for a while. Or this is Grant trying to take Richmond.

Like you're going to be at it and it's going to be ugly and it's going to be bloody, and you may not win, but you're going to keep going. Like you got to be able to do both.

Ken Harbaugh:

Donald Trump just released a statement outlining the top list of things he would do as a reelected president. And it is chilling stuff. It's not just gutting the federal bureaucracy and shifting jobs out of DC. It's going after journalists. It's basically abolishing warrants. It is truly putting us on the road to fascism.

And I would love your thoughts on how to raise the alarm, how to leverage what you learned in successfully taking down Trump in this one instance and mobilize and motivate the American people to stand in the way of this.

Tristan Snell:

The silver lining out of all of this is, I think it's going to serve as its own wake up call. He is again, saying the quiet part out loud, and he has a habit of doing this. It's a strength for him because it allows him to — he is very much the example for his base of like, “He says what I'm thinking.”

And that's something the MAGA people say a lot about him. And so, he is saying it out loud, but he's so obvious about it that it's also, not a dog whistle.

Before he would talk about draining the swamp, whatever that meant. And that actually, what it meant is I want to be the king of the swamp, and I will rule over it in an even more correct way than other people have, but whatever.

Now, he's actually just delineating things that are very obviously undemocratic and un-American. Thankfully, I do think it will serve as its own alarm. But we need to take it seriously. We can't just look at it and say … we need to take him literally and seriously.

And before it was like I think a lot of the conventional wisdom, especially sort of inside the beltway or mainstream media thinking went, “Oh, Trump doesn't really mean these things.”

And I know I just said a few minutes ago that Trump doesn't, I don't actually think Trump means a lot of the crap that comes out of his mouth, but that doesn't mean he won't act on it.

And by the way, the people he surrounds himself with do not have that sense of theater necessarily. They do take him literally.

If you put people like Stephen Miller in charge of big chunks of the government, you will see people get detained without charges and without trial and in violation of habeas corpus rights. You will see detention camps set up. You will see political prosecutions, you'll see media prosecutions. I do think you'll see those things.

I think we need to take it literally. And if we do, I think that's the big thing, I do think that there's a solid majority of Americans who are ready to stand up and say, “Enough is enough. This has gone way too far. It never should have gotten to this point in the first place.”

But I think it's going to make this choice much more stark. And whatever people feel about Joe Biden or whatever people think about his age or about the Middle East or whatever, it's going to come down to a very stark choice between the republic and democratic processes and the rule of law as we know it, versus autocracy, and fascism, and totalitarianism. And a man who, if he gets in again, may not leave.

And I'm not joking, I don't think it's crazy to say. Like he could actually then say, “Great, I hereby nominate my son, Don Jr. to be the next president of the United States.” And there may be something resembling a plebiscite.

There were still elections after 1933, ‘34 in Germany, but they were very much rigged and people were cowed into submission. And if people had the temerity to think that they were going to run against the Nazi party, they were rounded up and arrested.

There are elections in Putin's Russia. There may still be an election, but it'll be a rubber stamp that will just confirm what has already been decided by the regime.

I don't think that these things are that farfetched. I think people have been in a bit of denial that Trump is actually going to be the nominee. I think that people have been sort of hoping that somehow he would go away. I think that the realization … and people have better things to do with their time, most people.

If you're watching this, if you're listening to this, you're probably a political junkie and God bless you. And I am too. And you are too. And so, we're paying attention to all of this.

Most people aren't because they've got better things to do with their time. And they're probably way more concerned about the football game this coming weekend than they are about the political stuff right now.

But everybody's going to, at one point or another, wake up to what's happening here. And I do have a certain amount of bedrock faith that most Americans are not going to go along with this. Maybe I'm crazy and maybe I'm going to end up in one of these detention camps, but like that's where I stand.

Ken Harbaugh:

I stand with you on that and I want to plug the book Taking Down Trump, one of the most encouraging through lines.

Besides the fact that you successfully prosecuted and held the Trump organization and Donald Trump himself accountable, is the fact that many of his victims woke up. They realized the danger to themselves, to their families. For some of them, they suffered a lot to get there, but I think that's instructive for our current moment as well.

We've got a cult expert coming on the show soon, Dr. Steven Hassan, who talks about the ability, the possibility of recovering people even from the deepest connections they may have to a cult.

And you talk to hundreds of people who invested everything in Donald Trump and were able to detach themselves.

Tristan Snell:

I think it is really critical. And by the way, they had come to that realization on their own. It wasn't because I somehow deprogrammed them.

When I picked up the phone to call them, they were already there. They just needed to tell me what they were feeling, and what they were thinking, and how they had arrived at that.

And I did ask them, I asked them, “When did you realize it?” And for them it was a little bit more clear cut because these promises had been made to them. And at a certain point it was like, “Okay, did you actually deliver on these promises to teach me how to invest in real estate or did you not?”

And so, it's unfortunately not a perfect apples to apples because there was sort of a moment of truth where you were either going to deliver on those deliverables or you were not. And ultimately, Trump University very much did not.

Donald Trump has not yet quite had that moment in a lot of ways, meaning he's had a lot of them, but he's been able to keep dragging people along, being like, “Well, this time I'll build the wall, this time I'll do infrastructure, this time I'll clean up the deep state. I got stopped last time. This time I'm not going to let myself get stopped.”

He's got an excuse for everything that he didn't accomplish in his first term that he now, somehow will accomplish in his second term.

It seems like his second term is premised on the idea of day one, “I'm going to get rid of all of my opposition and then just watch the wonderful things that I will accomplish.” Yeah, that's a dictator.

That's fascism in a nutshell is basically like everything else gets suppressed. All of the enemies of the state get pushed off somewhere off to the corner, we have unity, and then watch the wonderful things I will do. I will make the trains run on time. I will bring the jobs back. I will do this, I will do that. I alone can fix it.

We have yet to get to a point where people get to see that the deliverable is never coming. I hope that we get there someday with some of these people.

I do think that something that's coming, I will make one little thought here, is that I think some of the trials that are coming, even though people aren't going to see like, oh, he didn't deliver on his promises of whatever he was promising.

I think that this starkness of seeing somebody like a Mark Meadows or a Mike Pence stand up on a witness stand — well, stand up and then sit down, whatever.

They're getting sworn in, they're sitting in the witness box and they're there talking about how Donald Trump was leading a conspiracy to remain in office and overturning the election in violation of the Constitution and multiple federal laws.

I do think that there's going to be a certain number of people that are going to say (and poll numbers bear this out), that they're going to be like, “That's it. I'm off the bus.”

And it doesn't have to be everybody. It just has to be enough of a percentage to keep an electoral college win out of reach for Trump.

That's what we have to hope for here, is that it just dampens his support just enough that it will make this election potentially a lot less close than we otherwise fear it could be. We'll have to see.

Ken Harbaugh:

I hope you're right because either way he's going to contest a loss. You talked about the premise of a second term being vengeance. I think there's an underlying premise of his campaign, which is staying out of jail.

Tristan Snell:

Yes. That was very much it.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thank you so much for serving the country, for writing this book. We'd love to keep talking.

Tristan Snell:

Thanks, Ken.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter @Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.