Mark Penn, former senior adviser to both President Clinton and Secretary of State Cklinton (during her 2008 presidential campaign) joined me Tuesday morning to discuss his column in The Hill:

Audio:

05-22hhs-penn

Transcript:

HH: I am joined by Mark Penn. He is managing director of Stagwell Group. That’s a private equity firm specializing in marketing service companies. He’s also the chairman of the Harris Poll, author of Microtrends Squared, a relatively recent new book, served as pollster/senior adviser to President Clinton for six years of his administration, also as senior strategist to Secretary of State Clinton during her 2008 presidential run. And I read to you his column from The Hill this weekend and on Monday. Mr. Penn, welcome to the program, it is great to have you on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

MP: Thank you. Good morning.

HH: How has the reaction been to your column which I read in the last segment so the audience knows exactly what you wrote?

MP: Well, unbelievable in many ways. I mean, I thought I’d kind of get out my views. You never know who’s going to read it, and I think by this time, maybe millions of people have read this column. And I think it really struck a nerve, or a chord, on what people were thinking about how this investigation has gone off the rails.

HH: Have you spoken to President Clinton since it appeared?

MP: No. I mean, you know, people I noticed try to make something of the Clintons relative to that. The only thing I said was look, I think this inspector general report is going to come back and say that the investigation on the emails was a light investigation. I don’t think that’s the Clintons’ fault. I think that’s the fault of the James Comey and what was going on at the FBI.

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Nixon, Clinton, and now Trump.  Once again, the nation’s capital is becoming consumed with accusation, investigation and scandal.  On the one hand, it’s just politics – a bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred death match.  The egos involved all around Washington make things like this inevitable – these are people that want to win, and are willing to use whatever means are at their disposal to do so – up to and including creating a media firestorm designed to befuddle, not inform, the public.  It has saddened me since my father explained to me during Watergate that when things like this happen politics far outweighs justice.  Yet history has proven my father so correct.  Clinton was/is clearly guilty of perjury. Yet the Senate exonerated him.  Nixon, also guilty, was more noble and the Senate never had its chance.

But Trump seems to be a very different story.  Trump is first and foremost a media creature, not a political one.  I have certainly heard from numerous reporters that there is evidence that Trump’s political victory is accidental from Trump’s perspective; that he sought office to enhance his media profile, not to actually win the office.  That said, temperament and personality quirks acknowledged, he seems to be doing his best to fulfill the obligations electoral victory has placed on him.  I find this admirable, but it is deeply threatening to the professional political class.  This is indeed a bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred political fight, but of a different order.  This is not Republican v Democrat, this is much, much bigger than that.

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Former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal joined me this morning:

Audio:

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Transcript:

HH: So pleased to welcome Neal Katyal to the program. You know, for years, I’ve done Erwin Chemerinsky and John Eastman as the smart guys. Someday, I’m going to achieve the dream of getting Paul Clement and Neal Katyal together to do the same thing, because then we can just eliminate the need to ask anybody else anyone’s opinion. Neal comes from all the wrong places – Jesuit trained, Dartmouth and Yale Law School, but nevertheless widely regarded as the smartest guy in D.C. not named Paul Clement. They’re tied. Former acting solicitor general of the Department of Justice, the man behind the Special Counsel regulation, Neal Katyal from Hogan Lovells, welcome, it’s great to have you on.

NK: Thanks, it’s great to be here, and always great to be associated with my friend, Paul Clement.

HH: You know, how many arguments have you made before the Supreme Court?

NK: A couple of weeks ago, I argued my 37th.

HH: All right. So I just want people to know we’re talking about someone who knows what they’re talking about. And what was your relationship to the regulations 28CFR 600, etc., about this special counsel?

NK: Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s kind of almost a quirk accident of history. I was a young Justice Department staffer. I was 27. I was on the deputy attorney general’s staff. This was when Janet Reno was the Attorney General and Eric Holder was the deputy. And this was, you know, my very first day was the day that Ken Starr’s deputies requested permission from Mr. Holder to wire Linda Tripp. And you know, it was compartmented, and I didn’t know about it for a long time. But ultimately, when it became public, there were questions about, you know, that started to rise to the fore about well, should we have an independent counsel act for the future, for Ken Starr would be grandfathered under the existing independent counsel act. But the act was to lapse on June 30th of 1999 by statute. And so the Department wanted to think about should we keep the act in place, should we replace it with something else. And so Ms. Reno convened a working group, and we met for 16 months to discuss that, and ultimately came to the conclusion that the independent counsel act was a bad idea, that it was a kind of headless fourth branch of government not really consistent with our Constitutional structure, and that something needed to replace it, and that something ultimately became those part 600 special counsel regulations which are what Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, has used to appoint Robert Mueller.

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Victoria Toensing joined me this morning to talk about the investigations swirling around President Trump and his announced intention to direct the DOJ’s review of surveillance of his camapign –if any– in 2016:

Audio:

05-21hhs-toensing

Transcript:

HH: When I joined the Department of Justice in 1984 as a very young special assistant to William French Smith, there was this hotshot deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division that everyone said don’t get in an argument with Vicki Toensing. And I never did. I just stayed along the wall when she would come and brief the AG. And so she has become, of course, one of the country’s best known white collar defense lawyers, along with her husband, Joe DiGenova in the firm of DiGenova-Toensing LLP, one of the best white collar defense lawyers and Constitutional law experts. She wrote ten days ago about the President’s vulnerability of not to being indicted and subpoenaed, and she joins me to talk about that. Good morning, Vicki, how are you?

VT: Boy, it’s good to talk to you on this wonderful day, finally, in Washington.

HH: Yeah, finally. We’re getting a little bit of spring instead of summer. Vicki Toensing, you said last week the President cannot be indicted. Would you explain that to the people who are listening? I hold the same view. I’ve said it many times. But you’ve got the authority here. Why can’t a president be indicted?

VT: There are two OLC opinions, and OLC, as you well know, is the Office of Legal Counsel. And it really is, although it’s housed in the Justice Department, it really speaks on the law for the entire executive branch. And both of these opinions, one by a Republican Justice Department, and one by a Democratic Justice Department, state that the president cannot be indicted for not only Constitutional reasons, but also for very practical reasons, and I can go into them.

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