53,030 views Apr 17, 2023 Farron Balanced
Donald Trump has suffered a string of legal defeats in recent weeks while trying to prevent his former aides from testifying to a federal grand jury, and these defeats have led to a parade of former Trump allies heading in to speak with prosecutors. Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows, and soon Mike Pence are just a few people that have to spill the beans on Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Farron Cousins explains what this means.
*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos. Donald Trump's been having a rough go of it recently with a string of massive legal defeats as he has continued to try to prevent his former aids and allies and even his former vice president from having to testify against him to a federal grand jury impaneled by special prosecutor Jack Smith. And according to recent reports, all of these legal defeats, even though Trump is still trying to challenge some of them, have still led to his friends being paraded into that grand jury room to give testimony. People like Stephen Miller and his, uh, former director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, have been spotted going into the jury room within the last week to let them know everything that Donald Trump talked about. And of course, Mike Pence will soon be added to that list. It was also reported two weeks ago that Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's former chief of staff after Trump lost his bid to claim executive privilege. Mark Meadows was spotted that same day going in to speak to that grand jury. This is obviously very bad for Donald Trump. All of these people that I have mentioned, and there's been multiple others that have uh, uh, that worked with Trump that have gone in and talked to the grand jury, it's bad for him because these are all of the people that were involved in the conversations, right? These are not just, nobody's from Nowheresville that, oh yeah, well you worked in his administration. Come on in. That's not what this was. These are the people that were in the Oval Office. These are the people that were on the phone calls. These were the people that were in the meetings when plans were discussed to seize the voting machines. Plans were discussed to pressure states to throw out their ballots. Plans were discussed for states to turn in alternate slates of electors before January 6th. All of these people were involved in these conversations. Now, Mike Pence, uh, who recently lost his bid to claim, um, uh, uh, what was it, speech or debate protections from testifying, announced recently, of course, that he's not gonna appeal it. He said, all right, fine. I lost, I'm gonna go talk. Trump has appealed that and is still trying to claim executive privilege over Mike Pence's testimony, but considering the fact that he's already lost on every other person he's tried to claim executive privilege over, there's a 0% chance that he will be successful. He's only delaying the inevitable, which is all he can do. And of course he's gonna continue to delay it as long as humanly possible. But those delays are coming to an end. The appeals process for most of these cases, as I said, is already over. He has nowhere else to turn. He has nothing else to do. Once his appeal in the Mike Pence thing Gets, you know, denied, Pence is gonna walk right into that room as well. And Pence of all people has the most to say because he has nothing to lose. Mike Pence might be one of these only people that I've mentioned that's not an actual target and has never been a target in this investigation. Pence's hands for once are squeaky clean on this. So he can tell everything, he can give all the secrets, and he doesn't have to worry because he knows that again, maybe for the first time ever he did everything right and he doesn't have to worry about incriminating himself. Whereas a lot of these other people, specifically Mark Meadows, may be harder to get testimony from him because, you know, there could be a lot of pleading the fifth, cuz Mark Meadows was at the heart of everything. Same might be true for Steven Miller, might be true for John Ratcliffe or any of the other folks, but not Mike Pence. And he was in that room when Trump was talking to those other people too. So even if they don't want to talk, Pence can talk and that may force the others to have to strike a plea deal to make sure they don't get charged. So they start opening their mouths as well. However you slice it, things are bad for Donald Trump and they're about to get a lot worse.
