Andrew Weissmann

speaker

1,068 appearances 9 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 20 May

Andrew Weissmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption · 10 Apr 2025 podcast

At the end of the day, I'm still an institutionalist, so I still think, you know what? Good luck making a criminal case on Chris Krebs. You want to have a trial on whether there was fraud in the election? Well, the last time the courts dealt with this, you lost 60 cases on that.

So that doesn't seem like a particularly fruitful avenue for bringing a criminal case when you couldn't even win a civil case.

You mentioned the law firms.

Well, that was the whole idea, which was that you sort of deter your enemies from being able to get counsel. Then you bring these kinds of actions with respect to them so that they find it that much harder. I do think that there's still...

although it's not as many as you would hope, but I still think there are lots and lots of lawyers who are reputable and believe in the profession of law and the fact that you have to zealously advocate for people. Here's just another irony. You would think that a president who has been through four criminal cases would understand the importance and need for defense counsel.

He enjoyed criminal defense counsel in all of his cases. He enjoyed civil counsel in all of his cases. And this is an effort to basically say, you should not enjoy the rights I had in defending myself.

Well, the other thing that's sort of interesting is I don't really understand if the law firms are now going to be doing administrative work, they're going to be conflicted out of cases where they're also suing and be willing to sue the administration. So I think that is one of the ways in which this is going to be insidious.

It's not just that we're going to get administration pro bono work, but it makes it very hard to do the kind of work that they've been doing, many NGOs partner all the time with large law firms in bringing cases. And these, by the way, they're private entities. They're entitled to be as political as they want to be.

They can be taking all Republican causes, all Democratic causes, whatever it is, they're private entities. So the idea that the administration is saying, oh, you're not being even-handed, who the hell are you to say that to a law firm? They And so it's really insidious in so many ways.

As the judges who have struck down every single executive order on the law firms that's been challenged has been immediately, within one day, struck down as violative of at least the First Amendment, if not also the Fifth and Sixth Amendment. It's a lot of different parts of the Constitution. Yeah.

The judges point out that in order to have a functioning legal system, a functioning judiciary, you have to have a functioning cadre of lawyers who are willing to take cases and zealously advocate. As I said, the president has enjoyed that in both the criminal and civil sector. And nobody thought of saying, oh, that's unfair or wrong, or we should go after those lawyers for doing that.

That's part of our system. Whether you like the plaintiff or defendant position, It's irrelevant. That's that's how it works. I mean, this is in some ways, Tim, it's just so hard to have this conversation because this is the kind of conversation you have with people in fourth grade. It's so basic. And yet you need to have it because you're seeing the kind of abuse happening from the Oval Office.

Yeah, well, Tim, I think one of the things that we're not going to see is not just the work that they end up doing, the pro bono work for the administration, but the amount of work that they now are not doing. The clients that they're not taking, the cases that they're not bringing.

If you remember, one of the things that the president did is said, I want to make sure my attorney general is looking very carefully at the law firms and the lawyers who are bringing cases against us to look to see whether they're making any arguments in bad faith because they should be investigated for that.

I mean, again, all of that is to chill the idea of a law firm saying, oh, let's bring a case because we think something happened here that's wrong. That's what the legal system's for. And by the way, as long as you're making a good faith argument...

I mean, I've seen that on both sides where you think, okay, that's a pretty weak argument by one side or the other, but that's what the courts are for. And then you'll make your argument and the judge will decide. So it's a really devious and strategic way of stacking the system.

On the Garcia case, the one where the government has admitted it was a mistake, but they're saying too bad, we can't do anything about it. That is, we're waiting for the Supreme Court to say something about that. It's got the briefs and we're waiting a decision. I think the big picture there is I'm going to step outside my legal role. Okay.

Tim, can you imagine the conversation at the Department of Justice where someone says, oh my God, we have wrongfully deported somebody and they are in prison in a foreign country. What should we do about it? And that the adult in the room is not saying, Get that person back here immediately.

Instead, the conversation is, oh, you should tell the court we can't do anything and let them sit there and rot, even though it was our mistake. The lawlessness and cruelty combination is off the charts.

You're totally right.

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