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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you confiscate the notes and shred them, you're entitled to draw inferences from the fact that you did that. If they were helpful for you, you don't destroy them. Right. Right. You put them in a safe somewhere. Exactly. So the other thing he could do is something that Emmett Sullivan did in the Michael Flynn case.
So that is in Trump 1.0, where remarkably, this is like the only other time I've ever heard anything like this happening. And I was a prosecutor for 21 years. The only other time I can think of a situation like this is from Trump 1.0. And there, what the judge did is he appointed somebody to represent the public interest.
He said, you know, I've got the government and the defense aligned here, but they may not be presenting everything because I have Danielle Sassoon's letter saying that's not what happened here. So Emmet Sullivan was in that situation and he appointed a former judge, John Gleeson, to represent and advocate with respect to the law and what else the judge should consider.
It doesn't mean the judge had to agree with what that amicus said, but it was important to have another voice at the table when the whole idea is that there's a collusion between the government and the defense at issue.
Absolutely. So this is like music to my ears because I wrote a short piece for just security. Can I just give a big plug? Because even though I'm on the board there, the people who do the day-to-day work are so great. Trust Security is affiliated with NYU Law School where I teach. It's just a great place for independent, smart analysis. It's also got a litigation tracker.
So if you're trying to keep track of the I think we're up to 80 cases that have been filed since January 20th with respect to the actions of this administration. You can sort of see it there. But I did a short piece pointing out that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, definitely has the legal authority to do this.
And he has the state crimes that are entirely comparable to the federal crimes. And I sort of matched them up. And I think your listeners know that Alvin Bragg, has done this before, where he has stepped into the breach, obviously, most famously with respect to the Donald Trump case when the feds balked, but he did it in the Steve Bannon case as well.
I agree with you that if it has not happened already, their position would be they would not want to do it. But there is reason to think that it may have happened already. We wouldn't know it because it would be under seal. But when Danielle Sassoon was still the acting U.S.
attorney, she could have shared that it is legal to do that under, just to be nerdy, Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6 that governs federal grand jury secrecy. There's a provision that permits the federal government to share that information with the state prosecutor. And so that may have happened. And it's worth remembering that although it's not on the same charges, Alvin Bragg has a
involving public corruption of a principal advisor to Mayor Adams. Oh, that's right. So he's already in the mix. Now, it's not the same scheme. I just want to make sure, as people know, it's not apples to apples. But all of that suggests to me, if I were in the Southern District of New York, I would have been thinking about making sure that the evidence that I've amassed
live somewhere independent of people who want to engage in bad behavior.
So can I just say with the word weaponization, this is – That is a real thing. I don't want Donald Trump to be able to co-opt it to say, no, you're doing it, no, I'm doing it. Facts matter. And what we're seeing is the actual weaponization of the Department of Justice. And so... I'm big on, if you want to use a label, where are the facts to support it? And that isn't something that they have.
In my view, what Ed Barton is doing, he's never, as far as I know, has never been a prosecutor. He's engaging in behavior that is completely thuggish. And You know, this is one of those things where at some point the worm will turn and he will not be in that position. If he engages in behavior that is criminal, there are sanctions for that.
If he engages in behavior that violates professional norms, I know this seems small bore, but he can be sanctioned and actually disbarred. So one of the things that I think there's already a bar complaint against him is he is the acting U.S. attorney. He previously was doing defense work and was actually the counsel of record on January 6th cases for those defendants.
There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, being a defense lawyer on controversial cases can be a very noble thing. He did both at the same time. He actually sought to dismiss cases where he was the prosecutor and the defense. That is not allowed in the legal profession.
That is a tough and great question. So one, I think it's a very individualized decision about sort of what you do, but at some point there is no choice because you are being directed to do something that you have determined is either illegal, unethical, or just violates whatever principles you have and you can't stomach. For instance, I don't believe in the death penalty.
If somebody directed me and said you have to prosecute a death penalty case, I would either say you have to fire me or I'm going to resign. I think that's sort of dancing on the head of a pin about which way you do it, the arguments either way. So at some point, if you're in that position where you're directed to do something, you actually have no choice. I mean, you can't go forward. You're
and look at yourself in the mirror. I think the harder situation is purportedly when Amiel Bove was trying to find somebody to do the evil deed of filing this motion, and he takes the Southern District of New York prosecutors off, and then he goes to public integrity of all places, the public integrity section that has public corruption cases,
And he basically, on Zoom, is like putting them in a meeting and it's basically cough up somebody or, I mean, what I understand is it's cough up somebody or you're gone. That's sort of the message. And that's where there's, I think, a healthy debate about what's the best way to deal with that. Do you cough somebody up? Do you all resign? I mean, I think there are pros and cons.
What ultimately happened was was one person who was near retirement said, I'll sign it. And essentially he then saves what I'll call the good people because they don't then all get fired. And so that is a positive. And if you look at the actual filing that he signed, it's really interesting because the attorney who signed it did not make any factual representations that were false.
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