The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 18 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sounded an extraordinary warning this week. After a House GOP report recommended that the FBI investigate Liz Cheney for activities related to the January 6 Committee, Murphy pointed out in a powerful social media thread that Donald Trump is clearly putting in place a plan to cripple our democracy, one we might never recover from. What made Senator Murphy’s warning particularly interesting was how he connected a series of dots to show the plan coming together and accelerating right before our eyes, even before Trump has taken office again. Today, we’re talking to Senator Murphy about his warning. Thank you so much for coming on, senator.
Chris Murphy: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Senator, Donald Trump has now tweeted about the House GOP report, basically endorsing its findings and saying that Liz Cheney could now be in a lot of trouble. Do you take that as a direct sign that the FBI under Kash Patel—if he gets confirmed as director—will try to investigate Cheney?
Murphy: Well, you have to assume that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Kash Patel’s number one qualification is that he will do anything and everything Donald Trump tells him to do. He has, in fact, made his career off of an advertisement that he believes anybody who’s opposing Donald Trump politically should be prosecuted. He said, The people who tried to stop Donald Trump from becoming president in 2020—those are the people that accurately reported the results of the election—should go to jail.
So Kash Patel’s at the FBI to make the FBI an enforcer of Trump’s political power. Pam Bondi is not going to stand in the way as the attorney general. And if they pick the right court with a Trump-appointed political judge, the courts won’t stand in the way either. There is a very real possibility, increasing by the day, that one or many more of Trump’s political opponents, perhaps starting with Liz Cheney, end up in jail in 2025.
I do not think that we can overhype the potentially fatal damage that that will do to American democracy. It is important that we not normalize this. It is important that we talk about the gravity of the challenge, right now, before it is too late and everybody just goes back to business as normal.
Sargent: The House GOP report does look like a deliberate pretext for Kash Patel to use to potentially initiate a criminal investigation of Cheney. The allegations in the GOP report are a joke, but putting that aside, you lay out a scenario in which Trump’s DOJ collaborates with client judges to make a prosecution of Cheney or any other enemies of MAGA a lot easier. Can you talk a little bit about that side of it? How does that unfold—the client judges? Does that mean indictments become easier? Do you expect them to really seek indictments with grand juries of people who Trump just decides have angered him?
Murphy: Can we just spend one second on the substance of the allegation piece? I think it’s important because if you actually read mainstream news reporting on the referral that the House made, you would believe that there was substance to it. I read most of the headlines. The headlines were standard boilerplate headlines: House refers Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. You had to dig really deep to find out that it’s literally made up.
First of all, you cannot, under the Constitution, criminalize conduct done in your official duties—that’s the Speech and Debate Clause. But even if you wipe the Speech and Debate Clause out of the Constitution, they’re literally just making up things that they say that she did. They claim that she pressured one of the witnesses to lie, that she intimidated the witnesses to not tell the truth. That’s just not true. There’s no facts that allege that; it is just made up out of thin air.
It is a bogus claim on the merits, and it is also unenforceable under the Constitution, but that will not stop Kash Patel from acting on it. That will not stop the DOJ from acting on it. And if they find the right judge, potentially in a jurisdiction where the right grand jury is seated, then there’s nothing to stop her from going to jail. That, in and of itself, would have a chilling effect.
What we see all across the globe is that when you start to put a couple of the regime’s political opponents in jail, there are literally just thousands of people who say, You know what, forget it. It’s just not worth it. I think this is important, to oppose Donald Trump, but I got a family at home. I just don’t want to put my name in the mix. And all of a sudden, the bodies that are available for the political opposition are cut in half. It’s not that they disappear, but that you just don’t have the same crowds to organize because people become risk-averse for a good reason. So even if it’s just Liz Cheney—and it may not be just Liz Cheney—the chilling effect that it has on speech could be fatal.
Sargent: I love the way you connected all this to the media angle as well. Trump just secured a $15 million settlement with ABC News in a libel lawsuit that ABC might have won. Trump followed up on that by suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for getting her preelection poll wrong. Clearly, he’s going to try to cow media organizations into submission. And as you write, there are signs that they’re starting to fold.
I want to ask you about one more iteration here. Imagine these things interlocking. Imagine media organizations getting too skittish about reporting aggressively on the baselessness of Trump’s prosecutions of his enemies. You just pointed out that the headlines are not doing justice to the absurdity of the House GOP referral. These things interlock. Do you see something like that happening and snowballing on itself?
Murphy: I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe ...
Listen, they’re folding. They are. When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.
I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January. We have to understand that if we don’t raise that in the context of these nominations, if we don’t put up a fight as political leaders, then we are signaling to the American public that it’s not a big deal.
Sargent: You brought me to my next question, which is about your party. In the face of all this, it seems like Democrats—many anyway—are adopting this posture of strategic caution. They fear saying straight out that Trump is threatening illegitimate, corrupt, dangerous abuses of power because it might make them appear unwilling to work with Trump. To put it very bluntly, are enough Democrats saying what you said on Twitter, or X, and are they saying it loudly enough?
Murphy: No. No. And I’ll give you another example. Having watched Trump during his first term, when nothing was real, when everything was a faint or a fake—it was never infrastructure week; he was never serious, after Parkland, about doing gun control—why do we, all of a sudden, decide to take this government efficiency task force seriously? Why are we acting as if this is legitimate?
A, it’s not a department. B, it’s being run by two billionaires, people who have no idea how important basic government services like Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits are to regular people. But there are a lot of Democrats openly saying, I want to work with them, I want to sit down with this group. That gives the appearance that this is something other than either just a TV show or an effort by the billionaire class to privatize government to benefit themselves, which would be par for the course because all Donald Trump has shown us is that he wants to monetize his power for the benefit of himself and his friends.
So yes, on nominations, I don’t think enough Democrats are sounding the red alert on this government efficiency racket. And when regular people see Democrats treating all of this as normal, they start to believe it’s normal. It’s not normal, and we have to start telegraphing that to people.
Sargent: A hundred percent. It seems to me like the Democratic Party’s understanding of things right now is deeply problematic. Democrats seem to think that because Trump won in spite of their warnings of the threat Trump poses to the system that voters can’t really be reached with an argument about those things. The only thing that reaches them, Democrats think, are promises on the economy. But Senator, Democrats can’t use that as an excuse not to communicate with voters about what Trump is actually doing to threaten ...
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