On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, DA Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan have done enormous damage to the rule of law in Donald Trump’s NY case. Merchan should have dismissed the case, but he didn’t. This isn’t a great victory because this case still hangs over Trump’s head. There are legal pathways to deal with this, but the Trump team must go on the offense. Also, the issue of recess appointments is coming up and some in the media are saying Trump is threatening liberty. No, the Framers put recess appointments in the Constitution. In Trump’s first term, the Democrat Congress slow-walked all his nominees. This time around he needs his people to get through quickly. Later, the Drill Down exposes the collusion of the Virginia Attorney General’s office with radical animal rights activists. These awful organizations devoured what was a legit movement. Finally, Caroline Glick calls in to explain that the left wing in Israel is trying to oust PM Benjamin Netanyahu before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. They’ll stop at nothing to stop Netanyahu from achieving total victory over its enemies.
The Drill Down
ANIMAL LAWFARE, INC.: Exposing the Collusion of the Virginia Attorney General’s Office with Radical Animal Rights Activists
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP
The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Rewind page.
Rough transcription of Hour 1
Segment 1
Hello America. Mark Levin here. Our number 877-381-3811. 877-381-3811. There’s tons to talk about. 3 hours won’t be enough, but we’ll do our best. If anybody can do it, it’s moi. AKA me. Hope you’re well. All right, let’s get started in Manhattan. We have this Alvin Bragg, and of course, we have this acting state judge mission. And these two have done enormous damage to the rule of law, criminal justice, and they sought desperately to take out Donald Trump as the first case forward. They were in a rush. And in every respect, it was a Stalinist, a Stalinist type show trial. Apparently, that’s very popular among the Democrats in Manhattan because it looks like Alvin Bragg will be re-elected. In fact, it looks like it’s very popular among the legal community, including the judiciary in New York. New York has become, I’m afraid, a legal gulag. That’s right. Gulag. So what happened today? Well here’s Fox prosecutors request stay in Trump New York case and I’ll explain this in plain English until 2029 as defense plans motion for dismissal once and for all. What are we talking about? New York prosecutors are requesting a stay until 2029 in New York versus Trump. As the president’s defense lawyers prepare to move to dismiss the case. Prosecutors wrote a letter to Judge Juan Marchionne today who agreed last week to grant a stay on all deadlines associated with the conviction proceedings against President Trump in the final months before he takes office. Stick with me. You’re in the right place at the right time. Marshawn granted the request, which is to say, stay on odd deadlines, including the November 26 sentencing date, to consider the effect of his election as president. Prosecutors had asked for the pause in proceedings. Which they said would allow them to better evaluate the impact of Trump’s new status as president elect. Now as a result of the election held on November five. Defendants inauguration as president will occur on January 20. Manhattan D.A. Brag wrote to Mershon. Given the need to balance competing constitutional interests, consideration must be given to various non dismissal options, non dismissal options that may address any concerns raised by the pendency of a post-trial criminal proceeding during the presidency, such as deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings till after the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. Bragg said his team would not oppose Trump’s request to stay further proceedings, pending his attorneys motion to dismiss. And it goes on. Now. What should have happened is the judge should have dismissed the case on his own act, but he didn’t. Bragg should have. Filed a motion to dismiss the case, but he didn’t. I don’t know what Marshawn will do down the road, but this sword of Damocles continues to hang over President Trump. It’s not a great victory. I want to walk you through this. Pretty much as I have before. But just a reminder, everybody’s not. A lawyer. Even lawyers. They’re not all good lawyers. And some of them just have this damn wrong. I’ve been listening to some of the commentary and they say, I hope that Machan will come to a census or. What you expect from Bragg is playing to the. To the voters there and they want this sort of thing. So and it goes on and on. Well, ladies and gentlemen, when you represent a client, you can’t hope that things will change. You can’t wait around. You need to go on offense. And so on offense, they should go because there is an avenue to deal with this. You need to get it out of the gulag that is New York and you need to get it out of there now. Number one, we have the supremacy clause of the Constitution. The Constitution and the laws of the United States. Article six, clause two, which shall be made in pursuance thereof. And all treaties matter which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land. And the judges in every state shall be bound there by anything in the constitutional laws of any state, to the contrary notwithstanding. So why are we in state court when we’re dealing with a. President elect. We shouldn’t be. What authority do they have? Absolutely none. Zero. Number two. There’s also federal jurisdiction and that the so-called underlying offense. That they use to breathe life back into a misdemeanor offense that the statute of limitations had already run. Was a federal election campaign issue wrongly decided, I might add? Which brought the statue back to State and created a felony out of a misdemeanor. What else? We have a Supreme Court immunity ruling not that long ago. So key testimony from Hope Hicks while she was working for President Trump in the Oval Office and going through certain payments and so forth, that testimony is now considered unconstitutional. And then what else do we have? That’s three. How about for the Department of Justice memos in 1973 and 20 and 2000, which said in part, this issue of deferring was raised. An indictment. And by an indictment, I mean, the whole trial process can be indictment, conviction, appeal and so forth. Hanging over the president while he remains in office would damage the institution of the presidency. Virtually to the same extent as an actual conviction. And what they’re saying there is you can have this dark cloud hanging over a president till after his presidency. The effects will be very damaging to the office. But in any event, you’re talking about a day in a state judge. They have no authority, this case and the others. Were timed to influence the election, and they’re now trying to use it to damage the president. A local Danish state judge. They can’t hijack the office of the president. So what do you do? According to former federal prosecutors and certain professors, there’s nothing you can do. Hope for the best. Pretty much. That’s it. And that’s baloney. You folks remember the Bush versus Gore ad, the 2000 case? You remember the hanging chads? You remember the disputes over ballots. You remember the massive litigation that went on in one county after another. You remember the Florida Supreme Court, all Democrats, all but one of whom was a radical leftist. The chief justice was not. But remember, the court kept extending the deadline. Extending the deadline? Ruling what chads, excuse me, what ballots were to be counted and how chads were to be viewed always in favor of gore. And it was getting closer and closer and closer. Do you remember all that? So what did the Bush lawyers do? What are the great late Ted Olson do? Did you say? You know what? Well, just wait and get a determination. No. Now time is of the essence. Did you say, you know what will appeal to a federal district court? No, of course not. What did he do? Ted Olson, one of the great Supreme Court litigators, Arthur Ferguson, one of the greatest constitutional minds I know, and me. We say you get these matters in front of the Supreme Court and how do you do it? The Supreme Court doesn’t have a chance to decide these cases if he don’t ask it. And it does have common law powers. That is non-statutory powers, even non-constitutional powers. It has implied powers as the highest court in the country, and that’s been adopted from the British system, from the Western system. And the court has done it rarely, but it’s done it before Bush versus Gore. So what did Ted Olson and the Bush lawyers do? They filed something they called an emergency petition with the Supreme Court. There’s really no such nomenclature as an emergency petition. But that’s how they named it. To get it to the court to see if the court would would take it. And what did they say to the court? They said court. Stop the count. And while you’re at it. The state Supreme Court in Florida is acting without authority in excess of its state constitutional authority. And the court took the case. Only takes four justices out of the nine to say, take it. The court took the case. And. The Bush team won. They won on equal protection grounds, which was kind of odd, but it doesn’t matter. The court treated this emergency petition as a writ of surgery. That’s the normal statutory way in which you bring a case to the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t really a writ of search history since they didn’t use the statutory method. They’ve just filed an emergency petition. What they really did to complicate it, but I’m trying to put it in plain English, is a common law writ, which is, Hey, court Well, call it whatever we’ll call it, come quote, It doesn’t matter. We need to get this case in front of you. You’re the only court with the authority to actually do something about this. Please do something about it. And the court took it, and they did something about it. That is exactly what President Trump’s lawyers should be doing now, in my view, in New York. Now, it’s possible, Marshawn, and few days in a few weeks, he’ll rule. Okay, I dismiss the case and that’s great. So not to worry about it anymore, but it’s likely or at least possible that you won’t. So if I. We’re in charge of the case, which clearly I’m not. I would now move immediately. Immediately on the four federal prongs that I already mentioned. To seek from the Supreme Court the acceptance of a petition. And we can call it a writ of mandamus, a writ of whatever we want to call it. The court will decide whether it takes It is not going to worry about semantics. If the court doesn’t take it, you’ve lost nothing. Some lawyers will think, well, you humiliated yourself, you embarrassed yourself, you created a spectacle. Now this is normal. Where a lawyer, an advocate, tries to find the best ways to resolve a case on behalf of the client. This is an emergency situation. This is a timely situation. You know, everybody’s rubbing their hands together. So we’ve never seen anything like this. This shouldn’t be happening. Mershon should be judge. Okay, great. But you’re not paid as a lawyer to whine. And complain and then sit on your ass. I would say to these commentators. That’s what I would say. By the way, I like his lawyers. I’m not attacking them in the least. I’m just explaining. Generally, you don’t pay lawyers to like the TV lawyers. Now. That’s what I would do. I get this petition, I would call it as I said. Common law writ of mandamus, call it whatever you want. The court will decide what it chooses to call it and how it chooses to treat it. Excuse me. And I happen to think and I could be wrong, but I think I’m right that there’s justices on that court that are salivating at taking this case and fixing this so it never happens again. And even sneezing to the truth, Mr. Produce. That is, they don’t want a D.A. and a state judge. To be able to control the president right through his presidency as he waits for them to make a determination of some kind after he’s finished serving as president. No district attorney, no state judge, no federal judge for. That matter should have that kind of control over a president who is the head of the executive branch. The state has no authority or jurisdiction right now. None. Zero. So we shouldn’t have, though, sit on the edge of our chairs and wait for what Acting State Judge Mershon has to say at the prodding of Alan Bragg. Who cares? There’s so many problems with this case. The court doesn’t even need to consider those problems. Due process issues, equal protection issues, how evidence was used. All right. They don’t even have to get into that. It’s unnecessary. This is a jurisdictional issue. This is a federal constitutional issue. On whether Bragg and Nahshon have any kind of authority whatsoever to interfere. With an incoming president in preparing a new administration for the transition and then becoming president of the United States. I’m sure there are justices, a majority of the justices, who don’t. But don’t take this kindly. Who don’t like with this? This D.A. and this judge did who don’t like how they seized on federal law, which they have no jurisdiction over whatsoever. How they have violated the Department of Justice possession of half a century. And how some. Prosecutor in Manhattan. Some acting state judge in Manhattan is now going to call the shots over an incoming and eventual president of the United States. They’re not going to stand for it. I’ll be right back.
Segment 2
You see, there are lawyers with different levels of experience, and they could be great lawyers with different levels of experience. Some of them are multiple levels of experience. Some of them are trial lawyers. Whether it’s state or federal court or even county court. Some are appellate lawyers who argue appellate cases, summer Supreme Court litigators, Some are motions lawyers, some are just lawyers who write briefs and motions. So all kinds of expertise. In some cases, you have lawyers who do a lot of it. But I fear that many of the people commenting on how to handle this Brad case outside the initial prosecution in the courtroom are not that familiar. With the appellate and certainly the U.S. Supreme Court process. I spent decades as president, the landmark Legal Foundation chairman of Landmark Legal Foundation. And much of what we did was at the appellate and Supreme Court level, the various filings and so forth. And you have to really be not paint by the numbers. You have to really be willing and able to make really strong, intelligent, substantive cases to try and win them under difficult circumstances.
Segment 3
I was asked earlier to tape a short clip with Brett Baier based on what the Manhattan D.A. did and filing with Judge Mershon. And here’s how that went just a few minutes ago. Listen, I want to start as a constitutional lawyer. What do you do with this? Well, what you don’t do is keep it in the gulag. That is the New York courts. What you don’t do is just hope Mershon will come to his senses. That’s not what a good constitutional lawyer does. For the American people, we have what’s called the Supremacy clause in the Constitution. That means a district attorney and an acting state elected judge cannot interfere with the United States Constitution or federal law, or, for that matter, the functioning of the office of the presidency. Just imagine the mayhem and the chaos that would exist if we allowed 12 to 14000 district attorneys to do this. Number two, you look for federal jurisdiction, which we have. This whole case was built on a federal a phony federal campaign violation that breathed life into a state law, a misdemeanor that had died to create a felony. You have Hope Hicks, who was providing information to the court, to the jury, and that would be a violation of the recent Supreme Court ruling, the immunity case. So there’s three federal areas. And then and then the fourth area you have the DOJ opinions. In 1973 and 2000, they said an indictment hanging over the president. And you can substitute that with a sentencing hanging over the president or the right to appeal. Hanging over a president while he remains in office would damage the institution of the presidency virtually to the same extent as an actual conviction. Now, what do you do? What do you do as you look at Supreme Court precedent? The Supreme Court needs to step in. What happened in Bush versus Gore in 2000? The Bush lawyers said we have an out of control Florida Supreme Court. They’re allowing the counting and counting and counting of ballots until Gore wins. We need to put an end to this. So to me, President Trump’s lawyers, depending on what Marshon does, although I do it now, take this President Bush versus Gore, you have an overwhelming case of a violation of the federal constitution, federal law, and overwhelming case of a violation of a Supreme Court immunity ruling, an overwhelming case of a violation of the Department of Justice policy for a fifth century, and say to the Supreme Court court, you’re the only one who can help us here. Help our Constitution. We just had an election. Put this thing back in the box. Fix it before it’s applied to another president of the United States. And the court will either take it or it won’t. And I’m betting the court is sitting there chomping at the bit, waiting for somebody to come to its front door and say, Court, well, you fix this. Will you tell this person to cut it out and put this back in the box? That’s what I would do. Well, it’s very nice of Brett Baer to have me on. He didn’t edit it in the least. So you’ve heard me say that. And then you heard me say it. Their repetition in this regard is important because I feel like you’re getting a lot of information that is interesting and mostly political and policy advice from lawyers, but they’re not providing any legal solutions. And there are legal solutions. There are legal pathways to the United States Supreme Court. If the court decides, as the highest court in the land, that this isn’t worth considering. And I seriously doubt that under all the circumstances, I very much seriously doubt it. So a lot more here than Bush versus Gore, I can tell you that. Then that’s what they’ll decide. But otherwise Donald Trump’s in purgatory. And you can have that. He’s he’s bigger than Donald Trump. He’s the president of the United States. And even now, during the transition period, he’s a busy man. He has things to do. And this is totally without historical support, totally without constitutional support, legal support. There’s no precedent for any of what’s taking place here. And I feel like. You know, the litigators in this case really have an obligation not just to their client, but to the country to get this resolved and resolved now. That’s my view. Now, the other issue that’s coming up is the recess appointment. So I notice that some of our friends at National Review are all worked up about this passionately, almost emotionally unhinged, saying that Donald Trump is threatening liberty. Liberty. He’s threatening liberty with this idea of recess appointments. My God, we can’t have this. I’m not big as a matter of constitutional interpretation of policy on recess appointments. The problem is there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. And I’m not talking about since the beginning of our republic, I’m talking about over the last 25 or 30 years. They’re saying, you know, this provision was put in the Constitution, recess appointments because, you know, Washington’s presence in the United States, people had to travel from pretty far off to get to Washington, D.C., originally, Philadelphia. But who’s counting? But in any event, distant areas. And so he needed to populate his administration. So even though we have the the clause in the Constitution, advise and consent by the Senate, we also have the founders who get framers who gave us an out said, look, under certain circumstances you can have recess appointments. And those recess appointments don’t go on throughout the presidency. The recess appointments last as long as long as the term of the Congress, the House. So no more than two years recess appointment is no more than two years. So it’s not four years, the length of the presidency and so forth. It’s not like a natural confirmed position. Now that aside, Donald Trump, the first time around his first presidency, they slow walked his people. They blocked his people. They were trying to handicap him and his administration while they were plotting to impeach him, while they’re launching a criminal investigation. So this time around, he says, during the transition, look. Whoever is going to be the Republican leader in the Senate, you need to understand. Now I need to get my people through. And that includes potentially a recess appointment and their procedures for that. There’s procedures for that. Even the president himself can effectively dismiss Congress, and the period of days is ten days. So the Supreme Court has determined the Supreme Court has limited recess appointments to appoint, but it has not eliminated them. The only other way you can eliminate them is with a constitutional amendment. Well, we’re not going to get that. There’s not even a movement for a constitutional amendment. So George Bush had almost 200 recess appointments excuse me. Clinton had a slew of recess appointments. But, Mark, we’ve never recessed appoint cabinet members. The issue isn’t the position. The issue is whether it’s legal and constitutional. Not whether it’s the janitor or a Supreme Court justice. And by the way, under Dwight Eisenhower, there were three recess appointments of Supreme Court justices, and he later circled back and submitted them for confirmation. So it’s been used for a lot of reasons, political reasons, limited time reasons and to populate. Your cabinet. And so it’s not the end of liberty. Or separation of powers. Trump didn’t start this. Well, he’s going to take it further than anybody else. Let me explain. Let’s let’s have a little bit of context here, okay, folks. There’s two and a half million bureaucrats. In an infinite number of agencies. Departments. Offices. Divisions. Bureaus. 95% of the laws passed every single year are passed by the bureaucracy. Congress passes 100 to 150 laws a year maybe. But they’ve done something that Locke and Montesquieu, the two greatest philosophers, followed by the first, The Colonist during the revolutionary period, and Montesquieu, the the framers during the constitutional period. And he cited in the Federalist Papers, and that is that the legislature, they both said, cannot must not delegate its legislating authority to a person or another body because they will destroy representative government. You and I, we vote for members of Congress. We don’t vote for a GS 13 at the Department of Agriculture. We don’t even know who the G.S. 13 is. The Department of Agriculture making certain decisions is right. In fact, maybe our friends at National Review can show me where the bureaucracy is in the Constitution. It’s nowhere. Now, some bureaucracy was inevitable, but we’re not talking about some democracy bureaucracy. We’re talking about a massive lawmaking machine. That has no connection with the people and in fact has been moved from the Congress to the executive branch. Now, you talk about destroying separation of powers, representative government, small Republicanism. It stares us in the face every damn day. What kind of car you can drive, What kind of lawnmower are you going to have? On and on and on. When I wrote Plundering Deceit, as I recollect that over a. Ten year period, there were 1 million pages of regulations. They all have fines. They all have penalties, including prison sentences. So nobody really knows. The Heritage Foundation undertook to try and determine, well, how many regulations have criminal. Penalties attached to them. You know, they said at least 10,000, but we can’t figure it out. We’ve given up or exhausted. That’s how bad it is. So these guys are fighting over Cabinet secretaries. When Donald Trump’s trying to put in place a team of Cabinet secretaries and so forth. They’re trying not just to manage the bureaucracy, but trying to thin it out, hold it accountable, change what its its its objectives are and so forth and so on. It’s a big task. But they’re trying to cripple him right out of the box. You have individuals in the Senate since suddenly to one third of the Senate was up for election. Two thirds were not. And I’m watching this. And it’s interesting. Some of those two thirds of the leaders, including Republicans, in trying to support what Trump wants to do. Susan Collins, Lisa murkowski, the usual names. And so if you have a. Democrat Party all marching in line and a handful of Republicans. You’re going to block. Cabinet nominations. So what is the president supposed to do? Saying, look, I won in a landslide. I made these promises to the American people, the voters count on me. I’ve got to deliver to the voters. So I’ll give it to six members of the Senate or whatever the number is. So he fights back. This recess appointments clause. Wasn’t created by Donald Trump. The practice of using it not because of travel, but for many other reasons that wasn’t created by Donald Trump. It’s not unique to Donald Trump. But they’re trying to create that impression. Now he’s threatened to use it and he’s threatened to use it strongly. Which is the way Donald Trump negotiates. Like, if Naito doesn’t cough up the money, we’re going to withdraw from NATO’s. So they coughed up the money. But he may use it more strongly than other presidents. And then one of the writers or two of them have written, We ought to get rid of this altogether. It’s arcane, standard issue of travel anymore. It’s been abused. Let’s think that through for one minute. One minute. Let’s think of a Senate controlled by Democrats and Chuck Schumer. Let’s think of a president like Donald Trump. And the recess appointments clause has been somehow ripped out of the Constitution. This guy’s dream. What would happen? The same Schumer who wants to eliminate the filibuster rule, the same Schumer, who wants to pack the court by adding justices to the court. The same. Schumer wants to eliminate eliminate the Electoral College. The same. Schumer wants to nationalize state election laws. And I could go on and on and on. What do you think he’d do? He’d block almost all of the nominees that a President Trump or a President Reagan or a president to Sanders, however you want to put it, would promote. Try to cripple the presidency. That’s what he would do. That’s what they tried to do with impeachment twice. And the criminal investigations. They tried to cripple Trump. And then they tried to throw him in prison. They started trying to throw him in prison in New York. So when you start screwing around with the Constitution this way, rather than understand that in some parts of the Constitution, there’s a little bit of ambiguity that we have now. Traditions and customs and practices that have developed with respect to the recess appointment clause. You need to take these things into consideration if you’re a serious person. Now, Justice Scalia. In the 2014 decision of the Supreme Court was vehement about this. And I take. No. I take no second steps on Justice Scalia. My hero. Now. He said no. That this recess clause is a big problem. There shouldn’t be these recess appointments, but it’s the same Justice Scalia that signed on to the Chevron decision. They gave this enormous power, or at least confirmed enormous power on this massive bureaucracy for which there’s no constitutional basis whatsoever. And they limited review of any kind, including judicial review, that basically the decision of the bureaucracy is final from intensive purposes. Now, the court had the guts, I think it was six members, the guts in this last term to say, no, that’s not correct. They struck down the Chevron decision. They reversed it, in effect and provided for review, especially judicial review. And Scalia had said that his. Willingness to go along with the majority in his contributing opinion in that case was the biggest mistake. He remained on the bench. So we’re all human. But the point is they created this massive bureaucracy. The court under Chevron sanctified it, and now we’re fighting over the cabinet members. The Cabinet members. The Democrats want the bureaucracy to continue on to even be more ubiquitous, more powerful, more bureaucrats, more money. Because then elections don’t matter. Representative government doesn’t matter. Centralized, iron fisted government with red tape and endless control. That’s why they don’t want Trump to get the nominees that he wants, not because they’re good government types, not because they earnestly oppose Gates or or Hegseth or whomever it is because they’re bomb throwers. And we ought not play into that. It’s not too much to say that if a president wants his team air, get his team. Yes. Yes, I understand the role that the center plays, but I also understand the power of the president to push back. Or he could be completely denuded. I’ll be right back.
Segment 4
And next hour, I hope you’ll. Well, I know you’ll be here soon on the Ed train we may spend the whole hour on. And I’m going to show you how appearances aren’t always what they really are. Things seem a certain way, but they’re not. And I’m going to give an example of this in the Commonwealth of Virginia. When it comes to the state attorney general’s office. A man that’s received a lot of accolades from conservatives and Republicans. But things go on. The press doesn’t really report. Things that I think would alarm you. But I want you to know about it all over the country, not just in Virginia, all over the country on how these things work. So it’s going to take a little while to develop. You’re not going to hear this anywhere else. I think it’s illustrative is why it’s important. So illustrative, I can go down the checklist of all the things going on today and you’ve heard about, but I try to bring information to you that’s unique and yet has a purpose. Or if it’s something you’ve already heard about my take on it, which might be different than the story I’m going to tell you next hour is involved, but I think you’re going to find it extremely concerning.