'BradCast' 7/20/2026 (Encore: John Roberts and Corrupt Republican SCOTUS Majority Play the Long Game; with former DOJ official Lisa Graves)

This is Bradcast producer Desi Doyan. We're off today. Today's broadcast was originally recorded on July 8, 26. The Supreme Court has wrapped up one of its most consequential terms in decades, leaving the president with even more power and putting Congress in what appears to be the backseat. And now we're asking the question, are there any checks and balances left? Yes, there is me, there is you, and there's a couple hundred million just like us. Well, I don't know why I came here tonight. That's why. I got the feeling of something right. No one day. The work is on it. I'm so scared. From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast, as heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. and on dozens of other excellent affiliate stations over both the public airwaves and the internets around the country and the world. Blanketing, planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all-around swell fellow. Says Me from bradblog.com. Thank you very much for joining us for another thrilling edition of the broadcast. All right. Before we get to our guest now standing by, Desi Doyen, am I correct about that? A very, very few quick headlines for the moment as we go to air today. Donald Trump has declared the ceasefire and I guess his so-called Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. such that either of them actually existed in the first place to be, quote, over, describing the Iranian leadership that his administration was supposedly negotiating with to be, quote, scum. That'll always be helpful during a negotiation. After that, of course, oil futures prices began immediately to climb again following that so you can expect your gas prices to rise all over again. Thanks to Trump's... ill-considered, ridiculously considered, perhaps not even considered at all, choice of going to war with Iran, which is now an ongoing war, as we have been trying to explain to you for months. And now we are seeing another back-and-forth of attacks over the past 24 hours or so between both the U.S. and Iran. Democrats are still awaiting scandal-plagued main U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner's decision. to drop out of the Senate race, the U.S. Senate race, before July 13, so that they can begin the process of somehow replacing him by the July 27 state statutory deadline in their hopes of finally unseating five-term Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins. Word on the future of his campaign is reportedly...

Set to come as early as Wednesday evening, but we will see if it happens while we're on air, we will let you know. Former Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan, who helped an immigrant appearing at her court for an unrelated reason, avoid federal ICE authorities who had come to the court to detain him. Well, she was, as you know, arrested several months ago. She was found guilty. She was sentenced on Wednesday to a fine. of $5,000 but given no jail time by a federal judge. A federal court has ordered Donald Trump to release the $5 million, well, plus, including interest, that he owes writer E. Gene Carroll, who a jury found had been sexually abused by Donald Trump in what Carol has described as a rape. That, after Trump took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear Trump's appeal a week or so ago, leaving him on the hook for the jury verdict, though Trump is now appealing the Supreme Court's decision to not hear the case. Yes, apparently you can ask the Supreme Court to reconsider. their ruling, which he is doing. But the lower court has now apparently ordered the money to be paid to Carol right now forthwith a ruling which I would expect. Yes, Trump would appeal as well. And speaking of the Supreme Court, we were on a break last week when the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court majority came in with its final rulings of the 2025-2020s term before they enjoy their three month vacation. Must be nice. While we were not on air last week, I did cover a few of those final decisions on the blog, on Bradblog.com, but I want to catch up on them quickly here with you on air and ask my guest about a few of the most noteworthy and frankly... What we should take away from the big picture here of where the John Roberts Court has gone, where they may still be going, and what needs to be done to reform the corrupted activist, Republican majority on the court. Among the noteworthy term-ending decisions from the court, there were... A few losses for Donald Trump, vanishingly few, and mostly wins for the far right, at least as I see them, continuing the pattern that we have seen in recent years since Republicans packed the court with a six to three majority. In breaking with about 100 years of precedent, the radical right-wingers in the court held in a partisan 6 to 3 ruling that the president of the United States may remove commissioners of independent executive agencies at will. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, though it cannot, for reasons that do not remain completely clear, at least to me.

Remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board, despite its virtually identical structure to commissions like the FTC, the SEC, the SEC, the Consumer Financial Trade Commission, and others. The court's right-wingers ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted within its statutory authority when it terminated temporary protected status or TPS for hundreds of thousands of Haitian. immigrants in the U.S., many of them here for years, rejecting claims that the termination of TPS status unconstitutionally and unlawfully discriminated against them, even though as Justice Sotomayor cited in dissent, it clearly was discriminatory. In a five to four victory, though, a disturbingly narrow one for voting rights, the court upheld a Mississippi law or rule that allows mail ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be tallied, even if they arrive during a grace period after Election Day. Dozens of states are breathing a sigh of relief today for millions of voters, even if the five to four ruling... With Amy Coney Barrett and Chief John Roberts joining all three of the court's Democratic-nominated justices in protecting voting rights, even though that was a remarkably disturbingly narrow ruling, why that was only a five-before ruling is itself alarming. At the same time, however, the court expanded even more on their horrible rulings on campaign finance limits since at least 2010's Citizens United ruling. by this year allowing coordination between candidates and political parties, along with removing limits on how much money that parties can give directly to candidates. Yes, further reshaping federal campaign finance rules with virtually no limits at all left at this point, it seems to me. In another partisan 6 to 3 ruling, the corrupted right-wing radicals allowed policies limiting girls and women's sports teams to biological females allowing states and schools to exclude transgender girls from female teams, even if it's unclear how this cruel ruling might be enforced in which little girls will be scarred for life in the process. And in a loss for Donald Trump, but a win for America, Americans, and the U.S. Constitution itself. Even if three of the court's right-winger, Thomas Samuel Alito and Gorsuch dissented, constitutional birthright citizenship will continue to mean what it says it means in the Constitution that if you are born here, even if your parents were not citizens at the time, yes, you are a U.S. citizen, period. End of story.

At least for now. And while there were a few patches of good news in those end-of-term opinions, let's not forget that just weeks earlier, the very same corrupted court allowed states across the old Confederate South to completely rewrite their congressional districts, some while in the middle of primary elections. To erase majority minority voting districts established under the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause and the Landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has now officially... With this decision been all but completely gutted by this corrupted high court in what has been a decades-long effort led by its chief justice, John Roberts. Joining us now for some thoughts on what all of this means, both now and moving forward, hopefully toward reform of the corrupted court in the years ahead, and even how... All of this might affect this year's critical midterm elections, just 118 days away now, but who's counting as we go to air? It's our old friend Lisa Graves, who literally wrote the book on John Roberts. Lisa Graves is the executive director of TrueNorthresearch.org and has led the way on many breakthrough investigations into the corruption of our electoral system, our system of justice. an American democracy itself. She's also a former deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she served during both Democratic and Republican presidents, served as a former chief counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate, and as former deputy chief for the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. court system. She's now the author of the new book, Without Precedent. How Chief John Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismantled our rights. Oh, Lisa Graves, welcome back to the broadcast. Brad, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm glad to be back. Always a delight to have you here. I've got so much I want to ask you about regarding the corrupted John Roberts Court and what these decisions may portend for it and what may be done about all of it down the road. But before we get into some of those broader questions, let me start by asking first about the actual substance of any of the specific decisions that I sort of quickly summarize there or any others that were especially disturbing or. noteworthy or surprising in some way this year for you? Well, you did obviously, as usual, a really accurate, very quick description of the rulings this year. I guess I would just draw the lens back to say what we've seen is this sort of these two bookends where

was the person who was learning at the knee of Bill Rehnquist, one of the most racist justices in the modern era, someone who tried to get his, the justice he clerk for Robert Jackson to dissent in Brown versus Board of Education, someone who spent his time in Arizona before he came to Washington, literally photographing black voters at the polls in... Bethune out in one of the black neighborhoods in Phoenix. And what we had was a Rehnquist joining an opinion in the Mobile case right before John Roberts began to clerk for him. And that opinion was rebuked by Congress. As John Roberts was working for Bill Rehnquist, Congress was busy trying to undo a decision that Rehnquist joined in that said that the courts could not look at the effects. of changes in voting maps, for example, how they would affect black voters. And so then what happened was Bill Rehnquist called the Justice Department when Reagan became president and said, hire my guy, hire John Roberts. And he was hired at the top of the Justice Department as a special assistant to the attorney general. And he was given the voting rights policy portfolio. His job was to try to block Congress from reauthorizing the voting rights act and in the process correcting and overturning that decision. And he spent hundreds of hours in that battle and he lost. Reagan signed those changes in the law. And then fast forward to this year in that Calais case, John Roberts gets his moment to impose by judicial fiat what he failed to accomplish as a young attorney. And I have to wonder what kind of person, what kind of person at the beginning of his career in his, you know, 20s is so devoted to attacking the Voting Rights Act. At that time, the Voting Rights Act was only about 15 or 16 years old. It was this enormously important landmark piece of legislation still, you know, is one of the most important piece of legislation, I think, ever passed to make our democracy function. And he was devoted to attacking it. And then as a justice, he now has the chance through... Donald, you know, Donald Trump, the Republican Party's attacks on the Voting Rights Act to win what he could not win as a lawyer, but to do it as a judge. And if that's not bias, If that's not someone with an extreme agenda, I don't know what is. Yeah, and I don't know what they paid John Roberts back then to work at the Reagan White House. But boy, apparently they got a steal, whatever they, you know, paid him for because 50 years later, he got the job done, it seems to me. You've also, you've been a critical leader, Lisa Graves, in the fight against the Citizens United ruling and the money that has since flowed into campaigns from, you know, millionaires, billionaires, giant corporations. including groups like those founded and funded by the Koch brothers. What should we take away from the court's ruling last week in the National Republican Senatorial Committee versus FEC that essentially, if I understand it, does away with campaign finance limits on funding and coordination between political party committees and candidates?

Yeah, this is another part of the John Roberts Extreme Agenda. We saw it in the Citizens United decision back in 2010, which I call Billionaires United. I think you and I met shortly after that, Brad. Yeah. But that ruling has had a really detrimental effect on American democracy where billionaires have more influence than they've ever had. Obviously, there was a robber baron era with these sort of proto billionaires or, you know, multi-multimillionaires at the time. But what the Robbers Court has done, what John Roberts has done, is rewrite our First Amendment to basically say that money is speech and that Congress cannot limit how outside... special interest groups are spending money to influence our elections. And that was premised in part on this, I think. falsehood that it would not be a value to the candidates if they couldn't coordinate it. Obviously, it's actually an enormous value to have some big billionaire running attack ads against your opponent that you get to distance yourself from. But now some of those remaining limits are off. There was a long setting set of rules against the kind of coordination that set. that continue to have some limits on spending if the money was coordinated. And what John Roberts just did with the help of the other Republican appointees on the court is basically side with JD Vance and the billionaires backing him and the Republican Senate committee, senatorial committee, in striking down those congressional... limits on spending when the money is coordinated. So this is going to just inject more influence, more power by billionaires in our elections. And that's exactly what John Roberts wants. That's the agenda he's been rolling forward with these Republican appointees on the Supreme Court for years now. It's not what the American people want. Most Americans think there's too much money in politics, too much influence of billionaires. too many, you know, attack ads and negative ads. But John Roberts and his fellow appointees, that 6-3 majority, are determined to do what the Republican Party wants on elections in almost every issue, except for one this year, which you pointed out was the mail, the postal, you know, postmarks. for mail. And we can talk about that. Late arriving mail. Well, give them time, Lisa. I'm sure they'll get to that one, too. I mean, because they really do sort of, you know, go down the list over, you know, year after year after year, getting rid of more and more on this particular matter. I mean, what's the initial premise?

of, you know, some of the earlier rulings by the court that as long as, you know, political action committees did not directly coordinate their spending and their messaging with candidates that limits on funding were, therefore, unconstitutional because it was a violation of free speech after the court had ruled that money was somehow speech. So doesn't that ruling... last week sort of put the lie to that. I mean, if political parties and candidates can now combine both their funding and their political strategies, I mean, is there anything left at this point to prevent political action committees and corporate funders from doing the exact same thing? Well, it really is extraordinary what's happened. When you look at this area of law, this was an area of law that was governed by a Federal Corruption Act because it's fundamentally about anti-corruption, meaning the undue influence of individuals or corporations on who becomes an elected official and the policies that they take up. And so that was replaced in the late 1960s, early 1970s with the Federal Election Campaign Act. FECA, and that was assailed by very rich forces, including Charles Koch helping to underwrite the litigation that resulted in the Buckley versus Vallejo decision, where the Supreme Court back in the 70s struck down part of those election rules, left part of them in place. But the part they left in place is... why we have this term dark money, because what they left in place was this notion under congressional statutes that a person could not give more than X amount to a candidate or to a party in a particular cycle. And that was designed to limit the influence of super rich people on our democracy. And so they could only give a certain amount. to a particular candidate and cumulatively nowadays that limit is um you know probably in a hundred and thirty thousand dollar range so basically almost no american Almost no working American ever maxes out. They don't even know the limit exists because it's like you can give $2,500, for example, in a congressional cycle to a particular, you know, to this politician, you know, in this time frame and that. But basically the only people max out are super rich people. And that's, and then they have, and then the disclosure comes in. So if you give $2,500 or $500 or what have you to a candidate or a party, it's disclosed. What the Supreme Court did in that Citizens United decision was open up. this vast field of dark money. It had already been sort of coming in on the sides through what they called soft money. There was an effort by McCain and Feingold to block that off. But the Supreme Court struck that down and claimed in that citizen-outed decision that outside money...

could be spent without any disclosure, even though they claim that there was going to be some disclosure, there wasn't any disclosure. There's no requirement of disclosure. And it could be unlimited. And that's what happened in Citizen Genited. And now, as you point out, striking down this last sort of barrier on coordination basically means that the billionaires can give secretly. to these outside groups in ways and exceed in the amounts that would otherwise be limited and how much could be coordinated. Like, this is a, it is a sea change and one that is not good for America. And I will say, Brad, because I feel like I have to say this just for my conscience. Every time I mentioned this, that Citizens United decision was corrupt from the start. We now know. that Clarence Thomas, his wife, received $500,000 as that decision in Citizens United was pending. She received a half a million dollars from their benefactor, their billionaire benefactor, Harlan Crow. That was just weeks before the court issued its decision in Citizens United. It was so urgent that on New Year's Eve in 2009, she rushed in. an urgent request to get a corporation approved in Virginia so she could cash the check. Yeah. And then just, you know. Three weeks later, less than three weeks later, the court issued that ruling in Citizens United. It was a five to four ruling. Had Clarence Thomas recused himself for this obvious conflict in having his wife be poised to exploit the decision the court was about to issue, it would have been a four-four tie and those federal election rules would have held. But not just that. Clarence Thomas in that ruling issued a concurrence in which he claimed that disclosure. would chill free speech, meaning the spending of money, like the spending of money from his buddy, his billionaire buddy, to his wife. Right. And we know that now. We didn't know that then. And notwithstanding that sordid history, this John Roberts Court, with Clarence Thomas joining the opinion, continues to dismantle anti-corruption measures like these limits on coordination at the behest of the Republican Party that... that appointed this majority on this Supreme Court. And we should, I mean, I hate to like one up you here, but we should go back to, was it 93 when Thomas was, when was he? 91, 91 when he was nominated, a huge fight over his nomination. There was a whole bunch of money spent in D.C., you know, ads in favor of Clarence Thomas at the time by a group by the name of Citizens United. So all those years later, I mean, it seems to me he should have recused himself from that Citizens United ruling, however long, you know, 10 or 20 years later, just because he wouldn't have even been sitting there, arguably, had it not been for all of this money that was spent by this group who he's about to find in favor of in 2010. I mean. Yeah, I'm so glad you pointed that out because most people don't know that story. You know it well. I know very.

know very much. And the fact that that, like at that time in, in 1991, there were very few. groups that were, you know, running ads at the time. There'd been a bit of a battle, obviously, over Bork. People for the American Way had had a mail campaign. People were horrified by the things that Bork was saying, and they were raising, they raised like over a million dollars, 20 bucks at a time to take on Robert Bork. But by 1991, you had a group that wasn't like a big grassroots citizen group like people for the American Way. You had a group run by political operatives and they were spending money to back Clarence Thomas to him over the finish line. when he was so controversial, so young, and inexperienced for the job, but also obviously embroiled in the crisis over the testimony of Anita Hill that he had sexually harassed her and behaved in grossly in appropriate ways. And who was there to save him? Who was there to help him? It was Citizens United. Which, you know, it's just an unbelievable story. When I first came to understand that some years ago and connected those dots, it's kind of remarkable to mean. even now that it is not better known that, you know, that they were the ones who helped them get over that finish line back when, yeah, you're right, this was not done where they would, you know, ads on TV supporting this issue or this candidate or so forth. Now it's commonplace thanks to Clarence Thomas and, yes, Citizens United. A recent headline from your grave injustice newsletter, Lisa, quote, Unitary executive theory is a John Roberts power play to aggrandized presidential power at our expense. This made-up theory has expanded presidential power in ways that have already allowed Donald Trump to commandeer America and our economy. Can you just very quickly explain that made-up theory and then explain to me how that theory... sort of centralizing power within the White House and its executive, the president, how that works well for Republicans, but then doesn't work as well for some reason when Democrats are in the White House. Yes, this is a made-up theory. It appears nowhere in the Constitution. Those words do not appear anywhere. It's right next to presidential immunity in the Constitution. Apparently, you didn't read that. The invisible part of the Constitution. Yes, that part. Yeah. Yeah, so this was a theory that was really invented during the Regan administration. There are some precursor claims about this notion. But the frame of it was invented the Regan administration because they were trying to vastly expand.

presidential power. Ultimately, actually, that theory was disavowed by one of the top Reagan officials because it was determined to be really too extreme, but not extreme enough for John Roberts. We now know, and there's an early book about executive power from 2007, and I'm writing a piece about it right now, where John Roberts, when he was in the White House counsel's office after he got rewarded for his fight against the Voting Rights Act that he failed, got rewarded with a key post over at the White House Counsel's office as associate White House counsel. He spent hundreds of hours trying to expand presidential power from the White House counsel's office, including specifically... He spent time attacking the Humphreys' executor decision that was an issue in this case, the unanimous precedent from 1935 by the Supreme Court that held that Congress could create independent agencies that a president could not unilaterally fire the commissioners from those agencies without cause. And that opinion, that unanimous opinion was on the books for nearly 100 years. John Roberts back then, there are memos in which he talks about, you know, derisively, this quote, quote, independent agencies and talks about how, you know, basically they should go further, but there's not the appetite to do so. So here again, you have this young man in his 20s who's given this extraordinary amount of power. He's arrogant. What does he actually know about how the world works? He's a very young person in a lot of ways, but he is so... set in his ways that you know fast forward again here we are going from the mid 1980s into the year 2026 and there's John Roberts you know eagerly you know getting his chance yeah to strike down the precedent that he didn't like way back then and to wield the judicial power to do so. Now, what does that mean? If you look at the Federal Trade Commission, you know, a lot of people don't follow it very closely. It was a really and is a really important part of the regulatory world for America. And that's because it was created to deal with big, huge corporations that want to gobble each other up or merge and concentrate power in ways that hurt the interests of the American people. And so this is part of the longstanding commitment of the United States to having a so-called free market or a freer market by not having these sorts of combinations. And so what happened is this? In 2024, actually late 2023, the Heritage Foundation issued its Project 2025. And in it, it expressly calls for the president to attack this Humphrey's executor precedent. and assail it. So, of course, despite Donald Trump's claims that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, despite the evidence to the contrary, here he comes in. And immediately, after being sworn in his president, he begins to implement Project 2025, including attacking this idea of independent agencies. And so he fires Rebecca Slaughter, who was a commissioner on that FTC. The FTC has only five commissioners. By statute, three of them are...

appointed by the president, the president's party, and two are appointed by the not, or three, to be chosen by the not president's party. So in this instance, it would be three Republicans and two Democrats. Trump got two loyalists onto the FAA. FTC, two Republican loyalists, two Trump loyalists on. And then he fired the two Democratic commissioners. Right. So that since last March, the FTC has had only two loyalists to Donald Trump at the helm of the FTC. No Democrats are on that commission because of Donald Trump. And because the John Roberts court refused to allow the lower courts to reinstate her based on 90 years of legal precedent that every other president, 10 other presidents. basically, have followed. The John Roberts court said, no, no. We're going to just wait. We'll wait and decide this later and she won't be on it. Right. They knew in advance. Otherwise, they would have said, you know, well, we'll go back on. Stay on while the case is being heard, while it's being, you know, so we do less irreparable harm. But no, they knew what they were going to do. And that, I mean, we've seen that in all of their, I think, all of their shadow docket rulings haven't pretty much all of them ended up mirroring what they eventually do anyway. in the official ruling? Yeah, they're basically pre-reversing themselves while the lower courts are actually following the legal precedent of the Supreme Court and the Constitution and the statutes and the like. So in this instance, since last March, these two Trump loyalists have dismissed three dozen investigations into mergers and acquisitions. So basically they have turned away investigations that were already underway to assess. whether a particular merger would hurt the American people, would hurt the markets, etc. And this is happening in an environment in which Donald Trump is playing this game of choosing winners and losers based on whether they're loyal to him or they kiss his ring or their executives come to his inauguration or give money to his inaugural committee or secretly fund the ballroom debacle. or, you know, help support his business. What have you? This complete, extraordinary unfurling of corruption is happening, and some of it is specifically around mergers. FTC doesn't have the jurisdiction over all the mergers. FCC has some jurisdictions, some of the other agencies. And what we've seen Donald Trump do is put... his fist down using his loyalists, his cronies like Brendan Carr at the FCC to allow mergers to go forward of huge mega, you know, communications companies, huge media companies in ways that help him consolidate his power.

over those media companies like the destruction of CBS News and 60 Minutes at the behest of Donald Trump and the billionaire family that is helping to fund Donald Trump. All in violation of... Congress and the way they set these things up purposely to avoid this sort of thing. And the Supreme Court came in, you know, just last week and said, nope, it's up to the president who he wants to have there, who he wants to have on these commissions. Congress be damned. And but the question, and I got two that I want to hit here before I got to get to a break very quickly, Lisa, but isn't the court sort of painting itself into a corner? I mean, will they allow? A Democratic president at this point to come in and fire at this point now every single one of Donald Trump's federal employees if he or she wants to. Or well, the court suddenly discover yet another invisible provision somewhere in the Constitution, an exception to the unitary executive theory that only applies. every four years or when there's a Democrat in the in the White House? Well, you know, I mean, it, you know, on the one hand, if they were principled, then in theory those same principles would apply to a Democratic president. Right. But look what actually happened in the last four years. You had John Roberts intervene on one of the signature campaign promises of Joe Biden to give student loan debt relief. It was a modest, very modest program. It was capped in terms of the income and the amount. that could be forgiven. It was specifically under a statute that had been adopted to allow that sort of debt forgiveness in emergencies. We were in an emergency with COVID. People were out of work, et cetera. And this court came in with the invented... major questions doctrine and said, oh, no, no, this emergency doesn't count, only more type emergencies count. We're going to read the statute more narrowly than the words of the statute. And, oh, by the way, this is something that only Congress could do. Congress could do this, but not a president unilaterally. Same thing they did with Barack Obama and the Clean Power Plan, the CPP. That was a modest... a modest environmental effort to try to mitigate climate change by having the utilities get more energy from solar and wind to try to wean us off of major dependence on fossil fuels. And the Supreme Court came in and said, oh, wait, wait, wait, Congress. Congress actually has to do that. The president can't actually have this regulation about carbon. Because it's something we determined to be a major question. And they are the sole deciders of that. This one, oh, you can do anything you want. X, not that. That's a major question. Only Congress.

Yeah, and then, sorry, the internet. That's okay. So infuriating, it's so infuriating because look at almost everything Donald Trump has done. If these aren't major questions, can a president just literally tear down half of the White House? Can a president, you know, appoint some billionaire to some fake agency that doesn't even exist to fire people through the DOGE thing? Can a president just, you know, like at every turn, Trump is engaged in what would otherwise by any rational rational, principal thing, meet the major questions. Major questions. Congressional action. And this court has said, Go ahead. We're going to overturn lower courts to let you do it faster. Yep. Listen, like I said, I've got to get to a break here. And I want to come back and ask you about very quickly at this point about reform and about Todd Blanche. But Lisa Graves, I want to thank you for the headline of one of your recent pieces on your grave injustice site and newsletter. And I'll quote it, stop calling John Roberts. conservative while he recklessly wrecks our greatest historical gains. And I just want to say, thank you. I have been banging that drum for years now, though I would expand it to both, you know, the other right-wing justices on the court and their entirety of the Republican Party at this point and its followers who have not for years been anything close to something that you could call conservative. Yep. A word which used to have an act. meaning. These guys are far right radical extremist activist Republicans and there is nothing conservative about that. Yeah. Thank you for the thank you and thank you for all you've been doing to. Hit that bell. Seriously, Brad. All right. Stand by, Lisa. Can you stick around? A few more minutes to ask you a few more questions. All right. Stand by. Lisa Graves, of course, executive director of TrueNorthresearch.org, formerly of the DOJ and the U.S. Senate and the all everywhere else. She served everywhere. As I like to say, couldn't hold a job. Also the author of Without Precedent, how Chief Justice John Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismissal. our rights. We're going to talk about Supreme Court reform. And yes, Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's personal criminal attorney, now nominated to be the permanent U.S. Attorney General. I'm Brad Friedman, and you are listening to the Bradcast.

What the public hears on the public airwaves matters. At the broadcast, we do our best to bring you accurate news and analysis on the issues that actually matter, and we do it all independently without corporate or political influence. But we can't do it without you, now more than ever. Please help us stay on your public airwaves by going to bradblog.com slash donate to help keep us going. That's bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. Hey, this is Brad. You're listening to an encore presentation of the Bradcast. Yeah, we'll get to the Justice Department part of all of this in just a moment. Welcome back to the Bradcast, Bradfriedman from Bradblog.com. Lisa Graves is sticking with us. She is the author of the new book about John Roberts titled Without Precedent. She also happens to be a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the DOJ. She served as a former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate and a former deputy chief for the Article III Judges Division of the U.S. court system. All right, Lisa Graves, thanks for sticking around with us. I want to hit two sort of... key points here before we run out of time with all of the everything that that litany that we just ran through in the in in the first part of the show we probably could have done it you know two or three times as long at this point This entire court, well, for start, I describe them as the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court. A, am I too far out on a ledge there in doing so? And B, if they are in fact corrupted and fully packed by a corrupted Republican Party, as I see it, is there any choice at this point but to reform the court so that it can be uncorrupted and unpacked? somehow. And if so, how in brief, would you like to see that happen? Yes, this court has been captured. It is corrupted. It is using the judicial power to basically act like an arm of a political party and to advance an extreme agenda without the consent of the American people to roll back our rights and to basically invent whole new. rules, basically for Republicans to aggrandize the presidential power, to give Trump even more power. There's no doubt that we have to reform this court. This court is out of control. It will continue to dismantle our rights until we stop it, until we put appropriate checks and balances on this court. And there are a lot of reform ideas. I'm actually very hopeful about where we are because more and more people are waking up to how destructive this court is, how it's behaving in such a non-judicial manner, not behaving like a fair court. And we can see that in the voting rights rulings and more. And so I think we're going to have a really robust.

debate and conversation about reforms. Could it be term limits? Could it be expanding the court? Could it be some rule where, you know, presidents, each president gets a certain number of justices? Is there a mandatory retirement? Is there, are there methods that we should pursue to limit the jurisdiction of the court as Article III of the Constitution expressly allows Congress? So if a court is destroying voting rights, which the Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to protect, then Congress should protect those voting rights by limiting the power. of this court to dismantle them, to invent new doctrines in order to destroy this fundamental component of what it means to have a functioning and thriving democracy. There's obviously ethics reform that needs to happen. You can't have a situation where justices, Clarence Thomas or Scalia or others in the past are taking these trips funded by these billionaires, where Samuel Alito gets to hop on a private jet with Paul Singer, a guy that has a huge amount at stake before. the Supreme Court and just say, hey, we were going in the same direction to the same resort for a vacation together. And I didn't have to disclose it. You know, this is not okay. We have a court that has been behaving in corrupt ways and also is claiming that it doesn't have to abide by congressional ethics. rules, that the ethics rules in essence are not binding on it, that it can invent its own rules, including this ridiculous notion that Bill Rehnquist helped set forth, that there's a, quote, duty to sit, even if you have a conflict. That's not true. No one wants judges to sit in order to get a resolution where they have a conflict of interest. They should not sit when they have a conflict of interest, period. The idea that the, you know, the separation of powers. Congress cannot tell us what to do because that would be a separation of powers issue. Congress apparently cannot tell the executive branch what to do. Let the president fire anyone he wants despite what the statute says. But when it comes to what Congress does and when they pass a law for campaign finance, well, we, the Supreme Court, we can tell them exactly what they can and cannot do. Boy, they get them coming and go in there. No matter what the reform, and you went through a bunch of good ones, and I know there's a lot of discussion about that going on now, it is encouraging to see. But should Democratic voters be demanding that at least, you know, candidates commit to some sort of reform for the high court, even this year, even though, you know, no real reform can happen, I don't think, until at least, you know, 20. at the earliest, but isn't now the time to start holding these candidates accountable to say, yes, if you are in Congress, when it becomes possible, will you commit to reform of the Supreme Court?

Well, I'll just say I don't, I'm not involved in the electoral politics or the ads and the like, but I will say anyone out there who cares about voting rights, who cares about addressing climate change, who cares about equality, you know, this court reform has to be something you are asking your representatives or potential representatives about, insisting that they take a stand on the side of liberty, on the side of having a check. on the Supreme Court, no matter one's party or no party. This is a fundamental issue of freedom for the American people and the future of our democracy. We have to build this momentum to reform this out-of-control court. And because you have worn so many hats over the years, I only have more and more things to ask you about as you were both at the DOJ, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at Department of Justice, and on the Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate, those positions all sort of come together here for this question. about Todd Blanche. This is sort of a separate but related-ish matter, I think, to what we've been talking about. The 1,200 former DOJ employees, both Republican and Democratic now, submitted a letter this week asking senators to reject the nomination of Donald Trump's... Personal criminal defense attorney Todd Blanche to become the permanent new U.S. Attorney General, charging that he has, quote, utterly failed to abide by his oath to protect and defend the Constitution and rule of law as the deputy AG, where he is serving now, and I guess now he's also the acting Attorney General. Lisa Graves, did you happen to sign that letter of 1,200 former employees? I did, and proudly so, yes. Why? Because there's no way that Todd Blant should be confirmed to be the Attorney General of the United States. To have some, even in the role that he's in, he should have never been confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. He should not be acting. This is someone who, and I went back over his Senate questionnaire for the deputy position and also the questions for the record. And there are things that people don't realize about Todd Blanche besides what's obvious in his behavior in trying to protect Donald Trump from the Epstein files and his behavior in the sweet deal that Ghislaine Maxwell got for her move. Here's what people don't realize. One is not only was. was Todd Blanche, a criminal defense attorney for Donald Trump. He was, and in his own words, he served as counsel to President Trump in an advising capacity in various other civil investigations between April 2025 and February 2025. He has not enumerated what those other civil investigations and cases are. Meanwhile, we know this Justice Department has been deployed to attack E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won that verdict against Donald Trump.

and that there have been other civil suits, including Donald Trump's attack against the IRS for the leak that happened during his first term involving thousands of taxpayers, including him, where Todd Blanche settled that case by creating a slush fund that now supposedly has been taken down but is still operating in reality by paying out money. He's Jan Sixers. And also that gave Trump supposedly. you know, on a piece of paper signed by Todd Blanche himself gave Donald Trump immunity from any investigation or prosecution by the IRS or any other part of the federal government for, quote, forever, including himself, his companies and his family. So, like, first of all, Todd Blanche was not just his criminal defense attorney in the documents case or in the January 6th case. He was also defending him in civil investigations and cases. Second, What those documents reveal, what the QFR, the questions record reveal, is that here's what Todd Blanche said. He said that between that period of 23, April 2023 and February 2025, he said that he worked an average of 70 hours per week on matters for President Trump. So that's a 92-week period, which is like by math. over 6,000 hours for Trump. And then he walks into a job at the Justice Department where he's supposedly representing us. No, he is continuing to represent an act on behalf of Trump. And the last thing I'll say, and there's more to say about this, but let's just say, he won't say how much Trump paid him, right? The average billable rate for a partner at the firm he was previously at was between $1,200,000 an hour. But let's reduce it to like $1,000 an hour. You know, that would mean that Trump purportedly paid him millions and millions of dollars in that 92-week period, right? That would be the claim. And yet somehow, Todd Blanche bought a house near Mar-a-Lago. It was a $1 to $5 million house, and he took out a 30-year mortgage with an 8.5% interest rate. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was getting millions of dollars for working 70 hours a week for this big client, I don't know that I'd be taking out a high-interest rate 30-year mortgage on my home. But you know what happened next is that... Todd Blanche got rewarded with the, you know, penultimate job as Deputy Attorney General. So how much did Donald Trump pay him and how much is the office that he now holds a reward for the work that he was doing and he seems to continue to be doing? Not as acting attorney with a capital A, but is acting like Donald Trump's attorney with a lowercase A. I think he is. I think the Bar Association is going to have to look at this because I think he is still Donald Trump's lawyer, like legally and officially, on Donald Trump's personal cases in several of them. So that seems like it's going to have to be sorted out. I've got about 30 seconds. I've got to get out, Lisa. But you worked on the Senate nominations committee. What effect would you?

expect a letter like this to have from 1,200, you know, former DOJ officials, you know, working over, what is it, 14 different administrations, Democratic and Republican, et cetera. What effect would you expect a letter like that to have on the confirmation process at this point for Todd Blanche? Well, it was, it's unprecedented to see this kind of rebuke of someone being nominated for this post. I was on the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counselor nominations, we've never seen anything like this. And that's because we've never seen anything like this sort of conflict of interest that Todd Blanche represents. We cannot have the Senate confirm him. Right now, it looks like it's in the hands of Thom Tillis, in part, the outgoing senator from North Carolina. If you have friends in North Carolina, I think you should light up the phone. I think Thom Tillis may not feel like doing many favors for Donald Trump at this point. So maybe that's an encouraging sign to leave this with. Lisa Graves, executive director of TrueNorthresearch.org. You can find and read and subscribe to her newsletter at Graveinjustice. News. Her new book is without precedent how Chief John Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismantled our rights. And sadly, I suspect that story will continue. We will talk about it more in the future, hopefully soon with Lisa Graves. Lisa, always a delight speaking with you. I look forward to the next time. Oh, and also you can find her on... The Blue Skies at the Lisa Graves. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, everyone for listening. You bet. I could speak to Lisa for three hours. Can you tell? Six hours. I don't know if anybody would want to hear it. But I could do it. Yes, she knows so much. She is just such a font of knowledge and institutional memory that so many people don't know about. And she has worked everywhere. So she knows, you know, the DOJ, the classic underachiever. Exactly. And it's just, it is always gobsmacking to recognize how many decades the Republican Party and Chief Justice John Roberts have been working for decades on a very, very long-term strategy to dismantle the administrative. state to dismantle voting rights, anything that might reign in corporate power. Say what you want about the Republicans. They play the long game. Yes, and it will require the same to reform. Yes, it will. It requires an equally long-term strategy to reform. And I think people on the left, if they don't get what they want right away, they get angry and want to walk away. Understandably, that said, take a look at what happened on the right. Take a look at that long, you know, the way they go on for years, for decades until they get what they want. And now they got a whole lot of what they want. What are you going to do about it? All right, we got to get out. Thanks again to Lisa Graves. Thanks to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. Thanks to our producer, of course, Desi Doyen. If you missed any portion of today's program, download it anytime for free. Share it with folks you know, love, or hate at bradblog.com. While you're there, it's really easier than ever now to...

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