- But there are people who are not fans of Trump and not allies of Trump, who I think are responsibly raising the question to concern what is the level of seriousness of a crime on the part of a former president that justifies bringing it?

And they're really great arguments and I struggle with this.

[upbeat music] - Well, and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and on today's episode we are talking about it, it that thing that everyone has been talking about, that thing that sucks all the oxygen out of the room and promises to do so for at least the next year, not longer.

Former president has been indicted and the country has never seen anything like it.

The most politically corrosive criminal trial in history is poised to unfold while the defendant runs for president.

It's bigger than OJ.

It's huge.

What could possibly go wrong?

Today, I'm asking former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara.

Don't worry.

I've also got, you're a puppet regime.

- Sometimes it's nice to get a little bit of isolation from your own isolation, if you know what I mean.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis.

And by... - For the first time in history, a US president has been arrested.

Shocking but not unexpected.

He received plenty of warnings as they say, no man is above the law.

The crime racing his horses and buggy down a residential Washington DC Street.

In 1872, a 150 before former President Trump walked into a Manhattan courthouse and surrendered to law enforcement then President Ulysses S. Grant had a need for speed.

The residents of 13th Street had been complaining for weeks about gangs of horse and buggy drivers terrorizing their neighborhoods, gangs that somehow included the presidents of the United States.

And just the previous day, police officer William West had let Grant off with a warning.

The arrest does not appear to have been reported at the time.

But in 1908, the Sunday Star of Washington published an interview with then retired Officer West.

"Do you think officer, that I was violating the speed laws?"

West remembers the president asking, "I do.

Mr. President West."

Replied.

Grant's face had quote "the look of a school boy who had been caught in a guilty act by his teacher."

The president then offered West, a black man and a fellow civil war veteran, a ride back to the police station in his own private carriage, kind of cool, swapping war stories along the way.

Grant was released after putting up $20 in bail.

That's roughly 500 bucks today.

And in the weeks following the incident, he defended the officer's action complimenting West on his fearlessness in making arrests.

Other US presidents have faced criminal investigation, most notably presidents Nixon and Clinton.

But not since Grant has a commander-in-chief been arrested.

Now in truth, the Trump and Grant incidents could not be more different as plenty a cable news pundit has pointed out Trump's indictment is cast the country into uncharted legal waters.

How will an already deeply divided nation withstand such a polarizing trial with the defendant at the same time running again for president?

It remains to be seen if New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg has the goods to win a conviction or if his indictments will even be the last the Trump faces.

But at least we can take heart in knowing that in one very specific way, history will not repeat itself.

President Trump doesn't go anywhere without a chauffeur.

Here to tackle those weedy legal questions and much, much more is former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara.

Preet Bharara.

It's so good to see you as always.

- Good to be back, sir.

- Thank you.

So I mean we want to get to all the Trump stuff, but I don't want to start with it.

I wanted to ask you first about Clarence Thomas.

Some people are saying he should resign.

Not many to be fair, but it's this ProPublica investigation.

Benefits, gifts, large gifts that he took for 20 some years from some billionaire and did not disclose.

Do we care?

- I think we care.

I think there are varying levels of concern depending on how seriously you view the optics of it and how seriously you view the appearance of a conflict.

I don't think that he's violated necessarily any specific rule.

It may not look good.

It may look terrible and I'll explain all the reasons why it looks terrible and it shouldn't have been done in the first place, but maybe not an actual statutory violation, ethical violation.

Because there are rules that say that govern all judges that say gifts of a certain amount have to be disclosed or you shouldn't take them and that includes personal hospitalities.

It's not a good look for the judiciary.

It's not a good look for the Supreme Court.

It's not a good look for Clarence Thomas in particular because this is the second or third time in recent months that he's been surrounded by controversy.

The most recent time... - With his wife.

- Ginni Thomas.

- Yeah.

- His wife has been involved in and been associated with people who are involved in January 6th.

A lot of people have advocated for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from decisions relating to the investigation of January 6th.

He hasn't done that.

And at a time when I think confidence and trust in the integrity of the court is low, it's not a great thing to have done.

Who by the way, there's no evidence that Clarence Thomas voted in any particular way because of his association of friendship with this conservative billionaire.

People might also argue in defense of Clarence Thomas, I'm not defending him, but people have argued that Clarence Thomas is a died in the wool conservative.

He doesn't need convincing of conservative doctrine.

He already is one.

But when you know other members of the public, including members of Congress, including most state officials when I was in the Justice Department, I couldn't take so much as a sandwich from somebody.

In those circumstances, when you have the nine most powerful justices in the world or in the country, I'm sorry, to take what is the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in accommodations and travel from somebody who might have interests that are implicated, generally speaking by the court, it's not great.

- Now, he said that he had received advice from fellow justices as well as others that basically told him, hey, I don't need to disclose this.

You find that credible, given what you said about the ethics.

- He could have just disclosed it.

You can make the argument that I wasn't prohibited from doing it.

So then why not disclose it?

He didn't disclose it probably because it didn't look good because it's a terrible look.

- Okay, let's move on to a second topic, which is this leak, intelligence leak that we've seen very significant involving US understandings of Ukrainian capabilities, Russian capabilities, other countries around the world.

The DOJ is now investigating.

What does it mean for the DOJ to investigate a leak like this?

Do we usually have confidence that means that something will be turned up in relatively short order or not at all?

- It depends.

Certain kinds of leak investigations are easier than other kinds of leak investigations.

Leak investigations that involve at their core, the free press are very difficult to investigate.

So if you have a leak that's in the Washington Post, whether or not it's sensitive national security information or the New York Times, that's very difficult to investigate and to put to bed in part because you can't really subpoena the sources.

You can't subpoena the newspaper, the writers of the article who got the leaked information about who gave them the information, we saw this with respect to the leak.

I know it's a totally different circumstance, but we were talking about the Supreme Court a second ago and with respect to the leak of the Dobbs opinion to Politico I think it was.

- Which was several weeks before it was going to come out, it really changed the politics of the case at that point.

- Right, and it got people charged up and it was a violation of decorum in the court and all sorts of other things.

- And we don't know where it comes from still, right?

- No, but people have asked me the question, why don't I just ask the reporter?

Because the reporter knew because the reporter got it from somewhere.

Unless it was left in a brown paper bag outside the door, I don't think that's what happened.

That's the one thing you can't do because we have decided as a matter of policy and some amount of law to support this, that we don't go after reporter's sources.

And depending on the circumstances, even in national security circumstances, it might be difficult to do that.

Leaks are done, generally speaking pretty cleverly.

But sometimes you find out who leaked things.

We've had national security breaches before.

There are people who are still evading the long arm of American justice who leaked information.

You can guess who I'm talking about.

So I don't know.

It's too early to tell.

- So, okay, let's move on to the topic that is gathering so much media attention right now, which is the Trump indictments.

Trump felonies for 34 felony charges.

Before we talk specifically about the case, let me ask you, is the media, are we covering this too much?

This is the first time I'm covering it, but is that too much?

- No, it's not too much because I'm here.

- Okay, good.

But generally speaking, too much coverage.

- I don't know.

It's a huge thing.

It's a significant thing.

- Is it bigger than OJ?

- Yeah, it's bigger than OJ.

- For you?

- It's bigger than OJ because it is implications for how we view our democracy.

It has implications for how we think about the rule of law.

It has implications for what we think is the standard of justice for everyone and whether or not there's a double standard.

It has implications for the political race in 2024.

It has so many implications.

It is utterly unprecedented.

And so it's not surprising that every outlet in the country wants to cover it.

And by the way, it might be just step one.

Right?

- Right.

Well I'm asking you in part because of this case, we can talk about step two, step three, but this case specifically, the Bragg case.

- Well, the first case is always going to get a lot of attention because it's the first one.

- But it's the least important, right?

Isn't it?

- I don't know, if it's the least important one.

I think there's an argument to be made of the four things that Trump has criminal exposure on that we know about and that are ongoing.

It's the least serious conduct because it doesn't go like some of the other matters do to the core of American democracy or to national security classification and sensitivity.

So yeah, I think that's not an unfair thing to say.

- Now you know Alvin Bragg.

- I do.

- Who was brought this case, there are a lot of people out there including some Democrats that are saying that this is politicized.

What these charges were not brought under a previous prosecutor.

Do talk a little bit about what you think is motivating Bragg in this case.

- I think what's motivating Bragg in this case who used to work for me and in full disclosure I endorsed him in his race for Manhattan DA.

I haven't agreed with everything he's done.

He's done some things on the local crime side, street crime side that I think he's been criticized for and he's answered some of that.

I think he's made the decision based on the facts and the law.

This is a person who was handed another case against Donald Trump relating to inflated assets or deflated assets depending on what the Trump organization was trying to do.

Got so much criticism for it that someone, two people resigned from his office who are also well-known criminal defense attorneys, but also former prosecutors, angry at Alvin Bragg for not pursuing a particular case against Trump.

Now you can disagree with that.

We won't know because we don't know the facts.

We weren't in the grand jury.

But the fact that he had a case like that handed to him by well-respected prosecutors who were really angry that he didn't pursue it, that's not the kind of person who's grasping at straws and jumping at the first opportunity to charge the former President of the United States.

That to me shows that he looked carefully deliberated and again, we can disagree.

Maybe there's a case that should have been brought, maybe this one shouldn't be brought.

We'll able to figure that out in the fullness of time.

So I give him the benefit of the doubt because of that track record and experience and here he saw on another case and reasonable people can differ.

These are judgment calls that need to be made.

Is it the most serious crime in the history of the world?

No, it's an E felony 34 E felonies, which is the lowest level of felony.

- E felony?

- It's the lowest level of felony in the world.

- That is a classification of felony.

- Classification of a felony.

It doesn't excellent, it doesn't mean electric.

But at the same time, what I keep coming back to is when the supporters of Trump say again and again from their podiums that nobody would ever be prosecuted for something like this.

It's too trivial.

I have two responses.

One falsification of business records stepped up to a felony.

It's charged in New York state all the time.

And this particular conduct that's at the core of the question with respect to Donald Trump.

In the Manhattan DA's case has been charged successfully against another actual human being who you may have heard of Michael Cohen.

So it's not like people who've engaged in civil conduct.

- Donald Trump's former attorney.

- Former attorney.

Pled guilty to it in the southern district of New York, my former office.

Went to prison, in part for this, the judge thought it was a crime and accepted the guilty plea.

So you have somebody who definitionally is less culpable and responsible for this very conduct.

I think you can make a powerful argument that it's good and right and proper to charge the more culpable person Donald Trump.

But I think people are raising in good faith.

Not everyone, but there are people who are not fans of Trump and not allies of Trump who I think are responsibly raising the question to concern what is the level of seriousness of a crime on the part of a former president that justifies bringing it.

And they're really great arguments and I struggle with this.

On the one hand we say no one is above the law, and if something is indictable and prosecutable and you can convict on it as happened with Michael Cohen, justice requires in this American system one standard, not two standards.

You have to hold this other person accountable even if it's a former President of the United States.

On the other hand, Prudential Democratic concerns suggest, well how does it look when one administration is going after the leader of the prior administration?

No matter how justifiable it is, no matter how much evidence you have, if it's not that serious, the argument is how does it look to other countries?

How does it look to future generations?

Does it look like it's political?

- How does it look to future presidents?

- How does it look to future presidents?

I get that.

And by the way, I think here there's a good faith argument for supporting the prosecution and there's a good faith argument for being concerned about it given the level of crime here.

- As you said before, this is potentially only the first step.

There are lots of, well several, three other sort of potential charges that are out there.

We've got the issues of classified documents being mishandled.

We've got the issues of his involvement around January 6th and then we have the issue around the Georgian elections on with the call.

If you had to talk about those three, rank them, prioritize them in terms of severity which you think mattered the most, could you do that for me quickly?

- There's a disconnect a little bit between the likelihood of a case being brought and the seriousness of the conduct being investigated.

The most serious conduct being investigated I think without question is the January 6th matter.

It goes to the heart of the peaceful transfer of power.

It has as its essence, anti-democratic forces, authoritarian and propagandistic, the big lie origins.

That's what was driving it.

I think it shook the capital to its foundation.

- And a lot of people that ended up going to jail as a consequence of it.

- Yeah and people died.

- People died, yeah.

- That's a big deal.

That's something that's never happened in our country before.

That's something we can't count.

That's something if we can hold people responsible for it, not just the people who breach the capitol, but people like the former President of the United States, that is far and away the most serious.

I think the argument is likely that what's happening in Georgia, it's being investigated in Georgia, is part of the January 6th thing.

It's part of the big lie.

It's part of trying to undo democratic process and steal an election, which is very, very important and a lot of gravity attached to it.

The reason I'm hesitating is on the classified documents.

I don't think that he's going to be charged with mishandling of classified documents.

A tough charge to bring.

- A lot of other people do it.

- Well, it depends on what level of intent.

I think the greatest likelihood is based on reporting and what we know publicly about the conduct of the president and his lawyers and others is obstruction of justice.

And obstruction of justice I think is a very serious crime, but probably is not as serious as shaking the foundations of our principle of peaceful transfer of power.

But it's not unserious.

In all three of them as we say it probably more serious in terms of the nature of the conduct than falsification of business.

- So whether or not he's convicted of that, of course we've also had an impeachment process about that very issue and he was impeached, an unprecedented second impeachment for sitting president.

He was not convicted.

That is the process that an executive is meant to go through.

- I know I teach at NYU Law school and I offer this as a paper topic to students in the last couple of years discuss the propriety of the Department of Justice investigating Trump and potentially charging him for conduct that was already explored by the Congress.

The argument in favor of not pursuing it by the Department of Justice is as you put in the stem of your question, this is how our system handles it.

When you've got the head of the executive branch and you have the legislative branch separate but equal branches of government are at an impasse, you handle it through the political process.

Double jeopardy doesn't attach because it's not the same forum, it's not the same court, it's not the same process.

During the course of both Impeachments, I would point out to people that even though they called it a trial, most of the hallmarks of an actual trial or fair trial are not present.

You don't have people, the jurors are also the ones who are witnesses in connection with the January 6th event.

We tell jurors to keep an open mind.

They're not allowed to read press about the case in an actual criminal trial in this country.

Here, the jurors who are senators are not only watching the news, they're making news, they're previewing their, not in every instance, but they're previewing what they think about the case.

There's no real judge.

The rules of evidence don't apply.

Hearsay is admissible, all sorts of things.

- But it still is the process.

- It's the process.

The Justice Department has a separate process and the Constitution also makes clear that impeachment or no, a President of the United States is subject to criminal sanction still after he leaves office.

- As this plays out and these cases are going to take a while and Trump is running for the nomination, he is certainly the favorite at this point to get the nomination.

Let's imagine he's found guilty of one or more of these charges.

He's not yet president.

What does that mean in your view, for his ability to pursue that run?

- Nothing.

He can be pending trial.

He can be charged, he can be convicted.

He can be in prison as far as I understand it, and still run for and win the presidency.

Historically, you might predict that if someone gets convicted of a crime, they would lose votes.

We not had a situation where someone was on the verge of being convicted of committing a crime.

This may be one of those two cases.

- It's less clear in this circumstance.

That's right.

- Look, and in other countries people have been convicted of crimes and come back and run for office.

- Do you think it's more likely given where the cases are right now, that they would actually play out in completion before the election or not?

- I don't think so.

I also think that not to step out of my lane for a second and think about politics, I also think it's in Trump's interest not to have had the trial.

- Keep playing out.

- To say this trial's hanging over my head.

They're trying to persecute me because of my politics and on election day, a vote for me will send a signal that you can't intimidate me or some version of that because on the other hand, trying the case and getting convicted, the possibility of getting convicted, I think the likelihood is he would be convicted, I think is a sure thing.

It's a triable case I think.

On the eve of the election, who knows how that plays out.

Maybe it makes him more of a martyr, maybe not.

But I think the scenario I mentioned a second ago of being convicted and being imprisoned and running for the presidency is not likely to arise in the situation with respect to the Manhattan DA's office case.

Because I don't think Trump is getting any jail time.

And I think people may not appreciate that given the level of the felony.

- So why do you think Trump would not get jail time in this case?

- The arguments that someone of his age with his lack of criminal record and based on the seriousness of the conduct, would be unlikely to get a jail sentence.

And by the way, this is all, I'm not sure this is a factor in, it's all complicated by the fact that we say everyone is equal and no one is above the law.

But we do treat former presidents differently.

And one way we treat them differently is we give them Secret Service details for the rest of their life because we feel that they're important assets of the country, if you will, and we protect them.

So the idea that in a case of this level of seriousness, given all the other circumstances I mentioned and a Secret Service issue in the safety of a former president, I find it hard to believe a judge would sentence him to prison.

- Just so everyone that's paying attention gets what we're saying here.

You said before that this is going to get vastly more attention than OJ and you think deservedly so, it's also going to play out almost certainly over the course of the election.

So we're going to be in 2024 voting for the presidency and assuming Trump gets the nomination, all of this is going on real time when people are going to the ballot box.

- Yeah, look, I mean what's funny about this is nothing funny about this actually.

But the irony is, as we were saying earlier, when the shoe's on the other foot, people say something very different, they sing a different tune.

Donald Trump made it a feature of his campaign and his competition with Hillary Clinton.

- To say, lock her up.

- And to say someone who's under criminal investigation that if the FBI is investigating you, you're not fit for office.

And she was never even charged.

Donald Trump once said that if you plead the fifth, that means you're guilty.

He has pled the fifth in recent times in New York state.

So it's all new stuff.

We'll see how it goes.

- Thanks so much man.

- Thanks, Ian.

- And now to puppet regime where former President Trump is looking for legal advice wherever he can get it.

Roll that tape.

[birds chirping] - What's up guys?

It's your boy Vladimir Putin here.

Just checking in from Undisclosed Forest.

Sometimes it's nice to get a little bit of isolation from your own isolation, if you know what I mean.

Self-care is so important.

What the?

Hello?

- Vladimir?

Hello.

- Donald.

Blessed from Pest.

Tell me what's up.

Why are you calling?

- Look, I have a big huge problem.

Okay.

I'm on trial.

Charges like actual charges, criminal ones.

- Ah, you are so bad at this, Donald.

First you screw up reelection.

Now this.

- But it's totally bogus stuff, Vladimir.

A hit job by the president.

Fake.

They want to jail me forever.

- Please.

Where do you think you are?

Russia.

Hi everybody, we have Donald Navalny on line two over here.

Spare me.

Look, this trial is actually a great thing for you.

I couldn't have rigged it any better myself.

- You couldn't?

- I mean, I probably could, but look anyway, look on bright side, Donald always on bright side.

Glass of poison is always half full.

This trial will make all of America focus on one thing that you love most, you.

- Nah, I know, but man, it doesn't have the same vibes anymore.

I want to go back to like 2017.

I want to fall asleep in mid-tweet covered in hamburger rappers and flowers from Maggie Haberman.

I want that Covfefe energy again.

You know what I mean?

- Pull yourself together.

If you can't do this, who can?

Donald Jr?

[both laugh] - [Voiceover] Puppet Regime.

- That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, you're just kind of interested in what other indictments we might dream up to charge a former president or even a sitting president.

You never know.

Want to check us out, gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis and by...