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--:-- John Bickley: Republicans have increasingly sounded the alarm over the use of the justice system against not just President Trump, but his associates, legal counsel, and even his supporters. From the handling of the J6 cases to federal and state-level lawsuits against Trump and his allies, conservatives say the era of politically driven lawfare is upending American principles and having a widespread chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association.
--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, we talk with Harmeet Dillon, a Republican Party official whose law firm has represented Trump, about the lawfare trend and how it can be reversed. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, June 23rd, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss the lawfare trend is Republican Party official and Dillon Law Group founder Harmeet Dillon.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- John Bickley: First, let's start at the top with Donald Trump, we've seen an unprecedented series of cases brought against a former president and the leading presidential candidate. Are the quote-unquote conspiracy theorists correct? Is this a concerted effort to take down a presidential candidate coordinated at the highest levels of his rival political party?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, I think they're absolutely traceable to coordinated leadership in the Democratic Party. And it's not just the White House, although it does include the White House, but it also includes congressional leaders. And you start with the January 6th committee investigation.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And that was used as, first of all, an extended commercial for Democrats producing primetime theater out of hauling citizens, including sort of prominent advisors and supporters of President Trump in front of Congress to answer staged questions as if it's a TV show. And it was produced like that. And some of the production included Nancy Pelosi's daughter being there at the January 6th proceedings, somehow coincidentally filming a documentary.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so you start with that. And then the evidence that was gathered in that whole process was ultimately used and parceled out to other prosecutors. So first of all, it was all handed off to the special counsel appointed through Merrick Garland, who is of course answerable to the president. And he's gone on to do two different prosecutions in two different courts.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And of course, that's also purposeful to give the maximum amount of effort to have multiple proceedings happening at the same time, tying up the president. His team is supporters and with lawfare in that regard. And then you have the two state criminal prosecutions and one civil prosecution in New York, both of which are on the criminal side incredibly flimsy.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And in one case, the Georgia prosecutor and her team are shown in logbooks as having made multiple visits to the White House. And in the Alvin Bragg prosecution in New York that just concluded, you have a very senior United States Department of Justice, number three official, Michael Colangelo, sort of lent out seconded to the DA office in New York to help them.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: So all of this points to coordination at the highest levels of the Democratic Party and points to using the events of now almost four years ago on January 6th as a way to block Republicans from getting elected and specifically to convict President Donald Trump and timing it all to have a crescendo during an election year.
--:-- John Bickley: From what you've seen in terms of the reception of the public about these lawsuits, the federal lawsuits, the conviction in New York, the case in Georgia, is this tactic working against Trump?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, it's working in one sense, which is it's given Democrats a talking point and the hope is to persuade non-committed voters and certainly Democrats and independents to stay away from him. And that's a talking point that is resonating with some people, I'm sure.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: At the same time, I think the overreaching aspect of it and the coordinated aspect of it and the multiple attempts to use extremely flimsy efforts to, quote unquote, get Trump has created a sympathy backlash, certainly amongst wavering Republicans.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And I would say from what we've seen, he has increased support in certain minority communities that he hasn't had before. I think people are viewing President Trump as being the unfair victim of persecution here.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so how those competing threads are going to add up at the election time, it remains to be seen.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, it's not just Trump who's faced what many say is legal persecution. A lot of people associated with him, including former attorneys, have been indicted. Can you speak to that? What have we seen in terms of lawyers targeted for what appears to be political or ideological reasons?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, this is unprecedented in the United States. What we have seen is multiple attorneys being prosecuted, first of all, indicted in some of these criminal cases involving the alternate electors.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And you've seen that in Wisconsin. You've seen it in Arizona with multiple electors. And you've seen it in Georgia. And in some cases, you have the same person getting indicted multiple times, including after they pled guilty.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: This has happened to Jenna Ellis, for example, Kenneth Chesborough as well. They've still, after pleading guilty in Georgia, gotten indicted in other courts.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so that's unprecedented. You've seen bar investigations being brought against lawyers for President Trump. Right. Again, we have not seen that in the past.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: In California. John Eastman has lost his bar license in the trial here, and in addition to being indicted in other courts. Sidney Powell has also been dragged into bar court, although she just survived a challenge in Texas.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Doesn't mean she'll survive it in other jurisdictions. So the purpose here is, first of all, yes, they painted with a broad brush in indicting people.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: But I think the intention of that effort is to scare lawyers away from representing President Trump. And every lawyer in the litigation world pretty much has partners and employees.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And pressure is brought to bear on these lawyers who want to support President Trump as a lawyer by saying you might get indicted, you might lose your license, you might lose your livelihood if you do this.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so the easiest thing for a lawyer to do in that circumstance is to decline the representations. You know, it's not worth it for most people.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so that is not something we've seen in prior years. I mean we had some very shady behavior by leading Democrats and no one went after the bar licenses of the lawyers who did their faithful duty under our legal system to represent them.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: So that is extraordinary demagoguery from the top in the Democratic Party.
--:-- John Bickley: Could this have a broader chilling effect on attorneys representing other conservative clients?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Oh, I think it has had that effect, 100 percent.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: From a risk management perspective, a lot of the law firms you saw step up to represent President Trump, for example, in 2016, won't have anything to do with him today.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And it's become controversial amongst lawyers. You know, I'm one of President Trump's lawyers. I've been representing him for several years now, and so are many, many lawyers at my law firm.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And there are very good lawyers representing him and who've come together to do that. But the pool is definitely narrower than it used to be.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And so that's the goal. And when you see the lawyers who got indicted and the electors who got indicted in these multiple jurisdictions, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, some of them have had a hard time finding counsel.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And nowhere has this been more acute actually than D.C., where the folks who were indicted for participation in January 6th have had a very difficult time finding lawyers in D.C. who can represent them.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I mean, I probably get requests on a rolling basis, you know, every month for people. And there's just a very small handful of lawyers to choose from.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: It's deliberately done in such a way that people are not getting fair trials.
--:-- John Bickley: You mentioned the J6 cases. Broadening this out, we have seen the prosecution of people that are average citizens, and we've also seen some whistleblowers on the right. For example, Dr. Etan Haim from Texas, who blew the whistle on trans procedures being conducted at a hospital there.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: We've also seen some journalists that lean right, who the DOJ and other major entities have gone after.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Is this truly a broader trend in terms of prosecution of conservative citizens?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, yes, it's extraordinary. And you can contrast what's happened starting with January 6th. You know, we protect peaceful protests in our country.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And if it gets out of hand, yes, as a protester, you may be prosecuted, arrested, certainly, usually ticketed. You might have to answer for minor misdemeanor offenses or not.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: If you're a BLM protester in the summer of 2020 and on a rolling basis after that, where there was significant property damage, rioting in multiple American cities, nothing really happened to those folks.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: There was no accountability. And that includes protests in D.C. and protesters that have even created disturbances in the Capitol.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: But the way the January 6th protesters were treated, including folks who simply just walked through open doors with no evidence of having pushed a cop, broken a window, done anything even remotely violent.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Some people I know have been indicted and prosecuted and convicted of oral conduct, just saying words on the steps of the Capitol. That's unprecedented.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And that has definitely been used as a rolling basis to really terrorize supporters of the right. That's just one example.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I mean, you're seeing journalists get prosecuted. You're seeing this physician in Texas, of all places, be prosecuted for allegedly a HIPAA violation.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Who knew that one could be prosecuted for that? And in fact, one can only be prosecuted for it if the whistleblowing happens to target a sacred cow of the left, which is the lie that you can change your sex through surgery and that children are appropriate vehicles for that experimental procedure.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: So today anybody who seeks to challenge a liberal orthodoxy and is smart and is reading the media is pausing and thinking twice because we have crossed so many different barriers in our civil conduct today and criminal conduct that never were crossed before.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Prosecuting lawyers, prosecuting whistleblower physicians, prosecuting journalists, we're becoming desensitized in a way to the shocking excesses of the Biden administration and its supporters.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question, what can be done to reverse this lawfare trend?
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, some conservatives would like to turn it back by threatening that when we have power, we will wreak similar retribution.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And, you know, in my view, two wrongs don't make a right. There may be some need to prosecute officials who exceeded their constitutional bounds.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I think that's fair. Who conspired to deny Americans of their speech rights. That's appropriate. We have conspiracy law in this country.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: But overall I think the way that we win this is to stand up to it and make make ourselves too numerous we have to win elections and then we have to govern fairly and appropriately.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And you know that may seem pollyannish but I am a profound believer in our United States constitution and in freedom of speech including the freedom of speech of people who disagree with me.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: So I would not recommend that a Republican administration ignore the Constitution.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: But I do think that the officials who conspire to suppress truthful speech about vaccines, about the pandemic, about the 2020 election, about BLM rioting and violence, I think that's illegal.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And we should stop that. We should punish it. And we should make sure it doesn't happen again in our country.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And we should not be afraid to get to the bottom of it.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And I think our Republican leaders in Congress have been too shy to really do hard-hitting probes and demand accountability.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: For example, people are being prosecuted in our country, advisors to President Trump, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, are being prosecuted for the identical conduct that the current attorney general himself has done that is refusing to respond to a subpoena from Congress.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And that the Biden attorney general did. Same thing, just simply ignored subpoenas.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Well, guys in Congress, guys and gals, they have inherent criminal contempt authority.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I understand that Anna Polina Luna has introduced a measure that says that if the current attorney general doesn't respond by next week, then they can go after him and arrest him through the sergeant-at-arms.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I'd love to see that because fair is fair.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: I don't think anyone should have been prosecuted, certainly either of the two presidential advisors. They had immunity, and they were prosecuted and convicted in, I think, rigged proceedings nonetheless, and we really can't have that.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: So hopefully at least that particular wrong is righted.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And that's what I think we need. We need to really get smart on the right and be prepared for these tactics and understand the rules of engagement have changed.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: And meet those changes.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, you said the word fair there, and I think that this ends up coming back to fairness for so many Americans.
--:-- John Bickley: And many are very troubled by what has just taken place over the last few years, really shaken the confidence in the justice system and the courts.
--:-- John Bickley: Let's hope this can be reversed.
--:-- Harmeet Dillon: Thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- John Bickley: No problem. Take care.
--:-- [Theme music starts playing]
--:-- John Bickley: That was Harmeet Dillon, founder of the Dillon Law Group, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire. Thank you.
