Transcript: Damning Reports Expose Trump’s Corruption in Comey Fiasco

Kurtz: Yes. Yes, and I think we should be clear that it’s it’s not just intended to punish that James Comey or Letitia James, it is intended to chill the discourse, it is intended to have people retreat from the public square, it is intended to suppress dissent, and has a number of other sort of civic ills that associated with it beyond just the utter injustice to the individual people who have been targeted.

Sargent: Really want to pick up on what you just said there, because it’s absolutely essential. I have spoken to members of civil society, liberal advocacy groups and so forth. Look, let’s just face facts. All this stuff absolutely will chill political activity on the liberal side. Lots and lots of actors in the system are going to have to ask themselves whether they want to risk coming under the kind of crosshairs of prosecution from Donald Trump and Ed Martin and the whole weaponization crew. That is just a fact of life right now in American politics that we just, you we can’t deny.

Kurtz: It is. And it’s something that I hear a lot of, you know, people need to stand up individually and as institutions. And I agree, they do. I think it’s easy for us to overlook when we are not the ones on the front lines necessarily, at least not yet, the difficulty, the personal cost, the personal price of standing up, the real risk, right? It could be reputational, it could be financial. It could be your liberty, right? All of those things are in play and we need to find ways, I think, to imagine a way in which we can support that. We can create a culture that’s supportive of that, but also like real ways of supporting people who are taking it on the chin, who are on the front lines of dealing with some of this, because it’s not going to go away.