Tune In For Andrew Weissmann at 5pm EST!
The lawyer of the moment joins me on a live video chat for this week's episode of Vicky Ward Investigates.
Joining me on this week’s episode of Vicky Ward Investigates, today at 5pm EST, is the lawyer of the moment and fellow Substacker, Andrew Weissmann.
Andrew is right at the center of the current friction between the executive and judicial branches government.
On March 25, President Trump issued an executive order against his law firm, Jenner & Block. The order suspended the security clearance of lawyers and restricted their access to government buildings, officials and federal contracting work, specifically mentioning Weissman, a perceived political opponent.
Weissmann had been a lead prosecutor in the Mueller Investigation into Russian interference in the election in the first Trump administration and he was a known quantity at the Justice department under President Obama.
2015-2017, he was the chief of the Fraud section at the DOJ, and prior to that he was the FBI’s general counsel.
In the 1990s he cut his teeth as an assistant US attorney in the Eastern district of New York, and In 2002 George W. Bush (you’ll note, a Republican) appointed him to be the deputy director and then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Enron Task Force.
He became infamous not just for that successful prosecution but because in a follow-up case in U.S. District Court, he argued sucessfully that the auditors, Arthur Andersen LLP, a giant in the accounting world, had covered up for Enron. He convinced the district judge to instruct the jury that they could convict the firm regardless of whether its employees knew they were violating the law.
That ruling was later unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court, but by then Arthur Andersen was already kaput. Gone.
His reputation as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor was cemented.
The New York Times has described him as a “pitbull” and indeed when I first heard his name, it was mentioned in DC with great trepidation around the time of the Mueller Investigation..
I finally met him at a dinner in New York in the spring of 2023 where, to our surprise - and delight - we were invited by the Said Business School to become Visiting Fellows at the University of Oxford. He was teaching at NYU law school.
And since then, whenever I’ve chatted with him, I have found him to be the opposite of a pitbull!
I have only ever found him to be soft-spoken, and thoughtful. He parses his words carefully when he speaks. And, he speaks often these days, here on Substack, but also as MSNBC’s legal analyst.
He has PLENTY to say, as you might imagine, about the testing of the rule of law by the current administration. Unlike last week’s guest, Alan Dershowitz, who felt we were not yet experiencing a constitutional crisis, Weissman’s headline, here on substack, six days ago was:
So, Tune in at 5pm EST on the app (click the link below) for what is going to be a fascinating tour de force.
I told you: I like to mix things up!
