Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits

As the Jan. 6 committee was working on its bombshell investigation into the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, committee staffers took some time out of their seemingly 24-hour jobs one day in 2022 to brief a group of lawyers and legal pundits on a Zoom call.

The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work and learn about what to look for at the hearings.

The group’s gathering was not a one-time event, but in fact an installment in an exclusive weekly digital salon, whose existence has not been previously reported, for prominent legal analysts and progressive and conservative anti-Trump lawyers and pundits. Every Friday, they meet on Zoom to hash out the latest twists and turns in the Trump legal saga — and intellectually stress-test the arguments facing Trump on his journey through the American legal system.

The meetings are off the record — a chance for the group’s members, many of whom are formally or loosely affiliated with different media outlets, to grapple with a seemingly endless array of novel legal issues before they hit the airwaves or take to print or digital outlets to weigh in with their thoughts. About a dozen or more people join any given call, though no one takes attendance. Some group members wouldn’t describe themselves with any partisan or ideological lean, but most are united by their dislike of Trump.

The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment.

The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.

Sometimes there is a special guest, like the Jan. 6 committee staffers (who recalled briefing the group). One Friday last May, after E. Jean Carroll defeated Trump in the first of her two defamation cases to go to trial, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan joined as a guest to talk for roughly half an hour about her strategy for beating Trump in court. Another time, J. Michael Luttig, a conservative legal scholar and former judge who helped lead the public campaign to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment, showed up to make his case.

The existence of the call isn’t necessarily surprising: There’s a long history of commentators, journalists and newsmakers discussing current events in off-the-record settings, and similar groups gather regularly today in Washington. The concept has spurred controversy at times — including when news broke during the Obama administration that hundreds of left-leaning writers, commentators and academics had been convening in an off-the-record listserv known as JournoList. (Conservatives complained; journalists offered awkward defenses; the list was eventually shuttered.) But a group of legal analysts and political commentators who are largely up front about their anti-Trump leanings sharing opinions and theories off the record isn’t the same as a bunch of journalists who profess to be non-partisan.

There is also something very 2024 about this group: It’s the perfect emblem of today’s Trump-media-legal-industrial complex.

Trump’s unprecedented legal situation has generated intense public interest and a robust media ecosystem of its own. Suddenly, lawyers and legal pundits who might once have been relegated to unglamorous client or academic work are in very high demand in the media — even more so today than during Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. They are hosting podcasts, writing books and popular Substacks and crafting well-followed social media feeds that often appear to serve, as a practical matter, as self-promotional tools for their other media products and as a mechanism to attract the attention of television bookers with the latest hot take about Trump’s court cases. For them, this is a unique opportunity to weigh in with the public at a critical juncture in American politics and to obtain a level of public recognition and stature that few lawyers can ever attain. The people on this call — and on some level the call itself — are essential cogs in that system, helping to generate and shape content for Trump-hungry consumers.

I have never been invited to take part in these calls, but I managed to get some insight into them by speaking to a small number of regular participants and to people who had been invited to speak to the group. We reached out to everyone mentioned in this story to give them an opportunity to comment; none spoke on the record. The people I did speak to were granted anonymity because they had agreed to keep the sessions off-the-record and had not been authorized to speak to me.

Indeed, as I was reporting this story, I learned that some members of the group were understandably anxious about its publication. Trump has claimed that there is a legal conspiracy against him, and there is a risk that news of a group such as this could give Trump and his allies an attractive target.

Trump’s claims of an organized conspiracy might be bunk, but there are other potential problems with the Friday Zooms: There is a risk, for instance, that the calls could breed groupthink or perhaps help dubious information spread, where it might then reach people watching the news.

A prominent legal commentator with a TV contract was surprised to learn about the existence of the calls when I approached them for the story. That person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, volunteered some reservations about the idea of hosting a standing, off-the-record call with people working across different television, print and digital outlets.

“It runs the risk of creating the impression that there is an agreement or cooperation or conspiracy across mainstream media entities,” this person told me. “And that could feed into some false and damaging perceptions, particularly on the right.”

Members of the group, though, brushed aside the notion that it’s intended to devise talking points or strategy to take down Trump as part of a bid to send him to prison or derail his presidential campaign.

And there’s not always consensus; I’m told that CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig engaged in a cordial but pointed exchange with Luttig during his guest appearance, with Honig and others expressing skepticism about the arguments for Trump’s disqualification. (Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled Trump could not be thrown off the Colorado ballot by the state for his conduct on Jan. 6.)

“It feels almost like a seminar in law school,” said a participant in the group. Most calls comprise “deliberation, debate and discussion,” albeit “with a distinct anti-Trump tilt to it.”

You probably know some of the other regular participants on the call, which draws in some of the most recognizable names in the Anti-Trump Cinematic Universe.

They currently include Obama-era U.S. Attorneys Harry Litman, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance. Litman is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a cable news regular and a podcast host. McQuade and Vance co-host a podcast and are under contract with MSNBC, as are two other regular attendees — Jennifer Rubin, an opinion writer for the Washington Post who often covers Trump’s legal affairs, and Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and high-ranking official in the Justice Department who co-hosts a podcast for MSNBC with Weissmann. Karen Agnifilo, a former senior prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and CNN commentator, is an occasional attendee, as is Elliot Williams, also a former federal prosecutor who provides commentary on CNN.

Other regulars include Ryan Goodman, an NYU law school professor who often collaborates with Weissmann; Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor and occasional contributor to POLITICO Magazine; Asha Rangappa, a former FBI Special Agent focused on counterintelligence investigations who currently serves as an ABC news contributor and also co-hosts a podcast with Mariotti; Shan Wu, another former federal prosecutor, a regular contributor to the Daily Beast and a veteran cable news talker; and Norman Ornstein, a long-time political observer affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Given this lineup, I was intrigued to learn more about the group; but I discovered that, in the end, every standing conference call is more interesting in theory than in practice.

What’s typically on the agenda? “It’s usually about what’s coming up this week,” the participant told me, “which is one of the reasons I’ll dial in, because sometimes I won’t realize that there’s a hearing on [something] this week. But especially if I want information about things that are going to drop — indictments, decisions — sometimes there’s behind-the-scenes information that’s useful. Like, ‘This indictment’s not going to come Monday, but it might come Tuesday.’ And a lot of times that’s wrong.”

The calls are not always about Trump’s voluminous legal problems. The group has also discussed the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and the so-called “major questions doctrine,” which conservative justices used last year to block a part of Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness effort. But Trump’s legal questions are typically the main event.

When the trial judge in Trump’s federal election subversion case rejected his claim to be absolutely immune from prosecution, the group discussed an esoteric issue: Was Trump entitled to a pretrial appeal, or should special counsel Jack Smith oppose the effort and push for a trial? “There was a pretty animated and interesting conversation” on the subject, the participant told me.

There was also at least one particularly heated debate on the call about the merits of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution against Trump, which kicked off in earnest this week. Indeed, skepticism and some ambivalence about the merits of the case — and whether it should have been brought in the first place — has been something of a running theme across some of the calls.

Trump and his allies like to complain these days that he is a victim of “lawfare” — some sort of elaborate, multi-jurisdictional conspiracy involving federal and state prosecutors, private civil litigators and judges in different courts across the country to take him down through the court system. The media aids and abets it, in their telling.

The whole thing is nonsense — the moving pieces in the Trump legal story are in fact the result of a lack of coordination among the relevant government parties that has actually increased the odds that Trump might return to power.

And in any case, Trump’s team is not in a position to claim the high road. They’re known to work the media aggressively to influence the coverage of Trump’s legal problems. Indeed, in the days leading up to Trump’s trial in Manhattan, his team convened with surrogates to brief them on talking points to use in media appearances.

Still, a call like this will no doubt draw the attention of conservatives. The participant acknowledged that the anti-Trump composition of the group sometimes guides the conversation but went on to explain that it’s generally not a heavy-handed evaluation of PR strategy.

“It happens, but it’s rare that somebody says, ‘Well, I think this is a better argument for us,’ or ‘I think that that’s a stupid argument that we shouldn’t be making,’” said this person.

At the end of the day, it’s still a group of lawyers: “Everyone also knows that everyone’s headstrong. A bunch of egomaniacal lawyers, no one’s going to be like, ‘Yes, sir.’ … Everyone’s on their own. Everyone’s a free agent, more or less.”

Do some of the people on the call align their positions as a result of their discussions? Yes, probably. That can sound nefarious, but it is also the natural result of a group discussion that is working properly. People refine and clarify their positions. They find points of agreement that might surprise them. Their areas of disagreement become narrower, more precise.

The conversations, though, could also spread dubious analysis, or perhaps lead to wish-casting. The effort to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment never really had a chance, but many commentators — including some who participate in the calls — publicly argued otherwise. Far too many commentators have also tried to defend the Biden Justice Department’s gallingly slow approach to the criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. (There was only ever one correct answer to what should have happened, despite what you may have heard — incorrectly — about how prosecutors always work from the “bottom up” in situations involving large numbers of potential criminal offenders.)

If you follow the coverage closely enough, though, it’s also apparent that there are material points of disagreement that members of Eisen’s group have been more than willing to air publicly. Honig and Conway had it out on air about the Trump disqualification litigation. The disagreements over Bragg’s prosecution have been evident in the legal commentary as well.

Indeed, Litman recently hosted a subset of the group for “a very different, special episode” of his podcast where they discussed Trump’s criminal cases. Eisen, Rubin, Mariotti, Toobin, McCord, Dean, Ornstein, Agnifilo, Vance, Wu and Honig were all in attendance. It was a lively exchange of views with some limited points of disagreement — and it was also, with all due respect to everyone involved, instantly disposable.

After all, perhaps the greatest obstacle to coordinating any sort of party line on Trump’s legal problems is that they are constantly in flux, and that the metabolism of modern media encourages people to develop views quickly — perhaps too quickly — on novel and complex issues.

One of the guests invited to speak to the group told me that they appreciated the opportunity to talk with media figures who were clearly interested in what they had to say and were eager to learn more. “What was probably going on a lot of the time,” this person told me, was that “they were uncertain of what they had been writing, and this call gave all of us an opportunity to discuss that uncertainty and flesh it out.”

Others told me that they appreciated the opportunity to speak to the group but found it largely unmemorable — another conference call, perhaps, in a sea of conference calls.

The same guest positioned them as a natural fit for our strange political moment. “This is really the first time in American history where the Constitution and laws are front and center at the same time that the politics are front and center in the nation,” they said. “And so for me to get there and be able to talk to them about what you and I are talking about right now, was just a privilege for me.”

Perhaps.

My fellow outcast — the prominent legal commentator who regularly appears on television — suggested to me that we might be better off on the outside of this semi-exclusive gathering of our fellow analysts and pundits. We all talk enough for our jobs, both publicly and privately, and as many well-connected Washingtonians can attest, off-the-record sessions involving political commentators can be as tedious and uninformative as what you can easily get on television and in podcasts.

The commentator was both amused and unfazed by the possibility that we might be missing out on some valuable insights or inside information. Was it worrying — maybe even offensive — to have been excluded?

The commentator looked me straight in the face — eyes wide, eyebrows raised, with a slight smile — and quickly offered a crisp, declarative response.

“I’m fine with that.”