➡ James Rosen, a journalist for Newsmax, has written a biography about Justice Scalia, focusing on his professional life as a Supreme Court justice. Rosen was inspired by Scalia’s unique personality and intellect, which he observed from a young age. The book not only covers Scalia’s legal philosophy and significant cases, but also provides a personal insight into Scalia’s life, including his relationships with other justices. Rosen’s aim is to show why Scalia is one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years.
➡ The text discusses the professional relationship and disagreements between Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Sandra Day O’Connor, particularly on the topic of abortion. It also highlights Scalia’s strong Catholic faith and how it influenced his work, but he maintained a separation of church and state in his legal decisions. The text also mentions Scalia’s legal philosophy against the concept of a ‘living Constitution’, believing instead in interpreting the law as it was originally intended. The story of Elena Kagan’s early career and her humorous personality is also shared.
➡ The text discusses the role of judges, particularly their duty to interpret laws. It highlights the concept of a “living Constitution,” where judges expand the law’s meaning to accommodate new situations. The text also discusses Justice Scalia’s philosophy of originalism, which emphasizes sticking to the original meaning of the law. It ends by discussing the author’s process of writing a biography about Justice Scalia, including his rigorous schedule and the support he receives from his family.
➡ The text discusses a book about John Mitchell, who was Richard Nixon’s Attorney General. The book, which took 17 years to write, explores Mitchell’s life, including his role in the Watergate scandal and his subsequent prison sentence. It also highlights his efforts in desegregating Southern schools during a tumultuous time in American history. Despite his tough public image, the book reveals Mitchell as a genial and well-liked individual, even by those who should have been his adversaries.
➡ The article discusses a meeting between John Dean and Richard Nixon during the Watergate era, highlighting discrepancies between Dean’s testimony and the Nixon tapes. It also mentions a secret seven-page document from a grand jury testimony by Nixon, which was kept classified for 50 years. This document reveals a spy ring within the White House against Nixon and Henry Kissinger, orchestrated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The article concludes by discussing the discovery of this spy ring by the Nixon White House group, the Plumbers.
➡ President Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been spying on him, which he considered a serious federal offense. Despite the potential to use this information to his advantage during the Watergate scandal, Nixon chose not to expose the military’s actions to avoid further damaging the public’s view of the armed forces. This decision is seen as a notable moment in Nixon’s presidency.

Chris. I’m chris farrell, and this is Judicial Watch. Welcome to Judicial Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the mainstream old legacy media really does not want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today, we’re joined by James Rosen, chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax. He’s a biographer, a historian, a journalist, and I like to call him also a friend. Welcome, James. Thank you. And I call you the same. James, you’ve written a two part. Actually, it’s going to be three.

But the second volume has just come out, and we’ll throw it to the camera. Of a biography of Justice Scalia. Yes. And the first volume dealt with essentially his youth and his upbringing. And now this particular volume is called Scalia Supreme Court years 86 to 2001. So this is really what an awful lot of people would be very, very interested in, his professional life as a Supreme Court justice. So I got to know, what’s the motivation? What inspired you to go say, listen, of all the people out there, Scalia’s the guy. And I’m going to write about him and I’m going to spend 10 years writing about him, maybe 15 by the time I’m done.

Right. Well, I was fascinated with him from an early age. I used to see him on television, on PBS when I was in high school in these sort of theater in the round settings where they had a live studio audience on PBS and they would convene eminent minds of the time to debate hypothetical scenarios under the tutelage of, like a moderator from the Harvard Law School or someplace. And the eminent minds would be like Dan Rather, Sandra Day o’, Connor, Gerald Ford, Antonin Scalia, et cetera. Right? Even the announcer announced, that’s great. And they would debate these hypotheticals from their different disciplines and perspectives.

And so, Dan Rather, it’s a ticking time bomb terrorist scenario. How much are you going to report? Well, first I’d want to know what happened, you know, whatever. Scalia immediately struck me as fundamentally different from everyone else on that stage. First of all, although he was born in Trenton, New Jersey, he moved to Queens when he was five. So he’s got that outer borough, New York City chip on his shoulder and sarcasm and sensitivity. As someone from Rockville center, just across the line in Nassau County, I identify with what you’re saying. And I was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten island, the outer boroughest of the outer boroughs, the chippiest of the shoulders.

And he was sarcastic and funny and brilliant. And someday I said, I’m gonna meet this guy. When I came to Washington to start my career as a Washington correspondent then for Fox News in 1999, the company had no one covering the court at that time. So I wrote to him, and with this commenced this really amusing exchange of letters. And finally, we got together for lunch, and we had, in fact, two lunches off the record. In this new book, there’s a chapter. I’m biased. It’s my favorite chapter. It’s called the Rabbit, okay? And this tells the story of those lunches with Scalia and our correspondents.

The actual substance of the lunches was off the record and remains so. Right? But with the dispensation of the Scalia family, I’m allowed to tell about the atmospherics of those lunches. And, you know, I’m 30 years old. I’m not a lawyer. You know, I’m in way over my head. I’m having lunch with not only a Supreme Court justice, but someone who was identified even then as one of the most towering intellects of our time, right? And my simple goal is just to. Just to hold my own and keep making eye contact and conveying understanding, even when I’m utterly lost.

Don’t drool on yourself. And young as I was, this was 1999, and I’m 30. I had some experience with people of power, and I knew a. Don’t eat anything that requires you to eat with your hands. Nothing that will splatter on him or you, right? And so you want something that’s easily manipulable with knife and fork. I come from Staten Island. This was an Italian restaurant, a very modest, kind of shabby place that he loved that had plastic grapes on the wall, and I knew exactly what to order. Scalia walks in, Okay, I was there first.

And he had a kind of grandeur, a sort of Jackie Gleason grandiloquence about him, you know, Shar elbows and stuff. And he sits down, and the Italian waiter was a young guy, barely spoke English. And Scalia says, pulpy. What is pulpy? And the waiter says, octopus. Octopus, right. And he says, octopus. I’ll have the pulpy. And he hands the menu back with a great flourish. And now I know exactly what to order according to my criteria that I laid out. I’ll have the veal parmesan, right? And the guy is writing it down. And Scalia just interrupts.

He goes, no, no, no, Give him the rabbit. And the waiter and I look at Scalia in unison and we both say, rabbit. He goes, yeah, he’s going to. You’re going to like the rabbit. Give him the rabbit. And the guy walks off at the menus. Now, Chris, I had never had rabbit. I didn’t want rabbit. I was kind of grossed out by the thought. So inexperienced was I, that I didn’t. I was wondering, as the guy stalked off with the menus, like, is rabbit served like some courses of fish are with the head still attached? I have no idea.

And I haven’t had rabbits since. But what’s most significant about this is here you have the country’s foremost opponent of judicial activism overruling my lunch order. Okay. Which is something. Mrs. Rosen does, a pretty basic thing. So that chapter is called the Rabbit. And it makes a point I’d like to get across to our viewers about this book, which is it’s not written for lawyers. I’m not a lawyer, and I wrote the thing. Thank goodness. And of course, you will get. And I hope we get a chance to discuss why Antonin Scalia is one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years, which is his legal philosophy, and how he changed the law in this country, which affects everyone.

You’ll get the legal philosophy. You’ll get the specific cases that he ruled on where he made a big difference. Difference. But there’s the humanity of the man, what it’s like to have lunch with him, what it’s like to. This book covers the first half of his Supreme Court tenure. What it’s like to show up on day one as a Supreme Court justice. I had access to some of his private correspondence. It’s published in this book. He said that when he went to his first conference as a Supreme Court Justice. And this is the meetings behind closed doors.

It’s just the nine justices in their ornate conference room. And the Chief justice goes down the line by seniority with the justice. How are you going to vote on each case? And Scalia wrote to a friend in a letter in 1986 that when it came his time as the junior justice to finally speak up, he said he felt like a character in a Woody Allen movie. Okay. You get his relationships with the other justices. And some of the people there at the time really hated this guts. I mean, there was not a lot of. Yes, well, Harry Blackmun, for example.

There’s papers published in this book for the first time that show that Blackmun and his clerks, once Scalia arrived, and he hated Scalia before he got there because Scalia had been very critical of Roe vs. Wade. And other decisions of Blackman, Blackmun and his clerks when they would receive the cert pool memos. These are the kind of memos that the clerks circulate amongst each other about. Which cases should they grant cert, which ones should they listen here as justices and folks should remember that there are like something like 10 to 15,000 essentials, applications, petitions for people who want to have their case heard by the Supreme Court.

And they then Cherry pick about 100. Yeah, about 100. Sometimes it’s like 65. It’s down a lot, but it’s an enormous number of cases that come in. So these memos going back and forth. So the clerks basically sort through them and make recommendations or they’re recommending, but yeah. And when those memos were being circulated in the fall of 1986, on Scalia’s first term on the court, his first days on the court, Blackmun’s clerks are scribbling on those memos and they’re pointing at the names of these individuals, some of whom are very well accomplished today and well known, such as Chris Landau, who’s the Deputy Secretary of State under Marco Rubio, and writing next to the name as if it were a scarlet letter, Federalist.

Then they would say things about the individual clerks like his overzealous evilness and things like that. And Blackmun, Justice Blackmun, far from discouraging them, was chiming in with his own handwriting on these documents. So he’s. So these are mostly like snarky comments. Well, it’s a kind of a snideness campaign. And it went on for years. And it started targeting other Federalist Society alumni who were working for Tony Kennedy or Sandra Day o’ Connor or so on, some of whom went on to very distinguished careers. So, yeah, there were some who were not disposed to receive him kindly.

And then you add on top of that, the changes in the law that Scalia was determined to press to make the Supreme Court clean up its act in terms of the consistency of its rulings, the bright line rulings he wanted to see the lower courts receive. And they didn’t like it, especially Sandra Day o’. Connor. There’s a photo in this book that’s never been published before. And it shows. I hope we can show it. It shows on Halloween 1986, at the Supreme Court, Scalia and Sandra Day o’. Connor. He’s dressed in a suit and tie. She’s in professional attire, like a jacket and skirt and blouse.

He has got a red bulbous nose on his face, and she has enormous groucho nose and glasses where the. You can’t even see her eyes from those fake eyebrows and they’re smiling. And as I say in the caption to this photo, it went downhill from there because Scalia was determined to call out o’ Connor for what he considered muddled thinking and sometimes dishonest opinions that she was writing, particularly on the abortion matter, and she didn’t like it. And there was One case, famously 1989, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, where Scalia said of O’ Connor’s writings, they cannot be taken seriously.

And I’ve got a lot of untold anecdotes in this book, previously untold, about how that rupture played out between them and how long it lasted. And we see circumstances like that in the current court where there’s some muddled thinking and some very strange questions that are asked. I’ll tell you a fun story. This goes back to my days going down to the Clinton, the Clinton Presidential Library. I was digging through some papers and I came across some White House counsel documents and sort of this third string, like deputy associate assistant White House counsel is sending memos around commenting on everything that’s going on in the office when we’re going to celebrate birthdays, who’s bringing in cupcakes back and forth about any number of different topics.

They’re pretty funny memos. I mean, it’s got a kind of snarky, edgy comments about things. Elena Kagan. Oh, how interesting. Yeah. So her early. I’ll be coming back to you on her Volume three. Yeah. In the White. In the. In the Clinton White House, you get a sense for her personality and her sense of humor, and she couldn’t resist commenting on everything under the. Obviously, it didn’t hold her back, though. No, it did not. It did not hold her back. Nothing too controversial. So we talked a little bit about his reception at the Supreme Court, but clearly that was not going to hold him back in any way.

So he starts to assert himself, I think, by personality, but also clearly by intellect. Right. By what he’s advocating and advancing and what he’s writing in opinions or dissents and the way he writes, the literary gift he had, the instinct for, the cutting remark, too. All that’s playing out. Look, again, I want to emphasize to our viewers this is not just a book for lawyers. You’ll really get a sense of the man. Not just, for example, from him overruling my lunch order or the interactions with the other justices, but you’ll get a sense for his faith, which is a very Important part of this story and of course, his marriage to Maureen Scalia, who’s kind of the unsung hero of his story because she raised nine Scalia children, all of whom have grown up to be devout Catholics, and with the exception of Father Paul Scalia, parents of large families and so forth, without much help from Nino, as both of them would have said or would have told you.

He’s a little preoccupied. But the first book treated the. Traced the formation of his faith. This book, the discussion of him going to Xavier High School in Manhattan, which was a military academy. High school, Jesuit run high school. Yeah. And the formative experience there, to me, illuminates everything that comes after. Yes. I like to say that Scalia’s Catholicism was the rocket fuel that propelled his rise to greatness. Of course, it was one of the conglomerate of winning attributes that he had. But in the second book, having traced the formation of his faith. Now this book deals with his struggle to maintain in his life, not in the law, a separation of church and state.

Where the law was concerned, he didn’t really believe in a separation of the church and state. It was his view that the founders never intended that faith should be driven from the public square entirely. The founders just did not want to see the federal government picking winners and losers amongst the faith or establishing, which is what the legal term in the First Amendment. But in his own life, in his own conduct, he did maintain separation of church and state. He regarded it as wrong for a judge, any judge or justice, to graft the tenets of his.

Of his faith, in his case, his devout Catholicism, his pre Vatican II Catholicism, onto his jurisprudence. The way he used to put it, Chris, was there’s no such thing as a Catholic hamburger. The closest we would come would be a hamburger that is made perfectly. Yeah. I mean, it really. It’s a distinction, some would say a distinction without a difference. But it really, it does, again, sort of illuminate his thinking as to. He said when people would come up to him in public places and they’d say, Mr. Justice, we’re devout Catholics and we can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done on abortion.

He said, I would sheepishly have to remind them that I didn’t reach those positions on the basis of my faith, but rather through reasoned legal analysis. To his fans, it’s a distinction without a difference. They don’t care what bus he took to get there. Right. And it’s a very interesting. I mean, it’s a fascinating intellectual exercise to go through and understand how he could arrive at conclusions, whether it was legally or even through sort of a scientific analysis that, you know, it gives you the. It gives you the formula and the elements to put together to come to a decision.

But it’s not some theocratic, dogmatic thing. It’s not weighted down with that. It’s simply an intellectual exercise that drives you to a conclusion. Process was king for Scalia, and so often he wound up ruling in cases and contributing to outcomes in the cases that he personally found abhorrent. But his view was, that’s how you know you’ve got an honest judge on your hands. If all the outcomes come out favorable to the way the justice personally believes about society, politics, religion, the law, or what have you, that’s not an honest judge. And this is a function of his legal philosophy, which I hope, again, that we can spend a bit of time on.

Yeah, please. Well, go ahead and do that. I mean, talk about what it was or it lives. It continues today, although I don’t want to talk about a living Constitution. That’s a horrible thing. But what was his philosophy and how does it impact us today? Let’s put it that way. When Antonin Scalia became a federal judge, President Reagan nominated him in 1982 to the court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. circuit, that’s the Court of Appeals. That’s one rung below the Supreme Court. And it’s often described as the second most powerful court in America, both because its docket shapes so heavily the work of the Supreme Court and also because so many of the justices are plucked from the ranks of the DCC and the government lives here.

Yes, yes. So if you’re litigating something that has to do with a government policy or law, this is the venue. It’s going to go to the D.C. circuit and then probably to the Supreme Court. At the time, from 82 to 86 that he was serving on the Appellate Court, his colleagues included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert Bork, Kenneth Starr, James Buckley, Larry Silberman. Like a real murderer’s robe of judicial talent. In fact, in the first book, I was able to use the documents from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s papers at the Library of Congress, which were open for her D.C.

circuit tenure, to portray in real time, in their own words, through the memos and the handwritten doodles and the draft opinions that are flying back and forth between Judge Ginsburg and Judge Scalia’s chambers, the birth, the blossoming of that famous friendship, how they’re kveling over each other, they’re needling each other, they’re conspiring against each other, etc. Then he goes to the Supreme Court. In 1986, when Scalia joined the federal benchmark, there prevailed in the American law a liberal notion called the living Constitution. You just made reference to this. What is that? The living Constitution holds that because the founding fathers could never have anticipated a number of current modern phenomena, such as the Internet, or nuclear weapons or social media or what have you, that latter day judges in dispensing their duties, what is the central business of a judge? What do judges do? And Justices, they interpret the law.

They tell us what it means. The living constitutionalist believes that the modern day judge interpreting the text of the Constitution or any statute enacted ever since, should have the latitude to expand the meaning to account for these newer phenomena. That’s why they call it the living Constitution, the idea that it should breathe, it should expand to account for these things. And in order for a latter day judge to tell us what the law meant rather than what it says, they tended these liberal judges who believed in a living Constitution to relegate the text of the law or the Constitution to a secondary status.

What they really cared about was the founder’s intent or the lawmaker’s intent, and had policy the chief decision they wanted to get. What they’re doing basically is they’re grafting their latter day policy preferences onto an enduring text. And so they would go to the legislative history, what was said in all those House and Senate floor speeches or committee reports. Scalia stood athwart all of and through the force of his personality. And it wasn’t because he was on the winning end of so many cases, he was usually in dissent. But through his tireless evangelism for his philosophy, both on and off the bench, he changed everything.

His philosophy was called originalism, that judges and justices, if they’re going to be in the business of interpreting the Constitution or any law passed, since they should adhere to the original meaning of the law, the meaning it was widely understood to carry at its time of enactment, sometimes also called strict constructionists. Meaning. Well, he hated that term though, because what is strict or what’s moderate construction? Right, right. He said the Constitution is neither living nor dead. It’s an enduring legal text. And if we go about expanding its meaning beyond what it was widely understood to have at the time, that’s an activist judge on your hands.

And how to discern the original meaning. That’s where he introduced the sort of what I call the metal detector to find the original meaning, and that’s textualism. Pay attention to the text. And he always said, I don’t care if we should discover some scrap of paper that’s 250 years old on which the Founders declared their secret intention for what they meant, what the Founders meant, what the Congress meant with any given statute, what the state legislatures meant with any given statute. What they meant is what they voted up or down on. That’s where you had a chance to show us your intent, what they put in black and white.

And so by the time he dies, so successful was Scalia in reorienting the view of lawyers at every level of the bench, in every facet of the practice of law, to originalism and textualism, that no less a figure than Elena Kagan, who was the justice appointed by President Obama, declared publicly that in effect, as a result of Scalia’s counter revolution, again effectuated through his force of personality, his genius, his writings, his speeches, as she put it, quote, we’re all originalists now. And that impacts every American today. If you do a360 and you look around you, or a180 if you’re driving or something, everything you see bears the imprimatur, the stamp of Antonin Scalia and the way he changed the way the law is drafted, debated and interpreted in this country.

A very heavy legacy, right? I mean, that’s. There are worse legacies to carry. Yeah, but I mean, very important. That’s why I say this is one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years. And if you want to understand modern America and how we got here, read these books. And again, they’re not just for lawyers, right? So, I mean, like you said, you’ve taken a mere 10 or 15 years of your life to briefly go over these things. That speaks a lot about your work ethic and your commitment to a topic and your attention span.

What’s your routine? What’s your practice? How do you. I mean, it isn’t like you’re just kind of hanging around thinking grand thoughts, right? You’ve got a job, a family, a life. You’re busy doing all the things everybody else is. So how do you carve out time? What do you do? What’s your practice? Do you get up every morning at 6 and you write till 9 and then go do whatever or how do you go after this? How relieved I would be to have such a luxurious schedule as you just laid out. First of all, to the question of where do you find the time, which a lot of people ask the very simple Answer is, I steal it from my family, okay? And in the acknowledgment section of this book, I save my family for last and tell them how sorry I am for how much time away from them this project has required.

This book began as an effort at a concise biography of Antony Scalia, okay? The type of book you could knock out Volume two on a long plane ride, let’s say. As you and our viewers have discovered in this segment, and as Mrs. Rosen, Shirley can attest, I don’t do anything concisely. I wrote 170,000 words and I got the man up to taking his seat on the Supreme Court. And that was volume one. And the publisher loved everything about the idea of publishing a second volume that would take us through his whole Supreme Court tenure and his death, except for paying for one.

But we got past that. Just keep writing, Joe. Right. And so I was supposed to just wrap it up in a second volume. I wrote 183,000 words. That’s about 25,000 words more than your average nonfiction book. And I had just gotten him through the halfway point, which is where this book’s stops, which is Bush v. Gore. You ask about the routine. You know, I get up when I’m in the heavy writing period for these, you know, which is about a year and a half, two years worth of time. I’m getting faster at it because I’ve sort of developed a system.

But I tend to get up at 4 in the morning. I will write till 6, 6:15. That’s when the first live shots start coming through for Newsmax. You’re live at 9:05. Then I got to get cracking on that. You know, there might be. Meanwhile, news is breaking, right? The world keeps turning, and you’ve got to keep up with it, especially in 2.0, right? So, yeah, it’s a life in full. No complaints. I’m mindful of my blessings. I would say that the one person who was least enthralled by the extension that he was able to secure on the lease of on the Lives of the Rosens for Justice Scalia would be Mrs.

Rosenberg, who couldn’t believe that there was going to be a second book and now can’t believe there’s going to be a third book. But, you know, the story requires it. Scalia’s life is so important and he touched so many things and was such a great, fun subject in his own right, being so funny and witty that he’s one of the few American figures who actually deserves three books. Well, you’re Very fortunate you have family and I’m sure also your circle of closer friends who understand and get what you’re doing and we’ll cut you slack. And that you talking about my family.

Yes. And are not saying, I don’t know what the hell are you doing? Maybe I should buy them a saw for this, start cutting me some slack. But no, they understand that it’s really, it’s a labor of love. You know, I got to meet Justice Scalia, as I mentioned earlier, and so that’s invaluable for any biographer. But you know, I’ve been, as I say, like fascinated by this guy since I was in high school in the 1980s. So are you a meticulous note taker? Did you like walk out of a luncheon or a meeting and then like sequester yourself and just more typing than writing? But yes.

So after the lunches with Justice Scalia, I composed memoranda to the file relating everything we had said that were single spaced and went on for 10 pages or so. But as I say, those lunches were off the record and will remain. But you’re still going to keep your own. Just a refresher. Some of the things that we discussed I was able to confirm through other sources. But some of the most interesting and perhaps saleable and newsworthy and marketable facts that transpired at our lunches will remain on the cutting room floor, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. And that’s a tough because I’m sure there’s a couple of nuggets in there that you would just love to be.

Oh yeah, yeah. They would be leading this publicity campaign. But that’s all right. So of course all of you are supposed to immediately go out or go online and fill your shopping cart with copies of Scalia Supreme Court years 1986 to 2001. We’re going to put links to James books in the show notes for this episode so you can quickly go in there and find them and you don’t have to guess or search. You’ll know. Right. Where to go and what to get. I want to talk about another book that you wrote that’s one of my favorites, wildly off topic, not Scalia related at all, but another book that my impression is took another mere 10 or 15 years.

17. 17 years. It was 17 years part time, Always part time. I want it new, but yes, all these part time, I’m ashamed. 17 years it took. So you’re doing biographies and histories that are, you know, taking decades to write. But it’s a good thing I started young. That’s right, you were 12 and pounding away at the keys. But it is a biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and it’s called the Strongman. I think it’s a fantastic book, not just. Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you. It’s about John Mitchell and frankly, I don’t know anybody else who’s written about John Mitchell.

I think you’re the lone biographer of John Mitchell. Yeah, I mean, lots of people wrote about him this book, but I’m not talking about magazine or he figures in a million books and newspaper and magazine articles, but. But no one had ever done a biography of him. Right. So the book came out in 2008. It was called the Strong John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate. And John Mitchell had been Richard Nixon’s law partner and campaign manager in 1968 when he won the presidency. He served three very tumultuous years as Attorney General of the United States, and then he was convicted for his role in the Watergate cover up and served 19 months in prison, making him the highest ranking US official ever to serve time and parenthetically to be denied parole.

So his is the ultimate cautionary tale in the law, in a sense. And Scalia’s, by the way, is sort of the inverse. Here’s the embodiment of the American dream who came from a father who was a Sicilian immigrant. His mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants and rose through his own hard work and genius and devout faith to the pinnacle of that. And I was fascinated, I think it impacted Scalia enormously that his father, an immigrant, literally off the boat from Italy through just sheer dedication and hard work, is a PhD in languages. Yeah. Who spoke no English when he arrived at Ellis island and became a professor of Romance Languages at Brooklyn College for 30 years.

And so, I mean, that’s Scalia’s dad. So that’s the home environment. So you wonder about. And the church, a professor of languages. Right, right. And the church where sacred liturgy and text are inviolable. That’s where the textualism formed. And so that’s, I mean, again, that’s the foundational principles of the environment, the circumstance situation that he’s coming up in. But back to John Mitchell. Yeah, let’s go back to Mitchell, though, because I think Mitchell’s a fascinating guy. He’s portrayed as being, use a colloquialism, for lack of a better term, a real hard ass, a real tough guy, a real, and he was, as the title suggests, strong.

But the left and a lot of the militant lunatics of the 1960s viewed him as some fascist, you know, et cetera. And from reading the book, I mean, he was actually kind of a nice guy who was lighthearted and sort of jovial, and he was not the monster that they painted him to be at all. So for that book, the Strongman, John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, you know, again, I went through a lot of previously unpublished archival sources, and I had the yellow pad notes, 100,000 pages each, for Haldeman and Ehrlichman from their meetings with President Nixon.

And remember that the Nixon taping system was only introduced two years into his first term. So for the first two years, there are no tapes. And the closest thing we have to tapes are the yellow pad notes of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, who are literally jotting down as fast as they can everything Nixon says. Yeah, scribbles a P for President and so forth. Literally, though, with P, colon, and then M for Mitchell’s contribution to a meeting and so forth. And those notes showed that President Nixon was determined that John Mitchell should assume the role of Mr. Law and Order, which he appeared on the COVID of Newsweek in 1969.

And he said, he has this great stone face. We need him to be the tough cop. We need him to be the one that’s going to crack down on the hippies and the drug pushers and the revolutionaries. And he did. And, you know, 1969-72 was a very frightening time in American history. You had the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, which was a domestic terrorist group that was planting bombs at the Capitol and the Pentagon and elsewhere. By 1972, you had something like 1500 bombings a year in the United States. And also you had school desegregation taking place in the South.

And it’s not commonly recorded, but John Mitchell and Richard Nixon, working together as the Attorney general and president, Respectively, over those three years of 69 to 72, presided over the desegregation of the Southern school system, such that the percentage of black children who were attending segregated schools in the south went in 1969 from 68% by 1972 to 8%. It happened without violence, and that’s been airbrushed out of history. And it is one of the great accomplishments of the executive branch in the 20th century. It was not by any means foreordained that that would be accomplished without violence.

In a season of riots in Watts and Los Angeles and other places. And even, I mean, other crazy talk about the level of violence, the protests here in Washington, D.C. you describe this Period over. I guess it’s probably an 18 month period of these enormous protests that happen here in Washington D.C. and Mitchell coming out on the balcony at the Department of Justice and looking down at these crowds that are wild eyed giving him the finger. And he and his aides succumbed to tear gas at one point. That balcony is now closed even to the Attorney General of the United States.

By the way, I got to examine it when Ashcroft was Attorney General thanks to a friend who worked there. But you were right that Mitchell had a genial personality. He was taciturn by nature. He wasn’t a jokey, clowny type of person. No, but he would puff on his pipe. But I think personally, and I’m just doing this based on your writing, he was actually a very pleasant, cheerful, warm person. Not this, this fascist overlord. Right. And secretly, all the people that should have hated Mitchell told me that they liked him. And that included Leslie Stahl, who was a young reporter covering the Senate Watergate hearings for CBS News.

That included James Neal, who was the chief Watergate trial prosecutor who put Mitchell in prison. All of them said, you know what? I secretly liked him. And Mitchell’s story that fall from grace to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer to the most prominent federal convict in America. The day he surrendered to prison in 1977, the inmates lined the walkways of that prison in Alabama. We got you now, Big John. You’re just another number like the rest of us. In his long and winding road to incarceration. A shame that Nixon and Agnew escaped. Mitchell was welcomed into federal custody by people in whose offices hanging over their shoulders.

Mitchell could see their certificates granting them official power signed by Mitchell himself. It’s a unique story in the annals of American politics and law. Yeah, it’s a very, very. He’s a very interesting guy. And I forget how you worded this, but there’s something akin to the reason why John Mitchell went to jail was because he was a very good lawyer. Right. He actually exalted the needs of his client over himself. He was true to his. Now he might have been slightly misguided in regarding President Nixon as his client instead of the United States. Right. But these were different times.

Let’s not forget that President Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General of the United States. Yeah, it was a different, it was a different world. And he should have said to Gordon Liddy, you’re a maniac, get out of my office. Right. He kind of did. So what I found where Watergate is concerned is that Mitchell it’s what I called a complicated box score. There were crimes for which he was never prosecuted. They’re somewhat minor in nature, but nonetheless, you know, breaking the law, lying here and there to official bodies about what he knew about this or that.

There were crimes for which he was prosecuted, for which he just wasn’t guilty. And the prosecutors used fabricated and distorted evidence. And, you know, I was the first researcher to go deep on the files of the Watergate special prosecutors. And I could see their own memos which were never turned over to the defense teams in Watergate as they should have been, where they’re typing in their own Selectric font from the 1970s. Mitchell is right against John Dean in saying that that meeting couldn’t have taken place on that day because his logs supported better. So either we have to slide that meeting another day where there is a meeting between him and Dean where we have to drop it all together.

And they had John Dean who was willing to say virtually anything about anything to get what he wanted to secure leniency. Right. It was a common, common wisdom of the Watergate era that after John Dean testified on national television in June 1973 on the Senate Watergate hearings, dislodging all the soap operas at the time in such a sensational way and seemingly with such an incredible memory that when the tapes were finally released, as Walter Cronkite put it, they vindicated Dean and Toto. But in fact, I found a six page memo drafted, sent by the Watergate special prosecutors amongst each other, and again never turned over to the defense in Watergate as it should have been.

Right. Where the actual title of the memo was Material Discrepancies between John Dean’s Senate Testimony and the Nixon tapes. A material discrepancy in legal terms means not just any old sort of two things that don’t add up, but a material discrepancy is one that bears directly on the case. And so here the Watergate prosecutors themselves knew that John Dean’s testimony was not borne out by the tapes. But again, they forged ahead. And one of the, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in your own work, one of the takeaways from that is that generally speaking, prosecutors, and especially special prosecutors, prosecutors, special counsel, independent counsel, whatever they’ve been called over the years, they’re generally in the business of building cases, not tearing them down.

Correct. And they often don’t let the facts get in the way of that mission. Yeah, they gotta get a scalp. And it doesn’t matter who or what you need to Fit things to get at what the objective is. Do we have time for the New York Times piece? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please do. So, yeah, this was just, I guess, probably three or four weeks ago now. Yeah. On Super Bowl Sunday of this year, I published a 6,000 word op ed in the New York Times. I was blown away that the New York Times gave you that much space.

The response I’ve received from friends on the left part of the spectrum and all the way to Steve Bannon and everyone in between has been, I can’t believe the New York Times published this at all. That’s when I was amazed at. I said to myself, because I started reading it and I said, is this James Rosen that I know, James Hosin? And it’s like, well, who else would be writing about his. Then I went to the bottom and checked because they gave you a hell of a lot of room to really develop the story. And it’s probably one of the most sympathetic pieces of writing ever to appear in the New York Times about Richard Nixon and maybe even Donald Trump, who’s brought in at the end.

But basically your average New York Times op ed is about 800 words to 1,000 words. This was 6,000 words. So when you read it, I hope you’ll post the link. Yeah, settle in with a big cup of job. But basically the story was. It’s interesting, I learned that the New York Times tests different headlines for the first few hours of a story going public, and they’ll switch it to the one that’s getting more clicks. The original headline, which I tweeted out, was the Secret History of the Deep State. And later they changed it to seven pages of a sealed Watergate file sat undiscovered until now.

Right. I got my hands on seven pages of testimony by ex President Richard Nixon before the grand jury in 1970. All right, so 1975, 74, he resigns. Right. I guess you got it in 2025. Right? Correct. So 50 years. This was held classified for seven pages. Now, the truth is it was actually declassified in 2012, but no one until me had decided to ask for it. This was part of a larger transcript. Nixon, he resigned in 1974. We all remember the helicopter moment. Then President Ford pardons him and Nixon gets sick. He spends two weeks in the hospital nearly dying.

Tlebitis and other problems. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force is still in business back in Washington with a grand jury that’s impaneled and they wanted his testimony. And after lengthy negotiations, it was decided that eight special Prosecutors, joined by two members of the grand jury, joined by a stenographer, would fly out to San Clemente and take Nixon’s testimony for the grand jury. It took 11 hours over two days in June 1975, unknown until my New York Times article was that after those 11 hours were over, they kicked the stenographer out of the room, and the grand jury and the prosecutors interviewed Nixon for another two hours.

So it was 13 hours of interrogation over two days time. That’s a hell of a long time. This transcript got into so many areas that were so sensitive that first of all, the whole thing was kept under grand jury secrecy. It’s about 300 pages, but seven pages were so incendiary that the Ford White House decided this can’t even be shared with the rest of the grand jury. This goes into the safe of the deputy National Security adviser at the time, who was Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. Right. And one of the memos I got out that had never been published before, and I begin the whole article with this scene, is Scowcroft stamping each of the seven pages, handing them to one of the Watergate prosecutors, sticks them in an envelope, seals the envelope, staples to the front of judicial order dated the day before, sealing it all.

He hands that back to Scowcroft. This is in the White House counsel’s office on July 1, 1975. Scowcroft takes the sealed envelope, sticks it in a White House envelope, seals that, and then his own handwriting writes, do not touch. Not. Do not open. Finders were instructed not even to touch it. Like Spinal Tap. Turn around. Don’t even look at it. Don’t even look at it. Okay. Sealed in the Council, in the presence of the White House Council, July 1, 1975. Brent Scowcroft. That transcript, that was 1975, stayed secret until it was released by the National Archives in 2011.

And I reported on it. Josh Gerstein of Politico, a few other people. But when you’re a deadline reporter and you’re looking at 300 pages, you pick a few quotes, you write a story, and you move on. The vast majority of the contents went ignored, along with a lot of supplementary materials that were released. Finally, those seven pages were still withheld in 2011. So in 2025, approaching the 50th anniversary, I decided to try and get my hands on them, and I did. And what’s in those seven pages? What was so incredibly sensitive? And it relates to Nixon describing for the grand jury the existence, in essence, of the deep State, about a year, year long, spy ring that was mounted inside the White House against Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who was the White House national security adviser at that time by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Right. And Nixon was so disturbed by even the topic that he. Please recall this for our audience. He says to the prosecutors who are interviewed, nixon is resigned. He’s disgraced. He barely got out of the hospital. But even in such a diminished state, facing off against eight special prosecutors who are armed to the teeth and documents. Yes. Refused to call him Mr. President. That’s right. They called him sir. He still conjured an aura of power. Never forget about Richard Nixon, that he’s the only Republican and one of only two politicians ever to run on the national ticket five times, the other being fdr.

That speaks to an affinity with the electorate. And even in that diminished state, he conjured an aura of power. And he said, I would just urge the special prosecutor, don’t open that can of worms. And what’s more extraordinary still, they agreed. But he did testify about this young yeoman who’s still alive, 82 years old, declined to participate in my reporting, who was working as a courier and a typist and a stenographer and a body man for Henry Kissinger and his deputy, Al Haig, and who, over 13 months in wartime, stole 5,000 documents from the White House National Security Council and delivered them to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Plumbers, which was the group that was formed in the Nixon White House to plug news leaks. Who were the guys that broke into the Watergate and wiretapping operation there? Who broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist? He was the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, New York Times. Well, they were the ones who discovered what this yeoman was up to and broke him on a polygraph machine until he started weeping. And back in 2000, the National Archives released for the first time the tapes of Nixon being informed of all this. For the first time, there was only one lonely researcher, Chris, who showed up to hear those tapes, and that was me.

And I published the contents of those tapes and the next 10 days worth of tapes in the Atlantic Monthly in 2002. That was called an article called Nixon and the Chiefs. And that got me my book contract to do John Mitchell. But Nixon hearing all this for the first time in a rare nighttime Oval Office meeting with Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, all three of whom later went to prison in Watergate, he’s hearing that the Joint Chiefs have been spying on you for a year, Mr. President. He says this is a federal offense of the highest order.

That’s what he said. And he wanted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moore, prosecuted for espionage. And it falls to Mitchell in the meeting, in the tape to say, Mr. President, I agree with you. The idea of this yeoman getting in here and giving these documents to the Joint Chiefs, it’s as if they were coming in here and robbing your desk. And the title of that chapter in the John Mitchell book, the Strongman is called Robbing the President’s Desk. Right. Mitchell recommended that they paper over the whole thing, that if they were to try to prosecute the chairman at that point, when they themselves were running secret operations in Cambodia and so much else, they’re sort of like Mitchell.

These are my words, not John Mitchell’s. But Nixon and Kissinger were sort of like car thieves who awaken one morning to find that one of the cars they had stolen had in turn been stolen from. You’re going to call the cops. And so they buried the scale. It would have been so incredibly divisive for an administration that was already under attack from so many other different fronts. So they buried it, okay, and they reappointed Moore. When Watergate happens and Haldeman and Ehrlichman are fed to the grand jury and the Nixon presidency is collapsing, Senator Howard Baker, the Republican of Tennessee, who was the top Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, learns about the Moore Radford.

Radford was the young yellow. This scandal and the plumber’s role in exposing it. And he says, Mr. President, let’s tell this story. This puts the plumbers in a wholly different light. This could save your presidency. To his eternal credit, Nixon said no. Why? Because, A, he was probably fatalistic about his chances of survival in office at that point anyway, right? But B, and he was explicit on the tapes about this. He did not want to contribute to the vilification of the armed forces at a time when the uniform was under widespread cultural assault in this country and Vietnam veterans returning to US soil were being spat on and jeered as baby killers.

Right? And in fact, he says to Alexander Haig, who was thought to be complicit in what the yeoman was up to, he said to him in May 1973 on the tapes, I could have screwed Admiral Moorer and the whole Pentagon on that business and been a big hero, and I didn’t do it. And you know why? Because I thought more of the services. So it’s really a heroic moment in Nixon’s complicated tenure. And What I got out of the archives this past year and wrote this New York times story on February 8th about was the seven pages where he’s now ex president and he’s testifying before the grand jury.

And this comes up, one of the chief revelations is he testifies to the grand jurors. This fellow Radford, I met him once on an airplane. Brilliant young man. He spoke several languages. He could type at high speeds. He was privy to everything Henry Kissinger was doing, for God’s sakes. Right. That’s amazing that Nixon remembers all these details about this. Well, this was only four years later at that point. And by the way, when he publishes his memoirs in 1978, it’s a much shorter version of the whole thing right now. What does it mean that he met Yeoman Radford and shook his hand on an airplane? There’s no film footage or document of that handshake.

But if you want to answer the question how high up did the mole get up the chain of command? The answer is the very top. And as I say in the New York Times piece to Americans of a certain mind, it recalls the very famous photograph of Alger Hiss, who was a Soviet spy in the Cold war period under FDR and Truman, shaking the hand of President Truman in 1945 in San Francisco. If you want to know how high up the mole got, they kick off the very. Yep. So everyone has reading assignments written for non lawyers.

I assure you these are your reading assignments. Obviously, the brand new second volume of the Scalia biography that James has just put out in the last couple of weeks. You got to read the first volume as well to understand the man, his upbringing in his early years. You’ve got to read the New York Times article that we just finished discussing about a plot within the Nixon White House for the military, the Joint Chiefs to raid the national Security Advisor, Kissinger’s briefcase, basically, literally. And anything else they could get their hands on and of course go back and read the one and only biography of John Mitchell, the strongman.

So those are all the reading assignments you’ve got the next few weeks. They make great gifts too, these reading assignments. We don’t like the word reading assignments. They just sound like a chore. You’re going to love these books. I like to assign it that way. People feel obligated. They’ll feel guilty. I think as a result of our discussion, Chris, our audience already felt compelled sufficiently. I think so too. They’re already ordering it. They’re saying, holy, I had no idea any of this stuff was going on. This is fantastic. It’s been a lot of fun. Scalia, the work you’ve done on this, I think, you know, as you pointed out, not Scalia set the tone for, and really created the conditions for the current legal environment, really.

One more link we might post to promote the Scalia volume in Politico. Two days after that New York Times piece, I published an op ed featuring my interview for this project with Justice Alito in his chambers. And of course, Justice Alito was the author of the Dobbs opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. And I asked him, is there a direct line in your mind from Professor Scalia on PBS in the 1970s, calling Roe v. Wade the embodiment of the imperial judiciary and his writings in dissents on abortion alongside Sandra Day o’ Connor and the rest at the time? Is there a direct line between all of that and Dobbs? And he said, absolutely.

He said, I flatter myself to imagine that Nino would have written the Dobbs opinion just the way I wrote it. Well, there’s evidence of the linkage there. Yep. But without you writing this book, you know, the story doesn’t get told or it’s told in anecdotal magazine article form. Not in a comprehensive way or in a way that’s hostile of Scalia, as the first two biographies were. Yeah, yeah. And that makes a big difference. So you’ve done a great service. Thank you. And this is tremendous stuff, and you don’t get enough credit for it. So I hope you do get as much credit as you deserve for all this excellent work.

Credit, royalties, whichever. Well, one feeds the other as well. Thank you, Chris. You’re a dear friend. We’ve known each other for well over a decade at this point. Collaborated on some shenanigans ourselves. We’ll have to do some more collaborating, conspiring. So thank you, James. Thank you very much. Great to have you with us. Thank you. I’m Chris Farrell on.
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