This is the Tom Hartman program.

Officials that served under President Joe Biden have told the Washington Post that these are people who Trump is

like now going after, now investigating and prosecuting, they're telling the Washington Post,

they can't find a lawyer. They had big law firms who are willing to defend them. Those big law

firms are now terrified of the Trump administration. This is how fascism works.

Fascism is all about authoritarianism. It's all about threatening your enemies. It's all about threatening people with consequences

that are outrageous. I mean, you would think in America that you're entitled to legal protection.

But no, Donald Trump is trying to make it that if you are on the other

side, if you are a Democrat, if you are somebody that Donald Trump views as an enemy, that you

can't even get a damn lawyer. It's scary, said a former Biden official who needed a lawyer

after getting drawn into Trump-era litigation, and the

attorney they'd lined up from a major law firm dropped him as a client after this executive

order attacking that firm.

He said five other firms declined his case, citing conflicts of interest, but the former

official said individual attorneys were not happy with the decisions.

Scott Cummings, who's a law professor at the UCLA School of Law

said this is the autocratic legal idea of claiming a democratic mandate to attack the rule of law by using law to really erode

institutional pillars that are supposed to check executive power. And he notes that this kind of a campaign against lawyers is virtually identical

to what Vladimir Putin first did in Russia in the late 1990s, what Victor Orban did in Hungary

in the early 19 teens, and what is happening right now in Turkey under Erdogan. The exact same thing. Meanwhile, Donald Trump

has gone to war on immigrant children. He just, have you ever heard of the unaccompanied children

program, the UCP? This was something that George W. Bush started because there were families who were

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