Trump just got a brutal rebuke from his own appointee: ex-FBI lawyer

President Donald Trump suffered another legal setback in the federal courts on Tuesday, July 7 when U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II — a Trump appointee in Atlanta — shot down a grand jury subopeona related to Trump's push to relitigate the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, a swing state he lost to Joe Biden that year. Former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann weighed in on Ray's ruling during an appearance on The Bulwark's legal vodcast, emphasizing that Trump got a humiliating rebuke from one of his own federal appointees.

Weissmann told host Sarah Longwell, a GOP strategist and Never Trump conservative who rooted for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024, "The judge… just quashed a grand jury subpoena related to the 2020 election — and that judge was appointed by Donald Trump — saying: And you are not even meeting good-faith standards. ... The main problem with this grand jury subpoena is that not only is there no there there — you haven't articulated anything that sounds criminal[.] There's a five-year statute of limitations."

Longwell asked Weissmann for his insights on legal arguments to use against Trump, and he told her, "I would focus on the complete denial of justice as shown by trying to indict six members of Congress. Judges finding that he engaged in vindictive prosecution. Abrego García. His issuing grand jury subpoenas that get quashed because of lack of good faith regarding the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, the sitting governor of Minnesota, the sitting mayor of Minneapolis. ... Then, I would talk about the people who have been fired at the Department of Justice for doing their job."

Weissmann continued, "I would grill him on: Can you just walk me through why people who are afforded due process — including people who attacked police officers — why it is that you called them, you called this whole group and the way they were treated, a grave national injustice. Can you walk me through why you're saying that all of them got injustice from every federal judge who they were in front of? And it's a whole panoply of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans in DC — why is that a grave national injustice[?] I mean, you can go on and on. ... There's so much fodder."

Native New Yorker Weissmann, now 68, has a long resumé in the legal world, serving as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) during the 1990s before serving in the FBI under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Weissmann is also a professor at the New York University School of Law.