Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed The Tennessee Star’s national political editor Neil McCabe to the newsmaker line to describe the environment outside SCOTUS Tuesday night and comment upon the unprecedented leak.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, the very brave Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor for The Star News Network and The Tennessee Star, the very best Washington journalist in the country.
He was on the front lines yesterday with 20,000 pro-choice protesters all surrounding him as he was broadcasting for The Star News Network and on WarRoom and also on Frank Speech last night. Good morning, Neil. Did you survive the evening?
McCabe: Yeah, it was really something. The whole time, though, as things got a little hairy, I was thinking about your old friend Lord Tennyson, who wrote about the Light Brigade: into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.
Leahy: So you reported all day there. We have a live broadcast, and we’ve got that capability now at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. You’ll start to see it, actually, as we unveil our live video capabilities over the next month or so. We’ll be doing state and local news from Nashville and then expanding beyond. But you’ll always be on because you’ve got the best take on what’s going on in Washington, D.C. So describe how the day went. What was your day like yesterday outside the Supreme Court? Start with your first appearance on WarRoom with Stephen K. Bannon. That was at 10:00 yesterday.
McCabe: I actually got to the Supreme Court around 7:00, and the first person I bumped into that I recognized was Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, who was sort of walking around and just sort of checking it out.
He basically looked like he had just finished a run. He had a ballcap on. It almost seemed like he was trying to gauge the public reaction, maybe to decide what his position will be.
We went on with Steve Bannon and, you know, at that point, the pro-life guys were being pretty aggressive. It was maybe 50 percent pro, 50 percent against abortion. Throughout the afternoon, Students for Life were ver, very active.
They would break into the pro-abortion demonstrations and sort of shout them down, and at one point really drove them off the field. But around 5:00, during a break, I took a look around, because there was one particular pro-life student protester I wanted to interview, and I made a small circle, and then I made a larger circle, and I couldn’t find her, and I couldn’t find anybody.
And by 6:00 and 7:00, there were about 20,000 pro-abortion protesters. And if there were any pro-life protesters there, I didn’t see them. And I was looking. It was crazy.
Leahy: I found your 7:00 interview on Frank Speech, with like a 15-minutes interview, and the crowds were huge. And there you were, surrounded and trying to get the word out. What was that like? Did you feel like you were in any physical danger?
McCabe: Obviously, Mike, if somebody had tried anything I would have gotten on my hind legs and they would have been in physical danger. But the only danger, Michael, was the danger to the truth.
And they were interfering with my lens, and they were trying to block me from talking into my microphone. It just became impractical. But we sort of drove through it, and it was pretty exciting. Of course, my gallant videographer, Anthony, was along for the ride.
Carmichael: Other than the little altercations you’re describing with yourself, was there violence with any of the Capitol Hill police or Supreme Court police who are on duty?
McCabe: Law enforcement officers were very omnipresent. You saw both Supreme Court and Capitol Hill officers. You saw bike police. You saw guys on foot. Around 6:00, they arrested one guy who’s sort of on my side.
Around 6:30, they arrested four people who are on the other side. What they did was they created these bicycle rack barricades and they created a neutral zone in the middle, directly in front of the Supreme Court.
So people were forced to be on the left or the right. But what ended up happening is that that split the pro and the anti on the left and the right. So it’s like one side didn’t belong to the other. And so that had the effect of … you never got a concentrated mob.
Leahy: This unprecedented leak of a draft opinion never happened in our history before and has really rocked the court. It was leaked to the German-owned Politico late Monday night. One of the co-authors, Josh Bernstein, had interviewed, coincidentally in 2017, a fellow who now clerks for Justice Sotomayor, Amit Jain.
Now the U.S. Marshall has been instructed by the justice to see who could have leaked it. I guess there are 45 possibilities: the nine justices, and there are 36 law clerks. That’s 45 people. How will that investigation proceed and will Amit Jain be the first guy who gets a lie detector test?
McCabe: It can go two ways, right? The NSA and the Deep State or whatever, they know exactly who did this and they know exactly went down.
They have all the WhatsApps, all the text messages … in the surveillance state that we live in today, someone knows exactly what happened.
And the question is, are they going to do anything about it or not? A lot of times the intelligence agencies will have the evidence. They give it to law enforcement. In this case, it would probably be the Justice Department.
And then they do what’s called parallel construction, where they use the information from an unconstitutionally captured surveillance. They then build a case using that, saying, okay, now we know where to look, and it takes time to build that case.
Maybe the guy comes forward and says, I did it and I’m glad I did it. I think it’s important to note that whoever did this waited until after oral arguments were done because they were aware that it would create a complete breach of trust inside that room where you have nine justices who really have to get along with each other at a certain level.
I think it also points to the complete breakdown of Chief Justice John Roberts’s control of this court. He is someone that has bent over backward or bent over forward, however, you want to phrase it, to help out the Democrats. I’m thinking of Obamacare, transgender rights, and when he helped knock down the Indiana anti-abortion law. And this is how the Left thanks him.
I think there are a lot of internal dynamics playing in the court. And if it turns out that this was Sotomayor’s clerk, you have to wonder – is this going to push Roberts into the conservative camp more so, or does the court just continue to spin out of control?
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
