Hawk Podcasts

The speech matters less for its facts than for its signal. Hawk reads it as telegraphing that this administration will not accept the results of the midterms, and he puts it alongside the rest of the week: Jay Clayton declining to say who won in 2020, Todd Blanche testifying the president may direct prosecutions of his enemies, and Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller announcing an expansion of groups d...

North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis is now threatening to block the nomination unless Blanche meets personally with survivors within a day or two. The committee splits 11 Republicans to 10 Democrats, so a single Republican no vote stops it from reaching the floor, and Tillis says the earliest vote is roughly two weeks out. John Cornyn has separately voiced concerns over the settlement fund. Hawk...

Then come the numbers. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report covering 1994 through 2020 found that right-wing extremists carried out the large majority of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, roughly two-thirds in 2019 and over 90 percent in early 2020, and were responsible for 335 of 357 domestic terror deaths across that period, about 93 percent. None of t...

Jay Clayton, questioned by Jon Ossoff and then Mark Warner, gets as close as any Trump nominee has to acknowledging 2020, allowing that Biden won the Electoral College and that Congress certified it, while still avoiding the popular vote. Hawk notes the pattern across every nominee for a year and a half. The real news is John Cornyn. Pressed on the roughly $1.8 billion settlement fund, Blanche did...

The defendants include the Heritage Foundation and its employees Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Markwayne Mullin, Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem, plus Betar and Canary Mission. Khalil's theory traces a line from the Heritage plan known as Project Esther, written after October 7th, to the targeting of activists by those groups, to his own arrest and months in detention...

Hawk focuses on Springfield, Ohio, where he grew up nearby, using two newsletters by Jim Swift at the Bulwark. Haitians came to Springfield at the request of the Republican governor and mayor to fill unfilled manufacturing jobs and reverse decades of population decline. They filled factories, opened businesses, started churches, and stabilized the city, until Donald Trump and JD Vance spread the f...

The emails center on Ed Martin Jr., the right-wing lawyer pushed out as acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. and then parked at DOJ headquarters to run the weaponization working group. Blanche wrote "I am frustrated" within a month, set up weekly check-ins, and reassigned investigative lanes to his own deputies. Hawk covers Martin's role in the Letitia James mortgage case, the January 6th review, and the...

Hawk connects the killings to the legal warning from his previous video, that murder and assault are state charges a president cannot pardon, and to a Fourth Amendment argument about race-based stops, referencing an MSNBC segment and New York Times writer Mara Gay. He also previews Trump's Thursday prime time speech on the 2020 election, noting the lapsed federal statutes of limitations, and Dan A...

Using a Nicolle Wallace MSNBC segment and his copy of Jack Smith's indictment, Hawk revisits the record. Trump was indicted on more than 40 felony counts across two jurisdictions for trying to overturn 2020, lost some 60 lawsuits, and his attorneys and fake electors were later charged. He also notes the reported White House task force preparing to release documents, and figures like Tulsi Gabbard...

At the center is a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against the IRS and the Treasury Department after a contractor leaked his tax information. As Hawk lays out, the suit appears to have been time-barred by a two-year statute of limitations, sought far more than the roughly $10,000 the statute allowed, and pitted Trump against agencies he controls, meaning there was no genuine adversity between the parti...

Hawk walks through the legal reasoning. A presidential pardon reaches only federal offenses, so a future pardon would leave state prosecutions untouched. He points to how murder is charged at the state level, citing the Tyler Robinson case and the prosecution of the man accused of killing Minnesota's House Speaker, and notes that murder carries no statute of limitations. Looking ahead, Hawk argues...

The Trump arc is the spine of the video. Hawk revisits Graham's 2016 warning that nominating Trump would destroy the party, his endorsement of Jeb Bush, and Trump giving out Graham's cell phone number, then the turn: endorsing Trump, working to overturn the 2020 election Joe Biden won, condemning Trump after January 6th, and getting back on board weeks later. Hawk also traces Graham's close friend...

Hawk builds his assessment around three moments he calls flashes of moral clarity: Graham's early 2016 warning that nominating Donald Trump would destroy the Republican Party, his Senate floor speech denouncing Trump after the January 6th insurrection, and his past defense of Joe Biden as a fundamentally good and decent man. In each case, Hawk argues, Graham soon reversed course and returned as on...

Hawk, a former criminal defense attorney, walks through the evidence now in the record, including the Discord group chat first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein and additional text messages reported by the New York Times. He explains why this far exceeds the probable cause standard, why Twiggs received state and federal immunity, and why he expects Robinson to be held over for trial and, abs...

Much of the argument centers on the recorded testimony of Lance Twiggs, Robinson's roommate and romantic partner, who has been granted state and federal immunity in exchange for testimony. Hawk walks through why spousal privilege does not apply, how hearsay and the statement-against-interest exception work, and why the prosecution wants to frame the interview as Robinson's confession. Along the wa...

Marjorie Taylor Greene brings her McConnell and AIPAC claims to The View, which gives Hawk an opening on a subject close to him: the roughly $60 million AIPAC has poured into congressional races this cycle, Miriam Adelson's spending against Thomas Massie over the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and where that leaves both parties. George Conway flatly calls Donald Trump an adjudicated rapist, point...

The rest of the video turns to Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, credibly accused by Jenny Racicot of a violent 2021 sexual assault in reporting Hawk finds credible and Platner denies as categorically false. Hawk points out that Platner's two-minute response video spent only about fifteen seconds on the allegation before thanking voters, and walks through Racicot's CNN interview with Jake Tap...

Hawk, a former trial attorney, walks through the reporting, the accuser's account as told to Politico across three interviews, and the corroborating material the outlet says it reviewed. He notes the Maine statute of limitations leaves fifteen years in which criminal charges could still be brought, though no charges have been filed and the claims remain unproven. The heart of the video is a questi...

Hawk argues it is an affordability problem. Zohran Mamdani's winning mayoral platform was built on housing costs, rent control, free transit, daycare, and taxing the rich. Those policies poll extremely well. The word socialism polls badly. Paul Krugman's Substack draws the distinction clearly: what most Americans actually support is social democracy, a market system with progressive taxation, safe...

Trump's 2025 financial disclosure showing $2.2 billion in personal income, much of it from crypto, is drawing backlash even from Republican voters in Florida. CNN aired a supercut of Trump on the 2016 campaign trail ripping politicians who enrich themselves in office, nearly ten years to the day before his own disclosure dropped. John Fetterman appeared on Fox News to say the only thing that would...

The headline finding: fourteen of twenty-one study participants, two thirds, had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy. Hawk reads quotes from participants by name throughout the study, including a Wyoming homeschooling mother who says she does not like the word democracy, a Michigan retiree who says if they had a democracy it would be a problem, a Wyoming delivery driver who s...

Hugh Hewitt praises the ruling while pivoting quickly to celebrating Kavanaugh's concurrence encouraging Congress to pass a law restricting birthright citizenship. Hawk responds by noting that Congress cannot even get all Republican votes for the Save Act, let alone pass a constitutional amendment. Lisa Rubin analyzes Kavanaugh's partial dissent in detail, with Hawk describing Kavanaugh as the kid...

The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett. Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment while dissenting in part. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Neil Gorsuch. The court grounded its decision in the historical context of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause,...

Second, NBC News correspondent Ryan Nobles corners Republican Senator Roger Marshall on Meet the Press over voter fraud claims, with Hawk noting that Republicans won the House, the Senate, the presidency, and effectively control the Supreme Court in 2024, making the left-rigs-elections argument impossible to sustain. Third, an Ohio pastor from the Springfield area shares a firsthand account of wha...

Serwer's piece documents the Trump administration's explicitly race-based statements about Haitian immigrants, including claims they all have AIDS, eat household pets, are genetically predisposed to crime, and are poisoning the blood of the country. Samuel Alito's majority opinion declined to repeat any of those statements, substituting his own race-neutral explanations for what they might have me...