The Justice Department gives Trump an unprecedented settlement
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This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.
Why can't you sue a president or a presidential candidate who knowingly lies to the public? After all, corporate executives can be sued for lying to shareholders. This question about our inability to legally hold politicians accountable for their speech, the threats that poses to our democracy, and what we can learn from how other countries deal with these lies, are the subjects of my guest Andrew Weismann's new book, Liar's Kingdom, How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America. During Trump's first term, the Washington Post tabulated over 30,000 false or misleading Trump public statements.
Andrew Weissman was a lead prosecutor in the Muller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Russians colluded with candidate Donald Trump and his campaign. Weissmann also served as chief of the fraud section in the Justice Department and general counsel of the FBI when Robert Muller was the FBI director. Weissmann was a leader of the Enron task force, which successfully prosecuted Enron executives for knowingly lying to shareholders by inflating Enron's profits. Earlier in his career, while working in the Eastern District of New York, he prosecuted three of the five most powerful crime families in New York. He's now an MSNow legal analyst and co-host of the podcast Maine Justice.
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