“War Room” host Steve Bannon and Article III Project’s Mike Davis discuss President Donald Trump’s criticism of former Federalist Society president Leo Leonard. From Trump’s Truth Social message: “How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be? I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court – I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is! In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own ‘thing.'”

STEVE BANNON: Let’s go to Jerusalem and our own Mike Davis. Mike, the Leonard Leo, you’ve warned people about this for a while now. President Trump just put a shot across the bow. What is going on and why is it important, sir? MIKE DAVIS, ARTICLE III PROJECT: President Trump is going to build on his biggest accomplishment of his first term and pick even more bold and fearless judges in his second term. We got a lot of them right in the first term, but the problem is that we didn’t get a lot of others right, so we’re going to make damn sure in President Trump’s second term that the Article III Project is going to help President Trump pick even more bold and fearless judges. We have judges, judicial nominees like Emil Bove. You hear the FedSoc types like Ed Whelan wailing about Emil Bove, saying somehow that Emil Bove is not good enough to be a Third Circuit judge based out of New Jersey. I would say this about Emil. He graduated at the top of his class at Georgetown Law School. He was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, the premier federal district in the country. He was a national security prosecutor. He clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit in New York. He clerked for a judge on the Southern District of New York. He was the acting deputy attorney general, the acting number two at the Justice Department, and he was President Trump’s lawyer when all these other lawyers at these big, fancy law firms would not represent President Trump during the three years of unprecedented, unrelenting Republican lawfare against President Trump. It was Emil Bove who was President Trump’s defense lawyer. He is exactly who President Trump — BANNON: Hang on. Hang on. I got that. We’re getting much more MAGA type judges. I understand that. The Federalist Society had a, and they did help us in 16 by identifying the first charge, and then you got involved. We had the second group of which Gorsuch came out of, the great Gorsuch. But this is something different. Why is Leonard Leo taking money from that billionaire, the billion dollars he’s sitting on, and actually going to and setting up these phony groups and attacking President Trump’s policies? You got to go pretty far in the woods on something like this to hit President Trump’s tripwire. Would they hit it, brother? Because he put a shotgun blast out there. What is that about? Yeah. What implication? And particularly what implication it’s going to have, because we got to get this thing resolved by the 30th of June on the Article II powers, brother Davis. DAVIS: I mean, when you have Leonard Leo taking over a billion dollars, I think it was like $ 1.6 billion from a billionaire who gave him his fortune, Barry Seid, and then Leonard sat on the sidelines with all the money for three years of lawfare and didn’t support groups that were helping President Trump with the lawfare, and actually had guys out there like Ed Whelan, who Leonard funds, undermining President Trump during this lawfare. And Ed Whelan continues to undermine President Trump with Emil Bove and other judicial nominees. I don’t know what Leonard’s doing. He funded the anti-RFK campaign for HHS secretary. He’s fighting against President Trump on tariffs. I think Leonard Leo needs to remember that he was a nobody before President Trump named him as his judge picker in 2016. And then Leonard Leo got very wealthy after that. You go from making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year at the Federalist Society to flying around in private jets and having $ 8 million homes in Maine. He got very wealthy from this. You would think that after you’ve gotten very wealthy off of President Trump, that you can at least give President Trump the loyalty of keeping your mouth shut. STEVE BANNON: Where’s this going to go for — I know you got to bounce, but what should we look for? Where’s this going to go from here? Because this is inextricably tied to these issues of the Article Two powers and this kind of confrontation, this Jacksonian type of confrontation that you know, because you laid it out very clearly from the beginning that we’re now reaching at least the first climax stage of by the end of June. What do people should think about in the Leonard Leo and Federalist Society part of this, sir? MIKE DAVIS: I think President Trump’s going to rely more on the Article III Project than he is Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. We’re already doing that. We’ve already compiled a list of Supreme Court nominees and shared that list. We’re working very closely. I’m working very closely with President Trump and his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and his White House counsel, David Warrington, and his Deputy Counsel for Nominations, Steve Kenney, who used to work for me on the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Trump has learned his lessons from the first term, good and bad. He knows that the people he picks for these key posts, whether in the executive branch of the Justice Department or on these judicial slots, these are critical roles. Those people are policy in Washington, D.C. President Trump had never run for office in 2016. He had never served in office. He had four years in office. He had four years in the wilderness. He had four years to reflect. He has plenty to govern. BANNON: I’ve got to bounce, I know you do. Do you think, though, that Leonard Leo’s going to start taking out ads in these phony conservative front groups to attack President Trump’s assertion of his Article 2 powers, particularly if we get to the point … I know you’re not a huge fan of this, but you’re getting closer to my side, suspending the writ of habeas corpus and other things that President Trump needs to do as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and having taken an oath to defend the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic, sir? DAVIS: Well, I thought that conservatives, constitutionalists, like the Federalist Society types believed in what the liberals call the unitary executive theory, what we call the Article 2 of the Constitution, where the president and the president alone has the executive power, all executive power under Article 2. I don’t remember a Trump derangement syndrome exception to Article 2. The American people made their decision on November 5th. They gave President Trump an overwhelming electoral mandate, 312 electoral votes, all seven swing states, the popular vote. President Trump was sabotaged during his first term. He’s not going to get sabotaged during his second term, not by leftists and not by establishment conservatives. We will make damn sure that doesn’t happen at the Article III Project. I am very happy that after Ed Whelan put out his piece going after Emil Bove, we had three Article III Project opinion pieces from me, from Josh Hammer, from Will Chamberlain out immediately punching back against this. We are going to be in the fight every day for President Trump. We’re going to make damn sure he succeeds with the War Room Posse.

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