The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As you’ve heard by now, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles gave 11 interviews to Vanity Fair, in which she was way too candid about, well, everything. To our mind, though, the most interesting thing she did was to admit that Trump’s prosecutions are about “retribution” against enemies. We think this gets at a bigger story, which is that this entire effort on Trump’s part is just falling apart. And it’s happened with astonishing speed. On top of that, what Susie Wiles just said is surely going to make it even harder for Trump to carry out his lawless efforts to jail his opponents. And right on cue, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult in response, making the whole spectacle even uglier. Asawin Suebsaeng, a political reporter for Zeteo, has a new piece coming out today explaining all this, so we’re talking to him about the implosion of those prosecutorial efforts. Swin, always good to have you on.

Asawin Suebsaeng: It is always a pleasure to be here to talk to you about America’s ongoing democratic backsliding.

Sargent: It is lurching backwards at a furious rate. And so we had Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, saying in these interviews that she had reached a loose agreement with Trump early on for him to stop going after opponents with law enforcement. Now, clearly that didn’t work too well.

Wiles also admitted that what Trump is really up to with these prosecutions is clear. “In some cases it may look like retribution,” she said. And then, even more directly, she allowed that the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James did seem like retribution. Swin, there you have the chief of staff in the White House all but admitting that Trump’s prosecutions are not rooted in the law. Your reaction to that?

Suebsaeng: Well, not just admitting that this is retribution—or I guess you could say it looks a lot like retribution—but saying on the record to a reporter working for Vanity Fair: Look, I tried to get him to stop. I tried to limit it to three months.

So, like, why were you trying to get him to stop unless there was something gravely wrong with it? So, look, obviously the White House—from Susie Wiles to everybody else in the communications operation and also all across the vast expanse of the Trump administration, including Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense—are trying to propagandize to the American people that, look, this was a hit piece, it was missing some vital context, or certain quotes were taken out of context. And, look, it’s no big deal. In fact, we’re laughing about it. Donald Trump gave an exclusive interview to the New York Post on Tuesday, basically stressing that point, like, I actually think it’s funny. Nobody here is upset. Susie didn’t do anything wrong.

So there’s a wall-to-wall administration communication strategy right now to kind of say, This is a nothingburger, this is no big deal, please don’t pay attention to it. In fact, everybody loves and adores Susie Wiles and we really, really, really adore Donald Trump.

I don’t think this will come as a shock to that many of your listeners, but there is a large screen of bullshit covering that, in the sense that they’re trying to make it seem like Susie Wiles slipped on the banana peel and she meant to slip on the banana peel.

What they are not saying in her and other statements saying, This is out of context, allegedly, is the part that she is not allowed to say publicly, which is—and this is something we have heard from a variety of our sources in the know and in the administration who would be in a position to know about this—[that] she did not expect a lot of what she said and what Christopher Whipple got on tape to end up in the published product.

She thought she was off the record or on background. There are a bunch of things in the two Vanity Fair pieces that you can safely assume—or not just assume; we know— she didn’t want her name publicly attached to, but she didn’t know she was on the record.

So this whole thing about, like, It’s missing context, this is a hit piece—you just can’t publicly admit that you fucked up and that you thought for much of this you weren’t going to have your name attached to it. So that’s what’s going on.

Sargent: Right. And so that’s why they’re going after the reporter and Vanity Fair really hard. Wiles put out a statement calling it a disingenuous hit piece. Then on Fox News, White........

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