For the past six-and-a-half years, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of appearing on TV to discuss and analyze the legal issues of the day. I’ll be honest, growing up as a rough-and-tumble kid in Jersey, someone who was far more interested in playing football, wrestling, drinking beer with my buddies, and getting in minor scrapes with the law, I never thought anyone would give me the opportunity. And yet, I became an on-air legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, discussing legal developments involving, among other things, criminal investigations and prosecutions of a president of the United States.
Having spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor – first as an Army JAG prosecutor for more that six years then as a Department of Justice lawyer at the DC US Attorney’s Office for 24 years, prosecuting cases in the courts of Washington, D.C. – I was comfortable discussing legal issues involving criminal investigations and prosecutions.
The way I looked at it, after talking to juries for 30 years about the facts and the law, I could probably talk for three-to-four minutes at a time as I looked into a TV camera.
Don’t get me wrong, as I sat in the MSNBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Center the day after I retired from the DOJ, about to appear on television for the first time, I was pretty damn nervous, “I know I can talk to a jury,” I thought to myself, “but I have no idea if I can talk on TV!”
But as I started answering questions from the anchor, Alex Witt, I settled in, and the nerves subsided a bit. I’ve often told the story of how, at the end of that first appearance, Alex said, on air, “Glenn, consider yourself booked for next weekend.” That was an incredibly generous and reassuring thing for her to say, signaling that I must have done OK. I’ll always love Alex Witt for those kind words.
Shortly thereafter, MSNBC offered me a contract as a legal analyst, and I’ve been with them ever since. Until just a few weeks ago.
I relished the opportunity to explain the legal developments of the day - developments that not only came at break-neck speed but that often were accompanied by a healthy dose of spin and disinformation. I was convinced that discussing what were often complex or confusing legal issues in a way that was understandable to everyone was valuable and important. My job title was “legal analyst,” but my mission was to translate legalese to English, and to separate disinformation from truth.
I talked about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the prosecutions that investigation produced. I covered for MSNBC the prosecutions in Washington, D.C. of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and others, often running to the cameras outside the courthouse to provide real-time legal analysis of what was unfolding in the courtroom. I discussed and analyzed the criminal cases against Hunter Biden and Senator Bob Menendez. And, of course, I discussed the legal developments in the criminal investigations and prosecutions of Donald Trump.
For me, enforcing the law has nothing to do with whether the defendant is a Republican, a Democrat or an independent. It’s about the facts and the law.
After a few years of regular – sometimes daily – appearances, I had a growing concern: was I making a positive contribution to what appeared to be the continual erosion of the vitality of the rule of law? Was I doing anything of value in the battle for a healthy American democracy? The concern I think I tried for a long time to ignore or suppress was whether I was reaching diverse audiences. Put another way, was I penetrating conservative bubbles or was I just preaching to the converted?
I think it’s fair to say that relatively few Trump supporters watch MSNBC, and relatively few Biden/Harris supporters regularly tuned in to Fox, NewsNation, or other right-leaning outlets.
These days, we don’t seem interested in talking across the great political divide. Rather, we retreat to separate echo chambers, not trying to convince or even talk with the “other side.” It’s become “us” versus “them”, with seemingly little effort to try to appreciate or understand why we’ve been driven so far apart.
I find objectionable the notion of America being made up of us and them. I’ve always maintained that it’s not us and them – it’s just us: different kinds of us, different flavors of us, perhaps with different ideologies and political preferences. But not really with different priorities. We want a good life for our kids. We want to be safe. We want to be healthy. We want to be happy. We want a fair opportunity to move forward, to succeed in life. These are the things we have in common. These are the things that should bind us together, the things on which we can agree.
If we can’t even talk with one another, how can we ever begin to bridge the divide?
So, I decided to do something different. I don’t pretend it will have some huge impact. I’m just one voice. Still, if we put enough voices together, we can create a chorus that just might be heard.
I decided to offer myself up to any and all conservative news outlets to talk about the legal issues of the day from the perspective of a career federal prosecutor. I see Democrats like former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Representative Eric Swalwell appearing frequently on right-leaning networks to provide their take on issues, their counter-points to the points being made by the program’s anchor and/or other guests.
I’m not suggesting I will be as effective or compelling as Buttigieg or Swalwell. But I’ve decided there’s more value in at least trying to reach a wider audience rather than just remaining comfortably in my own bubble.
Given that my contract prohibited me from appearing on other news networks, I made the difficult decision to ask MSNBC if they would consider releasing me from my contract. I assured them I would not break my contract, but was hoping they would understand my desire to try to communicate with some of my fellow Americans who likely don’t spend much time watching MSNBC.
The MSNBC leadership was very gracious and supportive, and agreed to release me, with the only ask being that I didn’t sign as a legal analyst with anyone else during the next six months. I gladly agree to those terms.
A quick note about independent media vs. mainstream media. I am not going to launch into an attack on what these days is being referred to as legacy media or corporate media. But I do think some of what ails America can be attributed to media outlets that decided to cover the 2024 campaign as if it were a normal election cycle. It was not. Trump is a convicted felon for crimes he committed in 2016 to conceal important information from the voters of New York about his unsuitability to be president. He is also an adjudicated insurrectionist (per a Colorado trial court and the Colorado Supreme Court - a ruling that the United States Supreme Court neither contradicted nor disavowed when it took up the Colorado case). We all saw what Trump incited on January 6, 2021. So, 2024 was no normal presidential campaign.
More recently, I watched as cable news networks covered Trump’s speech and Q & A session at the economic forum at Davos. Trump’s address included lies, half-truth, and insults. Yet some networks broadcast his diatribe largely uninterrupted and with little or no fact-checking, comment or correction. I view this as damaging to our democracy, and anathema to responsible journalism.
So, I am opting to be 100% independent in what I do moving forward – in my writing, my commentary, and my daily legal analysis videos on my Justice Matters YouTube channel as well as The Legal Breakdown videos I do with Brian Tyler Cohen on his YouTube channel.
Building a bridge in these times of deep political and societal divisions isn’t easy. I may be just one voice, but I’m making a commitment to this mission: doing this now in the urgency of the moment.
