Accountability In An Age Of Unaccountability

0:11Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am joined by Katherine Rubino. Hey, friends. And we, you know, we do this every week to discuss kind of the week that was in legal over here at Above the Law. And, you know, this week will be no exception. Yeah, there's a there's a it's a big week in legal, as it turns out. Yeah. But first. We have small talk, which I guess we will make our an announcement. Congratulations. You are in the Epstein files. Yes, yes, yes. As are you. As are you. The entire ATL team has their names in the Epstein files.

0:53But don't worry, it is literally the most innocuous possible version of being in the - Technically, that's what they all say. But in our instance, it's true. Yeah. It appears a FBI agent is subscribed to the ATL newsletter. Or at least had a ping on to get, because the newsletter that's in the dump has a story about Epstein in it. Now, a story written long after all this. It's a 2003 ATL newsletter. Not three, 2003. Oh, 2023. I was like, yes. I'm like, it is. 2023, fair. Yeah, so the FBI didn't have subscribed. And the reason why I think it got pulled into the dump is because there's a right because there's an Epstein story in that newsletter.

1:38Not one of our stories, one of our sister publication, Deal Breakers stories about a banker who worked for Jeffrey Epstein is in the newsletter. But that point remains, if you type Catherine Rubino into the Epstein files, you will, in fact, find one hit. Oh, you're just one. OK, I'm also just one. I didn't know if there were any other stories that made it in. But yeah, no, so we get to say that. Now, I'm going to go ahead and call out the government here. So there's a lot of pressure on the government given that they are statutorily required to release all of these documents. They missed all the deadlines for them and now turned over documents which are far fewer than the ones they're legally required to turn over and with redactions that seem to be arbitrary at best in both directions, which suggests that there is an attempt to cover this up still ongoing.

2:36But I will also say the inclusion of this newsletter that has got us in there coming long after he was dead seems to suggest that these are that they are pumping out patently irrelevant documents. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I have managed a lot of document reviews in my day. I spent a number of years working at a document review company. Right. Like I've managed a lot of this. This is not a relevant document. I do not know the exact search terms They obviously just use Jeffrey and Epstein But this is not something that's relevant The FBI's personal subscription list is not relevant This is a public document There are no notes It's not like the agent forwarded it and made comments to it Which might make it relevant No, this is just sent out to tens of hundreds However many millions of people Not millions, but whoever A lot of people Sent out to all these people it is from well well well after the relevant time period you would you would expect to be but you know this is counts as some of the pages of the three million pages we've released yeah this is three of them yeah this might be a good time to remind people if you do want to sign up for any of our newsletters you can go to the website and do that uh you can write to your inbox yeah you can be like the fbi guys yeah you can get a get and and we have a few we have like we have the daily one which was this uh which covers kind of like a digest version of the stories of the day that you get in the morning but we also have some that are subject matter yeah subject matter specific about the you know politics coverage big law coverage bonuses stuff so yeah no by all means our uh you know our business side cares a lot about newsletter how we re reaching people through different vectors so it's it's nice to get get in there anyway so i think that's that's some good small talk that we can a story that we can tell for years to come I was telling a friend and she said this is going to be your interesting fact about me for the rest of your life an icebreaker yeah it's not necessarily the blind icebreaker you want at a party like who here is in the FTP but alright well Well, you know, let's talk about the week that was.

5:01And it will actually still involve a little bit of Epstein. But I imagine we're going to be talking about the Epstein files for a minute. So we'll start with what happened on Friday. Friday was an overwhelming day, shall we say. Yes. So we had kind of a – it was the match of the Trump administration's stated strategy of flooding the zone running into the Friday news dump. So they were putting out basically everything that they wanted to bury because everybody was going to be so fixated on the volume of it. This was the day where Trump announced that he was going to be suing the federal government for$10 billion because his tax records had come out.

5:48Now, he, of course, had publicly said his tax records were perfect and he had no problem with them coming out. Theoretically, that would be a fact that could come up in any litigation over it. But to the extent that the litigation will be managed by Pam Bondi, it seems as though what's just going to happen is taxpayers are going to give him several billion dollars just because. Just because that story comes out, you know, and that's a sort of story that probably would get a lot of attention. and make a lot of people dwell on how problematic it was. So instead, they did a lot more that day. This was also the day where they sent somebody to go arrest Don Lemon at the Grammys.

6:29He's represented by Abby Lowell. It seems as though even though the judges, multiple judges at this point in this case, including an appellate court, have all said that there wasn't enough to justify an arrest warrant there, They instead went directly to a grand jury that was in a ham sandwich curious mood, and they issued an indictment that allowed them to arrest Lemon without having to get an arrest warrant. I think that the – we give a lot of deference in this country to grand jury proclamations. That said, I think the judicial record of multiple judges based on the exact same evidence the grand jury saw finding it insufficient and the nature of the DOJ going to them and then when they didn't get what they want going around their backs could well be – It could finally be the sort of situation where the judges quash an indictment because it's so patently bad faith.

7:32Yeah. And Don Lemon was not the only journalist arrested as part of this process as well. So coming after journalists is not it's not make you feel warm and fuzzy in a democracy. Right. Like this is these are real warning signs that your democracy is not in a good place. Yeah, I wrote a piece kind of talking about trying to get through all the stories in that Friday news dump, which was difficult. There was a reaction, the kind of right wing legal voices tried to spin this as the fact that this was an indictment means that it's malpractice for people not to point out that he was indicted and to dwell on these judges.

8:13But as we said, like the fact that this went to judges first and they only did this after they were shut down kind of highlights the problem. One of the other journalists who was arrested had video of the situation, which, you know, it's kind of a non-legal side point. But the video shows that a bunch of people, you know, masked federal agents showed up at her house and demanded she open the door. and this is in Minnesota and it's just you know kind of a side note that that's exactly how those assassinations happened earlier uh you know last year right was people pretending to be cops with masks on a sign of how that practice uh is yeah literally dystopian yeah uh there's actually a dystopian book right the the watchmen literally have that as a as a key not not a book the tv TV show, yeah.

9:07Comic book, right? TV show, yeah. Wasn't it, wasn't The Watchmen originally a comic book? Yes, but none of that, all of that stuff's from the sequel TV show. Gotcha, okay, whatever. But yes, that's a great point. There is a dystopian work of art that explicitly makes the masking of law enforcement a key kind of notation that, oh, this means we're dystopian, look it, they don't even show their faces. Yeah, it is definitely played off as, you know this is crazy, because no one would ever think that this was okay. Yeah. And here we are. Yeah, no. So that was all going down, taking a lot of attention.

9:41Now, at this point, they also choose to drop. And remember, this is all still happening in the shadow of the killing of Alex Preddy and the and the refusal to do anything about it. The government saying they aren't going to do that. We have Tulsi Gabbard now seizing ballots at in Georgia. There's a whistleblower complaint in some box somewhere. There's something happening with her in a lockbox that they say will implicate national security. But throughout all of this, they now released a bunch of these Epstein files, as we talked about, including the one involving us. Now, this is kind of amazing.

10:17You would think a lot of this stuff that has been going on, we all thought, were to distract from the Epstein files. But now, apparently, they are releasing the Epstein files to distract from the stuff that got out of hand while they were trying to distract from the Epstein files. that is that that is accurate uh and and listen i think you kind of said it earlier in the podcast but we're gonna have stories about the epstein files and i don't just mean above the law although also above the law but i mean like the nation uh not the publication the usa uh for a really long time uh first of all there are three million pages and there are supposedly supposed to be more to come.

10:55We'll see. But also because the database is wildly clunky and actually knowing, oh, I've read all the blah, blah, blah files. It's very hard to manage and to go through. You'd really have to sort of download everything and redo it into a functional database. The one that the government has put out is terrible. If I can make it a text story just briefly. Please do. If you want to engage in that search, you go to the Justice Department's website. And of course, The files include, and, you know, there's bad redacting, so they include really bad things, but they also include at least reference to graphic accounts of sexual abuse of children.

11:35And so it has a gate, and that gate is, are you over 18, yes or no? And if you say yes, it says great. Cool. That's not the level of quality that you would really expect out of the Justice Department, I would think. Well, that is one issue, certainly. But also, if you look at a document and you want to go back to see what the next in your search is, it takes you back to redoing the search entirely. So if you're on page 10 of 25 pages, because it's only 10 results on a page, so if there's 2 ,000 hits for a big law partner's name, just throwing out a random example that I happen to know clearly, you've got to be like, which page was I on?

12:18Okay, go back to page nine. Okay, it's just there's a little bit of a preview when you go through, and I really leaned pretty heavily on those to find sort of the most relevant documents, but I'm positive there's stuff I've missed. It's like a deliberate incompetence. Yeah, and as I said, you know, I've spent a lot of time doing document review in my life. I think that I am qualified to find these sorts of documents in anything approaching a functional database, and that is barely what we have here. Yeah, no, it's real bad. And yeah, and as you said, we were going to be talking about this for a while.

12:52We won't necessarily get into a lot of the details of the stories that are coming out this week because that will be for next week's show. But I feel like that Mr. Show bit about the live call-in show, the pre-taped call-in show now. That's last week's show. Yeah, but we'll get into it. But we do have, you know, we have one law firm that had extensive ties. It claims they never represented him, but extensive ties. Yeah, listen, and that's something we knew well before the release, right? Paul Weiss represented Leon Black and Apollo management, and Apollo had Jeffrey Epstein managing a fund, and there was a fee dispute between them as well.

13:32and so or maybe it was the op whatever there was a relationship between Apollo and Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein and that's how Paul Weiss got brought into it and that's how Brad Karp the current chair of Paul Weiss got brought into it and so there's a lot of information about Brad Karp in there and stories that you know we've written certainly but but this is a mainstream media story. Particularly, I think the fact that Paul Weiss was not only one of the firms that capitulated to Trump, but the first firm that capitulated to Trump really puts a spin that mainstream media has picked up. Right.

14:10So you're going to find a lot of Brad Karp stories outside of legal industry publications right now, you know, and they're not great. I think I described his interactions with Epstein as fawning. And I think that that's a fairly accurate description. He calls Epstein amazing at one point. He used Epstein's connections to try to get his son a job with Woody Allen. You know, another unfortunate similarity here. Yeah. So there's a lot in there. There are other Paul Weiss attorneys, some of which just, you know, nothing questionable sort of happened. It's just, you know, having a meeting with them about tax implications.

14:49And there's a lot of that kind of back and forth that you would expect to see. But there's just a lot of names. Yeah. All right, so we will be talking about that for weeks to come. Let's take a break now and move on to another thing from last week. Let's face it, you didn't become a lawyer to stress over summaries and analysis. You could hand it off, but you need an assistant you can trust. Co-counsel handles those important but tedious tasks that keep you from being a lawyer. And because it's trained only on expert legal content from Thomson Reuters, it's as precise as you are, which means less stress and more confidence to focus on what matters.

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16:29All right. So you had a story about a judge who handcuffed some people. Yeah. So we have a story about a judge that handcuffed an attorney, which is never super wonderful to say it's Texas judge, Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez. And they were arrested before restraining a attorney in their courtroom. It was during a hearing and the defendant was pleading to some charges. The attorney wanted to consult with their client and judge lost it. yeah this seems like a judge who's been kind of fried by impatience which is never uh what you want to see in a judge uh it sounds like uh from your coverage it sounds like there were other people who had worked with this court maybe in the past yeah who were speaking out saying that this wasn't a surprise almost yeah well actually the initial investigation into the judge came, the sort of media investigation, not like a tribunal investigation, happened prior to the actual arrest.

17:35The complaint had been filed, but the arrest had not yet been made. And it was a bunch of people saying that Judge Gonzalez was saying wild things on the record, and not just for any judge, although for any judge, but the court that Judge Gonzalez, her courtroom is meant to be a trauma-based courtroom where they have only first-time offenders that have some underlying issues. And the focus really is on getting people the help that they need to prevent recidivism as opposed to punishment. Punishment is not really the goal of the court, but rehabilitation is. So you have a trauma-based courtroom and the judge is saying things like when one defendant had a pregnancy scare, well, maybe you should get a vibrator.

18:19She didn't say those words, but she said something that implied you should get a vibrator instead. That is not really something you want to hear from a judge, period, but certainly not in this trauma-based environment. So people said that, you know, this is a judge who's been a judge for a while, but the last two or three years, really, things started to change and all these questionable things started happening. Yeah, no, like, look, this reminds me of the judge, the federal judge out in San Diego who handcuffed a child who was just in the audience. Look, there are some people who like hardened lawyers who push back against the idea of the imperial judge in every case.

19:02I don't necessarily do that. I think it is valuable that the judge exercise a good deal of power to maintain the workability of a courtroom. But this is what happens when you give somebody a sense of their own importance a little bit too much. Yeah. And I also think that there's something to be said for just burnout, too. That's kind of the sense that I got reading all the allegations where this was a judge that people liked and felt was doing great at their job until for a number of years. It was only recently that their demeanor changed. Well, if all you're doing is hearing trauma cases, that takes a toll on you, too.

19:37Sure it does. I'm sure it doesn't. That's like, you know, obviously I have the other podcast, the Jabot, where I talk to people about their careers and whatnot. And that's one of the questions I'm constantly asking people who are doing work that I think is great and important, but feels like it would be very heavy after a time. What do you do to prevent burnout? What do you do so that you're not taking the trauma home with you? Because part of taking, you know, part of trauma based lawyering or trauma based, you know, judicial orders is that you do take a little bit of it and you do are sympathetic.

20:06but there has to be a point where you have to let it go so that you can recharge and continue the job. And I just wonder if that's really at the root of what's going on in this case. But, you know, we'll see. No, absolutely. All right, let's take a break and we'll be right back. All right, well, so to close out today, I wrote a story and there's going to be, this is another one of those where we will probably talk about this more in the coming weeks. But I put out a story where I really want to make a call to action to attorneys who are maybe involved with their state regulatory groups, whether it's run through the bar or run through the courts, or even if they aren't to get involved in those organizations, to really stress discipline and ethical investigations of some of these lawyers involved in the stuff going on with this administration.

21:02I think it is important to remember that there's not going to be lying to we now have several documented situations of lying to the courts. Right. That's that's what should be an auto no no. And it is not going to be dealt with. Some of these these misrepresentations have had broader impacts than just, you know, hoodwinking the court. but there's not going to be any people's liberties have been yeah there's likely not to be any criminal repercussions from this not just because our system makes it almost impossible to do that to to prosecutors but because there's a high likelihood all these people get pardoned on the way out the door but the profession polices itself uh and even with all of that stuff happening we have a position we are in a position as a profession to make sure that people who have made wild ethical breaches like lying to a court uh affirmatively lying to a court when they knew that that what that they were telling a falsehood uh we can make sure those people don't practice law again we can make sure those people don't revolving door right back to a cushy job that is something that can happen not all of us you know have our finger on that button but But there are mechanisms that we as a profession have, and we should be involved in pressuring them to take action.

22:27Yeah, I think that you're right that we have to sort of make there be a professional zeitgeist that says, if you were involved in this, that's it. Yeah. That's it. That is an ethical lie that we are not coming back from. And I think it has to happen here because while I would also encourage law firms not to give cushy jobs to these folks, we've already kind of seen with the spinelessness of some of the big firms when they got remotest push from the administration that they're willing to do whatever. They're willing – and they'll write it off as, oh, well, we brought somebody in. Business, blah, blah, blah.

23:02We're also hired somebody from the Obama administration. All of that sort of stuff. So we can't rely on them. We do have to take action at a profession-based level. And I think that it's important for everybody to start thinking about that. There will be follow-ups. I'm working on a follow-up to this article that gets into some of the more detailed explanations of like what you can do in different jurisdictions to help. And we've seen some action. The Campaign for Accountability, I've written a couple stories about them. They are pushing in Virginia where Lindsey Halligan, who's a member of the Florida Bar, but was cosplaying as the U.S.

23:42attorney there, acting in complete contravention to court orders and misleading, found by a few judges to have been misleading grand juries and so on. they have filed a complaint with the Virginia bar there because she was practicing in Virginia while not a member of that bar. Like they take on that responsibility of regulating it when she's practicing there. And initially the bar refused to take action, but they have renewed their call now that there is a deeper, more detailed record from the courts. But that's the sort of work that folks need to get into. and I think getting involved in those processes is important.

24:27Absolutely. So I think that's it. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for everybody for listening. We'll talk to you next week, of course. You should be subscribed to the show. Probably more about the Epstein files at that point as well. You should be subscribed to the show to get new episodes when they come out. You should give reviews, write things. Catherine's also the host of the Jibo, as she mentioned. I'm a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. There's other programs by the Legal Talk Network you should check out. You should be reading Above the Law so that you read these and other stories before we talk about them here.

25:01Social media is always available too, abovelaw.com. Catherine's at Catherine1. I'm at Joe Patrice. And we will talk to you later. Bye.

25:23Thank you.