Afroman And Elon Had Very Different Trial Experiences

0:11Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above law i'm joined by chris williams hello hello we do not have katherine who is already departed on another trip but we will carry on while she makes her way through the ice infested waters of security checks at airports we're all following that right you don't have to yeah for a second you were like my brain did think because you was like katherine departed and i was like oh no and you were like airplane i was like yay and it was like ice i was like oh no so i was going through an emotional roller coaster oh that sound means that we're ready for some small talk because i think we already kind of fell into it but yeah no so yeah she's off uh dealing with security lines at airports which i gather must be really bad uh but we're moving on small talk wise uh well no still still dealing with those security lines okay so you know that you know that cute thing that's been among well in my mind it's been among leftists but at this point given the nature of surveillance it's probably everybody that thing where we're like oh i hope our lines are touching on the government watch list everybody who flies through the airports all their names get sent to the government now right so if you are on the plane if you've used a plane we'll use a plane it's in the last like two some odd weeks or so you will be on the government watch list so maybe maybe your name is touching your significant others because i'm assuming it's done in like the order that the you know people are you know go through tsa or whatever but that is a thing so just an fyi i mean why wouldn't they have done that like of course they of course they have access to all that like that's what that's the whole purpose of it right well of course they do and of course and of course uh ring cameras are uh surveillance that they tricked people into buying that they give that data to the government but the thing is oh and of course pokemon go was a surveillance site that was being used to map things but there was still the the veil of ignorance people didn't know that that was the case but now it is obvious that that is the case yeah well i mean it obviously the the point of it was to know who's going through and getting on airplanes uh which we had records through the airlines anyway but yeah they they do that now you there are opt-outs of a lot of the stuff like the taking of pictures that they've now added, you can technically opt out of, but it just adds a layer of inconvenience if you do.

2:46I actually need to add the touchless thing to mine. I haven't done that yet. And speaking of government conspiracies, last week on the podcast, I did clarify that this was suspicion on my part. Yes. But I theorized that to be clear, assistant attorney, Rudy Reffner, Renfer at the time, it was reported that he resigned rather than have the sanctions against him and his department. But that was due to faulty reporting based off of limited information. Someone at the DOJ called and confirmed that he was actually terminated. So I just want to clarify that in the spirit of good journalism. You did, though, more or less say that.

3:30You said that even though technically – I mean it's one of those things where people say they've resigned. But you even at the time were like, but you know, that probably was not all their choice, which – so we now have confirmation of that, which that is fair and good. But I do think the firing – deciding to terminate him is still good housekeeping. Sure. Since it was an explicit termination rather than asking him to fall on his sword, which I probably wouldn't – it is still better that the DOJ took that route. So flowers given when due, that was a good move to make. And that – and now I assume – I guess I don't know how government jobs work, but I assume this gives access to unemployment and stuff because he was fired.

4:20So that's always useful too. So that was going on. I actually, since we were talking about airplanes beforehand, I actually just got back from a trip myself where I was dealing with the security of these airports. And yeah, I actually didn't have any problems, but I saw problems everywhere. I was going through pre-check and all, so I was fine, but I did see 40, 50-minute lines everywhere I was going. And I gather it's getting worse today. So it's good luck out there, basically, if you're flying anywhere. Wait, that's it? Where did you come from? Where did you go? Cotton-Eye Joe, et cetera. Right.

5:02So I went to Vegas for the opening round of the tournament to watch those games. And yeah, no, it was a good little trip. It was like 100 degrees every day, which is wild to fly to. I had a conversation with my friend about, and this, of course, sounds like a make-it-up actual friend i have friends about the the nature of global warming so what happened was i think there was sometime last week there was like a a record the days don't matter but let's say it was on wednesday there was a record a temperature record that was set and that has been like seen for like several decades and then on say like thursday that record was broken and i was like the thing that i find most interesting about global warming or weather pattern changes that are happening.

5:48It's not that the world will be uniformly warmer, even though that is the case. There will be time, there probably will be times where places will be colder than usual because of global warming, because of the nature of the thing. It's not that the weather's getting hotter, but that the things that, but that the. Right. It affects wind patterns. Yes. Don't, it's the wind pattern, but the things that we take as a given, the nature of the climate itself is in flux and the norms that we associate with temperatures in flux. Because I think that people People do think that since it's because warming is in the name.

6:18So they'll always think it's getting hotter. But I think I do think climate change is the more accurate name, but it's not as it's not as hot. Yeah, I know. I think a lot of people move toward that phrase climate change for that reason, because, yeah, it it will make a lot of places colder, too. But anyway, when it went there, did not gamble, the whole city doesn't really based around gambling as much anymore. uh obviously it's there but they they've spent a lot of their time and energy trying to make it be about all a bunch of other stuff and oh wait no no baby no what no baby keem i have no idea what that is got he's a he's a rapper uh i think one of kendrick lamar's cousins he recently dropped the album he recently dropped the album called casino and it's uh it's like las vegas theme music but it's like really no mentions of gambling it's like growing up in las vegas So interesting went to Las Vegas, didn't gamble, baby team.

7:13Online online sports betting in other states has taken a lot of the a lot of the the gambling centric punch out of that city, I feel. But anyway. All right. Well, let's move on and start actually talking about legal stories. and we can transition pretty seamlessly uh because we can transition to talking about rap since we've had that uh being discussed there let's talk about the trial of the century that just concluded afro man afro man it's so ridiculous that the because i got high guy had a really cool first amendment case like this there are times where i'm like okay the The writers for the whatever, 250th some odd season of America are just writing it in sometimes.

8:05But this was a fun little arc that isn't over yet, apparently. What happened for those who are in the loop years ago, I want to say around 2022, his home was raided by, I want to say, the Ohio Police Department. They were there. They broke down his door, broke his window. He caught them on video stealing like apparently$4 ,000 from him. But the justification that they gave was that the raid was to find drugs and human trafficking victims. And they said that the money was taken under the auspices that he got this money unjustly through illegal activity. They find nothing. They rummage all through his belongings.

8:45They were searching his suit jackets, apparently for either massive amounts of drugs or trafficked victims. But, you know, he's a pretty big guy, but I've seen the pockets on his blazers. He can't fit much of either of those things in them. Yeah, his tailoring is not he probably if the menswear guy on social media were talking about him, he'd probably say he needs to go a suit size up. But yeah, so he's like, can I have my money back? And he's like, what are you going to can you repair my door? And they're like, we took the money because of the nature of the search. And also one of the officers said them rather smugly is like, we are not required to assist you in fixing your door.

9:28So Afro Man did the most Afro Man thing possible and made songs about it, mocking them up and down. There was this one officer who during the raid, gun in hand, notices a slice of pound cake on the kitchen table, like an island, and he takes a very pensive look at it. I don't think he ate the cake. I ultimately don't know if he ate the cake because while there is video footage of him looking at the cake, one of the officers cut the surveillance cameras that Afro man had in his house. So there's a limited amount of information that we could see from the raid. But the amount that we could see, we did see because he released a music video showing these goofy officers doing a botched raid.

10:07Right. They pulled guns out. He scared his kids. And then they sued him for intentional inflection of emotional distress because coming in guns blazing is one thing. But if you say bad names, if you call them bad names, you know, then that's just that's the issue. You just clown them to the world, which is really what what he was doing, which I think the obviously one of the big takeaways from this that I don't think a lot of people understand is the nature of civil, you know, of forfeiture in this country has gotten so broken. And police, if they claim they have reason to look into your house and then turns out they say, yeah, there was nothing.

10:49I guess there's no crime here. They still steal all your money and they just get to keep it more or less. Yeah, that's one of the – it reminds me of those old things you read in like philosophy and political science that stick out to you. It's like it's not that the law prevents crime. It's that the first crime is the establishment of the law as such. because like that's the thing that determines what counts as other crimes or like it's not it's not theft when the officers steal from you because they can't steal from you from the nature of what the law is sort of thing yeah but yeah that happened yeah there's a lot of work to push back on and to finally bring some justice and it's a it's kind of a bipartisan situation that like there are a lot of right-leaning libertarians who are just as angry about forfeiture uh and push back on that uh but yeah it it is a problem that hasn't been fixed and they bust up your house and steal things uh as it turns out uh yeah so afro man prevails in this case which is big because the lawyers for the cops want him to pay four million dollars over their hurt feelings oh yeah and the hurt feelings include saying that a man who had a receding hairline when that man when he was on the stand was bald one officer saying that he didn't know why he was being called lemon pound cake but then we show the video of him looking like he's looking you know desirously at the lemon pound cake it's it's right on the tin folks um there was one officer who blamed um afro man for his divorce but it turns out that his wife divorced him had a restraining order put on the guy and then she came on the stand said that it It had nothing to do with Afro Man.

12:35And quite frankly, this might be the same cop. There's this one guy who was like, no, I think this is a different cop. He said that in part of the song, Randy Walters is the son of a bitch. He says that he, Afro Man, says that to get back at Randy, he had sex with his wife. And then the officer sued him for defamation. The attorney asked Randy, he's like, well, did Afro Man have sex with their wife? And he's like, I don't know. you know which is a thing for like a defamation claim you have to have it has to be demonstrably false and then he's like you don't know if afro men have sex with your wife and then he's like come on now we've been are you really going to ask me that yes he's really going to ask you that it's a defamation case you're the one who's sued yeah for one because because one let's not forget one of my favorite defenses against defamation is the truth if he was actually smashing on your wife he can say that and if you don't know if he was matching on your wife then you don't know it's defamatory because it could be the case you know so yeah the whole thing was a joke so yeah it was a joke jurors uh got this one seemingly very very right uh based on everything that came out during the case and we will take a break and come back in a minute let's face it you didn't become a lawyer to stress over summaries and analysis.

13:56You 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. Head to tr.com slash co-counsel to discover AI that lawyers swear by. All right. Well, while we're getting some degree of justice in against small town law enforcement, we have a Department of Justice that's in the midst of massive meltdowns. We've been talking about this, of course, for months now, all of the problems going on down at DOJ.

14:37But we had a whole week of little stories, nothing like truly epic, but we have a bunch of small stories about the DOJ that we wanted to quickly run through. So we have – the biggest one I think, not scandalous necessarily, but probably the one that has the most impact definitely long term is that the DOJ announces that they're going to be dropping their requirement that you need actual experience to work for them. They are now going to hire directly from law schools, which they have not done. There have been a few jurisdictions where they have special waivers where you don't need a ton of experience.

15:21Very isolated areas, it's harder to find folks. But this is huge. They're getting rid of that requirement. Now, historically, this is a job that is of such prestige and importance that they're looking for people who have built an established resume to fill these jobs. We are now going to start picking the low-hanging fruit, it seems, which is consequential in a few ways. One, it's a sign of the declining importance of the DOJ. I think it is a longer-term sign that they are dealing with the fact that people who have actual careers and have built an understanding and professional judgment before joining the DOJ are all leaving the DOJ.

16:07this is an attempt to kind of fill the ranks with people who don't know any better before they go lie to a court right and yeah now i think it's gonna lead to a bunch of more and more bad decisions more and more contempt allegations it's it's just a real problem for the institution as a whole and it makes it easier to throw uh people under the bus because like yeah yeah if there was a person that had a career that had the moral fortitude or as the french say the balls to say no to when they're being told to do something that they shouldn't their resign could signal something it could be like oh snap this person who's been here since george washington had enough they must see something really wrong in denmark but if some dude who um who has a poster of big balls in his dorm room if he if he one he won't have the book he won't he might not know to resign And two, if he's like, I'm stepping away, like there's only so many like so many like Rachel Cohens that can be there or like them, them breaking away means something, especially when they're new to the game.

17:14Yeah. And also, I'll give it two weeks before they start hiring off of Craigslist. Well, I mean, they already – so that's a great segue to they already announced that they were hiring through people sliding into their DMs because that was a few weeks ago where the former chief of staff asked if anybody wants to be his attorney, just DM me. So that's not great, and now they don't even need to have any experience. Meanwhile, the problem over in New Jersey is that there are too many people who think they work at that office. We had a hearing. Catherine wrote about a hearing that turned very testy as the judge got very agitated with the New Jersey representative of the U.S.

17:57Attorney's Office in front of, you know, speaking because couldn't figure out who's in charge over there. They've got like a three-pronged committee supposedly running that office. There's some question whether or not Alina Hava, who's supposed to not have anything to do with that office since she was illegally appointed, whether or not she's actually still running it from her weird new post. And the judge is deeply concerned. And I think a lot of folks, including – I think a lot of folks don't understand the significance of this and think it's just, oh, the judges are kind of – judges are all mad at the Trump administration for illegally appointing these people.

18:37The issue in that particular case, as I understand it, was it was a – it was like a child sex exploitation case, and the judge is very concerned because if these idiots continue to not run the office in accordance with the federal law, then they have to let the perps go. And the deep concern is maybe we don't want to let go people who we have evidence are hurting children. So the Trump DOJ at this point, it's not just a matter of, oh, well, they just aren't doing things according to buy the book and blah, blah. They are jeopardizing the safety of people by acting like this, by having this petulant refusal to appoint somebody correctly through the process and get them confirmed.

19:25Hey, well, you know, we can't we can't focus on small things like protecting children from aggressors when there are illegals out there, you know. Well, and then we also have the deputy AG. You know, when you say talking about protecting the children, the deputy attorney general seems to have made it his mission to do the exact opposite. We had a letter from the Senator Ron Wyden was sent a letter to Todd Blanche going, hey, I'm kind of interested. We're looking into this Epstein stuff. There are these redacted documents that talk about how there had been an investigation several years earlier into him and several of his friends who were allegedly involved in exploiting children.

20:06and their names are all redacted, which is not legal under the terms of the statute. And we were going to get an unredacted copy of that document. And then it appears as though you personally have prevented that from happening. So kind of interested to know why that's happening. But yeah, the deputy attorney general, who is a job that should be management, seems to now this is not even the first instance, as the senator's letter points out, This is not even the first incident where the deputy AG has reached down and personally taken action to cover up and run more interference for Jeffrey Epstein's buddies.

20:44So the DOJ is moving along swimmingly these days. Well, we should probably take a break from that less than fun story and be right back. All right. So we are back. Zach, I don't even know what to talk about for the last bit here. We've been – there have been a lot of little stories. I guess maybe one that's always fun is the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, which was star-crossed from Jump. Those who've read Above the Law for a long time, listened to the show for a long time, know that we had a lot of fun with that when it went down since his purchase of that company was marked by him ignoring – Stupidity.

21:30Ignoring. Yeah, absolutely. Openly ignoring the advice of lawyers, refusing to do due diligence, then turning around and claiming, oh, well, these things have turned up. And it's like, well, you waived due diligence, but also you said that the thing that you were complaining came up is that you didn't know there were bots, except we have all these emails of you or all these social media posts of you saying you needed to buy Twitter because you knew that you could get rid of the bots. So it seems like you did. No. Anyway, yada, yada, yada. He ultimately ends up taking over the company after Twitter itself sues him to say, you need to take over because the deal is a deal.

22:09Also, fun point about him knowing and paying attention to the website. Remember, shortly after he took over, he ran a poll asking people if they wanted him to be CEO. Majority said no. He still had to continue to be CEO. Well, no, he hired a CEO to replace him. Later. Yeah, exactly. That person just does what he says anyway. But so in this instance, so in this case, a bunch of Twitter investors brought suit claiming that he intentionally was misleading the a misleading the public in an attempt to influence the stock price, which, you know, he was saying he was going to be he was going to buy it.

22:49Then he wasn't something that would potentially lower the strike price for buying it, which would mean that he would not have to pay as much and save himself some money. Yada, yada, yada. And I'm pretty sure the price is so high because he was trying to do a weed joke. Yes. Wasn't the stock price like$69,$420 or something like that? Yeah. Because, yeah. But these investors went to court. The case kind of came down to whether or not the things he was saying were something that anyone would believe, whether or not he was just an idiot or whether he was intentionally misleading. You never are in a great place when your legal argument is, but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, maybe I'm stupid.

23:31But that was his – I think the proper New Jersey way to say it is the legal argument is, come on. Come on. Yeah. Come on. So he tried to make the argument that he was stupid. As it turns out, while the jury didn't necessarily say that wasn't true, they said that it was also possible that you could be stupid and misleading. And so he has lost his suit there. That will require him to fork over some hefty amount of cash to Twitter investors who feel they were defrauded by the way in which he handled that. The thing that gets me is, I'm not sure if you know this, but Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet.

24:15Why is any of this going to trial? He could just settle it. He could just pay the money. Whatever they're asking of him is a rounding error. Right. Why go through the bad publicity of having to just pay people? Well, I think he has a few problems with that front. So one is the nature of this specific allegation, I think, complicates. So he's already been disciplined by the SEC and supposed to have a monitor monitor all of his social media posts. That seems to have kind of fell off. But that was a concession he made to settle a government investigation of him using his social media to influence the market.

24:58So I think he had like some extra dimension here that he needed to kind of protect himself from the idea that he's back to using these – not that I think this SEC would do anything about it. But a future SEC run in a different administration could dig in and say like you were under this consent decree and now you are doing this again. So I think he wanted to push back against that to protect himself from broader issues. And I also wonder, I think a big part of the Delaware case, which we've talked about, and I don't know if we've talked about it on this show, but I certainly have written about it, where he's trying to get a pay package of several – an obscene amount of billions of dollars for being the CEO of Tesla.

25:42He's trying to get that in a way that usually doesn't happen. Most CEOs don't want that. They want stock options, and they're willing to seem heroic for taking only a dollar of real compensation, but they're getting millions of this other stuff. He's trying to take this – he's trying to get this multibillion-dollar pay package from a company that is only worth about$100 billion in real sense as far as his actual assets. he's trying to convince them to do that and the Delaware courts don't necessarily want to do it but I think the reason he's doing that is so much of his massive richest person ever is so on paper a lot of it is just the stock is there and if you're like me you think that stock is probably hyperinflated over what it's actually worth that that becomes a problem and so he also doesn't own Twitter outright he that was part of it he had to hey there are people he has to pay out for that So he's part of a deal, like a consortium there.

26:43So he is the richest on paper, but I don't think he has access to a lot of that money. So there's another reason why he has to continue fighting some of these cases. But yeah, Elon failing yet again to understand how law works is always fun. Okay, well, so that's it for us. We will, you know, you should be listening to the other shows. The Jabot is Catherine's other show. I'm a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable sometimes. And there are also shows from the Legal Talk Network that you should be checking out. I'm at, you know, you should check out social media. I'm at Joe Patrice on Blue Sky.

27:24Chris is at Rights for Rent. We have the, you can check out Above the Law itself. Read these and other stories before they hit by going to above the law.com. And I think that we will check in with you later. Peace.