Sex In Chambers Met With Slap On Wrist

0:11Elie Mystal:Welcome, everybody, back to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am joined by my usual colleagues. I've got Catherine Rubino and Chris Williams here. Hey, friends. Hello, hello. And we're, you know, talking about the big stories from the week that was in legal, as we are wont to do. But first, we begin with a little bit of small talk. Small talk. Which we set off with a trumpet for, well, just so that I can play with some sound effects, mostly. I'm glad we are indulging your play instincts. I really don't think I use the soundboard as much as I should you don't and it frustrates my heart I wish I understood I kind of want to have like a post ironic morning zoo feel to it where I'm getting all sorts of goofy sound effects this would be a much different show if I was in control of the soundboard there would be far more wah wahs Yeah, yeah, right?

1:17And like from that song, I think London Bridge by Fergie, there's like a, oh, shit. Like that would be on the soundboard. It's just a good sound to have.

1:27Elie Mystal:But yeah, alas. My problem is, my soundboard, the way it's set up is there's a bunch of things, and they have shortcut keys, but I never remember what they are. So whenever I open it to try to find something, I'm gazing through to figure out where it is. And by the time I find it, the moment has passed. Seems to me like we need an intern to be in charge of this. And it might go terribly awry, mind you. But listen, risk nothing, get nothing. What I should do is rearrange everything so the shortcut keys are logical. But I don't know. It's seems like a lot of work for a little bit of payoff. Speaking of lots of work and a little payoff, I've been personally enjoying all the artists that have been canceling the Trumpapalooza.

2:13That's the schedule. at first when I saw that shit I was like oh no not Morris Day in the time Prince is somewhere back flipping in heels in shame and then they dropped out I was like yes I can still listen to Jungle Love and then Milli Vanilli like dropped and said hey we're not going to perform her and I was like is Milli Vanilli Milli Vanilli-ing like did they have a stand-in and then they dropped off hey blame that on the rain

2:39Elie Mystal:oh good in fairness Milli Vanilli doesn't perform that's kind of the whole problem with milly vanilly right hey dancing and showing up is a sort of performance it is a performance not the only performing right right and um what's the name all of this just to be a what is a vanilla ice concert i don't even i don't even know if he's still left on uh on the dais listen i i do want to make uh since you brought it up we should make clear uh for anyone listening uh we are not going to be performing at the concert either i think everybody has to make clear that they aren't doing it we're that's our press our press release is going out oh you speak oh you speak french now i will be there i'll be heckling i'll be heckling from the front and the back because i will be the only one there i will be the crowd yelling out boo not all of us speak french yet uh but we probably will after the Spurs win, then then we will all be legally required.

3:40Elie Mystal:Hey, listen, listen, I will hear none of this Nick's slander. Is it wild? Is it wild that they're in the finals? Yes. But at this point, you have to believe that it's the Pope being involved. Right. Like, yes, I mean, right. There's a ton of former Villanova players. He's a Villanova alum. And literally the next run feels like the sort of divine intervention I believed in as a child. Right. Like this sweep of Cleveland. Are you kidding? Are you kidding me? Game one. This is giving me faith in God. I can't remember who it was who put it on social media, but somebody said a thing on social media a couple of weeks ago before it was obviously going to be the Spurs.

4:20Elie Mystal:But it's something like every time I watch the Knicks play, I think they could really win a championship. And then I turn the channel and see cyborg do basketball, do something and go, Oh no. But watching the Spurs is one of those things where you just watch it and go like, Oh, Oh that. I mean, listen, people said the same thing before the Eastern Conference finals, that of course the Cavs were going to win. People said this shit. All I'm saying is, if the Pope believes it, so do I. Fair. All right. Pope Leo being my Pope is the same as Mayor Mamdani being my mayor. I am not Catholic, and I do not live in New York, but I claim both of them heavily.

4:58These are the leaders I am looking for.

5:00Elie Mystal:You're close to Villanova. That's functionally the Knicks at this point. So there's a Philly logic to it. All right. We should move off of the sports talk, I guess, although that is making us more of a morning zoo DJ sort of thing. All right. Let's talk a little bit about the news. There was a very big story last week that we had a couple of stories about. A federal district judge. Let's do this chronologically. So I won't I won't say who it was. A federal district judge was the subject of a newly released because it was has been confidential throughout this process. But now a newly released ethics complaint that determined the judge was, among other things, having sex in their chambers with a high ranking police official.

5:56Elie Mystal:And when confronted by their fellow judges about this, they lied about it a couple of times. There are some other allegations in here about attending a partisan event. There's some allegations about not properly guiding clerks and instead just kind of telling clerks that, yeah, you do what you're going to do on the civil docket. I'll just handle the criminal docket more or less. so this this came out uh it generated a good deal of controversy putting aside the having sex in the chambers part and there's a whole aside about whether or not a couch cushion needed to be tested uh and it was tested apparently but uh and it turned back negative despite everything anyway whatever is it is it wrong to ask what it was tested for oh so one so yeah okay okay I thought, you know, this is like a – It is the obvious answer actually here.

6:52Listen, I thought they might be doing cushion competency tests or whatever. You know, it's 2026.

6:58Elie Mystal:So that is a whole aside in the report that the clerk saw this couch cushion and then saw that it had been turned over. So they thought, oh, they're trying to hide it. The college freshman way of cleaning. Sure, right. Now, but then – but despite that – you see, I actually thought this was not necessary to put in the report, frankly. I thought this was a little gratuitous because they also in the report say that the investigators, when they came to do it, shipped the couch cushion across state lines to have it tested, and then it came back negative. And I was like, if it came back negative, we didn't need to hear the whole story.

7:34Elie Mystal:I don't think that needed to be in there, but whatever. Well, I, for one, I'm still happy they disseminated the information. Oh, there we go. So, yeah, there's our sound effect. So this is going on. The report generated a good deal of controversy because the punishment the 11th Circuit handed out, confirmed then by the judicial conference, was a private reprimand. They stripped the entire report of any identifying information, and by that – spoiler alert – by that I mean they didn't put the judge's name, any gender markers. As I said, it kind of proves that conservatives understand how pronouns work if they put in minimal effort.

8:16Elie Mystal:They took out what court it was, what state it was, all of that to keep the judge anonymous. And they even said that the only thing the judge had to do was they could never be the chief judge of the district, which I'm sure they're heartbroken that they won't have extra administrative work that they don't get paid for or at least not enough for. Do chief judges get paid more? I don't even know. Whatever. Then they also said that the judge had to apologize to the clerks involved by writing a letter. But then there's a whole footnote saying that they are allowed to be vague about what they're apologizing for so that it could never be those apology letters can never come out and prove that they were the subject of this report.

8:57I think it is controversial what happened. I think mostly because of the anonymous nature of it all. She never the judge never actually heard a case where her sexual partner was testifying or involved in any way. You know, it never came up. It was just happenstance. They never filed any. It was just happenstance. That was true. But it didn't happen. The thing that really gets me and the thing that I thought made the private rebuke inappropriate was that the initial answer was to lie about it. Right. I think lying to a tribunal is exactly the things you don't want judges doing. Not only that, the judge turned around and started blaming the clerk who had originally brought it to – started the ethics complaint process.

9:45Those two facts, I think, make it wildly inappropriate. Those are the things that I personally am most, I think is the most inappropriate.

9:52Elie Mystal:You know what? I'm going to do something we don't often do. I'm going to insert a break here midway through the story so that I can say. It is two stories in one, so that tracks. Right, so that I can say, you know, you kind of gave a spoiler. You said her, even though the report doesn't say who it is. It did, it did. So we will identify who this judge is on the other side of the break.

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10:54Elie Mystal:All right, we're back. So as we said, the report doesn't identify and give any obviously identifiable information about who the judge was. We figured out who the judge was in about 45 minutes, I think, with the help of another former ATL columnist who I was, you know, we were having a side conversation about this story with. And as I was trying to figure out who the judge was based on a few breadcrumbs, even though the report strips a lot of the data, you know, there's little things. There's a reference to the fact that this district judge hires clerks for two-year terms. Not something that judges typically do.

11:32It's typically a one-year term. Not district courts.

11:34Elie Mystal:Yeah. Like I've seen appellate, even in my day, there were some appellate courts who had two-year terms, but district judges didn't do that. So whatever. So I was trying to scour Oscar to figure out who does that in the 11th Circuit. And what our former colleague did while we were talking was dumped the reports into both ChatGPT and Claude and said, figure out who this is. And both of them produced, they turned on the deep research modes on both of them, whatever. And after about 10 minutes of grinding, both reports came back, they were lengthy, they were like 30 pages long, and they methodically went through the reports and said of the stuff that's here, there's only one person it could be.

12:23Elie Mystal:And that's Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia. We have since learned that that is absolutely correct, that got confirmed. But we knew this within it had had we fought to use AI immediately, We would have known this in 10 minutes from the moment the reports dropped, because even though the judges thought they were trying to keep this anonymous, there's basically no way you can keep things anonymous from AI so long as you have. It just takes a couple of breadcrumbs and access to the Internet to figure things out pretty quickly with this stuff. My immediate thought is this is just ruining my childhood because now the whole premise of like Scooby-Doo Mysteries doesn't make sense.

13:02just plugging a couple things and jinkies he noticed that guy i mean you plug it in and it

13:08Elie Mystal:would have come back with you know the deed on this amusement park is held by old man jenkins like it would have been obvious and i want to got away for it too if not for claude yes but i did think that that was an interesting kind of angle that you had to your story joe um and again because you did know what the end result was going to be you could work on it even before that you know know physical confirmation happened and i think it was it's it's you know we talk about ai a lot and it's usually all the ways in which people use it incorrectly but i think that what this showed is that burying your head being kind of an ostrich about ai is just as damning in the year of our lord 2026 i think nobody should be uh surprised that ai is really good at surveillance and and identifying suspects like that.

14:00I think what it is is that people aren't thinking about it, right? You know, the judicial conference took a lot of time and effort to anonymize the report in a way that they thought made sense and they thought, sure, it may be possible for someone to do it. It will take a lot of hours to, you know, comb records and to figure out. And the way that their brain works is a non-AI way and never thought about the possibility of just dumping what they put in in AI. It reminds me of a case early in my career. I was working for some senior, senior partner, and we were doing some document review, and he asked me how many boxes a terabyte would be.

14:38And I had to, like, literally, like, I spent, like, an hour of my life, like, working out about how many boxes I thought a terabyte would be, which was ridiculous. I was a first-year associate, obviously. You don't, you know, but it's an absolutely ridiculous task that I did that was, you know, whatever. But it was the way that his brain worked. And I think that what we're seeing is that people who don't think about AI when they're creating these sorts of things are at a disadvantage.

15:09Elie Mystal:Yes. If you are trying to protect your client by keeping something confidential, you need to understand that AI will crack that code if you leave enough breadcrumbs. And vice versa, if you're trying to get into finding secrets buried in a discovery set or in diligence materials, you should be using this to find that. And it's like AI can be used for surveillance and all that. But let's put aside Palantir's evil here. In this instance, it's more that the knock on AI that people have is that it doesn't really create things. It's just like fancy pattern recognition. And that's true. And what it is is pattern recognition.

15:49Elie Mystal:It looked through this and started finding breadcrumbs that could only mean identification. Like, what are the best ones? I had been spending some time looking at judges in Florida who do two-year terms. And what the AI did was go, well, no, there's this other part where there's a quote that says that they attended a party for their friend, a district attorney. and in Florida, they're called state attorneys, not district attorneys. So Florida can't be it. And I was like, oh, obviously, but I didn't even think to compare, to put those together. But that's what it can do, and it can do it at scale.

16:26Elie Mystal:There were 60, 70 pages worth of report that were dropped in there across the two reports, and it churned in 10 minutes, figured out all the stuff in them, and then went through every single judge in the entire 11th Circuit and methodically worked it down and did it in a logical way, too. It started with, well, first things, they have, you know, they have, it says that they talked to, the investigation talked to clerks dating back to 2020. So no judges who got appointed after that can be that. So we remove all them. We removed all the Floridas. We removed all this. And then once it got down to a smaller group, then it started applying the who has two-year clerks, who does this.

17:11Elie Mystal:There's this one quote that says that they excused going to the party of the district attorney because they had known each other when they were both in that office in the past. So it's somebody who had state prosecutorial experience. That limits it to these two. Like it just – it was smart, and it was doing the work that, again, would have taken somebody a long time. And probably someone was going to figure this out because this is an issue that people wanted to know an answer to. And in the past, it would have taken more time. But where the real value is with this AI stuff is in these instances where it's not a federal judge, where the fact that you want the juice isn't quite worth the squeeze.

17:54Elie Mystal:Is it a fact that you would really like to know, but would taking 100 hours of associate time to figure it out just not be worth it? Well, now it takes 10 minutes, and now maybe that is something that's worth it. Yeah, I mean I think – I don't want to get over Relio here, but the speed kind of is the point, not just because of the number of hours, but you have to imagine the number of people in hours. It also extends the story, right? In a week, if it wasn't like two days after the story broke, are people still caring as much about it? We're being firehosed with information and scandals currently.

18:32And so you need to be on top of these things. And the ability to sort of close the loop quickly makes it more of a complete story in the public's mind.

18:43Elie Mystal:Interesting. I hadn't thought about that. The AI adds a counterbalance to the fire hose of garbage that we're hearing. Interesting. Is it a counterbalance or a symptom? Because it just increases the rate at which we're exposed to information or satiates the need for information searching to where you don't feel the compulsion to learn as much. Or at least the compulsion to learn isn't as strong because you need to be satiated so quickly. Yeah, I mean, I hear what you're saying, but when we can't put the AI genie back in the bottle, at least we're able to use it in ways that make for a more wholesome, a more fulsome kind of story.

19:25Elie Mystal:This is a, that's an interesting issue. I think it probably does both of those things in different applications. But no, that's interesting. All right, well, let's take a break here and go to a second story. So the next story that we had to talk about was also a pair of stories happening once. The Justice Department is starting to get a lot of bar complaints. This is it's almost like your March Madness bracket was completely accurate, Joe Patrice. Oh, that's a good point. We had a March Madness bracket where we voted on which of these government lawyers most deserve to be disbarred, basically.

20:07Elie Mystal:and uh yeah it's coming coming to fruition or and the answer is we don't have to choose we don't have to choose in reality they can be all of them i think that bracket is so great for posterity's sake because i know what's going to happen it's going to be the we were all against this once the the this is done with and as we have like uh you know the opposite of surveillance the destruction of information and like uh what's the internet archive is going to be uh done away with because you know like news and what have you they're like oh you can't read our stuff at least there'll be an atl bracket we saw this shit coming the entire time i wrote an article back yeah right before that bracket called disbar the basically disbar the mall uh and the argument that i made there was there's not going to be any accountability for any of the wrongdoing going on at the department of justice and throughout the government because uh between sovereign immunity arguments and and Trump v.

21:03Elie Mystal:United States, and the possibility of blanket pardons, there is never going to be a way to get real accountability out of what lawyers in this government are doing. And the only accountability that could happen is local bars taking action against people's licenses. That's basically all there can be. And so far, they haven't done much, to the extent these have come up before disciplinary groups. Most of them have punted. But to the extent there is any conversation about doing anything, the Department of Justice has produced a new rule that they want to impose that would bar any local bar from taking action against any government lawyer's license, current or former.

21:51Elie Mystal:And they filed suit against the DC bar for trying to go after a former government lawyer who did stuff. So they understand that this is the only vector of responsibility that could ever hit them, and they are launching an assault to stop it. Now, that brings us to this week. We had two complaints come up in two different jurisdictions in New York. There is a bar complaint now against acting attorney general Todd Blanche. The basis of this complaint is that the Chief Judge Crenshaw over in Tennessee is part of the opinion dismissing the Kilmar Abrego Garcia criminal charges was to explain that this appears to be a presumptively vindictive prosecution given that you had zero interest as a government in prosecuting these charges for years.

22:44Elie Mystal:You only seem to have decided to bring this prosecution after it became clear that you accidentally sent this person to a slave camp in El Salvador. Yeah, because it is. It is a vindictive prosecution. So it's pretty obvious when that is true. And so this has been brought to New York. Now, will New York take action? Theoretically, it should. This is a lawyer who is licensed in New York. He's a former partner at Cadwallader. Now, will they? They did not take action against Emile Bove, who is now a judge but was also formerly in the DOJ and also committed actions that would theoretically be investigated by professional responsibility authorities.

23:29Elie Mystal:Will New York do the same thing again? I don't know. They did. We don't know quite what the discipline was, but we do know that they took some action against the U.S. attorney for the Northern District or not U.S. attorney, the acting, pretending U.S. attorney of the Northern District. So New York is kind of a mixed bag right now. We'll see what happens with them. The flip side, not flip side, same thing, different place. Down in Florida, Pam Bondi was the subject of a bar complaint that was signed by, at the time, something like 75 scholars and former judges even, both state and federal, calling for her to be disciplined by Florida.

24:14Elie Mystal:And Florida responded to the Florida bar who handles this in Florida, responded by saying, oh, well, we don't – we can't investigate someone who's a sitting constitutional officer. That is a rule they made up because they didn't have that rule for federal officials. There was a similar rule for state state officials didn't really apply to federal. They made that up and they felt very smug that they had found a way out of this complaint. As you may have noticed, Pam Bondi is no longer the attorney general. And more people have joined this complaint. So now we have something like it's over 120 now scholars, practitioners, former judges.