Jack Smith Surfaces in Surprise Lawsuit to Block Trump

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1:30Michael Popok:And the historians shall lead us. Oh yes, the American Historical Association has just filed in breaking news a new lawsuit. A new one would be coming to challenge Donald Trump's attempt to rip up, destroy, and purloin top secret classified documents all over again. Oh, yes. The president who was indicted for espionage and obstruction of justice for his failure to turn over the people's papers and keep top secret classified documents, including ones that had to do with war plans. That's the same president that had his office of legal counsel put together a 50 page memo that declared a United States Supreme Court precedent from 1978 about Richard Nixon and documents to be wrong.

2:15Michael Popok:Just wrong. There's no other way to put it. They just said that the Nixon decision by the Supreme Court, which declared that Congress has the power without violating the separation of powers to direct the presidency to have a certain unit of the executive branch that has some longevity, some legacy, like the National Archive, to tell the president to deposit all of your millions of pages of documents. with an executive branch office like the National Archive is not a violation of the separation of powers. It's executive to executive. Yet Trump's making the same argument all again. Congress can't tell me what to do.

2:58Michael Popok:Article 1 Congress can't tell Article 2 presidency what to do. That's not what the United States Supreme Court said. You're only the temporary occupant of the Article 2 office. You're only the temporary occupant of the White House. I mean, he acts like he's going to be there forever, like knocking over the ballroom without permission or approval. But he's only temporary. May not be short enough for the rest of us, but he's temporary. And to have his Office of Legal Counsel and this deputy, whoever, write this thing that has to acknowledge the existence of the 1978 law, Nixon versus the General Services Administration, about his millions of documents and his hours and hours and hours of secretly recorded audio tapes to just have him declare that the Supreme Court's just wrong.

3:52Michael Popok:Well, then go to court and have it declared wrong, not with an Office of Legal Counsel memo. And just to remind everybody what Nixon was trying to hide is that he had a secret taping system, oh yeah, that got disclosed during the Watergate investigation where he was taping allies and enemies and staffers alike and disheld them for extortive purposes or otherwise. And it got found out. Like, what do you mean there's a tape recorder in the White House? Like that. And then there was an erasure of certain aspects of the tape recording that made Nixon look bad, which all came out during the Watergate investigation.

4:28Michael Popok:Oh, remember when we had a Department of Justice we could count on after Nixon? Well, the American Historical Association, which was incorporated by Congress in the late 1800s, was the first one, along with American oversight, to file their lawsuit. It's in the D.C. federal court, and it claims that Trump has, he himself has violated separation of powers, the Presidential Records Act, because he's threatening to destroy everything if he hasn't already, the Administrative Procedures Act, and other law, and seeks an emergency injunction. What I love about the case is how they brought up Jack Smith and Mar-a-Lago.

5:09Michael Popok:Of course, you have to acknowledge that we're talking about a president who in his first term in office stole things, sticky-fingered Trump, you know, taken top-secret classified military documents, war plans, maps, other things. Things that were so bad as they repeat in their filing. This is on page 29, paragraphs 102 to 106 in the filing. I mean, if Trump's not going to acknowledge that he's a criminal, they're going to paint him that way. 102, upon leaving office, Trump kept significant numbers of official records rather than transferring them to the National Archives. The National Archives ultimately collected 15 boxes containing thousands of documents from President Trump's personal residence at Mar-a-Lago.

6:07Michael Popok:The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a search identifying more documents and 100 more marked classified because he didn't turn them all over. President Trump later claimed, paragraph 104, that he was authorized to retain sole possession to the exclusion of the government. He maintained his documents were personal, despite the fact that hundreds of them were marked classified about his clemency power, immigration policies and intelligence matters. And here's the part I love, besides mentioning Jack Smith, at least alluding to him. A memorandum from federal prosecutors in 2023 reportedly stated that the FBI had found that certain classified documents President Trump had retained would be pertinent to certain business interests, which may have been a motive for retaining them.

6:54Michael Popok:Yes, it may have been Pam Bondi's final shiv into the side of Donald Trump because her Department of Justice produced to the House Judiciary Committee, where the ranking member is Jamie Raskin of the Democrats, a memo from Jack Smith's team in which they speculated that the reason Donald Trump kept it is he never thought he'd run for president again. He had a business motive to keep these documents and to use them for extortive purposes. In fact, I had Jamie Raskin, who wrote a demand letter to Pam Bondi a few days before she was canned, demanding information about it, who talked about that particular memo.

7:33Michael Popok:Here's my interview with Representative Raskin. Play it. Representative Raskin, why don't we kick off with the letter you wrote on the 24th of March to Pam Bondi, the current attorney general, about whether she did it on purpose or not. It looks like a mistake where she sent over to the committees a memo, which outlined all of the things, including a top secret document that only six human beings in the United States have classification or have the security clearance to review that were retained by Donald Trump. And maybe a warm map shown to Susie Wiles when she was the CEO of his political action committee.

8:13Michael Popok:We knew about some of these things, but now we're trying to get to the bottom through you of them. Was there a profit motive to keep these documents? Tell our audience, brief our audience about what's happening with that letter and any response. Well, the reason we think there's a profit motive, a business motive, as they put it, was that Pam Bondi's DOJ sent to us information that included a progress report from one of Jack Smith's lawyers saying that there was a clear business motive. that that's what they thought was behind his pilfering of all these documents, including the one that was so top secret, only six people in the entire government could see it, one of them being the president of the United States.

8:55And then that, you know, he's brandishing and waving around these documents on an airplane, obviously engaging in completely cavalier and promiscuous use of these documents that he kept, you know, in the bathrooms and ballrooms and under the pool tables and ping pong tables at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, in response, the White House has been dragging my name in the mud all weekend saying Raskin has zero credibility, no credibility. All I did was release the document they sent us by accident, right? So I don't need much credibility to say, here's what the Department of Justice just sent us.

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10:56Michael Popok:That's trustandwill.com slash legal AF to get your 20 % off. Trustandwill.com slash legal AF. And then they continue on paragraph 106. At no point has President Trump stated or otherwise accepted that he was required under the Public Records Act to turn over custody and control of his documents to the National Archives. So we're doing it all over again. That's the fear of this association of historians who are normally running around with dusty manuscripts. But now they've got to run into court led by groups like American Oversight in order to try to prevent the entirety of the administration from acting on this ultra-various, illegal, unconstitutionally interpreted Office of Legal Counsel memo, which gives Donald Trump permission to destroy everything.

11:48Michael Popok:That's why they've got to run to court so quickly. Now, this is a fast-moving story. We'll cover it here. We'll cover it on Legal AF YouTube. Take a minute and hit the free subscribe button on Legal AF YouTube channel as well. And I'll be doing kind of real time updates on Legal AF Substack where I do two lives a day as well. But this is an important story. When I read the 50 pages of the Office of Legal Counsel memo a couple of days ago, I was like, oh, here we go. Leave it to Donald Trump, sticky fingers Trump, to have his office write up a get out of jail free card, a permission slip for him to destroy the people's papers.

12:27Michael Popok:He did it all over again. But shout out to the American Historical Association for running so quickly into court with American oversight. I'm going to reach out to both of those groups and see if I can get them on Legal AF to brief our audience further on the lawsuit. In the meantime, I'm Michael Popok. Until my next report.

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