Judge Excoriates Trump in Open Court for Fed Claim

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2:34Michael Popok:So funny thing, it turns out you can't tell a federal judge that the reason you're not complying with her injunction to avoid destroying a federal agency that protects the consumers while an appeal is going on. You can't tell her that the reason you're not complying with the injunction is that the Federal Reserve is busted, that it has no money. Pull out its pockets and say, we'd love to comply, Your Honor, but the Fed doesn't have the money to pay for the agency as Congress has required. What are we to do? And the judge says, no, I've seen your statements on Right Wing Podcast. In fact, Amy Berman Jackson, the judge, put one of the statements of Russ Vogt, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, on a right-wing podcast on the Charlie Kirk Network at the top of her order when she said, your manufactured attempt to choke off the funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you know, the one created by President Barack Obama to stop predatory lending and credit practices, credit cards and payday loans and banks and all those, and collection agencies.

3:47Michael Popok:You need somebody in your corner and it's the CFPB. You can't put it out of its misery or out of our misery and take it in the back and shoot it while there's an appeal going on and avoid my March injunction to prevent exactly that. You're on the Midas Touch Network. Happy early New Year's. It's cold where I live today. And so I'm in a sweater. Let me bring it to you for those that are listening. Let me bring you this new. We got a brand new order that just came out yesterday from Judge Amy Berman Jackson, one of our faves here on Midas Touch and Legal AF. She sits in the District of Columbia District Court and I've got the new order.

4:29Michael Popok:I'm posting it. It's 32 pages. I'll give you the I'll give you the heart of it. I'm posting it over on Legal AF Substack for paid members. I'm running a sale, everybody. 30 percent off. through the first of the year on paid memberships of Legal AF Substack. And thank you for getting us to number one in rising U.S. politics substacks. Okay, let's get to Amy Berman Jackson. We've been talking about the attempt, well, the efforts by the Trump administration, and really all MAGA, to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There's two entities that have driven MAGA and Donald Trump crazy since his first term and has been a thorn in their side.

5:16Michael Popok:Obamacare and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, mainly because of Obama and because it's the only agency that's out there protecting the consumer. As Donald Trump weakens all the other protective regulatory schemes and agencies, basically putting out to pasture by defunding the Securities and Exchange Commission about the stock market and that particular financial services marketplace, the CFTC, the FTC. They've all seen their budgets shrunk by a half or a third. They're not doing enforcement actions. They're not going after issuers. issuers. They're not going after corporations any longer because they're all friends with Donald Trump.

5:57Michael Popok:They're not going after cryptocurrency and regulating that. The last firewall to protect America, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And Donald Trump wants to take it out in the back and shoot it. Now, back in March, Judge Jackson stopped it. She said, look, guys are doing this on appeal. And the appeal is at the heart of the appeal is whether the president in the executive branch, in the unitary presidential model can destroy completely and defund completely a congressionally created agency or bureau. All right, you guys work it out on appeal. In the meantime, I'm going to protect it from being defunded.

6:37Michael Popok:I'm going to protect it from being destroyed so that there's something, if you lose on the Trump side, there's something here left behind. Because if I allow you to defund it and destroy it and fire everybody through Doge and otherwise, there's nothing left to save. Makes sense. Except the Trump administration has been squirming about that ever since. And several trips to the appellate courts have resulted, though, in an injunction that stops the destruction of the CFPB and requires its continued funding. See, that's the way Donald Trump has reshaped the relationship. That's a nice way of putting it.

7:14Michael Popok:Reshaped the relationship between the American people and the federal government and destroyed the social safety net through funding, through defunding, through firing employees. When you get rid of 10 % of the federal workforce, who do you think is picking up the phone at the Social Security Administration? Who do you think is generating the statistics that are needed to run the economy? Nobody. Nobody's home. The lights are on. Nobody's home. And Russ Vogt, remember that name, who is effectively the domestic policy president of the United States, the architect of 2025. Don't be misled by his bookish librarian demeanor.

7:52Michael Popok:He is Darth Vader. That's what Donald Trump has even called him. He runs the Office of Management and Budget. He's the architect of Project 2025, which he celebrates, you know, and he holds the pen and the checkbook. The executive branch can't execute on the laws unless Russ Vogt writes the check to do it. And that's how they choke off and starve the American people through Russ Vogt. Right? Why do you think he's called Darth Vader? Here's Donald Trump calling Russ Vogt and introducing him as Darth Vader. Let's play it. And I will say this, that we have Darth Vader. You know Darth Vader, right?

8:29Darth Vader is a man who I think he's sitting right. Is that Darth? Stand up, please, Darth Vader. Stand up. Does everybody know this is they call him Darth Vader? I call him a fine man, but he's cutting Democrat priorities and they're never going to get him back. And they've caused us and they've really allowed us to do it. And by the way, thank you. You're doing a great job, I have to tell you. So really a great job.

8:59Michael Popok:So Amy Berman Jackson has a Darth Vader problem. And Darth Vader, Russ Vogt, goes on right-wing podcasts in October and says, in response to a question about the CFPB, the following. So we want to put the CFPB out of business. And we will be successfully probably within the next two or three months. How do I know that's the quote? Because Amy Berman Jackson put it on page one above her order. Now, Donald Trump has also said he wants to get rid of the CFPB. And we've got a clip of that as well. And Amy Berman Jackson saw it also. Let's play it. Protesters are calling on the Trump administration to change course and reopen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

9:46CFPB workers were told to stay home yesterday and its D.C. headquarters is shut down. CFPB was founded in 2011 after the Great Recession and the agency aims to protect Americans from financial fraud, abuse and unfair practices. Critics say shutting it down is an attempt to loosen financial regulations. The CFPB is there to make sure that Elon's new project can't scam you or steal your sensitive personal data. I got elected on making government better, more efficient and smaller. And that's what we're doing.

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11:47Michael Popok:So now they decide they're going to starve the CFPB of cash. And they're going to do it by saying that the Federal Reserve, which is the funding source that Congress set up for this bureau, doesn't have the money. It's broke. It's busted. By the way that they define earnings, a defined term concerning the balance sheet. Now, she also remarks in her footnote four on page five and relies on a brief that was supplied to her by former officials of the Federal Reserve. Now, the whole thing stems to a two or three page memo created out of whole cloth by the Trump Department of Justice, which we know has been captured by Donald Trump, so it's not independent.

12:36Michael Popok:Its Office of Legal Counsel really been captured, really not independent, who defined the Fed's profitability and concluded that there isn't enough money to pay the funding for the Bureau. Here's what she says in her footnote. An abacus brief submitted by former officials of the Federal Reserve contends that Office of Legal Counsel's analysis of the Fed's profitability is flawed because the Fed never truly operates at a loss. Here's what they tried to say. On page three of her order, on November 10th, the defendants filed what they styled as a notice of potential lapse in appropriations to pay the expenses of the Bureau, which transmitted a copy of the November 7th memo issued by the Office of Legal Counsel, mainly Donald Trump, at vote's request, at this Russ vote's request.

13:30Michael Popok:The notice acknowledged that this court's injunction, which restricts the agency's conduct regarding employment, contracting and facilities, remains in effect. So she's saying now I'm getting trolled. You're saying that my injunction that you can't fire people, you can't cancel contracts, and you can't sell the building remains in effect. So you're going to defund underneath it? but that the Federal Reserve, this is over on page five, has no earnings. They're busted and cannot fund the CFPB and that the director has no statutory obligation to request funds when the Fed is not profitable. So the acting head of the CFPB, this Consumer Bureau, Russ Vogt, purposely did not ask for the funding that the Fed had set aside for the Bureau in order to argue that there's no money and he needs to shut down operations.

14:30Michael Popok:That didn't go over well. Here's what the judge rules at the end of her order on page 31. This sums it up. The court clarifies that the claimed lapse in funding, like you're out of money, Fed has no money, which was manufactured, her word, by the defendants based solely on that legal memo I just read to you, is not a valid justification for the agency's unilateral decision to abandon its obligations under the injunction. You're not getting out from under my injunction by a false claim that there's no money. The statutory text of the act, The statutory act governs and it prescribes a process through which that bureau is to request the funding it needs to carry out the mission assigned to it by Congress.

15:21Michael Popok:And the Federal Reserve must provide that funding from its, quote unquote, combined earnings. And you can't make combined earnings disappear through a new version of what combined earnings are to say that the Federal Reserve operates at a loss. And every year from 2011, this has not been a problem, she said. Neither the statute, the injunction, nor the Fed's willingness to pay has changed, she writes, the judge writes. The only new circumstance is the administration's determination to eliminate an agency created by Congress with the stroke of a pen, even while the matter is before the Court of Appeals.

16:04Michael Popok:It appears that defendants' new understanding of combined earnings is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the Bureau of Funding and yet another attempt to achieve the very end the court's injunction was put in place to prevent. Therefore, judges have to clarify a lot with this administration. Therefore, this ruling construes the scope of the existing order to clarify that the defendant's unilateral decision to decline the request, to decline, to request funding, not even put in the request, based on an unsupported interpretation of the law, contravenes the preliminary injunction. I can't tell you it's into the multiple dozens how many times judges are forced to reclarify, reissue, reconsider their orders for this Trump administration and the Department of Justice.

17:00Michael Popok:They act like they can't read. They act like they don't understand plain English. It forces judges to be like, I need to really redefine my order once again, buying more time for the Trump administration, wasting more time, you know, wasting more time and dollars. No wonder government spending is up 7 % over Joe Biden's period. I thought they were trying to shriek the government. I thought the purpose of Doge and Donald Trump and cost cutting and all that was to cut spending. Why is spending up 7 %? You know, he got rid of 10 % of the federal workforce, but spending is up 7 % under Donald Trump, right?

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