Judge Signals Major Epstein Reckoning for Trump

0:00Michael Popok:Is a D.C. federal judge, Judge Sullivan, on the verge of ordering the production of millions of unseen Epstein documents, including those closely tied to Donald Trump? Is that what we're watching with Judge Sullivan? I just did an interview with Katie Fang's lawyer, Brendan Ballew. And my takeaway from that reporting and a review of her original complaint is that we can't lose the forest for the trees. This isn't a case just about what she's seeking in her preliminary injunction motion, that she's won an unbreakable winning streak against the Department of Justice about five categories of documents.

0:45Michael Popok:Oh, no. It's not just about those categories. It's not just about the untranslated foreign language documents in this international child sex trafficking ring. It's not just about the documents about a sex torture video. It's not just about the documents about the four times that the FBI interviewed a victim who claims that she was assaulted by Donald Trump when she was 13 years old. It's not just about that. It's about the millions of documents to complete the production and the fact that this federal judge, Judge Sullivan, who's already throwing around the words like contempt against the prosecutors who appeared before him in his courtroom.

1:29Michael Popok:If he, now having seen that the Department of Justice has absolutely no defense, has sent in an ill-prepared advocate who spent, according to reports, and Brendan Ballew, the lawyer for Katie Fang, spent a considerable amount of time in court closely examining his shoelaces and not responding to the federal judge. Will this lead the federal judge to ultimately grant summary judgment in favor of Katie Fang, force the production, not just of those three or four categories of documents at stake in the preliminary injunction. But the millions of documents that have not yet been produced and more to the point, take away from the Department of Justice their self-policing of the production.

2:20Michael Popok:They're doing it themselves, their DIY, and turn it over to a court-appointed officer, an officer of the court, a special master, a former federal judge, to do the review and make sure all documents as required by law, as required by the statute passed by Congress, are produced. I'm going to cover that, including my interview with Brendan Ballew here on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. I'm Michael Popok. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button over on Legal AF YouTube channel. We spent, understandably, a considerable amount of time talking about Katie Fang's big win, as an intrepid journalist trying to do her job and to support the dignity of the survivors by bringing the lawsuit.

3:08Michael Popok:We then got kind of wrapped around the issues of her preliminary injunction, in which in the preliminary injunction, she's seeking five immediate categories of documents to be produced, the foreign language documents to be translated, the handwritten FBI 302 interview notes of that victim about when she was 13 years old in her interaction with Donald Trump, including her being, according to her words, sexually abused by him. The documents related to the sex torture video, and where is the redaction log of the more than 200 ,000 documents that haven't been produced at all? That was the focus, the narrow focus of the preliminary injunction in a masterstroke by her lawyers and by Katie.

3:54But the bigger picture is found, of course, in the complaint.

3:58Michael Popok:And I'm going to give you now some insider knowledge from Katie's lawyer who was in the room during the most recent hearing with Judge Sullivan. Let's remember, and we'll post this up on Legal AF Substack, what they are seeking. In the counts, they are seeking a declaration that there's been a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act and that there's been harm as a result. In their prayer for relief on page 14, they want the following in the underlying lawsuit. They want a declaration that the defendant, Todd Blanche, has failed to comply with the act, the law, stop the ongoing violations of the act, direct the defendant to remove all unlawful redactions, rip off the black tape, reproduce all materials that were produced but then unlawfully retracted, So there's documents that were out there for a moment in the public domain and then withdrawn, produce all the materials that have not yet been produced.

5:03Michael Popok:Those are the millions of documents, including those related to Donald Trump, and award them attorney's fees. Now here's paragraph four. The act required the attorney general to produce with limited and precisely enumerated exceptions all documents held by the Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning Epstein, Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, and other individuals named in connection with his activities. Paragraph six, that required production never occurred. We know that. Paragraph 28, talking about inappropriate redactions. Many of the redactions that defendant made facially conflicted with the requirements of the law.

5:44Michael Popok:The department redacted, A, the identities in a draft indictment of people who allegedly conspired with Epstein to persuade, induce, and entice individuals who had not attained the age of 18 to engage in prostitution. B, the identity of the person who wrote to Epstein in 2014. Thank you for a fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty. C, the identity of the person who wrote to Epstein in 2017 that I met blank today. She is like Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature. So now I should send you her type of candidates only. D, the identity of the person who wrote to Epstein in 2018 that, quote, I found at least three very good young poor, but we was so tired and that meet this one, not the beauty queen that we both likes her a lot.

6:32Michael Popok:The identity of the person who wrote to Epstein in 2013 that, quote, new Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute, 19 years old. The identity of the person to whom Epstein wrote in 2009 that, where are you? Are you OK? I loved the torture video. The identity of the people who wrote those emails in exchange with Epstein are likely should be investigated by the Department of Justice and the FBI as having participated in a criminal enterprise related to sex abuse and child sex abuse. Let's go to paragraph 31, withheld and retracted documents. Paragraph 33. For instance, in one document, a woman accused Trump of forcing her to perform oral sex when she was a minor.

7:18Michael Popok:The FBI found this accusation sufficiently credible that it interviewed the alleged victim four times. Now, let me show you my interview, a clip of my interview with Brendan Ballew. First, here's his observation about how poorly the Department of justice did in the courtroom. And then I'll explain why that will grease the skids for a future order of the court in favor of Katie Fang. Play the clip. It was a pretty crazy two hours, you know. So just to set the baseline here, the department, you know, we want a preliminary injunction requiring DOJ to produce a whole bunch of information or show cause why they couldn't.

7:57DOJ has just repeatedly failed to comply with the court's order here and has failed to reply to comply with follow-on orders. And so this was really a chance for the judge to bring the parties in and understand, okay, why Department of Justice are you not following these orders? And what am I, Judge Sullivan, going to do about it? And to your point, you know, I want to be diplomatic here. I want to be respectful, but it was a shocking sort of experience for me having been at the Department of Justice to see the arguments that they were making or the arguments that they weren't making in that they really didn't seem to have a plan for the hearing or for what the judge's arguments were going to be, or questions were going to be.

8:39Sort of basic questions about the case, what their responses were. There were just long periods of silence in the courtroom as the Department of Justice, I think, struggled to articulate why it couldn't follow the law here. So I had never really been in a hearing like that where one side was just silent on their own arguments, just saying that they were going to do things and wouldn't explain why. And I think that made the follow-on conversation, which was Judge Sullivan's essentially half hour long description of having previously found the Department of Justice in contempt more than a decade ago, I think really chilling because I think he really made clear the profound professional consequences that follow you if you are in fact held in contempt.

9:22I am certain that Judge Sullivan does not want that to happen. But I am hopeful that his message resonated with the government lawyers. What you described, I used to call in the business close shoelace examination. Here's something most people aren't told about their credit score. It's not just like whether you pay your credit cards. It's when you pay them. Yeah, most people don't realize that, like me. But smart credit data experts understand how credit bureaus operate. So they created something called the best paid down date built around how credit reporting actually works. So instead of guessing, you get a personalized strategy that shows you what to do and when to do it to help you maximize your score.

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10:45time.

10:47Michael Popok:Now, to reinforce my argument is the fact that the judge, Judge Sullivan, so ignored the Department of Justice and effectively took the position that they can't be trusted, that they only had Katie Fang's side, Brendan Ballou and Public Integrity Project write his proposed order and other submissions without having to share it with the Department of Justice. Here's my discussion with brendan on that has been so shocking about this particular case is that the department of justice very clearly wants to win but is very unwilling to make any arguments to win um you know that was what was happening at the hearing today it's also been what's happening across the entire case you know when we move for the preliminary injunction and i should really call out my colleague sam ward packard who really came up with the whole pi strategy emily gilman who argued the case in front of judge sullivan today um last week um you know the department of Justice's response, at no point did they argue that they were complying with the law, which I thought was pretty shocking.

11:51You would think you would want to at least nominally say, look, judge, we are actually following the law here. They didn't even try to do that. By and large, the same thing happened in this hearing. There really was not a sustained effort to argue that the Department of Justice was complying with the court's orders. Instead, there were sort of variations, and I don't think that they wanted to say this particularly explicitly, but there were variations on the theme of, we don't believe that we need to follow these warriors, or we have reinterpreted them so that we don't need to follow them. Again, it's something that I've really never seen the Department of Justice personally upfront do before.

12:25Michael Popok:And so you can't lose sight of the forest from the trees. All these wins for Katie Feng, this axe chopping of the tree, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. That's going to lead to a mighty redwood falling, don't you think? And that mighty redwood is when they move for summary judgment without necessity of a hearing or a trial to have the court declare that the documents have not been produced, it's in violation of the law, and they need to be immediately produced, and the appointment of that special master. That's really what this is all about. And at the rate that they are going and failing in front of Judge Sullivan, The special master is moving ever closer to being appointed.

13:09Michael Popok:Here's my discussion with Brendan on that. This is actually just about a small set of the overall documents that are at issue here. So I agree. I think Judge Sullivan is teeing up some sort of ultimate order on this sort of initial set. But ultimately, we're talking about millions of documents that need to be properly reviewed that we really can't trust the Department of Justice did a good job on or a complete job or an honest job on. And so I think what we need to be doing is getting to the substance of this case, get to what's called summary judgment, as you know, so that we can try to get the ultimate relief, which would be the appointment of something like a special master to oversee the Department of Justice work here, make sure that they're actually compliant.

13:47But I will say, you know, every time the Department of Justice evades, fails to comply, fails to be completely transparent, it's going to make it a lot easier for us to get that ultimate remedy.

13:59Michael Popok:So keep our eye on the prize. The preliminary injunction about the five categories is important, but every time they prove their point in court, Katie Fang and Public Integrity Project are one step closer to getting the federal judge to order the production of millions of pages of documents and take the Department of Justice out of the equation and turn that project over to a federal, ex-federal judge or ex-federal magistrate to handle the problem. that the oversight of that process. I'm glad you're here on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. Help us continue to grow our pro-democracy channel, our independent journalism and commentary over on Legal AF.

14:42Michael Popok:Take a moment, hit that free subscribe button there. Until my next report, this is Michael Popak. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN.