Legal AF - 5/6/2026

26:29KFA:You can't just go rifling through that because you are suspecting one particular thing. And obviously, people would be offended and upset by that because there are protections, there's privacy issues. And a reporter's information is just as, I think, sacrosanct. And it is so important to protect confidentiality and to support the press and the freedom of the press and the confidentiality. So I do think that this is going to be a hard fought fight. And I wouldn't be surprised if the lawyers work out some kind of deal where she gets her stuff back and agrees to turn over just a handful of documents or items.

27:12KFA:but the judge is going to keep a tight rein on this. But I think all reporters now will be really thinking about how they keep their information and protecting their sources and their information even better. Because she has ongoing stories, right? And she has her own ongoing investigations. So I think the press, if they haven't already, is going to really think long and hard. because they really kind of stepped into a place that you typically don't step as the Department of Justice.

27:48Popok:Yep, 1 ,000%, absolutely. So we will pick up when we come back from our first break with what's happening in the E. Jean Carroll sex abuse and defamation cases. Will she get her$100 million? How will she get it? And why is the Supreme Court even entertaining stepping into this fray? I want to talk about Louise Lucas, the Senate President Tempor in Virginia, and why her businesses were raided. Is it legitimate? If so, why was Fox there to film it? Or does it have more to do with redistricting and a political attack by Trump against Democrats? And then we'll pick up with the United States Supreme Court and things that have happened in a fast-moving story this week, including in states like Louisiana and Alabama and other states, as we try to get the musical chairs to stop and the redistricting, remapping to stop so that we can get to primaries.

28:52Popok:we'll touch on election night in America last night and some eye-popping results that are not favorable to Donald Trump from last night. Even one that looked favorable like, hey, he picked off five out of seven Republicans that opposed him in Indiana. I'm not sure that's such a great thing for the general election. We'll talk about that when we come back. So many different ways to support what we do here. You already do so much for us. You helped us win two Webby Awards, the People's Voice Award and the Committee or Academy Award, if you will, for Best News Podcast. So we're a top rated legal AF law and politics podcast out there.

29:35Popok:We're on audio. So go over to your audio platforms, you know, Apple and Spotify, five-star reviews, matter, count, comments, we read them. Help people continue to grow this pro-democracy channel here on Midas Touch, hit the free subscribe button. Come over to Legal AF YouTube, and we're going to hit 1.2 million subscribers with your help this month, 12 new videos a day, all curated for you at the intersection of law and politics. Lots of lives that we do in addition to that. And then we've got the Substack, Legal AF Substack, which is another way, a whole other community there. Like I did a live today with a thousand people and it's just great.

30:23Popok:There's just such great energy, an amazing audience, you know, updating them on what's happening. Talk back, you know, we have a chat back and forth with each other and other amazing content you can only find on Substack. So just to encourage you to become a Substack member and help us get to our 10 ,000 paid subscriber goal, I'm running a 40 % off sale for the month of May. Okay, and now we have our pro-democracy sponsors, all been vetted and curated, and here's a word from them now. Bathroom comfort and hygiene are things most people don't think about until something isn't working the way it should.

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33:16Popok:But the only way to get 20 % off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash Legal AF and then use code Legal AF at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash Legal AF, code Legal AF. Welcome back to Legal AF at the Midweek. Thank you for your fervent support. E. Jean Carroll, we've had her on Legal AF. Friend of the pod, we're friend of hers and supporter of hers. What is it with this administration and sex abuse scandals? You know, I can't, the amount of times I got to talk about Epstein with Howard Lutnick, the Congress Secretary, testifying today behind closed doors about the closeness of his relationship with a convicted child abuse and indicted child sex trafficker in Jeffrey Epstein.

34:07Popok:Now, again, we got the original one. The original sex abuse scandal wasn't Trump and Epstein. It's Trump and his attack on E. Jean Carroll, which was proven in a court of law by preponderance of evidence in front of nine jurors in two separate, well, one particular federal court. And so now the Trump administration is trying to argue that for the larger of the two judgments, he's not, or both, he's not liable because he was an employee of the federal government. Well, first of all, he wasn't an employee of the federal government when he sexually abused her, as the jury determined. He was in the 90s.

34:51Popok:Now, when he defamed her, he both defamed her before he was president and after he was president the first time. And so in the second trial, first trial, they determined sex abuse and had awarded her pain and suffering and other types of damages, 5.5 million. Trump did not testify. He famously kept threatening to testify, but he never testified. And the lead lawyer there was an outlandish character, almost a cartoon figure, named Joe Takapina, who I just saw in an interview recently. He's getting bigger and he's about to burst. He's getting bigger and bigger physically. He's just, every time I see him, he's filling the screen with his head.

35:35Popok:And I don't know. I mean, he wasn't the right fit for the first case. I was surprised they picked him because in an interview before he was picked, he said that Trump didn't have the right to be the defamer in chief against E. Jean Carroll. And yet Trump picked him to be his defense lawyer. In the second case, he did testify. His lead lawyer was Alina Habba, and the jury hated him and awarded E.G. Carroll$83.5 million, primarily for defamation and punitive damages. Those cases went off after appeals bounced around between the Second Circuit and the D.C. Court of Appeals, state or district court of appeals in D.C., about this issue of civil immunity, which is called Westfall, after the name of a case, immunity.

36:29Popok:And the main argument raised at the Second Circuit, raised with Judge Kaplan, was that Alina Haba and Donald Trump waived the defense because they didn't raise it. And you have to raise defenses. It's not like a mental telepathy. I'm thinking of a defense that doesn't work in courts of law. You have to raise your defense timely or they're stricken. and the second circuit told Alina Hava exactly that the first time and the second time the number of appeals back and forth. Judge Kaplan said it in his ruling after he got it back. He said I could do the substance and you're outside of the Westfall immunity doctrine but you also are untimely and and therefore cannot raise the issue.

37:16Popok:Trump didn't like it. Asked for an en banc review of all 10 or so judges of the or more of the Second Circuit. And I'll let Karen, you take it from there.

37:28KFA:Yeah. So they refused. They declined to to step in and and reverse the decision. and now the Department of Justice is now asking for a stay of the mandate, if you will, so that they can consider going to the Supreme Court. And that's what they're going to do. They basically said, we plan on going to the Supreme Court. E. Jean Carroll said, I have no problem waiting as long as you add to the bond that you've put up interest for this period of time. And this case, you know, I'm 100 % sure the Supreme Court's going to hear this case because it's Donald Trump, once again, using the Supreme Court as his own private personal court.

38:16KFA:And the question's going to be whether these defamatory statements where he basically called her a liar and said that he didn't do these things, that he's not a rapist and he denied these claims, whether that was something that he was doing as the president of the United States. and therefore the Department of Justice gets to substitute the defendant, right? Substitute themselves for the defendant. That's what Westfall does. It basically says if you sue somebody and they're an employee of the federal government, the Department of Justice comes in and substitutes themselves for the defendant and you're not allowed to sue the Department of Justice civilly for defamation and some other things and therefore the case gets dismissed.

39:08KFA:So that's why this is the kind of golden ring or whatever it is that they're trying to get to the Supreme Court. Because if they can get the Supreme Court to say, yes, you were acting as president, it was in your right to act as president, to make these statements, and to defame E. Jean Carroll, that somehow that was in your job description and part of your presidential duties. If they can say, yes, the Department of Justice can substitute themselves as the defendant, therefore you're immune, and the whole thing goes away. I mean, it's really just, it's a Hail Mary, but it's a good, it's certainly a smart play for him.

39:45KFA:It's the only play he has since every lower court has rejected this so far, and not just on procedural grounds. I mean, I think he's going to be hard pressed to argue that this was part of his presidential duties. Although you can imagine seeing the Supreme Court, the very conservative right wing MAGA Supreme Court, twisting themselves into a pretzel saying, well, he's president. And if the president is being accused of these things, of course, he should defend himself. And, you know, you could imagine that that's what that's what they're going to say. And I don't see how they would ever, the$5.5 million judgment, I think is solid.

40:25KFA:And I don't think that one falls anywhere near this. But this$83.5 million one, there's an argument that the Supreme Court, if they want to once again, do their bidding on behalf of Donald Trump, I think they're going to find a way to do it. But we'll see. You know, it's always we'll see. But I'm so just given their rulings recently and just seeing how the court has has really just fallen so far away from what they're what they've always been in the past, even if they were there were conservative justices, liberal justices. They were so you could at least understand what they were doing and the things they were doing didn't seem so partisan and political.

41:06KFA:All of that veneer has has gone away from this particular Supreme Court. So if they want to continue to do things to basically support Donald Trump, I guess he's taking his shot.

41:19Popok:Yeah, I mean, when you do the math, you know Alito and Thomas will find a way to argue something like something along the lines that you did, which is, of course, a president charged with heinous crimes and accused of rape needs to be able to defend himself. and otherwise the whole institution of the presidency, you know, could be undermined. You know, you can just, you can hear it. That's Alito and Thomas. We know that on the other side, Kagan, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, and Sotomayor are going to be less inclined and find that it falls outside the outer boundaries of presidential conduct, presidential responsibility, even stretched to its outer boundaries.

42:07Popok:You got to draw a line somewhere. What is it? Is it, you know, short of murder? I had to murder him. Does that fall within or outside of immunity? And so now you're at three on one side and two on the other. You got to count to five. And now you got this up for grabs, this jump ball with Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts, and Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh is completely unreliable. I mean, really. I mean, he's just such a free radical. You don't know what he's going to do at any given moment, even though I've read hundreds of opinions involving him. I still don't know what he's going to do. I'm not sure he knows what he's going to do.

42:50Popok:Amy Coney Barrett, I don't think is going to be, she has no problem taking on this president for personal conduct that she finds to be unsavory and not giving him a win. against great political headwinds. She defeated the tariffs for Donald Trump. I'm sure she's going to do the same thing with birthright citizenship and a couple of other rulings that were clearly anti-Trump. I don't think she's thrilled to have to rule about a sex abuse or rape case. So she could be potentially, depending upon the oral argument, and the briefing, she could be a fourth vote against finding Westfall immunity, which the Biden Department of Justice already found he was outside.

43:44Popok:It's just that when the Department of Justice changed, he had his new Department of Justice, how convenient, certify that he was inside the course and scope of his duties at the time. How convenient. So that's fourth. Now you have to look at Kavanaugh and Roberts. I'm sorry, Gorsuch and Roberts. And Gorsuch generally, depending upon the issue, sides a lot with the MAGA MAGA right. He likes to fancy himself to be a little bit more independent-minded, but his voting doesn't say that. And then Roberts. Is Roberts going to be, he's already the Supreme Court justice that led the Supreme Court to rip away a woman's right to choose, ripped away and destroyed voting rights, destroyed the separation of church and state, and gave a president criminal immunity, writing many of those decisions.

44:50Popok:Is he going to also go down in history as the Supreme Court justice that allowed a sex abuser to avoid the ultimate justice for the victim and give him a pass by way of Westfall immunity? Again, they are not arguing in their brief. They didn't do it. That he's not a sex abuser. That the judgment should be vacated because anything is wrong with the judgment. that all those appeals are over. They're not arguing that the money's too large or anything. They're arguing that even if all that's true, I did it within the course and scope of my job. It was my job to defame E. Jean Carroll and say she was a loser and a money grubber and a con artist and not my type and disgusting looking, all the defamatory things.

45:49Popok:Even Joe Takapina, as I said earlier, which was Donald Trump's criminal defense lawyer, before he got appointed to that, said out loud, he can't be the defamer in chief from his bully pulpit of the presidency. So very interesting. And the Supreme Court can very easily stay out of this by just not granting the writ of certiorari, the petition that gets filed for the appeal. But I think you're right. I think there only has to be four votes to bring this case up, and I think there's four votes for it the way I've just described it. Is there five votes to give him what he wants, which is to get out from under and have them live with themselves if they let a sex abuser go free?

46:37Popok:I don't know. We'll have to. We will do what we always do. We'll follow it closely. It will be a 26-27 term event for the Supreme Court. It will not be an emergency docket motion or hearing over the summer. It'll be second half of next year. You know, we'll have to see what happens between now and then. Right, Karen?

47:01KFA:You know, as we were talking about this, I'm thinking of two things. Number one, this Supreme Court is the court that gave him presidential immunity. So they already want, they've already signaled that a president should be free to be unencumbered and be free to do whatever they need to do. And so that's a principle that they don't want a president to have any kind of constraints. And I think you can imagine this Supreme Court, it's not a bridge too far, saying, look, a president has to be able to speak on topics, especially if they're being accused of things and they don't want to open the floodgates of, I mean, does anyone defame people more than Donald Trump?

47:44KFA:I mean, he is the defamer in chief, right? Like he, he overtly and outright lies about people all the time and ruins careers and ruins their lives. And I mean, I could see them saying, you know, we don't want to, we don't want in any way, clip the wings of a president who is going to speak, you know, they're going to use, they're going to use big fancy words, you know, they're going to, in talking about pushing the outer boundaries of speech and debate and all that kind of stuff. And the president is constantly under attack. Of course, he must defend himself. I see them contorting themselves into this pretzel and essentially giving him immunity again.

48:32This court, I just see it on this court.

48:35KFA:It's so depressing to me, but that's what I predict they're going to do. Yeah.

48:41Popok:I'd love to get Robbie Kaplan, the lawyer for E. Jean Carroll, back on the show. She's been with us a number of times. I'll reach out to her so she can brief her audience. When the timing's right, I'm sure she will. She may wait to see the petition before she comes on. But we will get Robbie back on, which will be a very unique perspective about what's going on and what her feelings are about the merits of the appeal. In fact, I'll make a note to do it tonight when we're done with tonight's live show to reach out to her. So we have that. When we come back from our last break, we'll talk about the Supreme Court again in the context of voting and congressional maps.

49:24Popok:and they're playing fast and loose with purported constitutional principles that, as Ketanji Brown Jackson laid out, seem to have yielded to raw exercise of power by the Supreme Court. And by that, she means the fact that the right wing have six votes and they're going to shove many, many things down our throats and up our bodies that we're not comfortable with. and we'll cover all of that, bring everybody up to speed so they know when we talk about maps in shorthand, voting in shorthand, and Supreme Court rulings like Calais, you know what we're talking about and you can use it in your own, to reach your own conclusions and to bring it into the marketplace of ideas in your own life and social media with friends and around the kitchen table and all of that.

50:17Popok:It's just important things that we need to talk about. We'll do that. but first we'll take our last break. Support the show. That's really important. Keeps us on the air. You have for the last six years and we appreciate that. Subscribe to our show and follow it on Spotify and on Apple. Here, let people know about it. Invite them to come join our show tonight or Saturday night with Ben Micellis. And then we've got Legal AF YouTube channel. For those who just can't get enough and want to have 12 videos a day, dedicated to law and politics. I joke, it's like a TED talk in a law school, had a baby and you were there for it.

50:57So join us and you can subscribe, become a member there.

51:02Popok:That's another way to support. And then we've got Legal AF Substack. Yeah, there it is. Where we got live reports, real live live, like now, but in a different way, you know, jump on at lunch, talk about issues at the midday, and then legal filings and orders and opinions. You can read them for yourself on Legal AF Substack. And now a word from our curated sponsors. Be honest. Have you ever actually looked at the ingredient list on your dog's food? After the first ingredient, well, good luck. You see, kibble is made using extreme high heat to keep its shelf stable and inexpensive, so brands have to add back synthetic vitamins and minerals in the form of strange chemicals whose names you don't understand and definitely cannot pronounce.

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54:35Popok:That's LEGALAF to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. Welcome back to LEGALAF at the midweek. So, Karen, we covered this. I want to get your view. We get the Calais decision. It turns out from Democracy Docket that Bernie Calais is an election denier of the first order. He's the non-white, sorry, the non-black voter that had a problem with Louisiana adding one more black congressional district and challenged it under the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. It's now known as the Calais decision and issued by the Supreme Court last week. We've been wringing our hands over it, figuring out what the silver lining is, there probably is one.

55:30Popok:I mean, it's mainly the dummy mandering of the Republicans over mapping and over districting to try to try to obtain a Republican advantage at a time when they've miscalculated about where the political will is and where the political winds are blowing since there's been such a tremendous change and rejection of the Trump administration in the last 16 months. I mean, mapping sounded like a good idea when Donald Trump's approval rating was in the 40s. It's a terrible idea as it heads for the 20s. And as Hispanics and Hispanic Catholics and women and voters under 30 and black and others, independents all run screaming from the house of trump and it's that missed change in demographics which could lead not to remapping giving the republicans an advantage but making unstable and insecure a number of those districts so that the republicans get less not more you know It's the law of unintended consequences.

56:42Popok:I was on with Mark Elias yesterday from Democracy Docket and a first-rate voting and MAP litigator who's involved with about 70 cases right now. And he and I both agreed that just because you redraw the MAP in Texas to give yourself five more doesn't mean you're going to get the five. You're probably not. You're probably going to get one. Maybe you get two. But where the Democrats did their vote change, their seat changes, it's like rock solid because they did it the right way. They went to have the voters vote on ballot initiatives and proposals and referendums. So California's plus five. You can take that to the bank.

57:24Popok:That's was Mark's comment. You know, Florida's another four or five. I don't know about that. Virginia, Virginia voters voted on it. Ten to one advantage to the to the Democrats. So be careful what you wish for, because you might get the opposite. Less seats, not more. So we're banking on a little bit of dummy mandarin, but we've lost the Supreme Court as any type of protector of voting rights. And that led to a very interesting, what should have been a straightforward rejection of a request, became the Supreme Court's MAGA-6 sacrificing their principles, whatever's left of them, in order to enter the fray of a political dispute, which they've always said is wrong under the political question doctrine,

58:18Popok:or untimely under the Purcell doctrine. We'll talk about those doctrines. But here, because it's Republicans that they're benefiting, they're like, where can we put our big fat thumb on the scale? Oh, over here, Louisiana and Democrat and Republicans, let's do it. But when they don't want to do it, like when a minority voting rights are at issue, then it's like, oh, we're a Supreme Court. We can't get involved with politics. We can't get involved with primaries. We can't get involved with voting that way, or it's too close to an election. We can't get involved. That violates the political doctrine, except when it doesn't.

58:57Popok:And so Louisiana asked the court to shorten the 32-day window on the Supreme Court rule to have a decision, an opinion recognized or rendered. to speed it up. And Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out that in 25 years, they've only done it twice. But here, Alito, writing for the majority, shortens the time to a day, enters the fray in Louisiana where there is active litigation being led by the ACLU and Mark Elias, about 80 ,000 voters who have already voted in the primary based on the maps. that were already in place, that now they want to toss. And yet the Supreme Court weighs in, which led, I'll turn it over to you, Karen, it led to this fight, broke out in the open between, not that civil, between Alito and Petanji Brown-Jackson.

1:00:02Popok:Take it from there.

1:00:04KFA:Yeah, look, this is, what this boils down to and what people are seeing and Supreme Court experts are seeing is the intellectual dishonesty of the Supreme Court. And that's one of the reasons people are so outraged. People are outraged for two reasons. Number one, this is an utter attempt, bold-faced attempt to essentially gut the Voting Rights Act completely, take away just decades and decades and decades of just strides that we've made in this country to really give people of color in this country a voice and the ability to vote and gutting the Voting Rights Act last Wednesday by ruling that you have to prove that you intended to disenfranchise people of color or black voters.

1:00:59KFA:That's what you have to show. It can't be that it had the effect of diluting their vote or disenfranchising them. You have to show that that was the intent. People were already upset about that, but what's happening here and the intellectual dishonesty of this Supreme Court is that five months ago, three years ago, and every other time they've been asked to weigh in to something that involving an election. If it's too close to an election, they always say, and they've always said, we're not getting involved. There's two principles. There's the political questions doctrine that basically says, look, that's just a political issue, so we're not getting involved in that.

1:01:40KFA:But even if it's not just a political issue, and it's a court issue, we're still not going to do something to interfere that close to the election, because now we're wading into politics. And again, five months ago, in a case, they said that. And why? Because it was about the Democrats, right? And so they're saying, okay, I'm sorry, You know, the Democrats, you're going to get an opportunity to have more votes. You're five months away or six months, eight months away from primary votes. That's too close. So it can't happen now. This one just absolutely throws that doctrine out the window because, as you said, they are in the middle of voting.

1:02:20KFA:Their primaries have opened. People have cast their votes. People are running for office from particular districts. Their whole campaign is I'm voting. I'm running in this district. And people have voted. They're in the midst of voting. So it's not that we're too close to an election. We're in an election. And if they were to adhere to their own principles, their own rules, how they ruled five months ago, this exact court, they would say, we're not, this is not happening now. Okay, this, this, we will, we will hold on to our mandate. We will hold on to our order, right? Because the decision has come down.

1:02:59KFA:And usually it takes about a month, 32 days before they send the mandate down to give the parties a chance to kind of, okay, what do we want to do now? and to give people a chance to maybe they want to ask for the case to be re-heard or they, you know, whatever it is. And so it doesn't become official until the mandate is entered. And Louisiana stopped their election, declared a state of emergency, right? Things that are normally reserved for things like a hurricane or a tornado or a terrorist attack or a flood or fires or whatever else is a state of emergency. No, there's a state of emergency.

1:03:39KFA:Why? Because the Supreme Court said we are allowed to redistrict based on party and we're going to. And therefore we are stopping the election. And they rush over to the Supreme Court and say, can you issue your mandate now so that we can use that to redraw our maps? and Ketanji Brown Jackson said, I'm sorry, there's no reason to rush the 32 days, the Purcell principle, meaning, you know, don't get too close to an elect, don't fiddle with an election, too close to an election doctrine. Let's wait, let's wait. And we should wait like we have in every other case when it's a Democrat, right? Not a Republican.

1:04:20KFA:It's not the party that you support. It's the other party. Let's wait. And accused the right-wing MAGA majority of essentially doing the bidding for the Republicans, going straight into party politics, tipping the scales in favor of Republicans. And Alito knew that this is what she was going to say, saw her dissent, and called her out and said, you know, you just want us to wait 32 days for the 32 days. You know, you're just, you know, sticking with a procedure that doesn't really matter, a technicality. Totally missing that that's not the procedure she's talking about. She's talking about the Purcell principle.

1:05:01KFA:She's talking about the fact that this is going to affect an election and that essentially she called them out for being intellectually dishonest and completely throwing off the robes and going straight into politics. I mean, there is no more justice is blind and we're just going to call balls and strikes, right? This is not a court that calls balls and strikes. This is, I think Mark Elias even said, I think I saw him on a podcast, said this would be like the umpire telling the pitcher what pitches to throw. I mean, that's what's happening here. And sure enough, they enter their mandate in very quick order and Louisiana declares a state of emergency, stopped the election, they're redrawing their maps.

1:05:50KFA:And I hope to God it backfires on them and that you're right. And that what happens in November is that they lose more Republican seats because this is dishonest. This is unfair. And my opinion, if this alone doesn't show why we should get rid of gerrymandering, why we should consider whether or not the Electoral College even makes sense anymore and we should go with popular vote, whether we should go and do something with court reform, this Supreme Court is just illegitimate at this point. And I think we have to really consider major Supreme Court reform. And I just, they go against their own precedent, they go against their own norms, and they go against themselves.

1:06:36KFA:And I think the American people are losing faith in this Supreme Court. And frankly, what this means for people of color in this country, I hope they show up in huge numbers in November and really fight back against what's happening.

1:06:52Popok:Yeah, I think they've miscalculated. I think that they fell in love with what they saw as the Trumpification or magification of the United States. All these districts went red and pink and they used to be for blue and he beat kamala harris by double digits in places where that used to be competitive forget all that donald trump used to be popular the the the because the reality is the for the republicans and maga and even independents at the time, the fantasy of Donald Trump is a lot better than the reality of Donald Trump back in office. And if they thought it was just going to be a version of the way he was in his first administration, sprinkled with a little more criminality, it is so much worse than that.

1:07:51Popok:In terms of his full frontal assault on the rule of law, on our values, and dare I say his unpatriotic policies, which are completely out of step with the American voter, the American ideal, and has, based on polling, has been borne out in polling. I said during the presidential transition after we were done licking our wounds off the election, that eventually this recognition of the American people rejecting Donald Trump and his policies and his criminality is going to seep into the water supply. And it has. It's finally, may have taken 16, 17 months, although it's been showing up month after month after month in polling.

1:08:41Popok:But, you know, I talked about it last night in the intersection on CNN, they had a good graph. And you can tie Donald Trump's shedding of 16 favorability points to about six different data points that he can't fix because he won't grow a brain or morals or judgment between now and the midterms. He's at a high February of 2025 at an approval rating of 46%, which is good for him. And then what happens in April of last year? Tariffs get announced. How does that go? Knock off three points. It's like a game. It's like a kid's game. Go back three steps. then what happens then we have let's roll out the national guard and the militia and the state police for the feds to crush Americans where they live in democratic and blue states four more points down then it's the murder of Renee Good and Alex Petty and all that it represents on the streets of Minneapolis down then it's Epstein file scandals down.

1:10:01Popok:Then it's, now we're at February of this year, a year later, Iran war, okay, down. And then the ultimate nail in the coffin in terms of his favorability and unpopularity, gas prices, which is a proxy for affordability in this country. Because if you can't fill up your gas tank or you are robbing other parts of your budget to put gas in the car, then you're going to find ways not to drive very far or spend money or take vacations. So it impacts tourism and business, people's ability to spend money and have disposable income. Remember that phrase? There is no disposable income in the Trump administration.

1:10:46Popok:So nobody ever talks about it. Disposable income, free discretionary income you can spend on things other than just living, people have very little of that. And so all that has now shown up. You can't turn around a 23 % approval rating, a 77 % disapproval rating on the economy. You can't do it in a term. You can't do it in a year. You certainly can't do it in half a year to the midterms. And Trump knows it. That's why he's spending his time with all of these, you know, oh, I had a bad news cycle. Oh, let me go rob the Internal Revenue Service. Oh, I had a bad news cycle. Let me go shut down the historic black golf course in Washington, D.C.

1:11:34Popok:Oh, I'm having a bad day with Iran. Let me pick a fight with the Pope. None of this makes any political sense. you know as i said at the top of the show there was an election night last night in america and he decided he was going to flex his muscle whatever's left of it um muscles built on wendy's and mcdonald's based on reporting from today he was this is what the president was was ruminating about lamenting the lack of wendy's in his life i'm like what is going on and uh he's flexing his muscle oh you're going to oppose me in Indiana, you state senators. You're not going to redistrict. You're not going to dummy mander for me.

1:12:15Popok:I'm going to primary you. I'm going to send in MAGA Republicans to take your seats. How does that help him in the midterm general election to make Indiana voters choose between a normal, team normal Democrat and a MAGA MAGA Trumper who had to kiss the ring in order to get the job to take out somebody that they liked originally. It was a very low voter turnout as well in Indiana. So he might have gotten a short-term ego bump of dopamine in the brain, but for electoral, it was terrible. The one real race last night, he lost the, again, 32nd time special election turned the Michigan State House Senate chamber blue with the win of a special election.

1:13:11I think it was in District 31 or something for the state Senate.

1:13:19Popok:And now that chamber is 20 Democrats and 18 Republicans. Otherwise, it would have been nodded at 19 a piece. And that's another special election where a seat got flipped from red to blue. Continuing the string of over 300 races since the start of the administration at every place on the ballot, on the ticket, state and federal, in which Democrats have outperformed Kamala Harris and or won the seat. And that's what the Republicans have failed to grasp. And I don't know who their pollsters are, that they are missing the sea change in the electorate, in its mood, in its opinion of the scandal-scarred Trump administration led by Donald Trump.

1:14:12Popok:And that's where dummy mandarin, as we let off this segment with, comes into play, because if we mobilize the vote and it comes out and millions of people who sat out the last election come back to the democracy and vote, it's a wipeout of epic proportion. You know, we're talking 1993, Republican contract with America, Newt Gingrich wiping out Clinton, wipe out. That's the word. And then, you know, that's what happens. And that's what probably needs to happen. Hopefully, the American people recognize that. Why don't we touch base, Karen, on continuing our map theme with what happened in Virginia today.

1:15:00Popok:Now, Louise Lucas is well known to Virginians. She'd been on there for 30 years. She's in her early 80s. She's an entrepreneur. She owns a bunch of stuff, marijuana dispensary, I don't know, massage parlor, her office, all the same shopping center. Now, according to reporting, the Biden administration was looking into her possible corruption. She also was one of the leaders and power brokers about Governor Spanberger's redistricting plan that won, which gave the Democrats 10 out of the 11 seats in Virginia. and suddenly today Fox is on the scene. The Fox Bureau of Investigation shows up to conduct the raid.

1:15:40Popok:So what are you hearing and what do you know?

1:15:43KFA:I mean, look, the fact that Fox was there and no other reporters, I think, tells you a lot. Someone tipped them off in the administration, which leads always me to think, okay, what are they trying to distract from, right? Why do they want this in the news today? This is an investigation that's been kicking around for years. As you said, under the Biden administration, prior attorneys who looked at it didn't think there was anything there to bring a case or certainly not enough to bring a case. And here we are. We have Todd Blanche trying out to be the next attorney general. So he's trying to flex his muscles and bring cases and bring cases against Democrats, frankly.

1:16:27KFA:and that that's what she is and who she is and and what's going on today what are they trying to distract from why today and sure enough howard lutnik was testifying today in front in a closed door session of course in a hearing in front of congress because why we all can't see it or see what he has to say to answer for why did he lie about his contacts with jeffrey epstein why is it that someone who's a cabinet member in this administration who swore during his confirmation hearings that he met him once and never spoke to him again because he was so creeped out from him. It turns out he actually visited him on his island.

1:17:09KFA:He had business dealings with him and he had an investment with him. He had multiple contacts with him and he has to answer for that. And so we're not hearing a lot about that, or at least they're trying to make it so that we don't hear a lot about that. And I think they're throwing these distractions out so that Fox News, instead of reporting on Howard Lutnick, is instead going to report on this. And they're going to say, oh, another corrupt Democrat and, you know, all that kind of stuff. She's a woman. She's a woman of color. She's a prominent Democrat in Virginia, which can go purple sometimes.

1:17:48KFA:And so that is just so typical, I think, in this administration. That's what I think. That's what I thought when I saw that.

1:17:55Popok:I think you're right on target. I've said that they purposely keep investigations and indictments on the shelf, and it's like programming. And they program it. Oh, we've got a bad news cycle. Somebody from White House calls up the Department of Justice. What do we got? Oh, we're about a week away from maybe executing on a search warrant. Oh, can you do it today? Because Lutnick is going to be testifying and we need to step on the news cycle. You got it, boss. Does anybody out there in our audience think that didn't happen? And it happens all the time. Every time there's a bad news cycle for Donald Trump, even a micro news cycle, he conjures up something else for us to talk about.

1:18:42Popok:Some shitty thing happened in the Epstein files. Start putting up my name on the Kennedy Center. Right? Some shitty thing happens with the Iran war. let's send down a couple of lawyers for the Department of Justice to go look around the construction site for the Federal Reserve and see if they can find a crime. Over and over again. And so you're totally right. This has been the dirty little secret of the Trump administration that they time, they cook the timing so that it rolls out not because justice demands it, putting aside even starting these investigations, but they do crazy shit in order to say, look at me, look at me, look over here, look over here.

1:19:27Popok:And then, you know, the media dutifully, we try not to, dutifully goes after it. You know, I had, I did an interview, it's up on Legal AF YouTube from yesterday of a star of Sky Perryman. Sorry, sorry, Sky, I made you a star. You are a star. Sky Perryman of Democracy Forward about her leading the case, her group leading the case, about the attempt to take over of a famous municipal golf course that sits along the Potomac with the Washington Monument in the background. It was also seen in 1941 of a famous integration moment in civil rights where black golfers with much derision and booing and hissing by white golfers played on the golf course.

1:20:18Popok:And it's been a model for municipal golf courses, you know, which are relatively cheap and make golf available to the masses around the country. And so, you know, on a bad news day, he suddenly tries to take over the golf course. And she said in her interview with me, and I'll paraphrase, it's almost like, we got this. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We know what he's doing, that these are distractions done intentionally by the Trump administration to take us our eye off the prize of protecting civil rights and civil liberties, constitutional rights, First Amendment rights, voting rights.

1:21:01Popok:And what I think she was trying to communicate to our audience is have confidence that we know what he's doing. And yes, we have enough resources and public support to do both, to do it all, to go after him for the distractive events while not losing focus over here about things that matter to our body politic and our democracy. And that was very comforting for me because we can flit from one story to the next. We try to have continuity and drill down on things so that people can follow a story from beginning to middle to end. But don't worry that the ACLU or Democracy Forward or the Attorneys General or Mark Elias' group or Norm Eisen's group or Abby Lowell or any of the people that are fighting this out, duking it out for democracy in the courtrooms every day and every hour.

1:22:01Popok:They're not distracted. They may use those events and put them into their filings as examples of things in their case. But that's the good news. The media may take the bait. The mainstream media may take the bait. But the lawyers, many of whom we bring on to our show, are not. And I think that's the moral to that story. Karen? Yeah.

1:22:27KFA:No, I agree. I agree with you. And we have to keep doing what we're doing.

1:22:32Popok:absolutely and thank you for being here on legal af at the midweek and supporting our show from its infancy into it we're now out of the toddler toddler period but what is it when you're six you're a child we're a child we're yeah i've been accused of being a child before so our children we're now just children we're your children thank you very much thank you for supporting us um hit the free subscribe button on midas do the same thing on legal af youtube channel it really does help. Otherwise, you know I wouldn't ask for it. Support us on Legal AF, the Substack, which we have running there with a 40 % sale to encourage you to become a member.

1:23:11Popok:Now's an amazing time to do it. It'd be a great time to do it. And thank you in advance. I'll do a live report from the Webbys, probably on Substack Live. We'll post something up on the Legal AF I think I'll have at least one, give me one, one of the Webby's we can hold up and accept on the behalf of our audience. And again, best wishes to everybody that celebrates. All the mothers out there, grandmothers out there, and anybody who's mothered a child, we appreciate you. We're glad you're here with us on Legal AF. Last word, our resident mother, Karen Freeman.

1:23:55KFA:Well, you know, I think everyone has to really think about just keep your eye on all the times that Donald Trump lies to us. And I really want to call them out as much as possible. And the thing that really is sticking in my craw this week the most is the fact that he said this ballroom was going to be paid for by private donations and that he's trying to now put a billion dollars through the budget bill to pay for the ballroom. And so when we talk about things like affordability, we talk about gas prices, and we talk about why people don't have enough money to buy your mother a present for Mother's Day, think about the fact that he's asking for a billion dollars of taxpayer dollars to fund his ballroom.

1:24:44KFA:And it's always like that. Whenever he says the war is over, it's still going on. The Strait of Hormuz is open. It's closed. It's these lie after lie after lie. And we have to constantly call them out and we have to talk about them and remind ourselves of them so that when November rolls around, we all vote and we can be done with this period in our life, at least this part of it. And then two years from then, hopefully vote in a Democrat or just somebody sane. So that's my final word, because I really want to focus on those issues. And happy Mother's Day to your beautiful bride, Popak.

1:25:27Popok:Oh, thank you very much. As I said, bittersweet. Lost my mom last Mother's Day about a week after. We got to celebrate Mother's Day with her, but that was the last time. but we do have our, my wife is a mother and we have our two-year-old and we will be celebrating in the city this weekend in New York and all of that. So thanks everybody for being here. Shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal AFers.

1:25:59Popok:When I found out I was gonna be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that.

1:26:08KFA:My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life-changing. Discover what BetterHelp Online Therapy can do for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today.

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