Legal AF 7/18/2026

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27:34Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to all of our sponsors. They make the show possible. They support our show, support our sponsors if you can. Oh, and by the way, new book out, WTF America, pre-order it right now. It comes out in October. I wrote it with my brothers. It's inspired by you, the Legal AF community. I have some chapters talking about my litigation background, the litigation approach to thinking about this Trump regime. It's called WTF America because I wake up and I go, what the F? I'm sure that's how lots of us feel in this moment right now. Speaking of WTF, that Todd Blanche confirmation hearing, I don't need to restate everything that happened.

28:12Ben Meiselas:You are aware what a disaster it was. But I want to take a more technical legal approach and show you some of the questioning by former top federal prosecutors, even a Republican former top federal prosecutor, state prosecutor, rather, and Supreme Court justice. People don't know this about John Cornyn, who also Trump destroyed his career as well. I'm no John Cornyn fan. So don't be like, oh, are you citing John Cornyn? I'm just telling you. He was a former Texas Supreme Court justice. He was a former Texas attorney general. He was a former Texas state court. They called a district court judge over there.

28:46Ben Meiselas:And so he was a top lawyer, you know, in Texas. Probably one of the reasons why Trump hated him, amongst others, despite the guy being also a MAGA sycophant, although I think that's how he thought he had to stay in power. But that's what happens when you are part of the MAGA cult. You know, Trump just throws you under the bus for Ken Paxton, the guy who violates the law and engages, you know, versus the guy who was the Texas Supreme Court justice. Anyway, then you have Senator Schiff was a former top federal prosecutor. I thought they're questioning. There was other great question. Popak and I talked about this before.

29:17Ben Meiselas:Senator Booker, other people did good. But to me, and you could push back on a Popak in a little bit. But to me, those are good questions. Those are political questions. It's good political analysis. it's good to expose the corruption of Blanche. I think we all know that this guy is a scumbag. He shouldn't be anywhere near this position. In my opinion, he aids and abets Trump's criminality. He's not a criminal defense lawyer in the sense of defending criminals. I think he is a criminal defense lawyer. I think he's helping Donald Trump. I'm sharing with you my opinion as protected by the First Amendment.

29:49Ben Meiselas:You could disagree or agree with my First Amendment opinion right there. But let me just get into and show you a few of these moments. And I may cut the clips off a little earlier, assuming you get the point of them. But let me show you first, Senator Schiff asking Blanche, did you write the did you write the agreement that settled the$10 billion lawsuit that Trump in his individual capacity filed against the Treasury Department and IRS for$10 billion, where Trump gave himself a super pardon preventing all audits or any tax evasion? Asian charges or anything regarding his taxes from the date the settlement is signed and going back.

30:28Ben Meiselas:So we know how Donald Trump made billions and billions and billions of dollars in quid pro quo deals, screwing over our country and doing all these deals with like Middle East countries, which is like the Middle East on fire. I was just so freaking angry. I'm so angry at this despicable piece of shit right now. I'm just so, you know, when I think about what he's done to our troops and what he's done to this country, sometimes it's, you know, I lose the legal commentator part and just get so damn angry sometimes. But I'll try to keep it together, especially on a day like today where we're learning about all these casualties and it's only getting worse and he's escalating.

31:04Ben Meiselas:But I digress. Let me just show you the clip of Todd Blanche right here. Senator Schiff is, you know, is is asking me about, you know, OK, this super pardon, this agreement. You sign the agreement. Right. So did you write it? You signed it. Did you write it? Here, play this clip. Well, it's in the plain language of your agreement. Did you write this language? You have to use the facts, though. He hasn't filed taxes yet. So when he files taxes, there's no protection based upon this agreement. Did you write this language? Did I write the, did I type it up myself? No. Did you write this language?

31:41Ben Meiselas:No. Well, you put your name to it. I did. So, who wrote this? I don't know the person that actually typed it. I don't know who it is. Was it one of the president's lawyers, or was it someone from the Justice Department of IRS? This document would have been somebody within the Department of Justice. But you have no idea who that is? I don't know the name of the person that typed it up. Did you debate with them the statute of limitations, which clearly would preclude the president's claim, this$10 billion lawsuit? We had extensive discussions internally about the underlying litigation. And did you reject the statute of limitations defense?

32:19Ben Meiselas:I'm not a judge. I don't reject things. But you signed an agreement for the U.S. There was discussion around the litigation. And an agreement for the U.S. basically indicating that the Justice Department's position that the statute of limitations applies doesn't matter. That's not what I did. Okay, there's that. I want to show you this next one. There's a few other ones. I'm going to skip a few. where Shiv said, so if Trump files tax returns this year for money he earned last year that his sons earned and they defrauded taxpayers on it, doesn't he face no liability right now? Haven't you waived all liabilities?

32:59Ben Meiselas:When we hear that Trump, at least publicly reported, that he made, what,$3 billion or so forth, it's probably way more than that, okay? That's what was disclosed. There's probably a lot more for him. We don't know what his kids did or what may be being kept in other vehicles that don't vest yet and may vest later that could be being concealed. So there's other ways that he may be hiding it. But let's take a look at when Shib said, so one of my thoughts is the whole January 6th insurrectionist fund, that's the smoke screen. That's the smoke and mirrors. He doesn't want to pay taxes on the billions of dollars that he grifted and that he looted while he's been in it.

33:41Ben Meiselas:That's what this is really about. And so some people were saying, well, it waives$100 million of tax liability because that's what the IRS had been looking at previously with all of those audits that Trump was involved in. that Trump's been fighting. I said, no, no, no, no. It's not the$100 million. The$100 million, that's peanuts. He doesn't want to pay taxes on the billions. And he's using this waiver, which in California, we call a 1542 waiver, a waiver of all known and unknown claims to say, I can't be taxed on this stuff that happened before the settlement agreement. That's what this was about to me.

34:14Ben Meiselas:So watch as Schiff questions him on that. Let's play it. Let me ask you this. Does this tax agreement, this identity you signed, also hold him harmless from any audit or tax liability with respect to the billions in crypto money he made in his first year as president? It's not forward-looking. So to the extent there are taxes filed by the president or his sons or the Trump organization after the date of that agreement, there's no protection. Well, but before that agreement. So he hasn't filed taxes yet for money he made last year, right? Yes. So if he... So no protection. If he filed tax returns this year for money he earned last year, that his sons earned, that his World Liberty Financial, all those people earned and defrauded taxpayers on it, he faces no liability under this agreement you signed.

35:05Ben Meiselas:There's no evidence taxpayers were defrauded and he is not protected. But there is, there's evidence in this agreement. Popak, I can go on and show you more about that. There's no evidence that he would defraud it. There's no evidence of that. And so you have Trump's criminal defense lawyer in a case where Trump was found guilty of dozens of felonies for criminal misrepresentations or in the business record case. Saying there's no – I mean just watching that unfold, you go, holy shit. And I don't mean to just plug – but this is why I wrote – WTF? That's why I say it. I go, what WTF? What the hell is this?

35:49Ben Meiselas:And as someone who's been practicing law, if anybody said this, it'd be like admitting, it'd be like showing up. That act right there, Popak, would be like showing up to your local police department saying I killed somebody. I was like, okay, so we're going to arrest you. No, but what's wrong with that? You said you killed. I mean, he's just saying this stuff, Popak.

36:16Popok:By the way, I know who's going to be on my Legal AF Book of the Month Club interview in October, you and your brothers. Let's get to the let's just get to the release for a minute, because there's a history about the release that's also demonstrates the disingenuousness of the responses that Blanche gave to Adam Schiff. The only thing I credit Todd Blanche for is that was if that was Pam Bondi, she would never have answered any of those questions. She would never admit it to the murder. She would have said, you shifty shift with your own mortgage fraud problem. At least he, give the guy credit because he's got such a tin ear.

36:52Popok:He doesn't realize, you know, they've been sucking off this noxious gas of the Trump hermetically sealed environment for so long that they don't understand that what to the normal person, they sound insane and criminal. Here's what happened. On the 18th of May, the thing that everybody followed and ran away and ran stories on was the settlement agreement of what has now been declared by Judge Williams in Miami to be a phony, bad faith settlement and not a settlement at all of an illegitimate lawsuit brought by Trump against his own captured internal revenue service that should never have been brought.

37:36Popok:and the settlement agreement could never have been produced from it. It's like fruit of the poisonous tree. She's not only said you can't call it a settlement and it undermines your ability, Todd Blanche, to use the Judgment Act statute to settle a lawsuit because this was never a lawsuit. And then she also, in that order, invited future fraud on the court motions to be filed. I'll follow up with that in a minute. That was what everybody covered. But the next day on the 19th, and we'll put it up in a moment, on the 19th, by himself, without any other parties participating in it, demonstrating that Donald Trump controlled this whole thing from the very beginning is the thing that the Trump family and Donald Trump always wanted.

38:24Popok:Exoneration, super pardon, and immunity from criminal and tax audit and liability exposure now and in the future. Signed by him on the 19th. You see, he got really ridiculous with Schiff when he said, did I personally type it? Do I know who typed it? Now, we don't give a shit who typed it. The question was, did you participate? I'm a lawyer. Did I draft the language? Did I approve of the language that was used? Did that language come from Trump private lawyers? You functioning as Trump's private lawyer or someone in the Department of Justice? Did I type it? No. So he's always trying to confuse the audience, but we're never confused, and certainly our audience isn't confused.

39:12Popok:This is what the May 19th document says. We'll put it up on the board. The United States releases, waives, acquits, and discharges each of the plaintiffs. That's the whole Trump family, organization, affiliates from and forever bar and preclude the U.S. from prosecuting or pursuing any claim whatsoever, known or unknown, as of the effective date of the settlement agreement, which is the 18th of May, have been or could have been asserted by defendants. That's the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. government by extension against any of the plaintiffs or related affiliates with respect to or in connection with or arise out of.

40:00Popok:Listen to this broad definition of things not defined. Any matters that were or could have been raised in the lawsuit that Trump trumped up. Lawfare and or weaponization. Undefined terms. Whatever that means. or any matters currently pending or that could be pending before defendants or any other agencies or departments. So that is a waiver, not just, as you said, of the$100 million penalty that's been in dispute after Donald Trump took a$70 million tax write-off to try to refund for himself all the taxes he had paid during his highest tax years when he was on The Celebrity Apprentice. Not that.

40:47Popok:It's the dozens of years since then. And he's audited every year with thousands of pages of thousands of organizations that he controls. That was the super part that he always wanted. That is the thing that Donald Trump cares about. The cover story was, oh, yeah, I'm throwing$1.776 billion to these guys over here that beat up the cops. But what I really want is this thing over here. And that's why for weeks you and I were like, why is nobody talking about the superpartum? Why is nobody talking about Blanche unilaterally giving his client, his boss, this thing that even the Supreme Court did not give him?

41:27Popok:Why is nobody talking about that? And of course, it got talked about, as we just saw, not just by Adam Schiff, but by the other nine cross-examining Senate Democrats as well. So you've got all of that, right, and the release over it. And for me, even though he was, for him, sort of calm and cool and collected, because he's been assured that they think they got the votes. So he just has to sit in that chair for 10 minutes per Senate Democrat, get through it. There's only one day. And for people that are upset, this is what happens when the Democrats don't have the gavel. They don't have the gavel.

42:08Popok:Everybody gets 10 minutes. They don't really coordinate that well either, by the way. Like if I were the king of the Senate, I would take 100 questions and divide them up among the 10 Democrats, you know, with room to move around as necessary to get. But instead, everybody does their own Epstein. Everybody does their own Jan 6 fund. Everybody does their own release, which is fine. You get these amazing moments done by former, mainly by the former lawyers. Cory Booker, Yale Law School, former lawyer, you know, Senator Whitehouse, former U.S. attorney, Rhode Island, Senator Corden on the Republican side, you know, a judge and a prosecutor in the past.

42:50Popok:And, of course, Schiff, a prosecutor. So they know what they're doing. There's a reason that they're on these committees. But for those that were frustrated, why didn't this go on for more days on this important decision? And you could see there is almost this air of inevitability that Todd Blanche, which is what he dragged into the Epstein victims meeting as well. I'm going to get the job, so I don't really have to do this. And so he walks around like he's got a stone in his shoe. But for the American people, and to peel away some votes for the confirmation process, this is important that this gets platformed and how he's reacted to it.

43:32Popok:But I agree with you. The sheer, not only the criminality of what he's done, but his failure to recognize that he is saying things that in any other era, any one of these black marks, the handling of the Epstein files. Let's just go through it. I mean, just for a little bit of a census for our audience. A Department of Justice that has had to dismiss indictments for false testimony and forged and false documents being submitted to federal courts on more than one occasion. A Department of Justice led by Todd Blanche that has had a declaration of vindictive prosecution by a federal judge. Another federal judge saying there's been what amounts to bad faith and fraud on the court perpetrated by Todd Blanche.

44:22Popok:Grand jury misconduct. Judges who have declared that the presumption of regularity, the presumption of good faith in anything that comes out of the Department of Justice mouth is now over. Grand juries who return no bills of indictment because they won't indict whatever they want. The going after the political enemies or the target list for Donald Trump from James Comey to Letitia James to Adam Schiff to others. all the Epstein files scandal cover up and cover up of the cover up Ghislaine Maxwell getting a puppy instead of being sent in the solitary confinement for being a five time convicted sex trafficker.

45:03Popok:I mean, at one time, Cory Booker said, let me get this straight. You're more concerned with Ghislaine Maxwell's safety and security. Okay. And what you can report on than you are any of the 10 Epstein survivors representing the other 1400 that are in this room, How upside down and perverse are you? And this was important because, A, I want to see the block blanch movement. And you and I will be doing a lot of coverage concerning it. I got a whole live stream coming on soon on Legal AF about it, led by Dick Durbin. But I want to see that it get real momentum. And it can, just because some of those people are going to vote for him to get out of the committee doesn't mean we can't still work Tillis and Cornyn for the main vote.

45:52Popok:They could flip. They're not bound by the vote they did in the conference. Some people are like, you know what? I'll get them out of committee. But the vote is still up for grabs. I'm not sure Tom Tillis is completely in the bag for the final vote or Cornyn. But you and I and Legal AF's community, the Midas Touch community have to work overtime in banging away at our senators and joining these organizations arrayed against Todd Blanche to do everything so that if he gets confirmed, we say we did, we left it on the field. We did everything in our power to oppose the most, I never thought I'd say this, the most corrupt attorney general that's ever been in history and that has ever been under Donald Trump.

46:33Popok:And that is saying a lot given the rogues gallery of attorneys general under Donald Trump.

46:39Ben Meiselas:I want to take our last quick break of the show when we come back, I want to share with you one more portion from that. But then I want to get into this spoliation motion that's been filed. And I want to also talk about how this Trump document dump backfired. We'll talk about the Trump document because to me, it's very similar to kind of the way these documents look with all of the redactions with Trump's name on it. Maybe you want to unredact that and you're like, there's nothing to see here, nothing to see here at all. Just, you know, just, just, just trust us, trust us. We're not going to actually prove the evidence.

47:16Ben Meiselas:We're not, we'll, we'll lose all of the court cases, but you know, we'll just try to, we'll just try to have state regime media Fox say, Oh wait, Fox isn't even going to cover it anymore. All right. We'll just say that, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll just say there's a massive deep state coverup. Murdoch's involved. Everybody's involved. The only person who knows the super secrets are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Blanche and those people. Let's take our last quick break of the show. A quick reminder, if you or somebody who has been injured in a car accident, trucking accident, injured because of the negligence of a company, Popak's firm handles catastrophic injury cases and wrongful death cases and sexual assault and harassment cases.

47:56Ben Meiselas:See if you have a case. Reach out to Popak's law firm. The consultation is free. Call 877-POPAK-AF or visit thepopakfirm.com. Also, go check out Popak's YouTube, Legal AF, Popak's Substack, Legal AF on Substack, Legal AF on YouTube. Let's get that YouTube 2 million subscribers, everybody. All right. Last quick break of the show. We'll be right back.

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50:57Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to our sponsors. Our sponsors support our show, support our sponsors. Discount code is in the description below. I just wanted to briefly show Senator Cornyn's examination of Todd Blanch. Just briefly. We don't need to belabor the point, but the point I just want to show you is how Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, who, by the way, I don't like him. I think he's a MAGA bootlicker. I think he got the karma he deserves. Although, you know, having Ken Paxton now as the Republican nominee with Paxton's, you know, releasing a child sex abuser, Paxton's, you know, own rampant corruption and being impeached and his own criminal charges brought against.

51:41Ben Meiselas:I mean, that's MAGA. I mean, Trump and Paxton, there's a reason. Trump, Paxton, Epstein. I mean, this is the crew. This is their crew. This is who they hang out with. But in this examination of Blanche, Cornyn, who was a former Texas Supreme Court justice, he knew the scam that Trump and Blanche were putting by doing a poison pill in the agreement, the settlement agreement that gave Trump the super pardon for no tax audits and any of that, that basically said the only way the agreement can be modified is with writing. If there's a writing by Blanche or a writing by the DOJ, that then invalidates it.

52:24Ben Meiselas:So what Blanche and Trump were trying to do is say orally represent that the thing doesn't exist anymore and we don't worry about it. It's not real. We're not going to fund it, but never put it in writing to then allow Donald Trump to argue, oh, the oral representation doesn't void the contract. The contract still exists and it could only be voided by a written instrument. There's no written instrument. Therefore, you can't audit me, my companies and my kids. That's the scam. That's the scheme. And Cornyn, I'm not going to show you the full clip, but that's what Cornyn gets to the bottom of. And you can see Blanche is an idiot.

53:00Ben Meiselas:Like Blanche also isn't a smart guy. He's just purely evil. And when Blanche is actually asked questions by lawyers, he kind of walks into the traps, which is why it would have been better to have more than just 10 minutes of questioning. But just watch this for a moment. Let's play it. Let's talk a little bit about the settlement agreement and the release. First of all, I believe you have said that the weaponization fund is a moot issue. Is that your position? Yes, it is a moot issue, meaning there is no weaponization fund. The weaponization fund is dead. It's not moving forward. Well, I would refer you to the settlement agreement.

53:42Ben Meiselas:Do you have a copy of that in front of you? I do not. Okay, well, you probably know what's in it. I'm familiar with it, yes. I'm sure you are. On page four, this settlement agreement may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties. Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund? No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward. There's no modification. It's just it never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account. There's no commissioners. It's not moving forward. Well, so the settlement agreement remains as it was originally, but I hear what you're saying.

54:20Ben Meiselas:Is the settlement agreement enforceable as a contract by the parties? Well, yes, it's an enforceable document. So I suppose if President Trump's counsel sought to enforce it, they potentially could. Including the weaponization fund. Exactly. Exactly. And you're his counsel. You're his lawyer pretending not to be his lawyer. And although he let it slip when he got the easiest softballs by Senator Kennedy of Louisiana. He was like, are you friends? Are you friends? And then Blanche is like, well, I'm his lawyer. I mean, was his lawyer. Oh, okay. Anyway, that's all I wanted to show you there about Cornyn.

55:09Ben Meiselas:Let me bring up right now just the issue of the documents. So we know Trump did this deranged press conference. He barely could speak in sentences. Kelsey, do we have the video just of Trump at this bizarre national address where he's like, couldn't read the teleprompter? I think his old teleprompter guy was now being investigated because he would bet on Calci, what Trump would say on the insider information, even the teleprompter guys involved in the grip. But let's just play this quick clip of Trump.

55:45Popok:My first administration in our 2020 campaign, they did not want, and they just didn't want it. They fought like hell not to have it,

55:54Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump to win. The hell is going on there? And then when you actually, you know, something about Venezuela and China, even though he posts like love photos of himself and Xi Jinping, but, and he doesn't sanction China and he says how much he loves Xi Jinping, but somehow Xi Jinping was involved. Well, I looked at the documents, Michael Popak, and when I look at the documents, you know, that are redacted as it relates to China, I think we have that in the, in the documents that relate to Russia as well. I mean, these are heavily redacted documents. And when you look at them, you know, it's like China says that if the election goes a certain way and they get worried, they may leak redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted about Trump, including redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted.

56:41Ben Meiselas:And then they talk and there are the documents that mention Russia and say, you know, when Russia really wants Trump to win and that they're going to come up with, you know, the Burisma stuff and work with Trump, you know, and basically work with Trump aides to frame Biden and Hunter Biden. It's like a total vindication of Hunter Biden as well in some of these documents, because it's like saying, you know, we're plotting basically all the Burisma stuff in order to try to influence the election. But of course, Trump doesn't bring that up. And then also, and I'll toss it to you, this current CIA director is John Ratcliffe.

57:15Ben Meiselas:John Ratcliffe during Trump's first term was the DNI, the director of national intelligence. So when Trump says, my intelligence community, they need to be investigated. Your current CIA director was the guy who you would basically say knew all of this stuff in real time. So that's the guy, your current CIA director is, you know, that's who it is. Or do we lift off John Ratcliffe's mask and it turns out Scooby-Doo style, it's Hunter Biden or it's Obama or something stupid. Popak, break that down and then you could jump into the reflecting pool. Okay.

57:53Popok:Yeah. Let's get down to this vomitous press conference or as Gavin Newsom called it or referred to it, or I'll paraphrase exhibit A of the tryout for Donald Trump to be removed under the 25th Amendment as being incapacitated. There's even new reporting, Ben, that Donald Trump is now wistfully thinking back on the Carter administration when it relates to the Iran war and suddenly is giving him a pass as to how hard it is to be at war with Iran. Yeah, there's a reason why nobody went to war with Iran, including Ronald Reagan, nor over the Strait of Hormuz. And now Donald Trump is learning the hard lesson now.

58:41Popok:Unfortunately, it's a great expense of treasure and blood of America, including the American military, as we learned as we came on the air. The problem with his speech is that it was reversed engineered. They wanted to be with the failing poll numbers with 29%, or let's call it an even 25 % with the plus or minus margin of of Americans believing this is a failed administration that has completely lost its way, never to be recovered, especially by the time of the midterms, just several months away. When you have American voters rejecting and the look at the bloodbath that would be the midterm elections and Donald Trump's inability and incapacity to turn the ship around, you can't turn the Titanic around.

59:29Popok:The Titanic sank. And this is all we're watching is just rearranging of the deck chairs. Now it's the moment, I guess, for them to spring on the American people, all of the crazies that are inside the White House, like Kurt Olson. Kurt Olson, a failed lawyer sanctioned twice by the Arizona courts for bringing up false information to the courts related to Carrie Lake's attempted bid for the governorship. He was so nuts that But even Team Crazy, which was the name for Judy Giuliani's group during the first Trump administration, wouldn't have Kurt Olson around. Now, Kurt Olson is inside the government as the director or the lawyer responsible for election integrity of all things, working with people like Cleta Mitchell, who is another right wing conspiracy theorist who has this whole network of election integrity network lawyers all around.

1:00:31Popok:They're the ones, the reason when you heard that Puerto Rico's voting equipment was seized or George's Fulton County voting equipment was seized, that was Kurt Olson working with the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard at the time, which explained her appearance in Fulton County to seize it. And then when they went in, they couldn't even find anything that indicated any kind of insecurity or more importantly than any hacking had ever happened of the voting machines to make the election results insecure. Nothing. But this is a Curt Olson special. And so he combined with, I don't know, Stephen Miller, write up a speech.

1:01:09Popok:Now, the problem they have, which they want to ignore, but we'll put up in Legal AF Substack for our viewers, is what you just referred to. This was declassified March 15th of 2021. This is a March 10th, 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment. See all those logos at the top? We'll put it up on the screen. That just happens to be the Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency, the Department of State, the CIA, and the rest. And here's the problem with Donald Trump in his speech, because he wants to sow fear and he wants to sow people having some sort of insecurity about their vote, maybe by depressing the vote.

1:01:56Popok:They won't vote because they won't think it matters. See, the Republicans have to put a boogeyman under your bed in order for them to try to win an election. They have to create discontent. They have to see doubt. They have to put Americans at each other's throat, much like the Russians, the Iranians, the North Korean and the Chinese. That's why they may not be colluding in the traditional sense, but they're rowing in the same direction because they can't win with a aspirational mature debate in the public square about ideas. So they got to put a boogeyman under your bed. Could be a murderous, knife wielding transgender migrant to pass all their policies or the Chinese are trying to steal your vote.

1:02:45Popok:Here's the problem with it. The focus of the intelligence community report was really on Russia and Iranian interference through social media and other influencer campaigns. Again, no evidence that there was any hacking to make your vote insecure or to flip votes from one candidate to another. But they had five key findings. I just want to go through a couple of key findings, key judgments of Donald Trump's then intelligence community. Key judgment number one, we have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. election, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.

1:03:32Popok:So no equipment or software was hacked. That's the second page of the report. Key judgment number two, we assess that the Russian President Putin authorized and a range of Russian government organizations conducted influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party to support Trump. Okay. But they did not see cyber efforts by Russians to gain access to election infrastructure. So Russia was using influence campaigns in order to undermine Biden and support Trump. But at the same time, key judgment number three, the Iranians were carrying out their own influence campaign to undercut Trump and to promote Biden.

1:04:19Popok:Again, no hacking, not just, but influence campaigns. And their last judgment, number five, was that China sat out the 2020 election. We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. And they had a high degree of confidence in this. They viewed the election outcome for them as they couldn't figure out who would have benefited them. So they didn't want to be caught meddling. So they said, we'll just do lobbying and we'll just do targeted economic measures. So for Donald Trump to stand up with all these ridiculous redactions and say that China stole 278 ,000 voter registration rolls, what does that have to do with voting?

1:05:09Popok:Anybody, you and I can buy voter registration rolls from states, by the way. So the fact that 278 ,000 of them ended up with the Chinese doesn't matter a whit. Again, not one piece of evidence in that 30-minute whatever that was that there's actually been hacking and changing of votes. And I thought that was what the concern was all about. And the redactions that Ben outlined, it would be the equivalent of saying, I get a memo about Donald Trump burying Ivana Trump on the 19th hole at Bedminster Golf Course. And it says, I decided to bury Ivana in the Bedminster golf course because blank. And then next to her in her coffin was blank.

1:05:55Popok:And then stand up and go, oh, something really terrible. We could all say, yes, yes, the Mar-a-Lago documents are buried with Ivana at the 19th hole. It is such an insult to the intelligence of the American voter that this is the reason that, get this, Fox and Friends, the next day, a three-hour show did not mention the speech once. I don't mean like they barely mentioned it. I mean they didn't mention it at all. Neither did Senator Thune, the Senate Majority Leader. Neither did the Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson at all. This is not a speech that anybody in the Republican leadership or strategist wanted Donald Trump to give.

1:06:42Popok:Because on the list of things that the American voter gives a shit about in terms of their next vote being cast, the 2020 election is not even on the list. And yet Donald Trump wanted to give a speech. He wanted to get, and the reason apparently is he's still pushing to get the SAVE Act to have, you have to require you to bring citizenship papers and your driver's license, your voter ID in order to vote. We don't need that. We have penalty of perjury signatures and prosecutions of the infinitesimal times that voter fraud occurs. He said, Homeland Security found 200 ,000 votes on voter rolls. Yeah.

1:07:24Popok:It represents, you know, of unqualified or non-citizens. Okay, I assume they would have got caught before they actually voted. They were just registered. Registration doesn't mean votes. Registration means you're registered. You still got to show up, sign in, and there's still a lot of barriers before you actually cast a vote, including criminal prosecution. And even if that number were true and nobody has any idea where they got the number from or how they figured out who's not properly an American citizen, it represents like 0.001 % of that state's votes. Again, not outcome determinative. No vote, no election has ever been that close.

1:08:07Popok:Even Bush v. Gore was not that close. So we didn't cover it. Mainstream media didn't cover it. Fox and friends, Fox News treated it like they had to do it on tape delay in order to figure out what crazy shit he was going to say out loud that they were going to have to counter because they've been on the receiving end of almost a billion dollar defamation case for airing the election lies the first time around. So they weren't going to go there again and risk their assets. So the only people that seem to be happier is like Kurt Olson, Cleta Mitchell, Mike Lee of Utah, and a couple of other people who want to sow doubt and sow discontent among American voters, it's not going to work.

1:08:51Popok:Because every time we do a story here on Midas Touch or on Legal AF, we hope we're creating a new member of the army to defeat Donald Trump at the midterms. He's not making any new voters. He's only shedding voters. But the Democrats, the independents, liberals, democratic socialists, the rest are all banding together, a band of brothers and sisters of soldiers to defeat Donald Trump. And that is our Trump card. That is our competitive advantage come the midterms. Now, some people might be wondering when I'm going to turn it over to Ben. Ben had a runoff to a family engagement. I told him I'd finish the show for us.

1:09:36Popok:So there's a reason why we're alone. But put your questions and comments. We'll try to get to them at least one way or the other tonight as well. Okay. That was the speech. Let me touch briefly on the reflecting pool, because it's also indicative, it's also emblematic of the disgusting, rotting failure of the Trump administration, how they handled the reflecting pool. Brand new motion filed to stop Trump and those around him, the National Park Service, from destroying evidence. The fact that you have to file in a court a motion to avoid the destruction of evidence about the pool should tell you everything you need to know about this administration.

1:10:14Popok:In fact, if you want to get more in the weeds here, I got a YouTube video up on this very issue on Legal AF YouTube today. So take a minute and go over there and you can grab it while you're subscribing. But here is it in short. The lawsuit that's being presided over by a federal judge in D.C. is about whether Donald Trump illegally, in violation of rules and regulations, drained that reflecting pond and had a sealant epoxy system blown on it in dark blue that created algae bloom. and hold sheets of it floating, liner floating in the reflecting pool. Trump wants to continue to use his Department of Justice to blame people like former Olympic canoeist Davey Hearn for touching a floating liner.

1:11:12Popok:Oh, he's the one. Trump wants everybody to believe that somebody poured chemicals into the reflecting pool. Zero evidence, not in Davey Hearn's indictment. and not in any affidavits filed by the Trump administration in the case for the National Park Service. So take off the board, chemical vandalism never happened. And that's not the reason that it's peeling off. He wants to argue with the American people that somebody with a box cutter ripped 375-foot gash or 200-foot gash. And that's the reason that there's pool liner floating and there's an algae bloke. Take that off the board. That is not the reason.

1:11:56Popok:First of all, there's absolutely no evidence. It's not in the indictment. There's no box cutter video because nobody did it that way. It must have been done by a contractor when they were ripping sheets in order to install this two-layer system that was untested, unproven by unqualified contractors, not just one, three of them related to that. You had a contractor out of Virginia who was given, without any competitive bidding or any oversight, a$1.7 million contract. You know what this company does for a living? They blow sealant and they blow a chemical into truck beds as a liner and pools. What could go wrong?

1:12:41Popok:That's one. They then hire another company to use an untested product on a seven-acre site. This is a seven-acre, think about the football fields, site of the reflecting pool. They hire another company to use a product called Rhino. So it was a two-layer system. First they blew a sealant on the bottom, and then they blew sort of a polyurethane topcoat in the color that we call American blue. But they did it in sections, big rectangular sections. And now reporting by the Washington Post is between the seams of those sections, because they were so rushed to do the installation, to get it done in record time, that there's been delamination.

1:13:32Popok:In other words, the sections have come apart and now we have floating liner. It's poor installation that created the liner floating problem, not Davey Hearn reaching down and ripping up a piece of the liner in a seven-acre site. A seven-acre site, how does that explain the middle of the pool floating pieces of liner? Bad installation from a number of contractors who didn't know what they were doing. The algae bloom, that's not chemicals. That's a company that Donald Trump hired called Greenwater Technologies, run by a Trump donor who's a two-time convicted felon, oh yes, who had another failed technology system of water filtration at the Tijuana River, which dumps into the Pacific.

1:14:20Popok:And Greenwater Technologies, its big claim to fame on their website is we pump ozone and the ozone will be a natural way to filtrate. No, didn't work in Tijuana River, not working here. Within one day of the ozone stopped being pumped into the system, algae bloom happened. And so what's the lawsuit and the motion about? They drained the pool for the third time down to the bottom where it was revealed that there are tire tracks from Donald Trump in his own The Beast SUV riding along the surface of the newly installed but probably not ready for primetime application of the sealant. So that probably wasn't a good thing.

1:15:05Popok:And now the group that's suing Trump wants to take pictures. I would suggest they do some testing while the pool is drained. And they're afraid that when the pool is replenished, that there'll be evidence that'll be destroyed that they need to prove their case. How do I know also that there's no chemicals that cause the bloom? It's because they, well, they either drain the pool not looking for chemicals, they haven't tested to find any chemicals, or they just destroyed evidence related to chemicals. Either way, this is a story that needs to be continued to be followed because it matters to Trump.

1:15:45Popok:He keeps wasting taxpayer dollars wrecking a national monument, which is the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. And kudos to the organization that brought the suit, that's brought the case now to stop the destruction of evidence, to allow them to prove that Donald Trump has in his own way destroyed, partially at least, a national monument. Well, this is the kind of things we got to follow together on Legal AF. So many different ways to support what we do on the Legal AF podcast, right? One is support the work that I do, and I have a dozen other contributors on the Legal AF YouTube channel.

1:16:28Popok:Our goal is to get to 2 million subscribers by the midterms. And at the rate we're going, we will get there. It's a free subscription. And with that size where we are now, that's how we're able to get to come on the show senators like Booker and Blumenthal and White House and governors like Shapiro and the attorneys general for the 24 different Democratic attorneys general and their organization. or how we're able to get, I have Senator Warnock coming on next week. I've got Epstein survivors and leaders like Danny Benski. I know, and people want to be on the show because they want to speak to our audience.

1:17:09Popok:And you are the reason for that. Come on, hit that free subscribe button. Separately, we've got a sub stack. That's an amazing community, which we're up to about 150 ,000 subscribers, which puts us in the top 10 of all U.S. news sub stacks. Certainly the top of law and politics ones. I do a live report every day at the midday, along with sometimes with guests and all of our contributors are there. And by building these two audiences, then we get the collaborators that you want to hear from, like the American Civil Liberties Union, who's with us there on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. The NAACP is joining us for collaboration.

1:17:51Popok:We have a big live feed going up on Monday on the Legal AF YouTube channel with the NAACP. Democracy Forward, Court Accountability Action, Court of History with Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz and their guest list. You know, Adam Klassfeld in All Rise News, you know, just a tremendous set of contributors under one pane of glass at that intersection of law and politics, all because of you. And I formed, as people know, a law firm. I've been doing this for 35 years. But I formed a law firm dedicated to our Midas Touch and Legal AF audience. It's called the Popak Firm. And you can use the QR code or hit the 800 number or visit us at our brand new website, thepopocfirm.com.

1:18:37Popok:Brand new website, Same Tireless Fighters. If you've been injured or somebody you love or worse by the negligence of others, by an accident, medical malpractice, civil rights violation, you name it, let us evaluate whether you have a case. I've got an amazing group of lawyers who have recovered billions of dollars for people in all 50 states. And that's at the Popak firm. Programming note, we got a tremendous group of 12 different videos every day this weekend up on the Legal AF YouTube channel on Tuesday night. Join me for my Webby Award winning show called The Intersection on Tuesday night on Midas Touch Network at 8 p.m.

1:19:22Popok:Eastern Time, where Mark Elias from Democracy Docket and the Mark Elias Law Firm will be joining me to unpack everything that's going on to protect our right to vote. Tuesday night on The Intersection, and then we're back at it every day on Legal AF and on the Midas Touch Network covering the stories that you want to hear. I'm glad everybody's here. What a tremendous audience we had. Shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal AFers. I'm Michael Popok for Ben Mycelis.