Legal AF Full Episode - 1/21/2026

23:26Popok:And Roberts is basically saying from a procedural standpoint, what are you talking about? We don't have the power to reinstate or put somebody in or out of a job. You can't have it both ways. But Kavanaugh, for me, summed it up, which was this will destroy, effectively, this will destroy the American economy, what you're proposing. Let's play Kavanaugh. This is not a ironclad. You can never be removed. There is a cause removal. But on that, your position that there's no judicial review, no process required, no remedy available, very low bar for cause that the president alone determines. And that would weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve that we just discussed.

24:15Right.

24:16Popok:He went on in that clip. I think I clipped the clip where he talked about the destruction of the economy. And then finally, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for me, is the intellectual heavyweight on the panel. Hopefully one day when there's a Democrat in office, she'll be the chief justice of the United States. I think that's definitely something that could happen, should happen. Here's how Ketanji Brown Jackson kind of brought it all together. I guess I think you may have to be a little bit more specific with respect to the irreparable harm that you are alleging, because really, as Justice Barrett sort of indicated, we are in a stay posture here.

24:52So the question is, to what extent do we believe that the president or the public is harmed by allowing Ms. Cook to remain in her position for the pendency of this case? I'm not sure that we have evidence here that Ms. Cook is an immediate threat to the public, that she's been in this position for a long time. The kinds of things that you're pointing to, as Justice Sotomayor indicates, are not related to conduct while in office. So it would seem to me that on the stay factors, You would have to say more about the harm of leaving her there for the next however many months while this case is being litigated.

25:43Popok:Yeah, that's that's really classic Ketanji Brown Jackson, like right to the heart of the matter about the issue here. And so I remember correctly, Sauer's answer was, no, the president's the one who's going to be irreparably harmed. Right. Of course. Always the ripple harm runs the other way because he's got to he's got to have Dr. Cook as a board of governor. He can't get control of the of the Federal Reserve. Here's my question for you as we round out this segment. Do you think. They all they all say they're just handling one case at a time. However, do you think this has an impact on what we can expect from the tariff decision with the same lineup of people?

26:24Popok:And a very similar commentary that you and I did. It was Kavanaugh against the tariffs and questioning. Amy Coney Barrett talking about, if we rule in your favor, how quick can you make the refunds? Which is never a great place to be if you're on the other side of that argument. It was really the same people except maybe Alito and Thomas. But is this same, are we going to get the band back together again with the tariffs too and take down tariffs? And Donald Trump loses two major signature attempts by him, which is to destroy our economy by tariff or by Federal Reserve capture? So this, I think this one he's going to lose.

27:02I don't know what the numbers are the way you said, but I think Trump's going to lose this one. And I'm not exactly sure how long the opinion's going to be, right? Because there's not a full record. This is just a stay in motion. It's probably not going to be a very long decision, I would guess. Because there's not a lot to go on, right? It's just kind of what the law is. And but tariffs, you know, it's hard to say because of so much has happened since that oral argument, right? And like I said, they were coming out saying, well, if you rule against us, we're going to still do, it's inevitable.

27:41We have all these five other statutes that allow us to do tariffs. We have broad tariffs powers. So that one, it's a good question. I'm not exactly sure how that's going to come out because of sort of, it's not in a vacuum. It's not happening while he's trying to steal Greenland, you know. So I think they see the ramifications of what he's doing. And I think that one has a fuller record. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

28:15Popok:Well, I think on the tariff side, he's threatening to use all these other statutes. But frankly, those statutes are very, very difficult. He'd never be able to replicate the 200 tariff, 200 country tariffs on basically every type of good for an indefinite period of time that he's tried to try to do through the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. And yes, there's about five different other statutes, but some of them you have to do public comment and hearing, you have to publish. So he's never going to be, maybe he can get some sort of what they call sectorial tariffs up and running, but it would be a far cry from what he's doing now, maybe 20 or 25%.

28:54Popok:And I don't think the Supreme Court and the MAGA 6, or at least four out of the six, I don't think they want to leave planet Earth with giving a president the power under IEPA to pass the laws, the tariffs, and the taxes, because they kept talking about it as passing taxes on to the American public. I think it's a setback for him. I think they're going to, you know, it's a little bit of muscle memory, right? Right. This case that we're talking about here, the Lisa Cook case, will break the ceiling for me about how they can come back together again in a similar combination and defeat tariffs. I think it's Amy Coney Barrett.

29:36Popok:I think I think Amy Coney Barrett is my prediction. You can put this in a time capsule and pop it open. I think if you put the two cases next to each other, I think Amy Coney Barrett and Gorsuch are going to be in the majority in both cases and they're going to be against Trump. I think Roberts is going to be in the majority against Trump in both cases. And frankly, that's enough. That's six to three right there. We don't even need Alito. I don't need Kavanaugh. I don't need Robert. I don't need Thomas at that point. I just need those three, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor, and I'm six to three.

30:09Popok:And I think that's how this is going to play out. And as we've seen from this past term, when Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett rule it, you know, vote in the majority, it's become their court. It becomes the law. And so that's what I think. Like, you know, people can debate with me all day long about whether, oh, no, they're all individual cases and one case doesn't lead. I don't think so. I think they kind of – they start getting their brain rewired about economics, constitution, and the presidential power, and I think that will help. The tariff decision is not done. It's not coming in January.

30:48Popok:It was like, oh, my God, it's another drop day for the decisions. Where is – it's not coming. People are writing hundreds and hundreds of pages of analysis and dissents and concurrences in the majority opinion. If we see it in February, I'd be shocked. March, maybe. If you remember the Dobbs decision that you and I covered when it leaked about ripping away a woman's right to choose, leaked in March as a draft with nothing else attached to it, just the majority opinion by Alito. It didn't come out until final, until June. And this tariffs is just as important in terms of the economy, in terms of papers, as that decision.

31:26Popok:I'd be shocked if it came out before the spring. And they don't care about, you heard, Amy Coney Barrett proved my point. Some people were like, but look at all the money they'll have to refund. The bigger the refund, the less likely, no, they don't care about how big the refund is. You just heard Amy Coney Barrett said, I'm not an economist. I'm a judge. She's not a business person. If she's going to rule that the tariffs were wrong from the beginning, then they don't they figure out the government will be able to figure out how to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars. What do you think Trump's just drumbeat of using tariffs as a threat?

32:01Popok:Oh, I know. But no, of course. What do you think? Do you think that because that's that's clearly what he's been doing, right? Right. Give me, you know, give me, give me Greenland or you're going to have tariffs. You know, like he basically he he uses as a as a cudgel and a threat. She's not supposed to do. Right. I was going to say, but what what impact does that have on on the justice? I think it seeps in. I know your point. I think it seeps in, even though it's not part of the record. It seeps into the water supply. They're human beings. They're reading the paper in the morning. They're getting the apps.

32:36Popok:They're watching Legal AF. Hi, I assume. And they're watching him. They're watching Exhibit A as to why you don't have a president hold that power and why the founding fathers and framers put it with the legislative branch, because it is a tax ultimately on the people. And if the framers and founders wanted to give the president that power or coextensive power like equal, it would have been in Article 2. It's not in Article 2. It's in Article 1. And the only way the president gets any tariff power is if it gets delegated by Congress, by an act. And even there, you got to like, well, IEPA is easy.

33:15Popok:There's no mention of the word tariff. That's the easiest analysis I've ever heard done by the en banc panel of the D.C. Circuit Court, Pellet Court, which is, show me where the word tariff is as a power in the statute that you're relying on. So that's, but he's proving the point because you see what happens when a power-mad, lawless, rogue, populist president, while he's got this amazing superpower, it's like giving a 12-year-old the keys to a Ferrari. You know, he'll keep running it into the wall until somebody takes the keys away. It's time to take the keys away, Supreme Court. It's crazy. Yeah, it's totally crazy.

33:53Popok:I agree. So speaking of crazy, we'll do one more quick segment before we take our break. People know the headline. Lindsey Halligan resigned in disgrace. That's, I mean, they try. By the way, I don't know if you caught Pam Bondi's posting. I don't know if ChatGBT wrote this. Actually, they would have written it better. It took me four paragraphs to figure out that Lindsey Halligan was fired. It was all this flowery prose about Lindsey Halligan. It was like past tense. So I was like, oh, something's up. But it wasn't like today I accepted the resignation with a heavy heart of Lindsey Halligan. That's how you and I would have wrote it, right?

34:31Popok:And then we would have, no, it was like Lindsay Allegan with flowers and protecting the people in her six months as a prosecutor. And she'll be missed. I'm like, oh, she'll be missed. She's been fired. She's resigned. And then we don't even know where she's going. That's what struck me was the fact that it wasn't like, oh, she's now going to be the special something or whatever. Like, she's out. Trump is a fucking, Trump is a coward. and he realized she's a loser in his world. And he went to Switzerland. They obviously did it with his approval. And she got thrown under the bus. He didn't even give her a safe place to land.

35:11Popok:Like she will now be the general counsel of the Trump PAC. Or no, we don't even know where she's going. I assume she's crawling back to Fox News or somewhere and all of that. But there is one thing that I wanted to raise on this issue. We had two back-to-back in the same day, hours apart, federal court orders different, but got to the same place, which is vacancy. And Judge Novak went further and said, one of my favorite quotes of a judge, I don't know if I have it handy here to read from. The quote was, her continued masquerading as a U.S. attorney must come to an end. He wrote that in the afternoon, and then it finally did.

35:54Popok:When you have a federal judge saying, I'm only taking it easy on you because you're a novice and you don't know what you're doing. But you, Bondi and Blanche, you do. And the rule of law matters in this courtroom. And you can't ignore orders that you don't like, because then I got to let everybody do that in my courtroom, including criminal defendants. And then what kind of justice system do we have? So after he wrote this 18-page blast, I mean, I told people on one of my hot takes I needed to wear asbestos gloves to hold this order. I was not shocked that they eventually folded like they did with Alina Haba and the Delaware U.S.

36:29Popok:attorney. They're going to do with John Sarkoni in New York and the one in New Mexico and Nevada. They all quit because they can't win. The writing is on the wall. But I didn't think it would come just hours from a timing standpoint, from a news cycle standpoint. in the middle of the night, I guess, while Donald Trump's in Davos. So you want to give your comments about the end of your fellow prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan? Look, Lindsey Halligan was not qualified to begin with. She didn't know what she was doing. She raised her hand and said, pick me, I'll go indict Tish James and Jim Comey. And she miserably failed at every turn.

37:12She made rookie mistakes. She was not at all up to the task to do what Trump wanted her to do. And he's not a loyal person. So he kicks people who he perceives as losers to the curb. And the writing was on the wall. You had so many judges say the same thing, which is, you're not the U.S. attorney. If you, you know, if you write, they directed the AUSAs in the Eastern District to not refer to her as the U.S. Attorney. And the judge essentially really lambasted her for holding herself out as the United States Attorney because she is not the United States Attorney. And they put out an expression of interest basically asking people to apply for the job for U.S.

37:59Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia because they can vote someone into office. So, and that's what I think they're going to plan on doing is vote someone into the office of U.S. attorney interim until Donald Trump appoints someone who can get confirmed by the Senate. But who knows, he'll probably fire that person and again, try to go through the same thing over and over and over again. But in the meantime, I don't know what's, what they're going to do about cases down in Virginia. I mean, the Eastern District used to be this very respected place that people are resigning in droves. And it's turned into this Donald Trump political prosecution machine.

38:37So hopefully this will end soon and we can get a real U.S. attorney down there, someone who's actually qualified and will fight normal crime, not just Trump's political enemies. But they clearly dropped this on the day that he was going to Davos so that it would get buried in the news cycle. And luckily, we don't allow these things to get buried in the news cycle. But I was surprised, like you said, that she didn't have a landing spot. He really kicked her to the curb.

39:08Popok:Absolutely. And well-deserved. I mean, she belongs on the cable news talk shows that Judge Novak said her filing would be a proper place for the things that she said in her filings against him. And yeah, and that's it. Hopefully she'll crawl back under the rock that she came up from under. He said, this filing is not befitting of litigants in this court, especially the Department of Justice. They're more appropriate for the cable news channel. Yeah, exactly. Cable talk show. She had his vitriol. That's a... And he's a trouble point. Exactly. That's why I was like, holy cow. That's a fighting words.

39:49Popok:Those are fighting words. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the reporter for The Washington Post who had the greatest quote so far, which is, I need my devices back to do my job. So, you know, it's like, yes, the FBI and Department of Justice picked up all of her devices as a reporter to send a chilling message to her First Amendment expression and her right of free press. Could you imagine if Nixon did this to Bernstein and Woodward or the New York Times reporters that were covering his administration? And it has to come to an end. We got a new order there and comments by Ms. Naitanson about the raid on her house and what it means.

40:39Popok:Again, it's not just about her. It's the Trump administration trying to bully media and press from covering them. Pentagon bars them from the room. The only one that goes to Pentagon briefings now are right-wing podcasters like Laura Loomer and the rest. No legitimate news organization goes to Pentagon briefings anymore. They have to get their news there some other way. So she's working the hallways. And, you know, they pass policies so they don't talk to reporters. But like intrepid reporters will figure out a way. And so we appreciate her. We will talk about her story. And then what the heck just happened in Greenland where Donald Trump tried to, I mean, in Davos about Greenland.

41:17Popok:And you notice there's no mention of Gaza and the Peace Board. Yeah, a lot of crazy things happened there. None of them in favor of Donald Trump, who comes back weaker than when he left. Besides the fact it looked like he was stumbling around again. with a medical condition up at the podium in Davos. So we'll talk about all that, but we're going to take our first break. Many ways to support what we do here on Legal AF. You've got the podcast and the support we get here and the love we get is unmatched, unparalleled, and we appreciate it. On our audio podcast platforms, put in Legal AF. Comments and five-star reviews always help.

41:50Popok:And then we've got the Legal AF YouTube channel over well on our way to 2 million eventually. I mean, we may hit 2 million subscribers in 2026 with your help. We've got a new paid subscriber level. We've got associate, counsel, and partner, and some great new content for those people that support us that way. And then Legal AF, the sub stack, it's another way to support. There it is. Another way to support what we do. I do two lives a day. I did a 40-minute live with Adam Klassfeld about many of the things in the news today from All Rise News. And I do that every day. And then we've got, yeah, those are the main, we've got other podcasts and things that are branded with Legal AF, but those are the main ways to support that all that we do.

42:33Popok:And then, of course, we've got our pro-democracy sponsors, some of which have been with us forever, some of which are new, all curated by Jordy, me, and Karen to support what we do. And so, and here's our first break. I've been genuinely impressed with the Tushy Bidet and the upgrade it's brought to my daily routine. Tushy sent me their bidet and installation took about 10 minutes. Easier than I expected and fit seamlessly with my existing toilet and bathroom aesthetic. It's a simple modern upgrade that makes your routine cleaner and more comfortable while reducing how much toilet paper you use.

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44:34Popok:It's also backed by two double-blind placebo-controlled studies showing positive impact on liver enzyme levels. Ready to give your liver that support it deserves. Head to dosedaily.co slash Legal AF or enter Legal AF to get 35 % off your first subscription. Your body, it does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot C-O slash Legal AF for 35 % off your first month subscription. Welcome back and thank you for the support and the commitment to all that we do on Legal AF. We got an Epstein files update. Good news, bad news, I guess. The bad news is that Judge Engelmeyer denied the motion to intervene by the bipartisan team of Representative Massey and Kana to intervene in one of the cases, the Ghislaine Maxwell case, in order to argue for the appointment of a special master or independent monitor to take over the process of producing the millions of documents and pages that the Trump administration continues to bury and disappear.

45:48Popok:And since the Trump administration ran to Judge Engelmeyer to begin with, I think it was fair game and part of his inherent authority to take over that process and protect the victims and give them back dignity and justice the way a federal judge can do. But he disagreed, but had an invitation in his order for another mechanism that could be used by the congressperson and survivors. And as a full disclosure, I represented Lisa Phillips, one of the survivors who filed a declaration to encourage the judge to help her reclaim dignity and justice and to appoint the special master and her independent monitor, Although he did not he did not ultimately do that and seemed a little sanguine about it.

46:32Popok:He did quote from approvingly from the comments made by Lisa Phillips in his order. How about that invitation, though, Karen? Tell our audience about that. I mean, look, the fact that the Massey and Kana, the representatives in the House who were the congresspeople who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the fact that they chose to vent their frustration, essentially, at the Department of Justice, totally understandably, that the time to turn over the files has come and gone. They have missed every deadline. They've only turned over 12 ,000 and change files, but there's millions, literally millions more.

47:23And so it makes sense that they want to push the Department of Justice and try to get the files released. Right. And then what's getting released is heavily redacted, overly redacted, way outside the bounds of what the law that they passed permits. And so that's why they want a special master or an independent monitor appointed. What I thought was weird was the mechanism with which they tried to do it, which is to intervene in the Ghislaine Maxwell case because that case is closed. And so I never quite understood that to begin with as a, as why did they do it that way? And, but as you said, I think the reason is because Engelmeyer was already involved in the, you know, the Department of Justice went to Engelmeyer, right?

48:19And said, basically help us. and you know so he was involved in it but they did it under the United States versus Ghislaine Maxwell heading and the judge said this case is closed she's she's sentenced and so I have no authority to do this over this case in this matter but he basically said but bring your own case you know bring a different case and uh and and we can do it that way because it just didn't make sense this way to me. And when I read the opinion, I actually kind of, I mean, at least I'm not saying I agree or disagree. It's kind of how I understood courts to be.

49:00Popok:Yeah, I think he's inviting another lawsuit he wants. And I think the survivors and or the representatives in violation of the act will file a federal lawsuit and ask that in temporary restraining order, that that be a remedy for right now. I mean, I don't know if they'll get it, but certainly somebody's got standing to enforce that act. Trump administration tells everybody, well, it's just a toothless act. If we violate it, it doesn't matter. They certainly act like it doesn't matter. And nobody has standing to challenge it or to sue over a violation of it. I don't think they're right about that.

49:32Popok:I think we're going to find out sooner rather than later. I don't have anything breaking news to tell you about whether one of my client survivors is willing to do that. But she's pretty courageous, Lisa Phillips. And I wouldn't be shocked if there's a movement to bring such an action. I think the Congress could do it, right? I think Massey and I think they could do it, the members, right? Like they could say, I mean, the problem with the EFTA, the Epstein's Files Transparency Act, is that it doesn't really have an enforcement mechanism and it is a civil, right? It's a civil action, but why wouldn't it just be enforceable like any other civil, you know, civil law.

50:14Like, I don't think it has to have an enforcement mechanism in it. I think they could bring an action and, and I think they have standing or one of the survivors, as you said. And then that would have, I think he, then the judge would have, be able to have jurisdiction over the millions of documents. But, but the, the particular criminal case that they brought this under is closed. And that's what the judge held. And so, but I agree with you. There was an invitation to bring a different case.

50:45Popok:And I think that will. So let's turn our attention now, as we see what happens next in the wheel turning in Epstein, to, it originally didn't get a lot of coverage, but of course it's now gotten a lot of coverage in which the government raided the house and stole the devices, the laptops and the computers of a major Washington Post reporter.

51:10Popok:of Hannah Natanson. On January 14th, they seized a phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive, and a Garmin watch because they wanted to know how her cholesterol is or how many steps she's getting in. And in order to try to get to the bottom of an investigation that they're doing about whether a government contractor obtained classified materials or whether she was involved, that's not the good cause to go rummaging around a reporter, a member of the Fourth Estate, and somebody who's got thousands of people that are cooperating with her about stories listed there. We have privilege in this country.

51:49Popok:We have a First Amendment right. And it went before a U.S. magistrate judge, William Porter, who has, at least for now, he's holding the ring. He's ruled that the federal law enforcement officials have to return the electronic devices seized and cannot look at what they have seized. And Hannah came out with a comment on social media, which is like, these are my tools. I need my devices back to do my job. This is what she does for a living. She is sunshine to try to shine light on a corrupt administration. These are the tools of her trade. I talk about, Karen, with our audience, this kind of crossing a threshold that we've never seen an administration do, which is to go after a – even Nixon, who used to hear on those secretly recorded tapes, which we now, of course, are able to listen to, where he would bitch about – to, like, Haldeman, his attorney general, or somebody else in his corrupt administration.

52:56Popok:he would bitch about all those rat bastards, Bernstein and Woodward. You know, where are they getting their information from? But he didn't say, let's go to their house and take away their typewriters and all of their papers. Even Nixon had limits. So walk through what you think is going on here. And were you shocked at the Washington Post, which is basically captured by Bezos, a buddy of Donald Trump, is fighting back here? You know, I'm not surprised because the independence of the press is sacrosanct. It's in the Constitution. It's the First Amendment, right? It's a freedom of the press. And it's almost like the fourth branch of government.

53:42It's such an integral part of our society that it is very, prosecutors, at least prosecutors that I'm familiar with, they really take their job seriously when they're thinking about executing a subpoena or a search warrant on a reporter or a reporter's office or a reporter's device. you have to get approvals up the ladder. You have to really have the goods. You can't go on a fishing expedition. You can't do that anyway, but you have to really, I mean, it is so, you think long and hard before you would ever do anything like that. And frankly, most reporters would refuse to, in a subpoena situation, to hand over anything because, and I've known reporters who go to jail instead of, you know, held in contempt before they'll give up their sources.

54:39Because, you know, people put their lives on the line and the reputations on the line and everything else to come forward and show transparency, you know, to basically put themselves out there so that reporters can do their job. And they depend on that and reporters rely on that. And that's just something that because it's constitutionally protected, like almost no other job, it really is something that you don't do and you don't take lightly. I think here, the fact that they said it was classified information that was being leaked to her, I'm sure that's what they use to justify, oh, national security, we have to do this.

55:19But even that, once you would, let's say hypothetically, okay, you have some information that she has classified information that we have to figure out who did this, who leaked it.

55:29Popok:But they don't. But they don't hear it. It's not a leak of password information. So, okay. But if they thought that's what it was, they would have to put like a taint team in place because you have to, you can't just go around and now suddenly dump her devices and look for absolutely everything and know who all her sources are and all the information that you now have, right? You have to be very, very laser scalpel, you know, you have to go in there and, okay, we're going to look for the one thing that we think we have probable cause for. You can't go fishing around and suddenly these are all the people who go to her.

56:05You know, that's just not how it works. So, you know, what happened today was the magistrate judge basically did, in addition to give her devices back, it's the standstill order, right? Don't look through it. You can't look through anything until we hash this out. You know, he basically did something that's very unusual and told the prosecutors, you can't look at what you have. Well, and the reporting by the Washington Post, just to kind of round it out, is that the leak investigation was about a systems administrator named Aurelio Perez Lugones,

56:38Popok:and that he had information about Venezuela, and he was in direct contact with the reporter. There's no allegation in the filings by the government or otherwise that Natanson received classified information in the signal chat at all. The lawyers that she hired at Williams and Connolly or Washington Post hired at Williams and Connolly were in negotiations with the government to make sure they didn't look through any of the materials while the case was being litigated in the court. And they only ran to court after the DOJ took a very hard tact and said, no, we're not going to agree. Our senior officials have said we're not going to agree not to look through this while the case is in court, meaning they had to run to court and get an emergency restraining order on exactly that and to return it.

57:27Popok:Now, if she got classified information, sure, they could try to use the Espionage Act. That's ironic since Donald Trump was charged with Espionage Act violations in his own Mar-a-Lago case. But what she said in the filings about Natanson is that what they seized contains, quote, years of information about past and current confidential sources and other unpublished news gathering materials, including those she was using for current reporting. It's essentially her entire professional universe. Almost none of the information is relevant to the search warrant. The proverbial, the government, the filing said for the Washington Post, seized this proverbial haystack and attempt to locate a needle.

58:12Popok:And she covers the federal workforce. She's been one of the most high profile reporters for the Washington Post covering government firings, national security, in-depth articles about Venezuela and Social Security. And according to this reporting here that I'm referring to in The Washington Post right now, she did a first-person account about her experience covering the Trump federal workforce across all the upheaval. She detailed how she posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers, got 1 ,000 sources to talk to her, and other tip lines. This is why they're targeting Naitensen, because they don't like her news gathering techniques, which are not illegal, but certainly she's meeting the moment.

59:01Popok:You got an out of control. You got to use whatever you got. You set up a website. You set up a hotline. You set up a tip line. You do whatever you got to do, especially when you're being blocked. You're being forced as a reporter to sit through the insufferable propaganda press secretary briefings in the White House briefing room or the propaganda that's spewing like it's North Korea in the Pentagon briefing room or any. a good reporter today has to assiduously avoid the official White House and Department of War and whatever briefing rooms, because it's just unmitigated bullshit. And so you got to go around it.

59:39Popok:And so she found a way that didn't like it. And so they targeted Natanson the way they target everybody. And now we're in federal court. And this is a story that we're going to have to follow because we're on her side. We're on the side of independent media and commentary. She's in a weird spot because she's independent, but her parent company is Amazon, who's close with Bezos. But even Bezos was like, all right, they didn't send in like the minor leaguers. Williams and Connolly, Karen, you know this well, is one of the most elite, top flight credentialed law firms in Washington. If I had a problem, W and C would be one of the firms I'd go to in a heartbeat.

1:00:19Popok:So the fact that they're not, it's not like they're getting some solo practitioner from Outer Maryland to go, sorry, solar practitioners in Outer Maryland, but you're not Williams and Connelly. So that's a good thing. But we got to follow this story because it's not going to end there. If we don't draw the line now, a red line now to stop him from doing it, what's next? Knock on your door, knock on my door? Yeah, no, it's, I mean, why didn't they subpoena the information? Like the fact that they went straight to a search warrant is really, I think, a very dramatic step. And I'm not surprised that The Washington Post is fighting back.

1:00:55This is a bridge too far for all reporters. Yeah. Yeah.

1:00:59Popok:And anybody that's in the media and journalism and commentary the way that we are, we're glad that everybody's here with us. We don't have billionaires and trillionaires, and we don't have their dollars to support what we do. I think that does make us better. I think that makes us more honest in terms of what you can rely on. But, you know, we punch above our weight and we need your we're people powered. We need the support of our audience to do what we do. This isn't volunteer work. We have teams of editors and and assistants and news gatherers and social media people all in this ecosystem that we create created on the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF.

1:01:41Popok:and, you know, it's a profession and it's a job. And, you know, some of us like me, we do it full time and all of that. So the way to support and how do you invest and make sure that we're on the air, Legal AF, the YouTube channel. 12 videos a day now. ACLU is now on with us for regular reporting. We're trying to put under one pane of glass everything at the intersection of law and politics, law, politics, and global politics, all under one plane. ACLU is there, Democracy Forward, Attorneys General. I just interviewed Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania today. It'll be up on Legal AF YouTube in a day or so.

1:02:22Popok:And so you come over there. If you can swing me to paid membership, we've got some exclusive content for paid members at the Legal AF YouTube. Legal AF Substack, a whole nother parallel universe for people that enjoy lots of different things, but law and politics particularly, we're regularly in the top five and rising us politics top 40 of all sub stacks in that genre uh and we bring it all we got right you know we got people writing regularly there you won't find that writing anywhere but there my two live reports a day the videos commercial free versions of things got a whole it's a whole ecosystem to nerd out on law and politics over on legal af F sub stack.

1:03:04Popok:And then of course, we've got support for the podcast itself over on audio versions, wherever you get your audio podcasts from YouTube, tell friends, continue to build our audience, leave comments and the like, um, and all the other things that are in our word, our world and our legal AF world. Um, and then finally we've got our sponsors who are ride or die. They are with us and they have been with us and they, and they fight to get on and address our audience and support our messaging. They know what we do. They know our editorial viewpoint, and they are here for it. And we are happy about that.

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1:06:06Popok:Sizzle for cooking, Drizzle for that extra kick of bold flavor. So here you go. Go ahead to Graza.co and use Legal AF to get 10 % off and get to cooking your next chef quality meal. Welcome back and thank you to our pro-democracy sponsors. And more importantly, thank you to our audience, our fervent audience. We're here. They're always here in large numbers, 10, 20 ,000 to watch. And then, you know, three, 400 ,000 before the show is all over during the week. We really appreciate everything that you do for us because without it, it would just be me and Karen getting a cup of coffee every day, talking about the craziness in the world, which I would certainly do.

1:06:45Popok:And I would do it with Ben too. But it's such a honor to do it with our audience. our audience. And so we move globally, global AF, as we like to call it, as whenever Donald Trump gets into a problem at home, which is every day with some scandal and the stench of some scandal, his handlers got to get him out of the country. So he didn't have to go to Davos, even though it was being sponsored by Blackstone, private equity shop in New York, where all the movers and shakers and all plutocrats and billionaires in smoke-filled rooms divide up the world economy. You know, that's what happens at Davos.

1:07:23Popok:And my old boss used to go regularly. He's there now as the Congress secretary, actually. And Donald Trump made a major miscalculation as far as I'm concerned, not surprising to me. He decided to go while it was in progress, as if it was like his convention. You know, like in the Republican National Convention or the Democratic one, the candidate doesn't arrive to the last night. Donald Trump's like, I'll come in three days in. And yeah, big mistake because that just gave the European Union and NATO and Canada and Macron and Germany all the time to take the podium first and fucking tell off Donald Trump and tell him you're not taking Greenland over our dead body.

1:08:01Popok:You'll have to rip it out of our cold, dead hands. That's my paraphrase for the European Union. We don't care about 200 percent taxes and tariffs on French wine because you'll never – nobody believes him because you'll never do it. You are the boy that cried tariffs. You are never going to, we don't believe you. And Donald Trump always, when we heard last week, he was going to go to Davos triumphantly and force down our allies' throats. Two things, two things, Karen. I don't forget. One, the signature on the dotted line on the peace board for Gaza. Yes, the peace board where Vladimir Putin, who's currently at war killing innocents in Ukraine can be on the peace board for a billion dollars that goes ultimately to Donald Trump.

1:08:51Popok:And he can sit next to the Canadians and the Belarusians and everybody else who wants to be on the peace board. That's going to get signed while I'm there. Hold that thought. Second is, while I'm there, we are going to own Greenland. They will bow down before me, the great and powerful Oz, and they will give me all of Greenland. and even when they've told them you don't need all of Greenland you just need certain military strategic parcels that you can get anyway under a contract that you've had with NATO and Greenland since 1952 no I wanted all I it's like well it's like watching Willy Wonka it's like the kid yeah I want to know it was a Veruca salt I want it no daddy I want Greenland no and I'm sorry so hope i'm on fire tonight sometimes i do things just to make karen laugh but but okay so that didn't happen because now he's trying to spin right karen that he's only going to get these quote-unquote strategic pieces of greenland which he could always have gotten if he just he didn't have to ask nice he just had to invoke the stat the law and which is similar to for instance as a comparison.

1:10:01Popok:Great Britain has British soil in Cyprus for their military base, for their Air Force base. Same effing thing. OK, you'll have more military bases. Trust me, NATO doesn't want to police Greenland, this frozen wasteland. We have Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Right. We got we got we own soil in other countries. Just do that. So Donald Trump backed off and said, OK, I'm not doing tariffs. I'm not penalizing the 10 NATO countries with tariffs. I guess France is off the hook too. I don't need the whole thing. I'm not going to buy it. I'm not going to take it militarily. I'm like, who is this guy? But you know, for him, he thinks if he goes from this negotiating position, this art of the deal, as we said before he got on the air to this, it makes him look strong.

1:10:47Popok:It doesn't. Is there any doubt in your mind, Karen, that he's coming home weaker than when he left? It's insane to me. As you said, he started having the ability through this 70-year-old treaty to basically go and use Greenland as we see fit for our national security. You just have to ask, right? So he had the ability and the authority to already have Greenland. But suddenly, even though no one's brought this up in my lifetime about this necessary. We have to have Greenland, you know, in it for our national security. That's never been brought up. But suddenly Donald Trump's decided, okay, he absolutely needs to have it.

1:11:30And he has, you know, so he says, I'm going to take it by force if I have to. And that scares everybody, right? Everybody's like, oh my God, the guy might do that. And because he's so unpredictable. And now we're all going to go to war and we're going to lose our allies and they're going to pull the bonds. Europe has more of our country's debt than I think anywhere else. And if they pull all their bonds and call their loans, what happens to our economy? And the world economy collapses. And everybody starts thinking, these are all the things we can do. How is this going to play out? And suddenly, he realizes, okay, a bridge too far.

1:12:11I can't do that. And he ends up basically in the exact same place that he was in before, but now he's going to declare victory, which makes no sense. He was already there. It's like he causes a problem. He solves the problem he created. And the solution is one that already existed, but he claims victory. It's like this, this complete charade that I think people have to stop falling for. I could tell you right now, the world leaders are laughing at us. We're a laughing stock because of it. They see behind this charade. Nobody's really afraid of him, right? The stock market, you know, the taco, Trump always chickens out with tariffs and everything else, I think, responds as well.

1:12:57And it's just, this is just a ridiculous problem, a ridiculous situation. The speech he gave at Davos was offensive. The fact that he, as always, puts down our allies who are long-term allies, who are not only our trading partners, you know, oh, but I love Europe. I'm half Scottish and half German, full Scottish and full German. Like, you know, it's like bizarre the way he talks and the things he says. It's all about him. It's not about our shared history and our relationships and what we've done for each other. Oh, NATO's never done anything for us. Denmark's never done anything for us, he says.

1:13:33Oh, really? Well, how about after 9-11? When 9-11 happened, guess who came to our aid who sent military forces, who was there, guess who lost lives on our behalf? These are NATO military people, including Denmark. But he just doesn't appreciate or recognize any of these relationships. And he puts down our allies while building up the strong, you know, I like Putin and she and everybody else who he thinks are strong. And it's just, it's offensive. And I think the more, and Canada stood up for, I mean, the fact that our brother and sister country, Canada, had to give a speech where they were fighting for themselves as if we're not their ally is offensive.

1:14:26This is, Canada is one of our most important relationships, right? Canadian people are among the most wonderful people and partnership that we have as a country. And the fact that we are at that point with Europe and with Canada and other allies that we are so close to, it's just, it's just, it's a really dangerous position in the long run. I'm not worried about today necessarily because Trump always chickens out, but, but they're going to remember and And they're going to remember, you know, I think when the first Trump happened, right, in 2016, it was like, what was that? Okay, well, fine. You know, we'll wait it out and then they'll elect a normal president and we'll go back to the way things are.

1:15:09The fact that we reelected him again and by a not tiny margin and the fact that he is in office and 10 times worse than he was, if not more, this is going to have long term impact on our country forever. And the speech today was just, I think, offensive and terrifying and head scratching. And I do think it's really not making us in any way stronger or safer or better. That's my takeaway from today.

1:15:44Popok:Yeah, totally, totally agree. Donald Trump says crazy things out loud. I mean, two days ago, I was reporting on Donald Trump begging Renee Good's parents, who he figured out may be Trump supporters to continue to love him, love him, even though his ice goons shot their daughter in the head several times. I mean, the fact that he makes everything about him, adulation, narcissism is really just disgusting and offensive. And, you know, he'll be coming back from the world platform, shrunken, bitter, on a fool's errand to begin with. Now returning back to the United States, we didn't have a time to really touch on Minnesota.

1:16:33Popok:We got a new, I'll just do one minute on it. We got an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that's blocked Judge Menendez's attempts to protect First Amendment freedom of speech in the way that she did it, similar to what the Seventh Circuit did with Judge Ellis about Illinois, but this game is not, this fight is not over. And Donald Trump, however, has backed off the Insurrection Act and sending in military troops, although he's investigating, opening up criminal investigations against, again, elected leaders of the states, of the blue states that didn't vote for him, like Tim Walls and and Mayor Frey, and even Attorney General Keith Ellison.

1:17:14Popok:And this is an administration that needs all eyes on it. Some people, I think, misinterpret what our approach is. When we talk about here, the lower third, you'll see Trump presidency, breaking legal news. We'll cover other things that are at the intersection of law and politics, but there are no other things, because Donald Trump's erratic behavior and his descent into madness on full display, enabled by the people in his administration, means that we don't just have one news story every day, one news cycle. We have micro news cycles every day. We've got, you know, everything hitting, all the cylinders hitting and firing at one time.

1:17:51Popok:Federal courts, appellate courts, Supreme courts, Donald Trump's executive orders, his social media threats and attacks on his political enemies, whether they're governors or former prosecutors or attorneys general or, you know, playing old war tapes, you know, his old hit list of people that he wants to get rid of. And then I haven't even talked about economics, monetary policy, tariff policy, attacks on the allies, trying to break NATO over his knee like it's some sort of baseball bat, and him losing. Every time he tries to be the strong man, insults our, this administration has spent more time starting with J.D.

1:18:33Popok:Vance at the top of the administration beginning in January when it went in last year to today, bookending the two of them, attacking our allies and shitting on them than any other administration in history. You want to have American first policy, that's fine. You want to completely put a, You want to completely torch and immolate our diplomacy that is used in many, many ways in order to accomplish American interests and American goals? You can't do everything with, you know, with saber rattling that everybody's ignoring now and social media posts. That's not how world politics works or the world economy works.

1:19:15Popok:And if anybody, this is the thing that's really why we have to keep all eyes trained on him, because he eventually succumbs to political pressure. If he believes he's not being loved, if he believes the polls are not supporting him, if he believes the American public are against him on major issues, he backs off. maybe not every time but enough that it is an effective strategy in opposition that's why we got to file the lawsuits sometimes he folds he folds half the time it doesn't even pursue the appeal and then the funds that were blocked flow back to the american people and so the lawyers have got to do their job the public interest groups and then we here in terms of the commentary we got to do our job we got to we got to figure out during the day what's important for people to know and understand and talk about on the podcast.

1:20:05Popok:And then we got to activate it, right? We got to turn information into action. And I think that's one of the jobs that you and I have here on the podcast.

1:20:17Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. Yeah.

1:20:21Popok:So with that, I'll turn over what we usually do. Six years running. Karen, you get the final word for our midweek edition of Legal AF. You know, a lot of people got their Social Security checks today, and a lot of people saw that their Social Security checks were less than what they're used to getting. I think that is a reflection of this administration's policies, whether it's about health insurance and health care, whether it's Medicare, whether it's all of the various policies that are happening. So my heart goes out to the people who are struggling because we're starting to feel the effects of this administration even tighter.

1:21:06And the more they talk about how, oh, well, prices are going down and gas is going down, stock markets going up. I want people who are feeling the real effects of this, not just the rich people who have stocks in the stock market, to know that we hear you, we see you, and thank you for sharing your stories with us so that we can give a voice to them. And we'll keep fighting like hell to turn us blue again so that we can make policies that make sense for the everyday person, not just for the billionaires and the hundred millionaires.

1:21:44Popok:Absolutely. And thank you all to our audience for being here. Until Saturday edition of Legal AF, you know where to find us, Legal AF YouTube channel, Legal AF Substack, and of course here on the podcast. So until our next show, shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal AFers.

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