Legal AF Full Episode - 1/28/2026

26:26Popok:And actually, it asks more questions than it answers about the chain of custody, about the evidence and who's got it, where's the gun. I mean, there's lots of things that actually were made worse by the declarations, not better. So with your prosecutor background, crime scenes, collection of evidence and things, chain of custody, I want to talk about that. And then I want to touch on Judge Schiltz, who's the chief judge. He's the judge involved with Don Lemon. And whatever's happening with Don Lemon, we'll talk about an update. And then also about him ordering Todd Lyons from the acting director of ICE to show up in his courtroom unless he's got a little extortive power to unless a detainee was released from custody.

27:13Popok:Talk about Epstein and this warfare that's now spilled out inside of the White House and what it means for the midterms. Miller, Noam, Wiles, Trump. Are we seeing the beginning of the end as these aides start backbiting each other and not waiting for Donald Trump to throw them under the bus as they throw each other under the bus and all of that? But, Karen, let's pay the bills. Is that the right phrase? Let's pay the bills. We've got a number of ways for people that if you enjoy this show to vote for us, to support us. Now more than ever, independent journalism under attack. We've got reporters whose houses are being raided with search warrants and having all of their electronic equipment picked up.

27:56Popok:Others, like Don Lemon, being threatened with arrest because he was covering a protest inside of a church. And Midas Touch is often threatened. Legal AF also. There's ways to keep us on the air, and it's relatively inexpensive, one of them, or free. There is the Legal AF YouTube channel where we've got over a million, up to a million 40 ,000 subscribers in just over a year. That's a testament to you. We've got free subscription. Great. We've got paid levels of subscription. You can be an associate, a counsel, or a partner level, and you get different additional content based on that. It's relatively inexpensive.

28:36Popok:And then we've got this amazing place. I talked a lot about it today, the National Trial Lawyers Conference. It's Substack. There's only one firm in the room that had a Substack. It's crazy. But we have ours. We've been up for about eight months. We're already in the top. We bounce between one and 20 in terms of U.S. news. Ten pieces of great content every day, stuff you haven't seen anywhere else. I do or try to do two lives a day only on Substack. You can become a member or a paid member there. Support this podcast. We've got Legal AF, which is regularly in the top 15 or 20 of all podcasts on YouTube.

29:16Popok:And then we've got our audio. It's a long B-roll. And then we've got our audio, which is up on Apple and Spotify and all that good stuff. And you can leave a five-star review and comments. That's what keeps us all on the air. Then, of course, we've got our sponsors. And these are sponsors that Jordy, me, Karen, Ben, we curate, we try, we use, we like them. They're supportive of our point of view. We never have point of view discussions with the sponsors. We wouldn't allow it. No one controls what we're going to say. Look, we barely know what we're going to say before we get on the air. So, but they're here and they're here for it.

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31:12Popok:The only way to get 20 % off though is to go to joindeliteme.com slash legal AF and enter code legal AF at checkout. One more time, that's joindeliteme.com slash legal AF and code legal AF. I feel like I'm constantly compromising on comfort. I'll take a long flight for a getaway, wake up early for a workout, or stand around for hours just to get the best spot at a concert. We give up comfort every day. Don't let style be another reason. Mack Weldon's Ace Collection makes it effortless to look put together while feeling truly comfortable. Their new Ace line, inspired by their best-selling sweatpants, combines everyday comfort with long-lasting and confident looks.

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33:26Popok:we got reporting that the FBI got around to raiding the Fulton County, Georgia election office. They're looking for fraud again in 2020. Donald Trump just can't come to grips that he is wildly unpopular in Georgia, especially in Fulton County, which he lost by like 70 percent, 70 to 30 percent. No, it must have been the hard drives and the and the software and the and the fraud. And find me the eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes. All I need, you know, Fulton County. I mean, just it's just, you know, Rudy Giuliani is as one hundred and fifty million dollar judgment for going after, you know, the two election workers.

34:10Seamus and Ruby Freeman.

34:11Popok:Right. The mother daughter team. And so he's still searching six years later for fraud over there. It's just what a waste of taxpayer dollars. But again, flexing whatever muscle he thinks he continues to have, it usually backfires. So we've got that going on. Why don't we turn to what's your observations about Christy Noem, who has been defanged and sidelined now, Tom Holman taking over, Bavino out. She's not. They're not trotting her out, talking about Alex Petty anymore. Miller, who made a big Second Amendment boo-boo in how he approached it. And then kind of Susie Wiles trying to hold all this crap together as chief of staff.

34:51Well, let's just say the first thing I want to say is in the midst of all of this, right, with all of this going on and the horror of Alex Preddy, just sort of the death, you know, front of mind, top of mind, to get on an airplane yesterday and to walk into the Fort Lauderdale airport and to be greeted by TV screens all around of Christy Noem's face with the smile and, you know, all her makeup and, you know, whatever. It felt very like Westworld or some kind of a, you know, like Handmaid's Tale or something. It just felt this terrible, like, oh, my God, you know, all the country's on fire. And here she's got her fake smile, you know, talking at the TSA.

35:36It was quite jarring and very unsettling. But it seems like the reporting is, despite Trump trying to defend her, It seems like she's on her way out and that there seems to be a huge rift going on in the administration. And Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, is a long-term person who's worked for him for a long time, who many have said was the grown-up in the room, is really trying to keep things together. And she's opened up a back channel with Minnesota officials trying to work out a way to get Trump out of this situation since the mess that's been created by Noam. and it seems like Stephen Miller has also been left out of certain key meetings as well as part of this backlash and so you know it's it looks like they're all pointing fingers at each other but it looks like Noam and her longtime rumored boyfriend Corey Lewandowski who works for her that they're the ones who are really on the outs with Susie Wiles and that Trump is holding meetings without Kristi Noem about this.

36:42And, you know, I think they're doing what they have to do. And they're all, of course, protecting Trump. But it looks like I've seen both that Miller has been left out of certain meetings and he's been noticeably absent, but also that Noem, also in Lewandowski, and Bovino is being pulled, Greg Bovino, the guy in the, you know, Nazi-looking SS troop jacket that walks around. He's really going to be the fall guy. And he's been taken out of Minnesota and sent back to California. And Noam and Lewandowski are apparently responsible for Bovino being the face of all of this. And so I think they're realizing that these, you know, that the puppy killer, you know, that the fact that she should kill a puppy should have been enough to tell people what she thinks of human lives and, you know, other lives.

37:34the way this is being handled and the things that she is saying, I think is really backfiring. And they're pulling her out, it seems, or sidelining her, I should say. That's what I'm saying.

37:47Popok:Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt on that. When you have Tom Holman reporting directly to the president, you have him sidelined. And you've got the Democrats who are leading pretty good charge now against knowing that Kristi Noem is on the ropes. They're going for they're going for the knockout. Yeah, they want to impeach her. Right. And so you need 218 to impeach. People think, well, that's farfetched. It's not. Because right now, the Democrats have 213. There's four special elections to fill vacancies like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mikey Sherrill, the governor now of New Jersey. If we flip one of those seats, it comes down to like 216.

38:29Popok:You just need to flip two Republicans. And there's plenty of Republicans that are not happy with Kristi Noem right now, and depending upon their own political calculus about what would win in their district, they decide to vote with the Democrats. That might be a safe bet. In other words, you may not get harmed at home if you take out puppy killer Kristi Noem over the death of Alex Preti. If you're a big Second Amendment district, it may be time to take out Kristi and vote with the Dems. And they've already seen, like that glass ceiling has already broken with Epstein. I mean, when the entirety but one of the House chamber voted for, it wasn't, remember we were talking about forever, will we get to 218 signatures on the discharge petition?

39:13Popok:Yeah, 434 votes for the Epstein Transparency Act at the end. So that's already been gone, that you can vote against Trump and against a Trumper. And he's doing, Trump's doing very, very faint praise of Christy Noem, you know, that old line about damning faint praise. Oh, what is it? Who? Christy? Christy Noem? Will you fire her? No. I was like, I was watching the press conference, like, what? No, the border. She's doing really great on the border. Next question. I'm like, oh, here we go. And for people that think he'll never fire anybody, he'll never leave them twisting in the wind. I refer you to the first Trump administration.

39:58Popok:Well, that's one. And I'd refer you to, that's true. And I'd refer you to the, he fired his chief of staff every five minutes. But I refer you to exhibit A, Lindsey Halligan, who's no longer the prosecutor in Virginia, is no longer in the Department of Justice. Alina Hamba, where did she go? So he has a way, and then he has the Susie Wiles of the world make the phone call. It's got Todd Blanche waiting in the wings to be the new Department of Justice head when Pam Bondi finally falls through the ice. And she's, no pun intended, but she's very close. So I could see, especially before the midterms, as he tries to right the ship, Bondi out, Blanche in, gnome out.

40:39Popok:I mean, the bribe taking Tom Holman in? I mean, somebody like that. Or a governor, another governor that he can support. Maybe they move somebody who not got controversial, like the interior secretary carry over Doug Burgum or whatever his name is, and sort of start shifting this around because this current crop of AIDS, not only are they going to be impeached at the midterms, once, I mean, they're definitely fodder for impeachment in January of 2027. Because by all the statistical models looking at the polls right now, the Dems are going to get Like 224, 225 seats. More, it's impeachment proof.

41:23Popok:It's more than enough. Now, to convict and remove, you need two-thirds of the Senate. That's, I mean, look, listen, if people really hate Donald Trump, they'll flip about six or seven seats Senate and give the Democrats the 60 filibuster proof and two-thirds they need to get rid of somebody. But impeachment is enough for us, right, at this moment. Let's say Stephen Miller would be impeached. I think half the Department of Justice leadership would be impeached, if not all of it. And so we are sensing, you know, here in the Midas Touch Illegal AF world, based on our total review of what's happening, that as you said at the top of our podcast tonight, there's an inflection point.

42:03Popok:And when you look back at history, the death of Alex Pratt, the way a lot of times the death of one person encapsulates everybody's feelings. You know, what is it? Prince Ferdinand, the assassination starts World War I. Sometimes it just comes down to one person. And that being the straw that broke the camel's back. And I think in history we're going to find that. Let's talk about Judge Tostrad, who is a Trump appointee first term. So that means he's not MAGA. And he issued an order right away, which I've never seen before, ordering the Department of Justice and the FBI not and the Trump administration not to destroy evidence.

42:48Popok:The fact that you have to issue an order for them not to destroy evidence tells you everything you need to know about how federal judges feel about the trustworthiness of the Department of Justice in this administration. And what you would think is to bail themselves out that the Trump administration would respond with, Judge, you don't have to enter an order like that. Of course we wouldn't do it. We'll do it by a consent decree or an agreed order. No, they filed an opposition paper telling the judge he didn't have the right. he's preserving the evidence so that the state, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota can do its job and do an independent investigation related to Alex Preti with the weapons gone, with the crime scene polluted, with shell casings on witness.

43:32Popok:I mean, and just preserve that. And then they filed three affidavits. Did you get a chance to take a look at those affidavits? I did. All right. So why don't you tell, so you got one from Border Patrol, one from FBI and one from Homeland Security. When you lay them on top of each other, what struck you? What struck me even before I saw, you know, before I get to those three orders is what you just said about the fact that how incredibly unprecedented in order to not destroy evidence to the government is. A judge can do that and has done that to in civil cases, right, to plaintiffs or defendants counsel when there's a dispute over things or to a criminal defendant or to witnesses in a case, right?

44:14Because you're worried that evidence or information might be lost or destroyed. But not the government. That does not happen. The government, of course, they're in the business of collecting evidence, securing evidence, analyzing evidence, and utilizing evidence. For the judge to issue an order to prevent federal agents from destroying or altering evidence related to this shooting, like you said, tells you everything about how this Trump-appointed judge views law enforcement at this particular time in history, at this particular moment, and in this particular case. Now, as you said, there were three different affidavits, right, which are sworn under oath statements by three different people saying what their position is about these different, you know, about the evidence.

45:10And these affidavits filed by these three different Trump administration agencies with a memorandum of law basically doesn't say what you just said. Oh, you don't have to do that, Judge. Of course we know our obligation. Of course we're the government. We would never do that. And we're investigating this. First of all, we know that there's no criminal investigation. They've already said there's no criminal investigation. They're just looking at it as a, you know, the officer involved shooting investigation, like an internal investigation, just look at our internal policies and see what happened and see if the officer should be disciplined.

45:45That's very different than a criminal investigation that could be conducted and should be conducted. That's what usually happens. Doesn't mean it goes anywhere. It doesn't mean that anyone ever gets charged. But you should have a joint investigation, state and federal law enforcement, people who have this expertise, because that is what every single local law enforcement entity is trained and equipped to do. If not the local, then the state, right? That's what all states have this ability to do, because what happens? Officers, guns go off and officers sometimes shoot people. And so you have these investigations that happen and they look at these investigations.

46:30District attorney's offices do it. State AG's offices do it. And they have a lot of experience in officer-involved shootings or officer-involved fatalities. And so guess who doesn't have this experience? not ICE, not DHS, not Border Patrol. And the FBI does have some experience, but the FBI, they're not the 24-7 shop that responds at an incident, right? And so the FBI relies on local law enforcement who does respond to a 911 call or a shooting because they're 24-7. They They have officers everywhere. They secure the crime scene. They put crime scene tape out. They put little cones near all the shell casings.

47:18They don't let people walk in to contaminate the crime scene. They go there with an eye towards, let's preserve the crime scene. And if it does go and get turned over to the FBI to investigate, it's usually done in conjunction with local law enforcement, who is in this rapid response 24-7 kind of, you know, how they respond to incidents. So when I was a prosecutor, for example, that's how we did it. We were always with the NYPD. We were the first responders. We were the ones who showed up at the crime scene and did that. And then again, if it needs to get turned over sometimes to the attorney general's office, if they had jurisdiction or to federal law enforcement, that's how it happens.

47:58But you do it in conjunction, you do it together. And so these three affidavits basically saying, oh, judge, you can't do this from these three different agencies, essentially acknowledged that the crime scene was not secured, that Alex Preddy's firearm, that they don't know where it is, or at least they're not telling the judge where it is. And two out of the three declarants refused to say or represent to the court that they won't destroy any evidence, which that's what I found most astounding. Now, of course, the FBI said they won't because the FBI knows that they won't and can't and shouldn't.

48:34But, you know, it was Homeland Security got there 40 minutes after the shooting. They said that they didn't do evidence collection because but they're in charge of it. Border Patrol said they aren't they didn't collect evidence, but they do have some body cam footage. And the FBI agent said, basically, you know, we we work for evidence recovery team. They're the ones who said they have the gun and the cell phone, but we turned over the cell phone to HSI, but didn't say anything about where the gun is. I mean, it just, it really didn't answer any, it asked, to me, it asked more questions than it answered questions.

49:11It seems like evidence is missing. It seems like nobody's in charge and that you've got this cluster of agencies seemingly not working together, but somewhat saying that they're working together. Um, and it, it really, I think if I, if I'm the judge, I think it, it makes those affidavits made matters worse, not better.

49:34Popok:I totally agree with you. And I think he's going to, um, keep the order in place, extend the temporary restraining order. And I, it, it, there's, where's the gun? I mean, they, and why are three different agencies, none of which are the one or two different agencies, none of which are in charge. Why is the evidence spread out between these three agents? The FBI has the phone, but not in the body. This one's got the body cam. This one says they got the phone, but not the gun. And then they just decided, only because of public outcry, they just decided to put the five Border Patrol agents on leave.

50:10Popok:Up until now, they were out. Where were their weapons? Were they retained? Were they still shooting them? I mean, for forensics purposes? Well, they have to retain them. Again, if this was a real investigation, we still don't know whose guns went off. We don't know if Preddy's gun misfired. We don't know which ones of the agents fired their weapons. We have no idea. They have to take their weapons in this situation. I don't know if they have. Do you know? No, no, I'm saying that's what they should. Right, exactly. Right. And in terms of the gun going off now, it looks like a gun may not have gone off at all to start to start the shooting that they reacted not to a gunfire because remember the beginning was like, oh, maybe his sour accidentally went off.

50:55Popok:No. Now there's reporting and testimony that they they heard gun when one of them reached in and found a gun. The guy was already prone on the ground and effectively hogtied. How did they think he was going to get to his gun? So disarm him, sure, that's appropriate in that situation. But apparently that led, and I've been involved with shootings where you get this kind of jumpy trigger finger, and they flinch and they shoot. But they shot some combination of one or two guns, fired 10 bullets into this person and killed them. So, yeah, they're just now on administrative leave only because we continue to talk about it because we're on the streets because we're arguing.

51:38Popok:I mean, you've got such a heartless, callous administration. Donald Trump, once again, you know, when he's not going after Gold Star families and besmirching the reputation and name and memory of somebody like John McCain, he hears about a Democratic member of Congress. This is a guy who allegedly had two assassination attempts against him. Right. So you think he'd be a little more empathetic. And he finds out that that representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, while she was at a town hall, had some crazy come up to her yelling shit and had a brown liquid in a syringe and shot it at her. And they reached Trump and his immediate reaction is, no, I don't think about her.

52:25Popok:I think she's a fraud. I really don't think about that. She probably has herself sprayed knowing her. It's so disgusting. And I've said this before, of course, it'll be borne out at the midterms. America will tolerate a lot in political discourse. And it will tolerate, obviously, a lot in who occupies the Oval Office. But a heartless president is not one of them. And that's what we're seeing. Now, the question is politically, will the Democrats rally around a candidate and candidates for the midterms and hammer home a message to make him pay politically a price for all the things that we watch?

53:04Popok:You can't run a campaign against him talking about the 500 craziest things that he's done in the last year, okay, because it's just too much. But you can take the top five, you can take the top 10, and you can run ads, and in debates, and in town halls, and in messaging, discipline, messaging, you can make the point home. We don't expect our audience to have encyclopedic knowledge or have this data seared into their frontal lobe the way we on Legal AF and Midas Dutch because this is our business. This is our profession the way we do. And the average voter is not tuned in the way that our audience is.

53:46Popok:I mean, that's a shame. But the average voter is not tuned in the way we are. They'll learn it at the end during the campaign. They hear it here and there, bits and pieces. But, you know, our audience is devoted and focused and reads up on this stuff. But the average person, frankly, doesn't. And so we need that kind of discipline to – and that's the mistake we'll make. Hopefully we won't make. Hopefully Midas will lead the way and Legal AF will lead the way. You can't just fire out a fire hose of a thousand – you know, for every one of his – It would be tens of thousands of things that he's done, said, did since he started in office.

54:29Popok:You can't, but we have to. So we've got an embarrassment of riches. We've got to narrow it down and talk about, but this is one of them. This is the thing that sticks in people's mind, right? Alex Preti and his reaction to somebody harming, you know, when people die. He said nothing about the Minnesota law. We're always talking about Minnesota. Sorry. Shout out to our friends and family and loved ones in Minnesota. Such horrendous things happening there. The two lawmakers killed with their dog in the middle of the night. Donald Trump doesn't say anything. Neither does his administration. Nancy Pelosi's husband almost gets brained with a hammer by a deranged person looking to hang Nancy or interrogate her wearing a costume, whatever this crazy bullshit was.

55:16Popok:And it was like, oh, he's probably a gay sex looking for gay sex and did it to himself. I mean, just this depravity. They'll say anything. And then, you know, of course, the American people have to respond to it. I want to talk about Epstein and developments there. And then that new lawsuit, a first of many, it probably opened the floodgates related to those that have been, what's the word, unalived, killed, murdered, executed by the Trump administration in the Caribbean in dozens and dozens of boat strikes with 100 people. 100 people have lost their life. We got the first lawsuit in Massachusetts.

55:53Popok:But we're at that point where we need to talk about some things together. Hard truths. We need your support. We need your commitment to us, Legal AF YouTube channel, 10, 12 new videos every day that I curate, along with about a dozen contributors of ours. The American Civil Liberties Union is now there with us. Democracy Forward is there with us. Regular interviews. I just interviewed Governor Shapiro. We've had senators, attorneys general on a regular basis, and people that are in the courtrooms. and you can become a subscriber and help us there. That really helps us, as does becoming a paid subscriber.

56:30Popok:Legal AF Substack, there it is. Got to shorten that B-roll one day. That is an amazing ecosystem where independent journalism and commentary lives. And I think you'll like what we're doing there. I curate that seven to eight pieces a day, including two live reports. Sometimes I bring in other people. We just had Adam Klassfeld talking about a hearing that he attended with Judge Menendez. And we had instantly, without too much publicity, no publicity, we had about 4 ,000 people join our live with comments and commentary that we were bouncing back and forth from. So that's a great opportunity there on Substack.

57:10Popok:And then we've got our sponsors, some of which have been with us forever, some of which are brand new, but all know what our point of view is. You gotta have a point of view here, and we do. They know what it is, they know who our audience is, and they wanna be here with us, and we appreciate that. And here's another word from our sponsors. Let's talk candidly about something that no one wants to talk about, what happens when you pass on. Because unfortunately, it's going to happen to you and me, but we can be prepared with trust and will online estate planning. Estate planning is something many people put off, even when they know it's important.

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1:00:33Popok:50 % off when you head to the number three, dayblinds.com slash legal AF. It's a little known fact that many years ago, the National Enquirer, of all things, sought the Epstein files. Did you know that, Karen? I actually did not. Right. I did not know that either. I mean, way before, maybe before Midas Touch was even, you know, anything was even formed back in 2017, 2018, they were going after the administration, which was the Trump administration, and seeking the Epstein files back then off of the reporting of what was happening and the deals that were being cut with Jeffrey Epstein. and they sued for it.

1:01:16Popok:They made a FOIA demand, a Freedom of Information Act demand. And that case kicked around for a number of years. Nobody really paid attention to it, except they did. And they won at the federal court level in New York with an order, it wasn't really covered, with an order of turnover. Learn something, I love learning something. Yeah, who covered this? And then it was just kicking around in there, a little dusty lawsuit, until the survivor movement and MIDAS and Legal AF, we sort of bang it away about the Epstein files. But that case didn't get preempted because there's a new law and they had their own obligations.

1:02:03Popok:So they, the Trump administration appealed and it went all the way up to the Second Circuit. And they trot out this Department of Justice lawyer, and they basically start – she starts ignoring many of the things that we've heard about. For instance, that there is a, remember when Pam Bondi Karen announced with great fanfare that they were going to open up an investigation into all the Democrats who were listed in the Epstein files and to bring those child sex predators to justice, ignoring the person she worked for and the Republicans that were in there as well. And then, you know, she said it was going to be the Southern District of New York and Jay Clayton was.

1:02:52Popok:And then we didn't hear about it again. Right. So it came up during oral argument at the Second Circuit because the lawyers for the National Enquirer's parent company brought it up. Why don't you tell our audience about that Second Circuit hearing? I'm learning about this. No, I'm saying tell me. Oh, all right. So. So the Second Circuit. was not buying most of what the Department of Justice was saying in their arguments. It looked very askance at it. They may end up sending it back to see if the Epstein Transparency Act solves the problem. But basically, because of what's going on with the Epstein Transparency Act, including a late night filing last night by the Department of Justice, talking about one hand not coordinating with the other hand, in which they filed an update with two judges.

1:03:43Popok:I don't even understand these updates. They keep filing these updates with Judge Engelmeyer and Judge Berman, who preside over the effectively closed Ghislaine Maxwell case and the closed Epstein case. But they keep filing it because they ran to these judges originally about getting, quote, unquote, the files, and they keep updating them on the millions and millions and millions of documents and the hundreds and thousands of hours that are being spent and when they're going to finally get around, which is in the near term, whatever that means. I saw all of that. I just didn't see this as the Second Circuit thing.

1:04:18Popok:No, no, I know, but I'm going to tie it back. So my point is they keep running to these judges. And my point is if they keep running to the judges and the judges keep saying, we have very limited jurisdiction in these closed cases, I think their jurisdiction has been expanded by the constant letter writing to these same judges to inform them about the process. It's like telling the judges you get what do they just get to be voyeurs? They get, oh, this is very interesting about the process. But if they see something wrong with the process, well, have you ever met a federal judge that doesn't jump in when they see something wrong in a process they're being updated on?

1:04:51Exactly.

1:04:52Popok:Right. So that's going on. So if they're going to send it back to the judge handling FOIA, what I don't want is him somehow, you know, punting it over to Engelmeyer or Berman. I mean, I would like the Second Circuit to make a ruling, which is they need to comply with FOIA. The Transparency Act doesn't vitiate the obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. The case has been kicking around for years. They had a very funny back and forth on the Second Circuit today about Ghislaine Maxwell, who's now unrepresented. Remember that lawyer we kept talking about, David Oscar Marcus down in Miami of all places, and how he was angling for a pardon.

1:05:31Popok:And then he watched her testify under oath with a deposition. She's going to be testifying again, apparently. Oh, my God. By herself. This time with no lawyer prep, this is going to be a high wire act. That kid, that guy that climbed the building in Singapore, Taipei, wait till you see Ghislaine Maxwell. without a lawyer prepping her, go before Congress. That's going to happen in the next couple of weeks. She has an audience of one that she's going to be speaking to. Absolutely. I love, oh, he's such a kind gentleman. He never did anything to me. I never observed anything. That's exactly right.

1:06:05Popok:But her lawyer got out as soon as, I think, as soon as he saw that she perjured herself. He's like, I'm out. So she's writing her own from the jailhouse, like on toilet paper. She's writing her own writs of habeas corpus and whatever. And it came up in the second, like the toilet paper inventory, you know, and the second circuit was like, isn't there a writ of habeas court? Like, isn't that case closed? Like, oh, well, there's a, she's filed a writ of habeas corpus. And the judges said to the Department of Justice, she's unrepresented. What are the chances that she's actually going to get a new trial?

1:06:39Popok:Right. In other words, because if these courts have limited jurisdiction, because they kept pointing to Engelmeyer and Berman, because Engelmeyer and Berman don't want to do anything, even though we're imploring them. Full disclosure, Lisa Phillips, who I think is on Jake Tapper tonight, is a client of mine. We filed a declaration, an affidavit on her behalf to encourage Judge Engelmeyer to appoint an independent monitor and special master. He quoted her affidavit approvingly in his order, but at the end, almost like bittersweet, like, I see the problem, but I have limited jurisdiction here. I don't think you have limited jurisdiction, or they shouldn't be writing you as if you do have jurisdiction.

1:07:19Popok:That would sort of be my point. So that's, you know, I was maddening it once again with impunity, the Department of Justice telling a federal judge, you know, we got a lot of people, they're looking at it, and there's millions of pages. Why aren't they doing, two questions for you. One is rolling production. Why aren't they rolling out as they finish 100 ,000 pages or documents every week as they finish? Why do we have to wait for this indeterminate period to get millions of pages when you and I do rolling productions all the time with even bigger numbers than some of these I've been involved with?

1:07:59Popok:Why do they get to not level to the American people? I mean, it is having such an effect, Karen, on the Southern District of New York that it's backing up into their other cases because more than half of the office is doing Epstein file review. In fact, they're actually at the point where they're asking federal judges for extensions of time in other cases. Like, remember, Maduro is being prosecuted by the Southern District, but there are other cases. It just came up in a case involving another law firm that I won't mention who said to the judge, we can't get our required documents while we're on trial because half of that office is on Epstein duty.

1:08:44Popok:And the judge had a great line. The judge came back and said, I would I would think they would find a way considering that Epstein is dead and this trial is going on right now to provide what they need to provide in this case. But you see the gurgling going on with the Southern District of New York, what once proud prosecutor's office, you know, has everybody on Epstein duty. Yeah, you have to wonder if the fact that they're not doing rolling production and rolling production, really what it means is as you go through the documents, you turn them over as you redact them. They have millions of documents.

1:09:23And that's what they this letter that was filed said that we've gone through millions of documents. We have almost the whole office working on it day and night. OK. And that we're going to have it in the coming weeks. Right. No date certain, but kind of soon is the impression they're giving. But that means they've completed some. That means they've gone through and they've redacted out the victim's names and the victim's addresses and their phone numbers and other personal identifying information that needs to come out. And rolling production would just mean as you get to it, as you redact it, as you put the black line through it, you then turn it over like they did with the first 6 ,000 documents that they turned over.

1:10:02And it makes you wonder, are they doing it like this so that they can dump a million documents out at once? And so that anything in there gets buried. Because otherwise, if they do it little by little, then we can digest it little by little. And it would also be a story every day. Every time you go through the next 10 ,000 documents or whatever they would dump at a time, you could go through it and highlight things that are in each of them. That's what the media will do. If they do it all at once, I wonder whether this is a concerted effort on the part of the Department of Justice to do it like that.

1:10:37And that way they can just bury them all and make it a one day story instead of a long, dragged out, multi-day story. I think it's going to backfire because no matter what, as the media and as people start to go through it, you're going to see every single day because it's going to take time to go through it. Right. No one's going to read the million documents or two million documents. What people are going to do is you're going to do word searches and keyword searches. And that's how you go through millions of documents in discovery or in any other way. And you'll put in various spellings of the same thing and people's names.

1:11:12And you'll look for things that way. And then you'll find certain key documents that will refer to other documents. And so then you'll go and look for those documents. And so it'll be a very interesting process. And so either way, I think if that's what they're doing it for, I don't think it's going to work. And I think people are going to be going through these for a long time, painting a story, painting a picture, and ultimately we'll finally get to see, and more importantly, the survivors will get to see. You know, the thing that struck me the most hearing from the survivors is many of them don't know what happened, right?

1:11:44They know what happened to themselves, but they don't know the full picture. They don't know the full picture of what was going on and who was involved and how big this was, who financed this and who covered this up and who allowed this to happen and who was protected, et cetera, and who are all the other people involved. And so they want answers for themselves because they want to know what was that and what happened. I know what happened to me, but I need to know what this monster was that I was a part of. And so I think that in addition to the stories that people are going to be talking about, these isolated stories, I think what's really going to come out ultimately is the full picture.

1:12:24And once they turn all of that over, hopefully we'll finally start to get answers about what that picture is.

1:12:32Popok:Yeah, totally agree with all of that. Again, we can't allow, you know, we do. We in our audience can walk and chew gum at the same time. And so we need to continue to follow these stories and not let them off the hook, not let fatigue set in like, oh, Epstein again. Yeah, Epstein again, because we have survivors and victims and people that have to be brought to justice. And it's going to be done on this watch, on our watch. And we appreciate our audience for bringing the public outrage and outcry. And it works. It works. I assure you that if there was not a Midas touch, if there was not a legal AF, if we didn't have the drill down focus that we bring to stories and even sometimes break the stories and didn't have the audience, which gives us the street cred and the power.

1:13:28When you link 6 million people together, 7 million when you add Legal AF together, and we're all vibrating on the same frequency, and we're speaking in one voice, at least on these major issues,

1:13:43Popok:it has an impact. We are bending metal. We are bending Donald Trump to our will, not on every issue, not at every moment, not in the maybe not at the velocity that we would like, but it is working. And as is the ice underneath him gets, no pun intended, thinner and thinner and thinner, he will eventually drop through. There's only so many people you can throw under a bus. How big is this bus that Donald Trump is using? I mean, there's only so many aides you can fire. There's only so many people you can blame. This, unfortunately, is not the last Alex Brettty that this administration will have blood on its hands for, or that it'll ask for any good.

1:14:25Popok:It just won't be. There is going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that have been disappeared, if not thousands, without due process, without a writ of habeas corpus in dark, dank detention centers who die in custody, who are abused, who die on the streets in First Amendment protests. This is not the last First Amendment protest against the Trump administration. This is, we are in progress, right? This opposition is televised, is body cammed, is videoed, is on YouTube. And we see it because we're so close to our audience. You know, when a status quo is on the streets of Minnesota, one degree and minus one degree weather surrounded by other patriots and Americans reporting guerrilla style from the streets.

1:15:19Popok:We see how our audience is responding to that and saying, we are with you. What else can we do? And wait till the spring rolls around and there are another hands-off, no King's Day, law day, 5501 protests. You think the last round at 5 and 10 million? That was nothing. What do you see the next round as we get closer to the midterms? And so there is a importance. This is not, I guess is what I'm trying to say, is this is not wasted time for people on YouTube in case your family gives you grief. If you haven't been able to get them over here, this is not wasted time on YouTube, okay? This is not like a cat video or some sort of crazy dance craze on TikTok, okay?

1:16:06Popok:This is important that we are here together in chat, in community, in postings, you learning from us and us learning from you. And together, that power that comes from 6 million and more, because there's people that aren't subscribed, so to speak, double, triple those numbers. It's a big number against an administration that, frankly, barely won the presidency. Popak, some of us actually like cat videos, okay? No, I'm kidding. You know, the thing that struck me about Minnesota in terms of numbers is that there's so many people out on the streets and it's below zero. I mean, it is frigid, freezing.

1:16:54it's it's there i saw i saw today about 10 people have died in new york from being exposed to the cold and these are people who are out there for hours and hours and hours to protest and that says something to me and when the weather when the when the frost chills and the weather gets better i agree with you we are going to see numbers like we've never seen before it's perfect timing with

1:17:18Popok:the midterms and i'm glad everybody's here karen i'm glad you're here more importantly i'm glad that you and I got to spend some quality time together since I left New York. That's becoming rare. You saw my wife again. You hadn't actually been in the same room with my wife in about five years. It was great. And you spent quality time as Aunt KFA with our daughter, Francesca. Do you want to talk about the boat, the lawsuit? Oh, crap. I'm like signing off. Okay. Sorry, folks. Yeah. So a bunch of... You want to do it? You do it. You start it. No, no, no. I know you. I know you so much now that I know when you're not pivoting to the next topic.

1:17:55Right. Right, everybody.

1:17:57Popok:All right. So, look, we've got what we expected, Karen, right? You've got 100 people that have been disappeared permanently by the Trump administration in Caribbean, you know, executions, in boat strikes, you know. And using that term turns me off because it's like it minimizes what's happened. You mean the violation of constitutional and international rights of people without any due process because Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump decided to push a button along with Marco Rubio? I mean, that is, it's not a boat strike. It's taking away someone's life. They were, they're not all or any, as far as I know, drug smugglers.

1:18:38Popok:They certainly weren't smuggling fentanyl in the middle of the Caribbean. and two Trinidadian men who were fishermen and their families for the estates of these deceased men filed in the District of Massachusetts under a death on the high seas laws and international law for civil, these are civil cases, to obtain justice in the form of compensation for it. And it's the first of many. The case just started, so there's no injunction hearing we won't be talking about. It's a case that the government is going to have to respond to. And what are they going to do, come forward with evidence that these two Trinidadians were smuggling drugs?

1:19:18Popok:I doubt it. There'll probably be a secret settlement that they'll try to do and quietly put this away. But I expect many of the hundred that have been killed will come forward, maybe with these lawyers that are representing them, and they should. But this is, again, this is the crack in the glass ceiling of cases that we're going to start seeing, as I said at the top of this podcast, against the Trump administration and its violation of civil liberties and civil rights, international law, and the Constitution. because we just got the first wave of like 500 cases, 700 cases. But this next wave of cases off of the things that we're seeing, every time we see somebody blinded, beaten, maimed, tortured, or killed by an ICE office, there's going to be a lawsuit, or Border Patrol, or National Guard, there's going to be a lawsuit behind it, following it.

1:20:11Popok:And then we'll follow those and bring attention to that, right? Yeah, and what I like about this lawsuit is it's going to really, I think, shine a bright light on the pretext that Trump administration uses to justify these things, right? It's the war on drugs. So we have to, drugs are killing Americans. So we have to do this on this war on drugs, right? Well, on the one hand, that's how they also justified the Maduro arrest, right, because of that. But then they pardon the president of Honduras, who was actually convicted of smuggling drugs. And I think the fact that this is all pretextual and this has nothing to do with drugs, I think is going to all come out through these lawsuits, through discovery, unless they settle, of course.

1:20:58And I do think that it's great that the families are bringing this. And look, the complaint brought by the ACLU that the families are bringing, it talked about how these were fishermen and these weren't drug smugglers and how, you know, what nice people these were and they were just minding their own business. And you can't just go and blow up a boat because you want to. We're not at war. These were civilians. and the fact of the matter is the legal commentary around this that I thought was so interesting was look not only is this illegal not only can you not do this this is a premeditated intentional uh you know strike of of a of a of a boat um even if it what if you were at war even if we were at war you're still not allowed to do that against civilians and so I think it's going to be very, very hard for them to justify this as they have been trying to say, as this was targeted, designated narco-terrorists involved in bringing drugs to the US.

1:22:04And I think they're going to have a hard time justifying that when they are acting differently in other areas as well. So they're going to have a hard time justifying this. It's going to be a very interesting lawsuit through discovery. And I think you're right, because so far, we don't know a lot about, we just see the videos that the Hollywood style videos that they like to put out of a boat being struck by a bomb. And I think we're going to learn a lot through these lawsuits. So I think it's great that these are being brought.

1:22:36Popok:Absolutely. And thank you for catching that I'd forgotten to do that last story. So I'm glad everybody's here. We're running a little bit late today, folks. I appreciate everybody being here with us. Support Legal AF on YouTube, on Substack, on the podcast. And of course, this Saturday, we will be with Ben Mysalas catching you up on the week's breaking legal and political news. So until then, Karen Freiby-Nignifolo and Michael Popok, shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal AFers.

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