Legal AF Full Episode - 12/27/2025

28 Dec 2025 · 1 h 42 min · 31 chapters

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In short

Legal AF discusses alleged cover-ups and delays around the “Epstein files,” arguing the missing material is likely millions of records (not just “a million documents”), and connects this to broader claims of “vindictive prosecution” and lack of transparency by the Trump DOJ. It also covers a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting Trump’s ability to federalize/deploy the National Guard in Illinois, plus updates tied to James Comey-related litigation and other retaliation claims.

Guest backgrounds

The episode features hosts Michael Popak and Ed (the other host). No separate guest is clearly identified in the transcript as an interviewee; Popak is the co-host.

Key claims

DOJ/Trump allegedly delayed required Epstein-file production while selectively releasing or prioritizing questionable material; Trump’s Christmas post is framed as “projection” and a confession. The Supreme Court ruling is portrayed as a major check on Trump’s domestic military use, potentially pushing reliance on the Insurrection Act. The hosts claim DOJ is vindictively prosecuting critics and struggling to comply with court orders in Comey-related attorney-client communication disputes.

Notable examples

A cited email dated Oct. 30, 2020 referencing “approximately 1.2 million records” on one hard drive; Trump’s Christmas message about “one million more pages”; Supreme Court 6-3 decision on National Guard in Illinois; discussion of Daniel Richman’s lawsuit over unlawful search/seizure of communications.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Trump and Epstein Files: New Revelations

2:41 to 3:19

Explore the implications of missing documents in the Epstein investigation.

“gets even worse if that was even possible.”

Legal Updates on Trump Cases

3:19 to 4:32

Get insights on various legal challenges facing Donald Trump, including Comey's indictment.

“But as we'll discuss in this episode, I think the true number is probably closer to 5 to 10 million records, not documents.”

Supreme Court Ruling on Trump

4:32 to 4:50

Analyze the Supreme Court ruling against Trump's actions in Illinois.

“I mean, the DOJ just keeps on be clowning itself.”

The Impact of Vindictive Prosecution

4:50 to 8:13

Discuss the implications of vindictive prosecution in the Trump regime.

“Talk about that and more in this episode of Legal AF.”

Transparency in Legal Proceedings

8:13 to 9:30

Understand the importance of transparency in legal cases involving the Trump administration.

“We'll talk about several of the cases today.”

Document Production Red Flags

9:30 to 14:02

Examine the challenges and irregularities in document production related to Trump cases.

“You know, all those people who go on Fox News, which I call state regime media, you know how like Todd Blanche and Kristi Noem and, you know, and Pam Bondi, the whole crew.”

Exploring the Volume of Records

14:02 to 16:44

The discussion focuses on the vast number of records involved in legal cases, emphasizing the complexity and time-consuming nature of document reviews.

“And it's fairly easy to go through all of this stuff.”

Understanding the Epstein and Maxwell Cases

16:44 to 19:34

Delving into the intricacies of the Epstein and Maxwell cases, the hosts discuss the importance of document production and the implications of missing records.

“Yeah, well, I'm going to throw that back up in just a second.”

The Government's Document Handling

19:34 to 22:20

The hosts critique the government's handling of documents and the challenges faced in the search for evidence, illustrating the complexity of legal processes.

“Within the production could be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents and pages.”

Trump's Connection to Epstein

22:20 to 27:04

Analyzing Donald Trump's statements and actions regarding Epstein, the hosts discuss the implications of his connections and the narrative he presents.

“And have they missed the million, the million pile haystack in the middle of all this searching?”
Show all 31 chapters

AI and Legal Implications

27:04 to 28:00

The discussion shifts to Trump’s views on AI and regulatory challenges, examining how his stance intertwines with legal issues and public safety.

“So you knew and you let this monster stay on the street to go after hundreds of other girls and women.”

Analyzing Trump's Legal Challenges

28:00 to 36:00

Explore the implications of Trump's actions regarding AI regulations, the Epstein case, and various legal challenges he faces.

“It will be a big and various, very dangerous problem in the future.”

Supreme Court Ruling Against Trump

40:06 to 42:00

Discuss the Supreme Court's ruling that limits Trump's authority regarding the National Guard in Illinois.

“Legal AF-ers, Michael Popak, great to spend this weekend with you, or if you're watching or listening during the week, great to spend it with you whenever you're listening or watching Legal AF.”

Understanding the Posse Comitatus Act

42:00 to 43:31

Explore the limitations imposed by the Posse Comitatus Act on military law enforcement.

“Because the statute requires an assessment of the military's ability to execute the laws, it likely applies only where the military could legally execute the law.”

Impact of Supreme Court Rulings on National Guard

43:31 to 46:22

Discussion on the Supreme Court's interpretation of National Guard deployment and its implications.

“Comes to the same conclusion that you and I always had about this through a method that, you know, we talked about it in the posse comitatus framework.”

Kavanaugh's Controversial Concurrence

46:22 to 51:48

Analysis of Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence and its potential effects on future crises.

“But these have defined terms or they're becoming defined terms within these various statutes.”

Racial Profiling Concerns in Recent Rulings

51:48 to 56:00

Examination of the implications of Kavanaugh's decisions on racial profiling and immigration enforcement.

“And they need to teach you more in law school, I think, about the political maneuverings really behind all of this versus this view of law as, you know, the best and brightest rise to the top.”

Kavanaugh Stops and Racial Profiling

56:00 to 56:40

Discussion on the implications of Kavanaugh's rulings on racial profiling.

“Because he didn't like that it was being called Kavanaugh stops.”

Donald Trump's Legal Maneuvering

56:40 to 58:09

Analyzing Trump's strategies regarding the insurrection act and the Mar-a-Lago report.

“She literally says, I'm going to give until February to allow all parties, including those that are frequent, that were dismissed, because she dismissed them, to intervene in the case.”

Delays in Legal Proceedings

58:09 to 1:01:30

The pattern of delay in Trump's legal issues and its implications.

“This is the weaponization of the pardon power.”

Abrego Garcia Case Analysis

1:04:55 to 1:10:01

In-depth discussion of the Abrego Garcia case and its implications.

“Remember, there's two things going on here.”

Asylum and Due Process for Abrego Garcia

1:10:01 to 1:13:29

Discussion on the asylum case of Abrego Garcia and the treatment by the DOJ.

“Just deport him to Costa Rica, deport him to Mexico, deport him.”

Court Rulings and Vindictive Prosecution

1:13:30 to 1:17:16

Exploration of court rulings concerning vindictive prosecution and its implications.

“who looks at the evidence and says, I'm not keeping this guy in prison based on this flimsy case of yours with these flimsy witnesses I don't even believe who are all corrupted by a desire to get out of jail themselves.”

DOJ's Corruption and Mismanagement

1:17:17 to 1:22:55

Analysis of the DOJ's actions and their implications surrounding the Comey case.

“requiring her or upholding her order, pardon me, to facilitate the return from El Salvador, requiring the government to do that.”

Unlawful Indictment and Judge's Ruling

1:24:03 to 1:25:50

Discussion on the issues behind the Comey indictment and the ruling on unlawful search.

“And so the federal judge made this ruling saying, FBI agent, you unlawfully got these records.”

Government's Compliance Challenges

1:25:50 to 1:27:38

Examination of the DOJ's struggles to comply with the judge's order regarding document return.

“So as Popak and I said before, you know, having had experience with cases like this, these documents are likely in a folder somewhere on your server, right?”

Implications of Lindsey Halligan's Actions

1:27:38 to 1:29:22

Analysis of Halligan's representation and the legal ramifications of her signature on documents.

“Not even interim for which she was disqualified from being.”

Judge's Clarification on Document Handling

1:29:22 to 1:31:29

Clarification from the judge on the responsibilities regarding document handling and return.

“lawyer for James Comey, who was subjected to an unconstitutional illegal search and seizure.”

Mark Zaid's Role in National Security Cases

1:31:29 to 1:36:48

Profile of Mark Zaid's representational work for whistleblowers in national security.

“So don't tell me about you're having trouble and you need more time.”

Legal Challenges Against Trump Administration

1:36:48 to 1:38:07

Discussion on the legal hurdles faced by the Trump administration regarding national security and attorney-client issues.

“But if you don't have the Mark Zades in the world, then you don't get these people with proper counsel, aggressive, successful counsel, into federal courts.”

National Security and Legal Representation

1:38:07 to 1:39:09

Explore the challenges faced by lawyers in national security cases and the implications for due process.

“intelligence community with a memo in March.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

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2:12Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. That's GoFundMe.com. GoFundMe.com. This podcast is supported by GoFundMe. For everyone who solves crime from their couch, knows more about forensics than their own job and has trust issues with small town sheriffs. Amazon Music's millions of podcast episodes are calling. Just download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite true crime podcasts ad free included with Prime. Donald Trump's cover up of the Epstein files gets even worse if that was even possible. We're now learning that there were over a million documents that have not been produced by the Southern District of New York to the Department of Justice or the Southern District of New York wanted to produce them, but the DOJ was rejecting them.

3:02And now Trump and the DOJ says, aha, it's going to take many, many more weeks now to go through the Epstein files. And it should be noted, the Midas Touch Network was the first to break the story that there were one million records missing. Within 12 hours thereafter, the DOJ and Donald Trump confessed to the 1 million missing records. But as we'll discuss in this episode, I think the true number is probably closer to 5 to 10 million records, not documents. And we'll explain how that is. You had a massive United States Supreme Court ruling this week against Donald Trump, ruling that his National Guard invasion of Illinois was unconstitutional, violated the law.

3:44Michael Popak and I will break that down. You also have an update related to James Comey's indictment, where again, you know, the indictment against Comey was dismissed. But the key witness, Comey's lawyer is a guy named Daniel Richman, who filed a lawsuit against the DOJ for an unlawful search and seizure of his attorney client communications with Comey. The DOJ was ordered to produce and delete Richmond's documents from their servers and to produce Richmond's communications back to Richmond. But the DOJ wrote an emergency motion the other day saying they lack the sufficient technically qualified government personnel in Washington, D.C.

4:27and the surrounding area this week or next week to be in compliance with the court's order. I mean, the DOJ just keeps on be clowning itself. We'll go over that. And then we'll talk about additional topics like a national security clearance being revoked from some top lawyers in court saying, Trump regime, you can't be doing this in retaliation because you don't like the people or their critics of you. Talk about that and more in this episode of Legal AF. Michael Popak, how are you, sir? Oh, I love this period between Christmas and New Year's with you and our audience. We have so much to talk about.

5:03One thing we didn't have on that list, which we will add, which is we're one major giant leap closer to a federal judge ruling that the Trump Department of Justice is vindictively prosecuting somebody to allow for the dismissal of their criminal indictment. The person's name happens to be Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who's had a pretty good week in a couple of courts. Major development there, but also has a cascading impact, domino effect, on things like the other vindictive prosecutions Donald Trump is currently going after, like James Comey, who we'll talk about, Letitia James, the York Attorney General, Adam Schiff, and Senator of California, Lisa Cook eventually, maybe, sort of, kind of.

5:45And I have my own working theory about many of these indictments, which Donald Trump, I'll share now, which is that Donald Trump has no real interest. He's actually bored by the process of an actual proper good faith indictment leading to some sort of conviction of his political critic. All he cares about is naming and shaming. In fact, he says it out loud in the Epstein files matter. This is how he, when we get into that segment, he's the charade that there is any separation between the Department of Justice, which is completely captured by Donald Trump as its chief legal officer, and Donald Trump, you know, where he says, well, I'm going to be on my social media account for Donald Trump and give directions to the Department of Justice.

6:30We had reporting just a couple of days ago that Trump's White House took over the Department of Justice's social media accounts in order to immediately, in real time, clear Donald Trump minute investigations of any wrongdoing or corrupt act every time his name shows up or a photo shows up in the Epstein release. How they can conduct, how, does anybody think that Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, Todd Blanch, FBI, DOJ could clear anything within an hour or two? It would take months or years to clear Donald Trump. And if they're clearing Donald Trump, why aren't they clearing anybody else? Why aren't they clearing Bill Clinton?

7:10Or why aren't they clearing thousands of other people that are in there. No, they're just clearing Trump. And now we know why they're clearing him, because Trump's writing the social media posts for the Department of Justice. And all we saw, and when we get to that segment in a minute, is this naming and shaming attitude. He literally said, we should just name them and shame them. Well, that's not appropriate under the Department of Justice manual, the principles of federal prosecution. That's not how the Department of justice works. And that plays into the hands of everybody who's going to argue that there's vindictive prosecution.

7:46So once again, Donald Trump manufacturing evidence that'll be used against him and his Department of Justice in courts of law. One last ticker or counter that I'm keeping track of, as you are for Legal AF, we're up to 500 lawsuits against the Trump administration in 11 months. 500, most of them successful. And that is doing a good job of holding Donald Trump back. We'll talk about several of the cases today. While in the election side, the politics side of our podcast, while the Democrats in the House and the Senate get their groove back about how to beat him and shellac Donald Trump and the Republicans in the midterms.

8:33And aren't we happy to say that we're almost at the 2026 year turning in the midterms? They seem so far away when he was busy issuing 200 executive orders back almost a year ago. But now it's right around the corner. And that's all you and I can think about is the midterms and how we return the House and the Senate to the Democrats and separation of powers and checks and balance to the American people. When we talk about the Abrego Garcia case later in this episode, what I think is going to be an important thing to mention, and we'll highlight it here, is just this idea of transparency. And what the federal judge and Abrego Garcia is really ordering is either be transparent, Trump regime, or dismiss this case, right?

9:17And this is just a theme that pervades this Trump regime because they engage in criminality and scams and treason and traitorous behavior. And then they want to cover it up. And then the cover up gets worse and worse and worse. And the American people are like, we're not stupid. Like we see what you're doing here. And so it's just an interesting thing that in the Abrego Garcia case, what you have Judge Crenshaw Jr., the judge from the Middle District of Tennessee, basically saying is, is, look, there is a burden shifting analysis that the courts do that Abregos put forward evidence that there was a vindictive prosecution against him by the Trump regime.

9:55But look, you can rebut it. You can rebut it. You know, all those people who go on Fox News, which I call state regime media, you know how like Todd Blanche and Kristi Noem and, you know, and Pam Bondi, the whole crew. Okay. So if you think it's not vindictive, have them show up in court. We're going to cancel the trial. We'll do an evidentiary hearing and you can have them explain themselves. And if they don't rebut the presumption, what else am I going to do? So they could show up in open court and testify or they can run. And I think that's the right framing of all of these things because you have the Trump regime constantly hiding, doing things in the dark.

10:33Same thing with the Trump GOP, right? Whenever they try to push forward these disastrous budget bills, whatever. They always do it at like 1 a.m. or 3 a.m., hoping nobody is looking. And on the other hand, you got people like Jack Smith who are like, can I testify publicly, please? Like, I want to let the world know unlimited time. Let me speak to the American people. House, Senate, anybody. By the way, even like last year, a year and a half ago, this guy's been in the news a lot more lately. Hunter Biden. Remember Hunter Biden even showed up before the House? He's like, I'm here to testify. You want me?

11:06Let's do it now. They remember Moskowitz was like, all right, let's take a vote. Who wants to question him? He's here. This is what you've always wanted. And nobody wanted to question him in public. They wanted to do it in private. Same thing with Jack Smith. They want to do it in private. Just think about it in those terms, even less about this politics or that or even the issues. Who wants to do everything in secret and private and on Fox and on regime media? And who wants to talk about things publicly and transparently? That oftentimes tells you who's right and who's wrong in these situations.

11:37Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes. So, Popak, here's the post that you referenced right here that Donald Trump posted on Christmas. This is one of Donald Trump's Christmas Day or Christmas Day messages right here, right? Now, one million more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat-inspired hoax. When do they say no more and work on election fraud, et cetera? The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our country. The radical left doesn't want people talking about Trump and Republican success.

12:18Only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein, just another witch hunt. And you think about him re-traumatizing victims here by, again, calling it a hoax and saying that this is just a witch hunt and saying that this is a Democratic thing. Let's be clear, whether it's Democrats or Republicans or independents or people from foreign countries, people from royal families, we don't care. The law said release the information by December 19th. All of it. Redact the name of the victims. Redact their face of the victims. That's it. Otherwise, everything gets released. And remember, back in February, that's when Pam Bondi said that she had everything on her desk and ready to go.

13:05Then we know from Jason Leopold's great reporting at Bloomberg that since March, there were about 1 ,000, I think it's 937 to be precise, but roundup, 1 ,000 DOJ and FBI officials who have been working around the clock, billing tens of thousands of dollars in overtime hours going through these files. So for there now to be 1 million pages, aha, suddenly discovered, you want to talk about waste, fraud, and abuse then, what were these people billing overtime hours for if they were not going through these documents? You certainly don't need 1 ,000 people to go through a few hundred thousand documents.

13:45And Popak, I'm going to toss it over to you. But that was the first red flag for me. You and I I had both been in cases and you and I back when I was litigating had been in cases together where we deal with document production cases that have hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of records. And it's fairly easy to go through all of this stuff. Yes, it's time consuming. But you and I have worked on cases with millions of records where you've had to comb through millions of just financials going through in a tedious fashion line by line to try to flag. Is this transaction suspicious?

14:22Is that transaction suspicious? Financial reports are generated on weekly, monthly, annual bases. So you compare the weekly to the monthlies. There's a lot that goes into those reviews. So one of the first red flags that I had was when they were saying this is a few hundred thousand documents to begin with. That never made sense to me because there's all of these LLCs, there's billions of dollars in money laundering and financial transactions taking place. There's co-conspirators. We now know there's at least 10, even though Kash Patel testified and said there were no Just to try the case against Maxwell would have taken up a tractor trailer worth of material electronic format.

15:01Absolutely. So I was going through these records and I saw this one right here dated October 30th, 2020. And it talks about this is exactly how you and I would talk about documents. This is when the DOJ was working in a way that made sense. Like this is my language, right, Popak? Like this is the language that we speak to each other in. Holy shit, we need a bigger boat. We'd be spending messages to each other, right? I can imagine myself sending this exact email to you. This is October 30th, 2020. Good afternoon, Ed. Good afternoon, Popak. Following up on our earlier phone conversation, a hard drive with the following production is being sent to the Southern District of New York via FedEx with the following production in the U.S.

15:42versus Epstein workspace. Then it lists the Bates numbers, as we call them, or the document labels. SDNY is the prefix. Production, P-R-O-D, 008 to 0014. 0011 has six subparts. And it says there are approximately 1.2 million records, not documents, records, currently being imaged. The images will be available in such and such a date. So, Popak, I'll toss it over to you. But I saw that document and I said, that makes sense to me. And that's on just one hard drive. And what about production 001 to 007? Also, was there 0015 to 0030? I don't know. That's just the workspace, meaning the electronic discovery tool that's being used in USA versus Epstein.

16:26What about USA v. Maxwell? What about the Southern District of Florida? What about the civil cases? What about the Treasury Department? And so when I say there's got to be at least 5 million, 10 million, 15 million records, that makes sense to me based on cases like this. Not a few hundred thousand. I'll toss it over to you. Yeah, well, I'm going to throw that back up in just a second. But you're totally right. Because when Pam Bondi said, we thought you and I, our eyebrows often go up around the same time. When Pam Bondi said, files are on my desk. We're like, the files are on your desk. You and I have been involved with, you know, back in the day before electronic discovery, when I started my career, we used to have file rooms, war rooms with just paper boxes filled with documents, you know, that you'd have to somehow organize in a case of this size.

17:17Now, documents have gotten more voluminous in cases, not less with digital and electronic. And so things end up on gigabytes and terabytes and on thumb drives and on optical servers and all sorts of things. So we were like, how are they defining the Epstein files? The Epstein files should be everything that's in the executive branch, never in the legislative branch. Everything in the executive branch from its Department of Justice and all the cases that it tried and prosecutor. You can't try the Maxwell case as Maureen Comey, James Comey daughter did, and get a five count conviction on child sex trafficking for a 20 year sentence with a couple of scraps of paper.

18:02There's binders. There's witness binders, electronic format or otherwise. There's documents. There's the results of search warrants and subpoenas and all sorts of things in and around Epstein and Maxwell's and others. We know it because there is a control pile that you and I often refer to. I call it the control pile. It's the keep the government honest pile. It's the stuff that we receive, that the Oversight Committee and other committees received by subpoena to the Epstein estate, who has his email inboxes from 2007. Remember all the stuff you and I did? Lots of hot, reminding our audience, lots of hot takes, lots of analysis about, look at this email exchange from 2007 between Maxwell and Epstein and how this puts a lie to her testimony to Todd Blanche that we've seen in video.

18:54Okay. So we have a control pile. Like you'd think the government would say, we better find at least that and produce that. And then you find the email. Put it back up on the screen for a minute. I want to make two comments about the email. Why is anything redacted in that email? The only thing that's supposed to be redacted is to protect the identity of victims, not government workers and contractors. Why? I should know who Ed Tyrell is writing to right now, right? Lack of transparency. Why does Ed Tyrell not get redacted? Poor Ed Tyrell. Contractor. Ed Tyrell, the contractor gets redacted, but not Ed Tyrell.

19:34was was the contractor a sexual abuse victim i mean i only partially jest and then you've got the bottom and then the way that's organized those are giant think of a we used to call them red welds these open red folders that you had subfolders in these are giant electronic productions that were made pursuant to the government's obligation under a law a series of laws we call brady it's brady material they had to make a series of productions in the maxwell case This was production one. This was production eight. Within the production could be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents and pages.

20:12So I don't want people to be fooled like, well, there's only eight volumes. No, each volume could be the size of a football field filled with documents. And that's what you spotted when this guy's saying 1.2 million. It's not just the 1.2 million. And then Donald Trump's Department of Justice takes credit for the sleuthing done by you and Midas and says, we've just uncovered over a million more documents. No, you read Ben Misalas' social media feed where he found a document in your own production that indicates that you got a bigger problem. And now we're into the world of the cockroach theory.

20:48And you know the cockroach theory, Ben. You know, if you see a cockroach in your kitchen, you don't have one cockroach. You have 50 cockroaches. We don't just have one one million missing documents. We have, as you said, multiples of that. And now Donald Trump is telling the Department of Justice, why aren't you? Why? Done. Stop. Stop work order. Why aren't you looking for the fraudulent election? First of all, because the 0.001 % of fraud in voting is not the subject of an act of Congress that's been signed by the president that requires already two weeks late the production of the Epstein files.

21:29So we always come back to how they define the Epstein files and how they conflate things to confuse the American people. For me and for us, the Epstein files is everything in the executive branch that they have access to, including the things they've obtained from the court files, the permission from the court now, the courts to release files and grand jury material. It's the IRS. It's the Postal Service. It's the money trail. It's the pictures in the Epstein safe that Michael Wolff, sorry, yeah, that Michael Wolff, the reporter, has seen. It's the results of search warrants. It's all of that.

22:09It's the subpoenas to Chase and other banks. Where is all of that? And right, talk about theft of honest service. They were working apparently from March, April, and May, round the clock in multiple shifts, morning, noon, and night, searching already through documents. And yet they are still searching. And have they missed the million, the million pile haystack in the middle of all this searching? And then at the same time, it's not the needle in the haystack. It's the biggest. What document could be bigger than the SDNY production in USA v. Epstein? Like if you were going through the USA v. Epstein, you're not aware of that.

22:48Why don't you ask the people who litigated USA v. Epstein for their freaking document? Because no, but well, they fired her, Maureen Kobe, but the, the, because you and I have done, because this is what you got to do to cut your teeth as a lawyer. The first couple of years, and if you're in a major law firm like I was too, you got to do document production. It sounds incredibly tedious, but you cut your teeth on it and you learn. My first business trip as a young lawyer was to go to Detroit, Michigan in February, to go sit in a room at a major accounting firm to make sure the boxes were all there that we needed for a production.

23:23And then when I was a fourth year, I got sent to California all summer to go supervise an entire team of paralegals for a healthcare company in California because a federal judge was fining that healthcare company$5 ,000 a day for late production in a civil case because they were screwing around with it and they needed somebody like me who was organized, even as a fifth year, to go out there and like, and like make sure this got fixed. And so, but here the Department of Justice doesn't give a crap. They're, they're senior people that know how to do electronic discovery and make a list. Like you and I would sit in a room and go, all right, let's, let's look big picture.

24:04What, where are the piles of things we know exist from the public record? The Epstein file in Florida, in New York, the Maxwell, New York, the this, the that, the IRS, the that, go to every one of these places and go get the files from these records custodians. No one's doing that. They're doing this half-assed. They got to wait for Ben Micellis to tell them they're missing a million files, you know, until you find the next document that says it's the next million. Now, here's the other thing that I didn't want to leave this Epstein story without putting up on the screen, too. It's the Christmas, talk about the smoke clearing from Trump's Christmas in America.

24:43God. So he puts this up. You guys repost it also. And talk about a confessional. This is Projection 101. Everybody in notes tonight, you tell me when we've now verged into projection, where he's talking about himself, but he's blaming other people. Merry Christmas to all, including the many sleazebacks who love Jeffrey Epstein. gave him bundles of money, okay, went to his island. Well, I don't know about going to the island, but there's at least eight different trips on Air Epstein with Donald Trump, including with his kids, attended his parties. How many videos and pictures do we have to see of Donald Trump at, put it back up because I don't have it in front of me.

25:29Attended his parties. How many pictures do we have to see of them attending parties and thought he was the greatest guy on the earth? Oh, you mean like the guy that said in an interview that he was a terrific guy? for the New York Magazine, Donald Trump about Epstein, only to drop him like a dog when things got too hot or somebody was running for the presidency. Falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him. Projection, projection, projection. Didn't know him, yes, and he was a disgusting person. This is Donald Trump. This is his confessional. And then blame, of course, President Donald Trump, who did drop Epstein long before it became fashionable, right, over a land deal.

26:07And here's the thing. We can go back to me now for this. Here's the thing that always gets lost in the shuffle, and I don't want it to, about Donald Trump. Because there's no other way to take his revisionist history than he enabled a child sex trafficker to continue to operate as a monster and a predator on the street without doing anything about it. There's no other way to interpret Donald Trump's inadvertent confessional where he says, I knew he was a sleazebag. I knew he was taking people from my spa, like Virginia Jeffrey. I knew he was basically using the Mar-a-Lago as a predator hunting ground.

26:49And that's why I, now here's where he should be saying, and that's why I turned him into the officials. And that's why I reported him to the police or law enforcement. And that, no, and that's why I canned him from a membership at Mar-a-Lago he never had. That's it. So you knew and you let this monster stay on the street to go after hundreds of other girls and women. And that's OK with everybody in Trump MAGA world. That always gets lost in the reporting that he's effectively admitted. It's one or the other. He either knew about it and didn't say anything about it, allowing him to continue when he should have been a first He should have been a first responder in that regard.

Read the full transcript

27:33Or he participated in it. I don't know which it is, but it's one of the two things. Instead, he posts messages like this. Remember this one back from January 9th of 2024? This is what the Democrats do to their Republican opponent who's leading them a lot in the polls. This is AI, and it's very dangerous for our country. I was never on Epstein's plane or at his stupid island. strong laws ought to be developed against AI. It will be a big and various, very dangerous problem in the future. Just taking the latter point right there. Trump is the one preventing any regulations and laws on AI to deal with this right now.

28:12And Trump wants there to be federal preemption that has zero regulation to replace state laws that are actually trying to grapple with AI. That's not the main point. What was the fake? That photo of Eric and Ivanka with Trump on the plane is not fake. Look, look at the email from the federal prosecutors. January 8th, 2020, for your situational awareness, wanted to let you know the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported or that we were aware, including during the period we would expect to charge in the Maxwell case.

28:53So look, when you're saying that Epstein is a hoax, when you say the 2020 election is the hoax, when you say Russia, Russia, Russia is a hoax, when you say as Donald Trump COVID is a democratic hoax, okay, this was the line of questioning that was done by E. Jean Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, in the cross exam of Donald Trump during the deposition, where she goes, oh, you said the 2020 election's a hoax? Got it. You're saying that any involvement between you and Russia is a hoax? Got it. You're saying that COVID is a democratic hoax in order to hurt you? So you're saying those things are hoaxes.

29:31So now you're saying that E. Jean Carroll's a hoax? Yeah. You're saying that the accusation that you had an affair with Stormy Daniels is a hoax? Got it. Okay, so your definition of a hoax are things that are true. You know, and it was a great line of questioning. And it's just so true here as well that he's saying that all these things are hoaxes. And here's the other point that they're either doing intentionally or incompetently or maliciously or what have you. Midas Touch also broke the story about this letter that was purportedly sent by Epstein to Larry Nassar that was postmarked after Epstein's death, but sent before Epstein died allegedly by suicide.

30:12The letter was found in the prison of where Epstein was. And it has indicia based on emails that were sent, that were obtained by the Bureau of Prisons of 2023 as being something that the FBI, let's just put it this way. They were concerned enough about that they sent it to a lab for a handwriting analysis and nobody's ever seen the results of the handwriting analysis in that period. Regardless of what your view is on this document or not, except what the Trump says, assume arguendo for the sake of argument that they're saying that's a fabricated document, it's a fake. Just assume that argument.

30:50So of all of the documents, as you and I are talking about, Popak, if you have the haystack, all the important documents that should have been released on December 19th, right, the witness statements, the FBI statements, the bank records, all that stuff, which you're claiming you just now found. So again, if you even take their argument as true, right, Popak, then they're saying we've prioritized with all of our resources that we've had, thousands of lawyers and FBI agents, tens of thousands of overtime hours, we've prioritized fabricated documents. We push those ones out first. And then it's like, well, then why did you do that?

31:29Well, are you trying to, and just think about it from a victim's perspective, without any explanation or notes or whatever, you're just pushing out the fake documents first and all that stuff. Unless your goal is to try to say, look, we can't trust anything in this files. I guess the whole files must be, and there's part of that, no matter what side you're on, it gets, it's bad, you know, regardless, Popak. And that's how I think I view that. Let me just, on that one last, I know we're going to take our great break at this moment, but let me just say one thing about that. Because there was a lot of, should we report on it?

32:06Is it fake? Is it not fake? Listen, I don't know whether it is or it isn't, but even in the words of the Department of Justice with their insta investigation, okay, even they used words that were quite curious in their social media posting, which we now know from Axios, is controlled by the White House. It doesn't say that the question document expert, that's what we call somebody who does forgeries, has determined beyond a reasonable doubt that this is not his handwriting. Jeffrey, somebody took the time, apparently, to take a blue pen in handwriting that looks awfully like things we've seen of Jeffrey Epstein, and write to a guy who is in jail for sexually assaulting and molesting the women's Olympic gymnastics team, who, yes, he was friends with and pen pals with.

32:58Take time to do it while the guy is either hanging in his jail cell or near or near that time, seal it in an envelope, leave it in the dead letter, no pun intended, of the office of the correctional facility in New York, mail it, have it returned in order to screw Donald Trump. This reminds me a lot, by the way, of page 233 of volume two of the Epstein birthday book, where everybody in the book has effectively validated the authenticity of their birthday submission, except page 233, somebody 30 years ago put in a card on behalf of Donald Trump that was obscene and made him look bad. Right. So we're back to the every conspiracy is really true that you just brought up before.

33:42With this one, when they use the language about the handwriting, they didn't say, as I said, definitively, emphatically. They said, it's likely not Epstein's handwriting. You know, to go from likely not to this is a scandalous fake, which was at the top of it in all Trump caps, to then you look below and you're like, why is it a fake? It's likely not. Where is the report? You and I have done fake document cases. I have, you have, I'm sure. You get former FBI guys, you know, and others from Quantico, and, you know, they're all running around as experts because you get a fake will, a fake this, a fake document, a fake board resolution, whatever.

34:27But where is it? No, so we're watching in real time Donald Trump clearing himself of any wrongdoing while they release pictures of like a half-naked Bill Clinton in a hot tub, which again is what you're saying. Undermine what have we watched with Donald Trump from the beginning? Undermine people's belief in the veracity of a process, undermine the criminal justice system, undermine the judges, make everybody think twice. Everything's a conspiracy. Everything's a hoax, right? Which undermines the credibility of the pillars of our society and of our constitutional republic. And it's just, we're seeing that exact same thing projected onto the Epstein files.

35:11You can't trust anything in the Epstein files. Look at this fake letter from Larry Nassar, maybe this, that, you know everything's fake about me and so that his supporters which are dwindling i'm not sure who exactly is still his his target audience here as uh based on recent polling uh is is everybody just throws their hands up and goes oh it's a big it's a big mess it hurts my head who can figure any of this out that's the whole goal of everything and it's 1984 orwellian couldn't even have gone this far, which is just war is peace and up is down, left is right. It is. And literally war is peace, right?

35:49Donald Trump using the line like he wants Nobel peace prizes for actually creating more wars across the world than ever before. So big segment we just did there. We covered a lot. We'll be right back. Reminder, make sure you check out Popat's law firm. There are a lot of legal AF-ers who have reached out to Popak. Don't be shy. Call 877-POPAK-AF or go to thepopakfirm.com. They've got lawyers all across the country. If you forgot that number, just go check it out in the description below. If you've been injured in a car accident, an auto accident, if you know someone who's been injured by the negligence of somebody else, sexual assault, harassment victim, wrongful death cases, medical malpractice, reach out, see if you have a case or refer people to Popak would be great as well.

36:36Popak hit 1 million subscribers on the Legal AF YouTube channel. Thanks to you. Right after that last episode, we did 1 million subscribers. Now we're on our way to 2 million subscribers. So let's, usually the hardest thing is that first million, getting to that 2 million. We're up 10 ,000 already since last week. Spread the word to everybody. And also Legal AF Substack, one of the most red Substacks out there as well on the top of the Substack charts. I couldn't be Prouder. My partner, Michael Popak on Legal AF, absolutely crushing it. All right, everybody, make sure you come back because you're not going to want to miss what we discuss next.

37:15Donald Trump losing in the United States Supreme Court. Donald Trump losing, losing, losing. We'll talk about that anymore. We'll be right back. This episode of Legal AF is brought to you by Moinkbox. Did you know four companies control over 80 % of the U.S. meat industry and that the largest share of U.S. pork is now controlled by China. These meat giants use mobster-like tactics to crush American family farms, flooding our food supply with sketchy additives and low-quality meat. So what can you do about it? Here's where Moink comes in. Featured on Shark Tank, Moink is standing up for family farms and your food security.

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40:09Great to see you. Legal AF-ers, Michael Popak, great to spend this weekend with you, or if you're watching or listening during the week, great to spend it with you whenever you're listening or watching Legal AF. We just covered the cover-up of the Epstein files. Now let's talk about the Trump regime losing big in the United States Supreme Court this week. I always talk about like the Trump years as kind of aging and dog years, because when I was thinking about our programming for this weekend's episode, I'm like, did this happen this week? Because it felt like it happened many, many weeks or months ago, but it indeed happened this week.

40:42As Kyle Cheney writes, a huge loss for the Trump administration. I call him the regime at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration lacked the authority to federalize and deploy the National Guard in Illinois, or as I say, invade Illinois. You go to the second page of this ruling. By the way, it was a six to three ruling where you had Amy Coney Barrett and you had Kavanaugh and you had Roberts side with the three liberal justices, thus the six, versus the three. dissenters. And the three dissenters, you had Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, who I think at this point are just fanboying for turning the United States into North Korea.

41:29But let's take a look at what the actual ruling says right here. We conclude the term regular forces as used in the statute invoked by Donald Trump, 12406 sub three, likely refers to the regular forces of the United States military. This interpretation means that to call the Guard into active federal service under subsection 3 of 124063, the president must be unable with the regular military to execute the laws of the United States. Because the statute requires an assessment of the military's ability to execute the laws, it likely applies only where the military could legally execute the law. Such circumstances are exceptional.

42:14Under the Posse Comitantus Act, the military is prohibited from executing the laws except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress. So before the president can federalize the National Guard under 12406 sub 3, he likely must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be unable with those forces to perform that function. At this preliminary stage, the government has failed to identify a source or authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. Now, Popak, I also believe this would apply across the board at this point, because the same logic applies whether you're in Oregon, or whether you're in Charlotte, North Carolina, or whether you're in Los Angeles.

43:05So this interpretation by the Supreme Court, and it's interesting that that's what they utilize, and I'll pass it over to you to make this ruling because to me there was so many other grounds as well from the fact that it required, like the very first sentence required coordination with the governor, and that like it was really the governor requesting it was the whole purpose of the statute. But, you know, look, this is how they interpreted it. This is how they found it. Comes to the same conclusion that you and I always had about this through a method that, you know, we talked about it in the posse comitatus framework.

43:42But what do you make of this ruling? It's a big loss for the Trump. Oh, it's a huge, huge loss. I had Rob Bonta, the attorney general for California on on the intersection, my Tuesday night show here on the Midas Touch Network. And he was very pithy, which I love about Rob A.G. Bonta when he briefs our audience. I said, what do you think this decision means in terms of all the other National Guard cases, including yours in Oregon and California? He says, they're dead. He said this should kill all of them because this is what, and now we know why they were taking a month and a half to render this decision.

44:16It didn't take a month and a half to write the four pages of the majority decision six to three, the concurrence for Kavanaugh that reads like a dissent. I want to focus on that in a minute. And the Alito-written dissent joined by Gorsuch and Thomas didn't take a month and a half to do that. It takes a month and a half to do a hundred-page decision about presidential immunity, not this. So why? Because they weren't rushed, because they knew they had the votes early on with the caucus. They knew that they had the votes to approve of what the judges were doing on the ground in the lower courts. So they weren't concerned when the Ninth Circuit a week ago said, yeah, you can't have the LA National Guard or Charles Breyer, the senior judge in San Francisco, got the troops off the ground in LA.

45:08They weren't concerned because they knew they were going to be finding that regular forces means the military. Now, here's the problem. The problem is this invites Donald Trump's use of the Insurrection Act, which is one of the limited exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act. The way our government works, he's not the commander-in-chief on domestic soil, so to speak. He has to get a delegation of authority from Congress to use, to nationalize, federalize the National Guard, the state militia, and to use these kind of troops. So you have to look to statutes and delegations of authority. Posse Comitatus Act says don't look to the military for domestic law enforcement.

45:54So that's out. Insurrection Act says, oh, you got an insurrection? The big I word that was so, what's the word I'm looking for? that was so scary that even Biden's Department of Justice didn't use it for prosecuting the 1600 or so insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol. Remember, the highest charge was seditious conspiracy, not insurrection, even though we all call it an insurrection. They call it a mob or a rebellion or whatever. But these have defined terms or they're becoming defined terms within these various statutes. So when they asked the question for further briefing, what are the regular forces.

46:34There was a split immediately. Some courts argued that regular forces meant the military, U.S. military, like the Army, combined with local law enforcement and federal security officers that like patrol ICE, right? There's a security team there. Some said, no, It's only the armed forces. And you have to look to them first. If you can, and you don't violate the Posse Comitatus Act before you call for backup and go cross sovereignty lines and snatch the National Guard away from the governor. which makes sense given how our country was cobbled together in federalism between state power and federal government power and the 10th amendment of the constitution and the federalist papers that are always get cited never thought i'd seen the federalist papers cited so much in the last year in court cases like well as alexander hamilton said or as uh you know uh marbury versus madison i've never thought we'd seen marbury versus madison as much as we have one of the leading cases from 1807, no less.

47:41So here they said they went down that road. They said, okay, we know Trump did not use the military before he grabbed the National Guard. Does he have to? And they concluded he does. And if he can, if he can't, then he can go to the National Guard because the posse combatatus blocks certain things. Alito's all up in arms in his dissent, frothing at the mouth because, well, of course there's an exception to the posse combatatus Act. It's 10 USC 12406, which says if there's an invasion or a rebellion, or you can't execute the laws without the regular forces, or with regular forces is not enough, there you go.

48:21You can use the National Guard. And six out of the nine said, no, you're wrong, Alito. That's not what that means. There has to still be a delegation from Congress, and there still has to be that analysis. Kavanaugh raises the specter in his concurrence, which I had to read twice because I thought it was a dissent. But in his footnote, he talks about the Insurrection Act. And maybe this will now lead to more army and less National Guard being called up on the streets of America. So we got that to worry about. The other thing I didn't like about Kavanaugh's decision, remember this is now, when I say remember, it's really for our audience to get a handle on where we are.

49:02in the procedure. We're not at the substance of this case. The question was, did the Seventh Circuit properly block the deployment of the National Guard in their analysis that 12406 had been violated, subsection three, yes or no? And the court said, yeah, we're not at the merits yet, which was full briefing and oral argument. We'll get there another time. But yeah, go ahead. don't let the National Guard be used by Donald Trump under this formula that he's been using. It's wrong. And they wanted to tell him it's wrong now. But there's still going to be a substantive case a year from now or whenever.

49:42And Kavanaugh, even if he leaves, it may still just be a five to four decision with Amy Coney Barrett sliding over with Justice Roberts to form the six with Kavanaugh to form the six person block. Here's what Kavanaugh says, which pissed the shit out of me. That's a legal term, undefined. He starts trolling the American people and rewriting history about January 6th. So he says, well, the court's legal interpretation is on page five of his dissent. As I understand it, could lead to potentially significant implications for future crises. I'm like, all right, go ahead. Consider a hypothetical. I'm but you got me, go.

50:21Suppose a mob rapidly gathers outside the US courthouse in Philadelphia. So now we're just substituting the Capitol and now a federal courthouse for this doomsday scenario in response to an unpopular decision or to influence the outcome of a pending matter. Oh, you mean to try to stop the certification of an election? Okay, go ahead. Suppose also that the mob is threatening to storm the courthouse Capitol and attack the federal judges, the legislators and their staff and to damage or burn down the building. Check, check, check. Thereby preventing the execution of federal law. Suppose further the U.S.

50:57military cannot readily mobilize to deploy to the site in time or the commander in chief is sitting at a dining room table watching the Capitol burn, not authorizing the National Guard nor the army to protect the Capitol. There's the rewrite of history about this particular president. Suppose further the U.S. military cannot readily mobilize to deploy, that the local police and federal security officers are outnumbered. Oh, you mean like the Metro Police and the Capitol Police who couldn't hold the line, who are outmatched? And the president wants to federalize the National Guard units to protect the courthouse, unlike what Donald Trump did, which we know from the Jan 6th committee.

51:34Under the court's order, even in those circumstances, he couldn't federalize. So see, Democrats, we're just going to have another Jan 6th again, and then you'll want the National Guard with some president of yours, and you won't have it. Why is this necessary? This analysis, Ben, in the middle of his concurrence, where he has to show his, I'm going to answer the question, where he's going to show his, he's got to show his bona fides and his fidelity and loyalty to the fearless leader, Donald Trump, in the middle of his joining the majority against Donald Trump. It's one of the disappointing reflections that you have after you graduate law school, And you start to realize that, you know, these Supreme Court justices who your law professors and others put on a pedestal are actually horrible people and also not all that bright.

52:24And they need to teach you more in law school, I think, about the political maneuverings really behind all of this versus this view of law as, you know, the best and brightest rise to the top. Because Justice Kavanaugh did something else as well in that footnote that you referenced. He tries to act like he didn't just make a ruling that permits racial profiling. And so he just made a ruling. I mean, this was what, a month ago, two months ago, September 8th, 2025, right? In the case of Kristi Noem versus Pedro Vasquez, which was all about can ICE and Border Patrol racially profile Hispanics? American citizens too.

53:06If you have brown skin and you live in a certain area, can you be racially profiled and detained? I'll tell you, this issue particularly hits home for me, one just as a caring and empathetic human being who supports the Constitution and doesn't want to see anybody ever harmed or racially profiled. That's kind of first and foremost. My wife's family came here from Mexico. They live in an area in Los Angeles that is predominantly Latino. They go to restaurants and stores and places where ICE hangs out around and where racial profiling takes place. And they've been afraid to leave their home and they've been afraid to go to the gym and the churches where they prayed at and the places that they go because of this stuff.

53:57So back in September 8, 2025, Kavanaugh issued an opinion allowing for racial profiling. This was Kavanaugh's order then. To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status, the government must have reasonable suspicion. Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of circumstances. Here, those circumstances include that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area generally, that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work, that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction that do not require paperwork and therefore are especially attractive to illegal immigrants, and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.

54:58They're basically saying if you came to the United States from Mexico or Central America, regardless of your status, if you work in construction, labor, landscaping, if you work in day labor, if you work a job, you can be temporarily detained because of the way you look. That's quite literally racial profiling. Here's what Kavanaugh says in his footnote, Popak and legal AFers, though, in this decision that he goes, the Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence. Stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force.

55:38Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity. Okay. Didn't the opinion you just said in September basically say race or ethnicity that people based on coming from Mexico or Central America who do not speak English, that that's one of your factors. And so this is what he said in a matter of three to four months. You know why though? Because he didn't like that it was being called Kavanaugh stops. That's what it was being referred to. The racial profiling, it's a Kavanaugh stop. And he doesn't want to have his name as a Kavanaugh stop because it affects him personally because it's being named that way.

56:17I mean, that's why these people are so utterly pathetic. So we here on Legal AF will tell you, OK, this is what the ruling said, but we have to dig deeper. And to your point, Popak, Kavanaugh is also out there saying, OK, well, if you want to do this, Donald, there's still the Insurrection Act for you. You want to have the Army do this instead of the National Guard, then you can do it well you know yeah okay can i interrupt one second because we're not going to cover it but i want to just touch on it you know it's like the island it's like the alien canon ruling this week that a lot of media reports was like she's going to release the volume two of the mar-a-lago report finally but it's going to be in february no it's not read the order i guess why people come here the order says she's inviting two things to happen literally one donald trump come back into the case and intervene.

57:09Waiting for you. She literally says, I'm going to give until February to allow all parties, including those that are frequent, that were dismissed, because she dismissed them, to intervene in the case. Okay. He's coming back on that invitation. And secondly, she's giving time to Walt Nauta and to Carlos de Oliveira, who were the co-conspirators with Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago to file with her yet another round of papers that they already filed to argue that their constitutional rights will be violated, even though they're not subject to any criminal prosecution, if the volume two of the Mar-a-Lago report is released.

57:50So this is just justice delayed, justice denied. She'll come around in May or June or after the midterms with some ruling that'll have to be appealed to the 11th Circuit. Ultimately, she'll lose, but look what she's doing to favor Donald Trump. And that was, you know, I did a recent hot take about it. This is the weaponization of the pardon power. Donald Trump should have pardoned his co-conspirators. He's not pardoning them because he wants to be able for them to argue as his puppets in court, I'm worried about a future prosecution until you can't release volume two from Jack Smith so that the world knows what we did at Mar-a-Lago because I could be prosecuted.

58:30All he's got to do is wave a magic pardon wand like he did with the Honduran cocaine trafficking president and just absolve them. But that won't help Donald Trump block the release of the report. I forget if you and I talked about it on Legal AF a while back or if I talked about it with Harry Littman on a hot take I did with him. But I know that we've addressed on the Midas Touch Network and you have on Legal AF predicting exactly what Judge Eileen Cannon's order was going to be about releasing volume two, where we said she's going to use the discretion that's been afforded to district court judges over scheduling to set an elongated briefing schedule to say, all right, come back in February and then file briefing about whether or not I should still keep these, this volume under seal, then what there will be is there'll be an intervention, probably two or three weeks before the ruling.

59:26You don't want to cut it too close. And then what will be requested by Trump and Nauta and all of those people is then a further briefing schedule on the issue, right? And then she goes, ah, they've intervened. And now they need until May or June in order to be able to respond. Okay, I'll give them until May or June to be able to respond. So then it's extended until May or June. And then you can try to appeal that to the 11th Circuit, except federal judges have a great deal of discretion over their own scheduling matters. And then so it'll be hard for the 11th Circuit to say, you know, you know, no.

1:00:04And then it'll be delayed until it'll be delayed until then. And then there'll be briefing and then she'll probably make a ruling denying it. Then it'll be appealed to the 11th Circuit. The 11th Circuit will then, so she's now on a path though to hide this until after the midterms. My daughter graduates high school. This is a, this is put this to the end of midterms. Now here's the thing with all of Donald Trump's plans though, right? Whether it's the Epstein files, whether it's volume two, whether it's his handling of the economy, whether it's his fake peace deals, whatever it is, This has always been his strategy in life.

1:00:43Delay, delay, delay. He's always been born with a golden spoon. So he's got resources to try to wait you out, right? So he wants to delay until like, I can't deal with this anymore. That's his whole goal. But the issue is with all of these things, as you delay, delay, delay, you eventually have to confront your problems at some point in time. And in Donald Trump's past, it's why he's gone bankrupt so many times, ultimately, because when you have a small contagion and it grows into a bigger and bigger thing and it metastasizes and you don't fix it or stop it, it ends up creating a massive problem, a mega problem, a catastrophe, and then a bankruptcy and an utter destruction.

1:01:29That's his life. So when we come back, I'm going to talk about that with Michael Popak in real time, which is Abrego Garcia is a perfect example of this. There were so many opportunities, Just facilitate the guy's return, deport him anywhere other than El Salvador. And it's done. Finito. But what does Trump do? He keeps on digging and digging more and more and more. Criminal charges in Tennessee. Tries to deport the guy to Liberia. All of these things. And when the guy fights back, Trump could delay, delay, delay. But eventually you meet your judgment day. That's the thing. A reminder. Michael Popak's law firm representing a lot of legal AF-ers.

1:02:04So if you or anybody you know has been injured in a car accident, a trucking accident, victim of sexual harassment or assault, medical malpractice. If you know someone who's died in a horrible accident, it's called a wrongful death case, call 877-POPOC-AF or go to thepopocfirm.com. Go to thepopocfirm.com or call 877-POPOC-AF. Subscribe to Michael Popoc Substack. That's the Legal AF Substack. Check that out and subscribe to his YouTube channel, The Legal AF YouTube channel now on its way to 2 million subscribers. We will be right back after this quick break from our sponsors who make this show possible.

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1:04:50So check them out. The discount codes are in the description below. All right, Popak, let's talk about Abrego Garcia. Remember, there's two things going on here. There's kind of the civil injunctive constitutional violation case. That's the one taking place in Maryland before Judge Zinnis. And in federal court, she's the one who originally ordered to facilitate his return after he was sent to the El Salvador Seacott terrorist concentration camp or detention center, however you want to refer to it as. And then ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed with the federal judge facilitate the return. He was returned, but then he was returned to the Middle District of Tennessee, where he was federally prosecuted by Trump's DOJ based on a traffic stop that happened four or five years ago, where the Trump regime alleged he was driving with other migrants in a vehicle and that he was transporting them from different work sites, which the Trump regime tries to claim as human trafficking.

1:05:53He was never arrested at that stop. There was no arrest made. The highway patrol officer asked questions, let him off. And that's basically the extent of it. But they are trying to charge him based on that traffic stop. And it's been an utter disaster, the prosecution that's been taking place in the middle district of Tennessee. And I could tell you how it's a disaster, because rather than try to actually bring the case to a trial. The Trump regime has been trying to deport Abrego to various African nations that he has no attachment to. And they've been lying to both the federal judge in Tennessee, as well as the federal judge in Maryland, that Costa Rica refuses to take Abrego and Costa Rica officials said, no, no, we'll take him.

1:06:46Like we're happy to take him. And every time witnesses from the DOJ are called to testify at both proceedings, the DOJ ends up sending like very low level people who have no clue about the case. And like the evidence has shown as these people have been forced to show up to actually testify because their declarations were not believable. They would then have to like admit, and this happened like repeatedly in these different court cases, that they were basically told what to say in their declaration by DOJ lawyers in like a five minute like Google meets or like Zoom call, but they know nothing about the case.

1:07:24And they'd show up and testify. And like within five minutes, they'd be asked a few questions like, do you know anything about this? No. Like, okay, well, how'd you write your declaration? They wrote it for me. So the DOJ basically wrote your declaration and you have no clue what's going on. That's right. And then you'd have the federal judges in both cases. They don't even know how to like deal with this because if it was any other litigant, not the DOJ, They would obviously like immediately hold them in contempt and like take away these people's bar licenses or like they're just they've been very methodically, these judges, though, moving this up, moving this forward in order to have like a showdown, which is like, who's really behind this?

1:08:01Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and what can we do to deal with the issue of Abrego so he's not deported somewhere and gets killed? And what do we do with this criminal case? So the criminal case was set for trial end of January, but the judge just canceled the trial, having previously made a finding that there's sufficient evidence to raise a presumption of vindictive prosecution, meaning that the whole basis of this prosecution is to attack Abrego Garcia and retaliate against Abrego Garcia. And the federal judge has set a hearing the end of January, an evidentiary hearing for Abrego Garcia to put forward his claims of vindictive prosecution.

1:08:47Let's bring in Popak, you know, the way these cases work, it's a burden shifting analysis. Abrego's already made the showing that there's vindictive prosecution. And so what the judge has now said in Tennessee is before this case even goes to a trial, we have to determine if this is an unconstitutional vindictive prosecution. So the judge says, look, why doesn't the DOJ just make it simple? The people who were involved, Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem, whoever, they could show up, they could testify and they could rebut the presumption. But if you're just going to say wrong. There isn't a presumption.

1:09:24There's sufficient documents to show bad things happened here. So show up because you sure show up on propaganda videos on Fox, which I call state regime media and all these things. So show up or not. So Popak addressed that. But then I think there's the broader issue that you should be addressing too, if you can, for the audience, which is just this Abrego Garcia thing. If they just handled it the right way, this is a non-issue. They could have deported him anywhere at first other than El Salvador. The only order that existed was you can't bring the guy to El Salvador. So they deport him to El Salvador.

1:09:56That's unlawful. Then when you bring him back, facilitate his return, you could deport him anywhere. Just deport him to Costa Rica, deport him to Mexico, deport him. As harsh as what I'm saying is, if you're the DOJ, you have the ability to do that. They then arrest him, federally prosecute him without any evidence, put him in horrific prison conditions, make him fight that, lie that Costa Rica doesn't want him, try to deport him to small African nations, and then later say, no, no, we meant Liberia and all of these things. And now lie, send bad witnesses. So they've now, oh, Donald Trump goes and says that he has MS-13 on his knuckles.

1:10:32Pam Bondi says that he's a sex trafficker and defames him and defames his life. And now they've actually given him all of the foundations for asylum, basically. But it's like, Where does he he needs asylum from the United States government at this point. And he needs protection because of how they're treating him. So they've created all the issues to Popak. So earlier, I agree. So I agree with everything you just said. Judge, we got, as you said, there's two judges. You got the habeas corpus due process constitutional violation judge and judge sentence. We had the appearance earlier in the week, just before Christmas, of Abrego Garcia, breathing fresh air, breathing freedom in a courtroom with Judge Zinnis and to determine whether she was going to extend her block of him being deported in the middle of the night and disappeared to Liberia or Uganda or wherever else they want to punish him or retaliate against him by sending him 3 ,000 miles away from his family.

1:11:31To your point, his lawyers, there's two sets of lawyers, One of the criminal case led by people that I know, Sean Hecker, used to be Robbie Kaplan's law partner, and others and Quinn Emanuel that are handling the case in front of Judge Zinnis. They made it clear, the lawyers, to this moment of our tonight podcast, that he is willing to go today to Costa Rica, and Costa Rica is willing to accept him. and that would be the end of it. Costa Rica is a place where lots of people go who want to stay kind of close to the United States in Spanish speaking and the family can visit. He's got a U.S. wife and U.S.

1:12:12children. They can fly from Maryland to Costa Rica as opposed to Maryland to Liberia, which is where the punishment comes in. And they said they would send him to Costa Rica for people that are following this case coming in late. The government said, well, we'll let you go to Costa Rica. It's like the mob boss tactics again. But you got to confess to your crime that you didn't even get a broken tail light ticket for four years ago in Tennessee that you were trafficking humans because there were seven guys packed in a van going to a job site or whatever they were going to. And every judge that's looked at things related to Abrego Garcia, every judge, Article III judge or magistrate, has cast doubt and basically refused to accept the Department of Justice's evidence or witnesses.

1:13:03He's won everywhere. This guy is like, you know, he should have a championship belt, Abrego Garcia. They should make one for him. He wins at the United States Supreme Court, 9-0. You can't get the United States Supreme Court to come together on a lunch order. 9-0, you know, 1 o 'clock in the morning, whatever it was. He wins twice at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. He wins a dozen times with Judge Zinnis. He wins with Magistrate Judge Holmes in Tennessee, who looks at the evidence and says, I'm not keeping this guy in prison based on this flimsy case of yours with these flimsy witnesses I don't even believe who are all corrupted by a desire to get out of jail themselves.

1:13:43No. And then Judge Crenshaw, who's ruled in his favor, not yet on the vindictive prosecution, but we're getting awfully, awfully darn close. So a couple of little points here to just fill out the puzzle pieces that you put together. In October, Judge Crenshaw said, let me look at your vindictive prosecution affirmative defense. All right, what is it? there's two ways to prove it in the middle district of Tennessee actual vindictiveness like you gotta you got a smoking gun email that says fuck this guy pardon pardon my French uh we're gonna prosecute him to pay him back for driving his crazy judge Zinnis's office uh judge's courtroom and then you know like boom right there and by the way the defense thinks they have those emails that they're just waiting for this to be produced or a presumption of vindictiveness almost circumstantial evidence that's pieced together that shows it once a defendant uh makes out his burden of proving a prima facie case which is a fancy latin way of saying you got the elements present the burden as you say as you said shifts to the government to prove that they're not vindictive in the prosecution.

1:15:07See, it puts the shoe on the other foot. That's great for the defense. But in order to carry your burden in the government, you gotta have testimony. You gotta have documents. You gotta have witnesses. The testimony has to be people with knowledge. Now, this all stems from an October ruling by Judge Crenshaw in which he said, there is one piece of evidence that stands out for me and for me is awfully darn close to actual vindictive prosecution. And he pointed to a one minute clip of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's criminal defense lawyer, masquerading as the number two in the Department of Justice, who got on Laura Ingraham in an interview, which the judge was given as part of the evidence of the case.

1:15:53And we got the receipts. We're going to show you the clip right now. Todd Blanche on Ingram's show. And this is the very moment that is still referred to in current orders as the moment when the judge believes that that that Kilmer Abrego Garcia might have even gotten beyond a prima facie case into proving actual a vindictive prosecution. Let's play the clip. This case, we had a judge in Maryland tell us that, oh, no, there's not any evidence that he's a member of MS-13. You had no right to deport him. And so what should we do as a Department of Justice when a judge is accusing us of doing something wrong?

1:16:32We have an obligation to everybody, including you, to investigate it. And that's exactly what we did. And so the reason why he was returned and the facilitation that brought him back here is not a judge. It's an arrest warrant issued by a grand jury from the Mill District of Tennessee charging him with two counts of very serious charges involving nine years of smuggling aliens all over this country, from Texas to Maryland and other states. That's why he's back. And that's why the government of El Salvador agreed to bring him back. And for the judge, that was a confessional that showed actual vindictiveness.

1:17:09Zinnis rules against them, Judge Zinnis in Maryland, about habeas corpus, and she gets the 9-0 ruling in her favor from the Supreme Court, requiring her or upholding her order, pardon me, to facilitate the return from El Salvador, requiring the government to do that. The government waits two months, does it under a vindictive, so the theory goes, prosecution-based. And by the way, what he just said, just to show you the lying, corrupt Department of Justice, you and I have seen the indictment. That is not what the indictment says, that he's being arrested for nine years of trafficking. Okay? It's about one traffic stop, eight guys that are, and one 16 or 18-year-old who's in the van, and then re-looking at the file and the security tape there, or the cam, the dash cam, or whatever it is, the body cam video saying, oh, oh, this is human trafficking.

1:18:09They have nobody in the car that testifies to that. They don't have anybody in, no witnesses. This is why he was released from federal detention in Tennessee and ultimately released by Judge Zinnis from ICE detention. And he's out for the holidays pending other rulings. But that is the video. And here's, let me read to you from the order. It's a very short order, but it's powerful. What the judge did very smartly, and it was really adopting the defense's posturing, which was, judge, we not only carried our burden on a prima facie basis, we're there on actual, as you noted with the video that we just played, actual vindictive prosecution.

1:18:53If they don't put Todd Blanch on, and the reason this order came out is the government moved to quash the subpoenas for trial, to have Todd Blanch, Akash Singh, we'll talk about in a minute, Deputy Attorney General, and James McHenry, who is the principal associate Deputy Attorney General, who would have had all the knowledge of the interaction between the local prosecutor and main justice in Washington, requiring them to pick up the reins and go after Braco Garcia on purpose as payback, right? These are the people that would know it. The government says, you can't have these people. We're not going to put on these people.

1:19:33So the lawyers for Braco said, then how can you carry your burden of showing it's not vindictive prosecution? We're going to put on other people. Well, how are the other people who are not in the Department of Justice, how are you going to prove it's not vindictive prosecution by bringing Homeland Security people in? So the judge says, I got an idea. Let's cancel the criminal trial. Let's focus on the second factor of vindictive prosecution, meaning your prosecution's ability to carry your burden to prove to me that this is not actual or presumptive vindictive prosecution. You pick your own witnesses.

1:20:09You don't want to use the ones that are obviously I'm interested in, like Todd Blanche. I mean, he didn't write this, but this is implied. You pick your own. You put on who you think. But you better carry your burden at that evidentiary hearing. Because if you don't, you know where I'm going with my ruling. Here's what the judge said. He talks about the burden-shifting framework for the analysis, talks about the prima facie case, he talks about the Todd Blanche video in its own way, and he says on page two, because Abrego has already affirmatively satisfied the threshold question of whether he is entitled to a presumption that his prosecution is vindictive, His subpoenas of Blanche, McHenry, and Singh serve to support the third step of the vindictive prosecution inquiry, whether he can establish pretext and actual vindictiveness.

1:20:59But we don't have to go there because there's a second step. The government has to prove, carry its burden. Go ahead. Show me how you cover your burden, carry your burden without Blanche. I'm going to let you. So he says on page two over to page three, he said, based on this record, Abrego argues that the court could rule on his motion now without an evidentiary hearing, but that the government asserts that it can rebut the presumption. So we'll see you in January for a hearing, effectively. If you want to put on these other people, go ahead. The judge is basically casting a jaundiced eye at this, saying, I don't know how you're going to do that with these people.

1:21:39But you try. You fail, case over. You don't fail, and you carry your burden, shifts back to Abrego Garcia, and then he can try to bring on these other people to prove vindictive. Now, what came out of the record, you exposed it on Midas, is that there is a memo. We don't know exactly what it is, but it's reflected in the filing by Abrango Garcia's lawyer between Singh, who's like the, he's like the, he runs all the U.S. attorney's offices. He's the underling to probably the number seven in the Department of Justice, but he's in charge of the 93 U.S. attorney's offices. It's a 33-year-old guy who has a DUI conviction, who is elevated because he's MAGA bona fides through the Department of Justice at this top level.

1:22:28And there is a memo. We don't know what it says because there's a redaction tape over it. There is a memo or correspondence between Singh and the local prosecutor at or around the time that it looks like there's an order from them to the DOJ. We don't know what it says, but the defense knows what it says and the judge knows what it says under that black tape. And so now we're going to see what's going to happen in January. You and I will cover it carefully. Adam Klassfeld, who does a lot of work with Legal AF, with All Rise News, I think he's going to Tennessee for this particular hearing, and we'll be able to do some live reporting from the courtroom.

1:23:06I want to cover this as well, though, because I think this rounds out this episode where you see both how incompetent and corrupt the DOJ is. And it's not a matter of Democrat, Republican, independent. And it's just quite humiliating from the perspective of anyone who's worked with for against the Department of Justice that they would have to file an emergency memo like this on Christmas, that they don't have the technical capabilities of deleting records that they're required to delete by court order. So back on December 12th, a federal judge made a ruling and an order saying that the DOJ had to delete documents that it obtained between James Comey's lawyer, a guy by the name of Daniel Richmond, and Comey.

1:23:54These are what's called attorney-client privilege and attorney-work product communications between a lawyer who happens to be Comey's friend, but also his lawyer. If you recall, one of the issues, the problems with the grand jury that ultimately indicted Comey is that Lindsey Halligan brought in a FBI agent who was exposed to attorney-client communications and attorney-client information. And so the federal judge made this ruling saying, FBI agent, you unlawfully got these records. By the way, that that would have been another independent ground, I think, ultimately to dismiss the Comey indictment had the judge not ruled that Lindsay Halligan was not appointed and not qualified and not appropriate.

1:24:40She was an unlawful United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and she never should have been holding that position. She was the only person in the room. So that's what it was dismissed. But it would have been dismissed, I think, on other grounds, including that the only witness who testified got this attorney client information. So after the grand jury situation and after the case was dismissed, Daniel Richmond filed this lawsuit against the Department of Justice and said unlawful search and seizure. A federal judge on December 12th found, yes, it was an unlawful search and seizure.

1:25:10And the judge made a very basic order. DOJ, delete the documents that are attorney-client communication from your servers. return the documents to Richmond, and then you can also place another copy of the documents with the Eastern District of Virginia. And to the extent you think that there is probable cost for these records, you can go at some later time, ask the magistrate judges in Virginia for the records, but go about it in the right way. Pretty basic order, right? Delete it and then return it. Okay. Basic, basic. So as Popak and I said before, you know, having had experience with cases like this, these documents are likely in a folder somewhere on your server, right?

1:26:00And for you to delete it, this order was made on December 12th. Popak, you would highlight them, you would press delete, you would put them on a hard drive, and then you would, you know, return them, delete them, and then certify that you've deleted it. This is not a hard task. Well, for the DOJ, it was because right before Christmas, they filed a memo regarding emergency motion for partial extension of time to certify compliance. And it says the court on December 12th ordered that the petitioner's motion for return of property was granted as to the image of his personal computer that it said that in order that it be returned.

1:26:43Okay. So then on paragraph seven, they go, however, because of significant operational constraints caused by the imminent Christmas and new year's holidays, i.e. lack of sufficient technically qualified government personnel in Washington, DC for the remainder of this week and next, which make the current compliance deadline fall a mere one business day after the court's revised clarifying order, The government anticipates that it will not be able to review all electronic storage devices containing classified information, delete that information and return those devices to Richmond's council by December 29, 2025.

1:27:25And Popak, who do you think signed this document? If you guess, Lindsey Halligan. Lindsey Halligan, Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche and Lindsey Halligan. And Lindsey Halligan signed it as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Not even interim for which she was disqualified from being. She signs it as though she's the U.S. Attorney. So the precise reason why the case was dismissed against Comey, she's now representing to another federal judge begging for an extension that she and Blanche are incapable of meeting a Christmas deadline that she's the United States attorney. It's and she's not.

1:28:05She's unlawfully representing that she's the attorney. This is the craziest, craziest incompetent stuff that there is. And Popak, I'll toss it to you to comment on that and then talk briefly about what happened on the national security front as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's easy. Yeah. She's impressed. She should be prosecuted for impersonating a U.S. attorney. And there are judges that are questioning why she's continuing to show up on pleadings. And I'm also questioning why Judge Curry hasn't done more in her original order, disqualifying her, and why the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia haven't filled her spot.

1:28:38I mean, there's a lot of weird things going on. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. I will. And we'll bring it back here. I think it's even simpler than what you just said. Actually, the judge made it clear she's not requiring much deleting. So they keep talking about deleting. She said in her order, I didn't tell you to delete. I told you to make a deposit copy. I told you to return to Daniel Richmond. And the deposit copy that goes to the Eastern District of Virginia, go back to Virginia and go get a judge to give you a search warrant. And then you can search through the deposit copy. But I'm not here.

1:29:11But that's all you need to do. Instead, the Trump administration, in a series of emergency motions, shot themselves not in the foot but in the head because they confessed that they violated the Fourth Amendment of rights of Richmond, the lawyer for James Comey, who was subjected to an unconstitutional illegal search and seizure. because they said in it, she said, okay, 2017, 2020, you had a bunch of subpoenas. I'm sure you have a file, like we saw earlier in the Epstein reporting. I'm sure you have a file that says 2017 search warrant response. You got another one, 2019, 2020, right? You got them all segregated, right?

1:29:53And they had to confess, and this is during the first Trump administration, so it's on them. They had to confess, nothing segregated. She's like, what? It's all smushed together? in one place and at the same time out of the other side of your mouth you want me to make you the custodian of these documents instead of the the clerk of the eastern district of virginia so it stays with your litigation security unit or as daniel richmond's lawyer said it's like putting the hen in charge of the chicken house in other words in the famous case of hen v chicken house which is a famous lost law class you know a law case that you and i studied where yeah we're not going there.

1:30:33So she, but they keep, as you said, the law of holes, they keep digging and digging after hitting rock bottom and they're starting to dig. So they keep going back, trying to get interpretations and clarifications of plain English language in her order and also try to make her look stupid. Judge, there's classified documents. Don't we need a classified documents person to look at she said there's one classified document i'm not even sure it's classified we have public records responsibilities how do we uh destroy she says i'm not even sure these are public records and i'm not i told you don't destroy anything don't delete anything give him back his materials give him back his devices make a deposit copy stick it in the court let the future judges in virginia because she's in dc deal with whether you could ever get a proper search warrant um so I'm not making it all go back to him.

1:31:31So don't tell me about you're having trouble and you need more time. And frankly, as a very beloved judge in Miami, the late Judge Schockett wrote at a bulletin board outside of her courtroom, your bad planning is not my emergency. Because half the people that come in on emergencies, when you hear it, you're like, that's not an emergency. That's because you fucked, you effed up and you didn't like have enough people staffed or you didn't want to work over the weekend or whatever. So for them to come in and say, judge, it's the holidays. We don't have enough qualified people in Washington, DC who can handle what you want in the entirety of the Department of Justice.

1:32:14We just can't do it. Well, maybe you shouldn't let 5 ,000 people walk out the door, paralegals and lawyers in the Department of Justice and not hollow out the Department of Justice and you won't have trouble in yet another case where you need more time to produce documents. You're two weeks past the Epstein deadline. And now in a run of the mill case involving one Blu-ray disc, apparently of material, they can't find enough people who are willing to work for the Department of Justice over the weekend. Here's what the judge says about their admission, about the court. It's on page five of her order.

1:32:54The court promptly granted the government's request for an extension and clarified some of the government's obligations. It then ordered additional expedited submissions from the parties to help resolve the other remedial issues presented in the emergency motion. In response, the government provided additional factual information, That means they confessed by accident about its execution of the four search warrants issued in 2019 and 2020. The government's response establishes that it, quote, cannot currently point to a segregated collection of material that was identified as responsive in the 2019-2020 warrants.

1:33:34That means they can't tell you which material came from which warrant. That's a big problem when you're in a document production. And so this whole, oh, there's classified judge and there's this, it's just delay, delay, delay. But now she's come out and clarified her order, making it worse for the government because she starts the order with, in her memorandum, after concluding, this is page one, after concluding that the government violated Daniel Richmond's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, This court ordered the government to return various unlawfully seized materials.

1:34:14The government suggests in this motion that the court order may require it to delete or destroy evidence. But the court's order does no such thing. The court has ordered the government to return certain materials to petition enrichment. Just return them. Don't delete them. Just return them. The court has allowed the deposit copy. And yet they still talk about we need more time to do deletions, Your Honor. This got filed on Christmas Eve. You and I are digging out from what I refer to in hot takes, all the things under the Christmas tree that came in on the 23rd or the 24th or the 25th. We had an injunction issued against the Trump administration on Christmas Day to stop the deportation of somebody who's in the anti-hate speech business.

1:35:01So the Trump administration now in the pro-hate speech business, apparently. That's who they're trying to deport at this moment. But Robbie Kaplan's firm, Eugene Carroll's lawyer, stepped in and stopped that person from being deported on a Christmas day. So what do we got to do in Trump's America, Trump's Christmas? We got to get federal temporary restraining orders issued on Christmas day by federal judges or Christmas Eve orders being issued at all. So where are we? Judge hasn't ruled on this yet. is not going to be good for the Trump administration. And one thing we should keep an eye on is they still, according to reporting and people on the ground, have not gone back into a grand jury to try to get an indictment against James Comey because I think the only grounds they have is that quote unquote comedy made during the September 5, 2020 congressional testimony.

1:35:52They don't have anything else on him that isn't time barred. And so they really need these files. It's one way or the other. We're going to see what's going to happen. And then if that happens, we're off into the world of vindictive prosecution, motions to dismiss and the like. Last thing, Mark Zaid, friend of the show, friend of Midas, been on Midas, Ken Harbaugh's show, been on Legal AF with Professor Ray Brescia recently. He is the probably number one lawyer dedicated to people who either are in the government or who have been retaliated against outside the government, having left the government in the areas of national security, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, military, and the like.

1:36:39When you get fired and you're a whistleblower in one of these areas, you go hire Mark Zaid. That's it. And the way to get back it, not just Mark Zaid for having represented Colonel Vittman and his brother, who were the whistleblowers about Donald Trump trying to shake down, as an impeachable offense, a very young and new President Zelensky in Ukraine, withholding a$400 million dollar uh congressionally approved and allocated defense package where would we be uh unless he agreed to open up a biden family investigation in ukraine vittman was on the call turned him in led to an article of impeachment and and he he after trump went after vittman and others mark zade represent zade represented these people trump hates him says zade should be tried for treason.

1:37:36But if you don't have the Mark Zades in the world, then you don't get these people with proper counsel, aggressive, successful counsel, into federal courts. So federal courts can't control the lawlessness of an out-of-control rogue presidency. So that's why it's not just about, hey, Mark Zade got his security clearance back. I left out that part. So Donald Trump tried to take away the security clearance of Mark Zaid, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Biden family, our former Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, a whole bunch of people, 37 members of the intelligence community with a memo in March. By May 5th, Zaid's like, how am I representing these people?

1:38:20If I don't have a national security clearance to be able to look at their documents, then I can't represent these people. These people never see the light of day in court. That's the problem. And courts that have now ruled against Donald Trump time and time again for going after law firms always say the same thing. They said it again with Mark Zaid, with Judge Ali, which is we can't do checks and balance. We can't do judicial oversight of the executive branch if the lawyers are being sidelined because they don't have national security clearance. This is a First Amendment violation. This is retaliation.

1:38:53This is due process violation. and we just had the issue, Judge Ali just issued a preliminary injunction subject to an appeal to give Mark Zaid and people like him back their security clearance. There you have it. Hey, Popak, we covered a lot of topics, legal efforts. We covered a lot of topics, pretty much every topic that you could cover on this holiday weekend. Merry Christmas, everybody. Hopefully you've been able to spend some time, you know, with friends or family or with us, because I think we're both friends and family. So we appreciate you, whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just celebrating being here and part of this community.

1:39:37We're grateful for you and everything you do each and every day to fight for our democracy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A reminder, hit subscribe here, help us get to 6 million subscribers, But more importantly, get that Legal AF YouTube channel to 2 million subscribers right now. They just passed 1 million subscribers. I think it'll be a quick 1 million to 2 million. So check that out. Also check out the Legal AF sub stack. Rapidly rising sub stack, one of the most read sub stacks out there. Go search Legal AF on sub stack. And then finally, if you or someone you know has been injured in an auto accident, a trucking accident, if you've been injured by the negligence of others, if you know someone who was the victim of a wrongful death case or negligence or sexual assault, harassment, call 877-POPOK-AF or go to thepopokfirm.com.

1:40:21877-POPOK-AF or go to thepopokfirm.com. The consultation is free. Popok has lawyers all across the United States. So regardless of where you are, they can give you the consultation you need for free, let you know if it's the type of case that they can handle. And Popak represents a lot of people here who have watched the show. And so I know it's a privilege and honor of him to be able to do that. So thank you, everybody, for watching. Again, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. And Popak, will we be back before the New Year's to see everybody? Midweek. Midweek will be back. Midweek. So Popak will see you before New Year's.

1:40:58I'll be here every day doing videos as always on this channel, but happy new years as well for everybody as well. Who's if you're taking a, if, if, if you're taking some time off, so great to see y 'all. We appreciate you. Shout out Midas mighty. Shout out legal AFers. Have a great one, everyone.

1:41:22Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. please for the love of everything good in this world stop with mint you can get premium wireless for just 15 a month of course if you enjoy overpaying no judgments but that's weird okay one judgment anyway give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch up front payment of 45 for three-month plan equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate first three months only then full price plan options available taxes and fees extra see full terms at mintmobile.com

From the publisher

Trump Hides Millions of Epstein Files from the public, while he makes an accidental confession in social media postings? The DOJ Confesses in Court it can’t find documents and no one wants to work for it over the holidays? A federal judge on the verge of finding that the Trump DOJ committed “vindictive prosecution?” Federal judges forced to issue Christmas Day injunctions against the out of control Trump Administration? Did we just find conduct too unconstitutional even for MAGA members of the Supreme Court? All questions will be answered when Ben and Popok take the controls of the latest edition of the top rated Legal AF Podcast, only on the Meidas Touch Network.

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