Legal AF Full Episode - 8/24/2025

29:10But he'd be allowed, he was viewed as a nonviolent guy, a hard worker. He's part of a union in Maryland. So he would just check in with, you know, the the Border Patrol, check in with Homeland Security once a year or whatever it was. Let him know I'm OK. Here I am. They let him go. All right. Go back to work. You're a productive member of society. The Trump regime accidentally, you know, or as part of their initial sweep of migrants, sends him to the concentration camp in El Salvador. door. He was ordered to be returned by the Supreme Court. The Trump regime said there's no way that could happen.

29:47Everybody, all the lawyers are about to basically be held in criminal contempt. They fly him back. They arrest him in Tennessee for human trafficking and smuggling. Just go think about our prior segment that we did where a actual convicted sex trafficker is getting all of these benefits. But they charged the Brago not with sex trafficking, but human trafficking, that he was driving a vehicle back in 2022 that had other migrants and they were driving to another work site. So they said, Abrego, you are a human trafficker. And then they tried to make him seem like he was like the leader of every single gang out there, which he absolutely wasn't.

30:26They made those claims and Bondi and all those people made claims that he's like this gang leader and murderer and just horrible things in public. But the underlying indictment said nothing It talked about a traffic stop in 2022. The evidence was weak. There was a hearing about whether he should be held or not held. Grego was just worried, though, that if he was released, that ICE was going to basically send him back to the concentration camp or hurt him. So while there was the Tennessee federal proceedings, there was the Maryland federal proceedings, which dealt with returning him from the concentration camp in El Salvador.

31:01So you had these like quasi-civil proceedings in Maryland, the criminal proceedings taking place in Tennessee. And basically what the order in Maryland was is, you know, release him, but give us notice if you're going to do anything with this guy so that the judge Zinnis could protect, you know, his rights. And then sure enough, and I'll throw it to you, Popak, we now got a letter from one of the top lawyers at ICE to Abrego's lawyer. So Abrego sees his family, hugs him. It's this incredible moment after he's He's been like literally tortured by the government, Nazi style, tortured by the government and see caught and harassed and all these things.

31:40He hugs his family. And then the Trump regime sends him a letter and says, we're sending you to Uganda in three days. And even the people in Uganda are like, why are you sending him to Uganda for? What are you doing? Why Uganda? So they picked a place just to just to F with him, just to mess with him. Like they think this is funny, right? You can see Stephen Miller and these people in the room together. Maybe it was when they were in Union Station earlier this week where they were talking about, we're going to go after the 90-year-old white hippies. We're sending ICE to go after the 90-year-old white hippies in D.C.

32:18Literally was a scene. military, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegsitt, the Secretary of Defense, our military, as though they were in freaking Fallujah. I did a video, Popak, where I showed speeches of actual commanders on battlefields. We're going in and you're going to do this. This is going to be the fight of your life. Stephen Miller was doing that in Union Station about sending the National Guard on Americans. So maybe that's where they were like, oh, let's send them to Uganda. That'll be funny. let's send them to Uganda. So that's where we're at now. Popak, what's going on here? And don't just talk about that one, but the vindictive prosecution motions now that are being filed in courts across the country.

32:58Yeah, I'll put it all together. So we've got two major developments in Tennessee that happened Friday over till now. We have a federal judge, district court judge named Crenshaw, who sits over the Tennessee indictment this manufactured indictment. It actually isn't for human trafficking. It's for human smuggling because Judge Holmes, the magistrate judge, made a point of saying in her hearing and in her filings that there's a big difference because trafficking, even though that's what they call him in press conferences and social media posts, trafficking suggests coercion and a victim. Smuggling is a consensual agreement between two people to get somebody over a border.

33:43It's different. It's different when it comes to sentencing, but it's not different to this vindictive Department of Justice that wants to call him, as they did today and yesterday, a human trafficker, a child predator, and I'll tell you where that came from, which is really nowhere, a wife beater, an MS-13 gang leader, in order to attack the judges, like Zinnis, who I'll talk about, and attack him and convicted in the court of public opinion. Fortunately, that's not where convictions happen. They happen in the court of law. And this federal judge, Crenshaw, he's sitting on right now a motion to dismiss the indictment for vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution, which will be the blueprint along with the one that Representative LaMonica McIver also filed in New Jersey, the first two that have been filed, two of hundreds that will be filed against the Trump administration before all is said and done.

34:40And I've been involved with the law for 35 years, and I've been involved with two vindictive prosecution cases in my entire career. They're very hard to get granted, but the government under Donald Trump provides the evidence for it every day, every day, including today. And so when they filed it, which was filed by a friend of mine, Sean Hecker, at a law firm in New York, I'm trying to get Sean to come on legal laugh and talk to us about it. In it, he laid out all the evidence to show prosecutorial animus and vindictiveness up to Bondi, Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, about going after Abrego Garcia and attacking him personally in a vindictive way and showing that that's the reason the indictment came out.

35:31As you said, in March, he was whisked away to El Salvador. He then in, he wasn't brought back for several months despite United States Supreme Court ruling 9-0 in favor of Judge Zinnis. They then under, for a cover story, they then indicted him when a prosecutor, an investigator, got the file from three years ago about a traffic stop where He didn't even get a ticket. And he looked at the file for two weeks and out came, boom, an indictment before Judge Crenshaw. So the vindictive motion, which is now going to be set for final briefing the first September 9th with an argument before the judge, final argument before the judge.

36:14And I think it's 70-30, if not better, that he is going to dismiss that indictment for human smuggling because of how the Trump administration has given the proof, the very proof of the vindictiveness of the prosecution every and every time, including in the last day. So they had to file a supplemental evidence to their motion just yesterday in which they said, okay, we got a call after Judge Holmes because I have to add another piece here. So there's a magistrate judge that's responsible for the terms of release or conditions of release, and she's the one that would not detain him pre-trial, finding that the case was very weak and there were no proper factors in place to keep Abrego Garcia in a Tennessee federal detention center.

37:08Now, he stayed in that detention center to protect him from ICE and Pam Bondi and Donald Trump. So they stashed him away for weeks while he was under the jurisdiction of the Tennessee court to give time for the Maryland judge, Judge Zinnis, who presides over the constitutional abuse of him, the fact that he was sent and then tortured upon arrival in El Salvador by a proxy of America. So he was tortured by the Trump administration. That's the only way to put it. So she's got jurisdiction. She got, they finally got around, she got around to issuing an order that when he's released from Tennessee custody, he is to be remanded immediately to Maryland, where he's from, under her jurisdiction about release.

37:57And so that happened. Holmes, the magistrate judge, had one last thing to decide, and she decided it on Friday, which was, is he going to stay in jail at all based on all of these factors? And she issued her order that he is to be released, that he is to be sent to Maryland, that he is to report not immediately, but on Monday at 10 a.m., giving him time with his family, report to ICE in Baltimore, Maryland on Monday. Now, this is a tremendous slap in the face of Donald Trump and his Department of Justice, who vowed to the American people when they taunted the American people and Judge Zetas and Abrego's family that he would never walk as a free man.

38:43He would never see the light of day. He would be left in dark, dank prisons here or in El Salvador. He would just be removed and deported somewhere else and he would never see his family again. Well, that didn't happen. He's with his family right now under the custody of his brother who was the custodian that was appointed. He reports on Monday And now he's under the jurisdiction of Zinus. So all of these, he's going to be sent to Uganda over Zinus' dead body because she's responsible for him now as she had been before. Now, what happened in the interim, this new evidence that got created, is because after Holmes let him out for two days, according to the filing that Sean Hecker just made, the Department of Justice contacted the lawyers for Abrego Garcia and said, here's our deal.

39:31Okay, what is it? We're all ears. Plead guilty to the two counts in Tennessee. They're like, okay. And for that, we'll send you to Costa Rica where you'll be given immunity and you can live as a free person and they promise not to torture you. You know, some version of that. And they were like, no. So, according to the papers, the retaliation vindictiveness campaign continued. And now you've got the Pam Bondi and the rest, Christine Ome and the rest saying he's a child of predator. He's a wife beater. He's a human trafficker. And this is who judges like Judge Zinnis and Judge Holmes want to have on the streets of America.

40:15So they use that as new evidence for the for the vindictive prosecution. And now on top of it, you've got the well, you didn't take Costa Rica. Well, we're going to send you to Uganda. And again, I repeat, Judge Zinnes is now in charge of the conditions of his release. And they're not going to be deporting him or removing him without her involvement. Michael Popak, a lot going on there. And it goes to the transactional nature also of Trump regime saying, look, just admit you did it. I need a win. So just tell the public, Abrego, that you love Donald Trump and that he's always right. And then we'll let you go to Costa Rica and you can live your life.

40:58It's a hostage video. That's it. And then Abrego says, am I going to do that? So then the Trump regime says, OK, well, you're not going to do that. Well, Uganda is where you go. And but but here's the thing. Abrego showing it. E. Jean Carroll showed it. Governor Newsom is showing it. There's a lot of examples. Nicole Collier, the state representative from Texas, who was literally held hostage in the Texas statehouse because she wouldn't sign a form saying that she would be kept under 24-7 surveillance. If you stand up to this regime and you stand up and you fight, there's a path to winning. When we come back, we're going to talk about Alina Habba refusing to leave the office, refusing to walk out when the judges in New Jersey said, you're gone.

41:58Bye-bye. Your term is over. She, Trump, this whole regime, they're so she bad. She goes, no, I'm staying. No, you know, fascism, these people are relentless because they're sociopaths. They crave the power and they get off on the suffering of the other. That's what they, you know how you wake up every day and you're like, man, I hope my family's doing good. I hope that maybe I'll go for a walk today, read a good book, have a hobby, just try to exist. to be keep to myself. You know, I don't know, go to a ball game, right? I mean, just think about the things that you think about in a day. Although I know with the Trump regime making things far less affordable and people living paycheck to paycheck, it's harder not to think about all these things.

42:50But the Trump regime goes, how do we make people suffer? How do we hurt? What can I do to them? And if you stand up to these people, they're going to come back again. They're going to come back again. They're going to come back again. But you can win because they're weak and they're stupid and they're evil. But if you band together with people, you can beat this. And when we see law firms stand up to them, the law firms win. When we see companies stand up to them, the companies win. When we see countries stand up to them, like Canada, the countries win. Just think about it. Of all of the countries across the world, Canada has the best, think about this, The best trade deal with the United States is Canada right now, which is no deal, which is no deal because Canada's standing up and they didn't bend the knee to Donald Trump.

43:39So that's what you got to do. And I think that's what Abrego shows as well. When we come back, I want to talk about Alina Habba and her refusal to leave, despite the fact that she needs to leave. But more significantly, how her refusal to leave is now impacting all of the cases in New Jersey because she's a rogue, unlawful United States attorney. So all of those cases are being deemed basically as inappropriate. Talk about that. Some other topics. We'll take our last quick break. A reminder, subscribe to Michael Popak's YouTube channel. Legal AF. It's crushing it. They're on their way to a million subscribers.

44:16I'd love to see that hit a million subscribers soon. So go and check that out. Subscribe to his sub stack, the Legal AF sub stack, one of the top five sub stacks of all sub stacks out there. You're getting a lot of great content, a lot of great legal scholars who are on the YouTube channel also writing with you. And you go live a lot on that sub stack. So everybody check that out. And if you have your own legal case, if you've been injured in a car accident, trucking accident, whatever, if you've been a victim of a sexual assault, sexual harassment, if you know somebody who's been the victim of any of those things, if you know someone who's been the victim of wrongful death, please, the consultation is free.

44:55877-POPOC-AF, thepopocfirm.com. So call 877-POPOC-AF or go to thepopocfirm.com. Reach out. Popak's got lawyers across the country who he works with who can help you. Don't be shy. If you're a whistleblower, if you've got any type of case, call Popak. Usually it's cases that involve real serious damages and injuries that they're able to take, but don't be shy. Reach out. They have a team that vets the case. Give a call. Again, consultation is free, so do that when you have a case. Let's take our last quick break, and then we'll go lightning round a lot to discuss. This episode of Legal AF is brought to you by Moinkbox.

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47:29For a limited time, our listeners get 20 % off your entire order at LaundrySauce.com with code LEGALAF20. That's 20 % off at LaundrySauce.com with promo code LEGALAF20. Support the show and tell them we sent you. Let's make Laundry Day the best day of the week. Welcome back to Legal AF. Special thanks to our sponsors right there. Discount codes are in the description below. Michael Popak, I want to... Okay. When you're a lawyer, Popak, and you've been interviewed, have you ever had to say, I'm a legitimate lawyer? Just want to let you know. I'm not crazy. I'm not a hack. I'm one of those legit lawyers.

48:12Usually legit lawyers don't need to go around saying, I'm not a hack. Well, here's Alina Habba. Let's play this video of her. I'm not a political hack. I'm an attorney licensed in four states. I've been licensed by the Supreme Court of the United States. And I have practiced law for the better of 20 years and run law firms for most of 15 that have been extremely successful, despite what the Twitter trolls would like to say. I mean, so-called, there's so-called hack, so-called name calling is kind of beneath me, to be honest. I would, I frankly would never despise somebody I've never even spoken to, but I assume he thinks he knows who I am.

48:53I'm a really accomplished attorney. Nate, I'm a really accomplished attorney. That's how I start all my interviews. Name calling is beneath me. Name calling. She does. She lives. Clearly beneath. Name calling in the Trump regime. I've never, I've never. But that's also why California Governor Gavin Newsom's strategy is so effective when he shines a mirror on what they're doing. And they're like, why are you calling me names? The moment you go on the offense against these people, they're all like that, right? They're all like, what are you doing? Name-calling? Come on here. But somewhere along the line, as an overall society, and I'm not saying our viewers are fighters, but at some point, we let these losers take control.

49:40And it's like, why? Why have we been accepting of their behavior? It's because Donald Trump was on The Apprentice. It's the craziest thing to me. But Popak, talk to us about this ruling that came from a judge from Pennsylvania sitting in designation. And it's important because the fact that she's remained on, despite her term being expired and her term not getting extended by the federal judges in New Jersey, which she then name calls them, oh, they're leftist. She literally like name calls them. It's now having an impact on the ability of law and order to actually be conducted. Let's talk about that.

50:22Then let's go to the Supreme Court NIH decision. All right. Sounds great. Back to our audience for fighters. I caught something in social media where one of our followers fought back against being abused by a neighbor. She's an older audience member of ours and posted the video clip under the line, thanks, Popok. I guess we talk about stop taking crap and start fighting back. And I don't mean physically, I mean emotionally and using your First Amendment rights. So that I thought was funny. For Alina Habba, let's just talk about Alina Habba for one moment, please. She was a little-known three-person law office runner in a small town, not a major business center in New Jersey called Bedminster.

51:17The only business it has is the Trump golf course. And she and her husband ran a very small law firm, which they did what I call door law. Anything that walks in the door, she did, including parking lot and parking garage representation, which can be very lucrative. You know, people get, you know, scrapes on their cars. They leave them, you know, three extra days. They don't have the money to pay for them. But this is not what I would call consequential national nationwide litigation of the highest order. Nobody ever heard of her. And I'm from New Jersey. And I had an office in New York for years.

51:58And so there's that. Her biggest success in her life, her only true success in her life, is that she made a beeline for Donald Trump on purpose at the Bedminster golf course, joined the golf club, and then try to ingratiate herself with him and rub elbows with him and try to handle some cases for him, including some that she's been accused of doing unethical things. No shock. That got her on his radar screen, including a couple of settlements. And then he started just dragging her along in her various cases. To say that for her to have to say to bowling, exclamation mark, whoever that is, some podcaster, that she's an accomplished lawyer, she's not even an accomplished lawyer for Donald Trump.

52:46She got fined a million dollars along with Donald Trump by Judge Middlebrooks for the case that she filed a couple of years ago in federal court. She got fined and sanctioned for discovery abuse in the New York fraud case, which we'll talk about later, in which she lost a$463 million judgment. We'll talk about that in a minute in New York. She lost not one, but two E. Jean Carroll cases. And E. Jean Carroll is now sitting on$100 million worth of judgments. She was involved with the team that lost the 34 felony count conviction of Donald Trump. So where are the accomplishments? Even for Trump, she's not accomplished.

53:26She's been failing up ever since. He tried to stash her at his pack. And when that didn't work, then he decided to bring her in as a White House counselor, like she was some sort of Kellyanne Conway. And when that didn't work, he kicked her upstairs or across the river to put her in Jersey. And then rather than just be a temperate, professional, mature, accomplished lawyer, as she says she is, during her tryout period, because there was a period where she was given the acting job, which was probably a mistake by Donald Trump. He probably should have stashed her away, nominated her. But no, he stuck her in the job.

54:01So she got a tryout. And while she did during the tryout, back to her, Philip Kowski called it the six lies in one sentence. One of the lies were that she's not a political hack. That's all she did was hack away. So first thing she does on a podcast as soon as she gets the job is, I'm going to turn the blue state of New Jersey red. Then she goes after and targets criminally the governor of the state, Democrat, the attorney general of the state, Democrat, the mayor of the largest city, Democrat, And Representative LaMonica MacGyver, who's a congresswoman from New Jersey. And she got reprimanded by a federal judge, federal magistrate judge, for having brought charges originally against Mayor Baraka.

54:49That is in 120 days. Okay? That's like the old joke about, you know, talking to Mrs. Lincoln, and she gives you the whole story about what happened, and somebody says, great, but how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Right. That was 120 effing days. And so was there any shock when her 120 days was up by statute? She then asked, pretty please, can I stay in the job longer? And the 21 federal judges in New Jersey all uniformly said no. and they, under the statute, appointed somebody who was qualified, the number two in the office, a career prosecutor, and she had the job for less than 24 hours because Donald Trump started this whole, you know, 16 steps to try to keep his office wife in the job.

55:37You know, well, I'm going to make her her own assistant. Then I'm going to elevate her after I fire the person that the court put in. And then, well, that didn't work. Well, then I'll make her a special attorney under the Constitution with all the powers, but not all the powers, but most of the powers of being the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. That didn't work. Oh. And so finally, one of many criminal defense lawyers in New Jersey filed a motion in his criminal defense case for a gun and drug case called Gerard, in which he filed a motion to disqualify Alina Habba. And that's what we're talking about.

56:12It was brought by a criminal defendant. Now, because the 21 federal judges all ruled against her and voted against her, they were all effectively disqualified from hearing this motion, the motion to disqualify her, dismiss indictments, right? Call her invalidly appointed and all of that. And we all looked at it and was like, you and I were like eating popcorn, like, is this going to work? Because I had known about some case law and some arguments about something that happened similarly. And I'm thinking, eh, it's about 50-50, but I'm in it. Whatever you're laying down, I'm picking up. Let's go.

56:47So it gets assigned because there's no judge in Jersey. It goes up to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals chief judge who appoints somebody from within the circuit, but outside of Jersey. So it lands on Chief Judge Brand of the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Okay, he was an Obama appointee, but he's pretty middle of the road. You would not called Judge Brand in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, a firebrand, no pun intended, liberal, okay? He gets it. He goes through all the pleadings and he says, yeah, of the motions. He goes, yeah. She was unlawfully appointed because he laid it out quite succinctly.

57:21This is what you get to do as president. You get to nominate somebody. You got 120 days to get them confirmed by the Senate. If they don't get confirmed by the Senate and their term doesn't get extended by the court, then that person is out and can't be put back in as acting interim whatever, while you go get somebody else. And the person that stays in the job until you can get somebody nominated and confirmed is going to be picked by the judges. That's it. That's the Federal Vacancy Act. That's the statute related to judge, to U.S. attorney filling. And that's the Constitution. And that's it.

57:57And all this other stuff that you did, where she's the special attorney, but she doesn't have all the powers of a U.S. attorney, but she does have all the powers, none of that's going to fly here. And I disqualify her. I disqualify everybody working under her. I disqualify anybody that tries to do an end run around this order. They're disqualified. And good day. Now there's complete chaos in the fifth largest federal district in America with judges like Judge Salas just yesterday said, in response to a motion by a completely unrelated defendant, to say, why am I getting sentenced by an unlawful U.S.

58:36attorney? I questioned, by the way, during that interview with Bowling, what office she was sitting in. It looked a lot like an office in Newark that the U.S. attorney would sit in. So she's still sitting there as the acting whatever. And the sentencing, and the lawyer said, postpone the sentencing. There is no U.S. attorney proper. And Judge Salas, Esther Salas, said, I agree. And the Department of Justice rushed in with, but no, there's other deputies and assistants. And she says, no, I'm not buying that. Go work this out. You don't have a U.S. attorney. I'm not sentencing. Laws have been postponed.

59:09Sentencings have been postponed. And now what I've read and what I've heard is that they actually have to have Todd Blanche, who was her co-counsel when they were criminal defense lawyers for Donald Trump, Take time out of being the number two in the Department of Justice in Washington to sign motions and pleadings and indictments, even down to the misdemeanor level. So like criminal littering or whatever in Jersey, he's got it now. She needs a cosigner. He now has to cosign for her to avoid any more arguments in court by other defendants that this is invalid and dismiss my indictment. Apparently he has nothing better to do anyway, which is actually there's a silver lining to this.

59:57The more time he spends going on interviews of convicted sex predators and having to sign misdemeanors in New Jersey, it's the less time he has to really focus on his job properly and do all of the terrible things that Donald Trump, who got quoted this week as reminding everybody that he is the chief law enforcement officer because, you know, about the raid, you know, the raid, the raid of John Bolton. Well, I am the chief law enforcement officer. You know, Pam Bondi again shrinks again, confirming there is no independent Department of Justice. This is what all federal judges have observed. There is no independent FBI.

1:00:35And Todd Blanche is busy trying like the boy at the dike, trying to put his hand in with all of these holes that spring up. And he's not doing a very good job. But that's how bad things have gotten. As Alina Habba goes on, it's not an apology tour, the victim tour. I saw one with Hannity. I don't know if we have the clip of it. I saw one with Hannity where she said, this is just another, you know, leftist activist judge that nobody voted for. I'm supported by the president of the United States, Ampan Bondi. He got 100 million votes. I'm barely, I'm barely announcing this. I got he got 100 million votes and we always win.

1:01:18This is what she said. F and then legal. We always win. Just like in New York. I was like, time to insert vomit here. Well, here's the here's the thing. Do they always win? I don't think. No, they don't. But here's the this shouldn't be a Democrat Republican thing. The interim United States attorney who should be in that place is a lifelong Republican, competent, qualified person who can do the job. But that's who they've now fired and pushed out so Alina Habba can engage in these shenanigans. We're all less safe as a result of all this stuff. Of all this performative stuff, the FBI and DOJ, they're not investigating the terrorism cases like they used to and the sex trafficking cases and the real threats to our homeland are being foregone so that they can arrest migrants in parking lots of the Home Depots and things like that.

1:02:15But here's the thing. Alina Hobb, the bar is so low with this Trump regime that if Alina Hobb had just went in there and conducted herself just as a professional for that period, just went in there and just prosecuted the bad guys, people would have been like, whoa, and she would have been able to stay on. But to your point, she goes in there and just behaves like a maniac because she is. I mean, Donald Trump behaves like a sexual predator, a fraud, you know, a felon and all of these because he is like and these people, they get into these positions. It was like what Obama said. You know, when you get into the presidency, it amplifies who you are and exposes it even more.

1:03:01It doesn't tamp it down. So all these people get these positions and they remind us why they don't have the temperament, moral character, decision making skills to hold these positions. OK, super quick lightning round, Popak. I'm going to ask you to merge it. We're going to put these two cases together for this lightning round because there's some misconceptions about what the holdings ultimately were. So and I know you've covered it in hot takes, so I don't want to be redundant. So quickly, tell us about what the New York Court of Appeals did and then merge that with the NIH Supreme Court decision.

1:03:36Both some confusion about it. Got it. Well, we're going to clean it. That's the common denominator. There's confusion. So we've been waiting for a year for the first department appellate division, which is the first level appeal court over Manhattan, to make a ruling about the appeal of the$463 million running with interest civil fraud judgment obtained by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Okay, now we're all on the same page. That's what we're talking about that Alina Haba actually was involved with. And in that case, after a 12-week trial with mountains of evidence, tons of Trump organization people testifying and others, including experts, Judge N.

1:04:14Goran from the bench made a ruling, 30, 40 pages, in which he found that she had proven the case for the state of New York that Donald Trump and those around him in the organization, including his children, except for Ivanka and Tiffany, had committed what's called persistent fraud in the operation of the Trump organization for 10 years. And fundamentally, the basis of that was his inflating, cooking the books on his personal net worth, his personal financial statements, pumping them up several billion with a B dollars in order to obtain favorable terms from banks, in order to run around and get projects that he wasn't probably entitled to because he didn't have as much money as he said.

1:05:04And he did it, you know, the old fashioned way with whiteout and a pencil eraser. I'm not kidding. And so he, He, in response to that, the judge did two things. He calculated the amount of what we call ill-gotten gains. That's the amount of money that he calculated that Trump and his family were obtained through fraudulent means or artifice and put in their pockets. And he calculated it project by project by project by transaction, from the triplex apartment in New York to a golf course to Mar-a-Lago and everything else. And he came up with a number. He came up with a$363 million number plus$100 million in interest.

1:05:43And it's all broken down in his 40, if you want to read it, it's all broken down in his 40 pages. And then he added on to that disgorgement, which has been referred to in the papers as a fine. He's added on an injunction, which has been sitting there for the last two years. That's how long that case has been going on, which is that there's an actual monitor, court-appointed monitor. It's former federal judge Barbara Jones, who sits on top of the Trump organization to this day, peering in and watching all of the transactions and making reports on them. She redid the compliance department. There wasn't one.

1:06:18She redid the accounting department. There really wasn't one. And she keeps an eye on everything. So those were the two major things that came out of a finding. And then a, yes, a finding of liability, of fraud by Donald Trump. That went up on appeal. And there's five justices that get randomly assigned. In this case, the five justices were Moulton, Renwick, Rosado, Higgett, and Friedman. Friedman was always the weird duck because he's the guy that kept granting stays for Donald Trump and is the only Republican on that panel. And he asked some really weird questions during the oral argument. Then we get the order.

1:06:58We get the decision, but there's no decision. There's five of them. And it's a split decision. there were three written opinions. No one written opinion even got a majority. So two people joined in on the decision, on the opinion written by Judge Moulton. Two joined in with the opinion written by Higgins. And Friedman wrote his own. So there's no there there. In 333 pages, there's very little agreement except for the following. There appears to be, at least for the purposes of the appeal to the next level, which in New York is the Court of Appeals. There's four justices that think there's at least an argument that fraud was proven by Donald Trump.

1:07:45That's why Tish James came out with, well, court said fraud, sort of. Two judges, justices definitely said fraud was proven, Moulton and Redwick. Two judges said, we think we'd send it back for another trial, well, but for the purposes of an appeal, we'll certify fraud. You know, kind of a compromise came up out of that. Okay, that's four to get it to an appeal. Both, there's four people that also bailed out Letitia James, because remember, she's been attacked, and there's a prosecution going on right now, led by a combination of Ed Martin and John Sarkoni for Pam Bondi and Donald Trump to go after his political rival and enemy, Letitia James, and her office, the New York Attorney General.

1:08:30There's a criminal probe right now about whether Donald Trump's or a probe, whether his civil rights were violated by this case. So four justices, in their opinion, said Letitia James had the power. She didn't abuse her power. She had the right. In fact, they said it would have been a dereliction of duty if she not brought the case based on. here we go, bringing it back to Midas, based on what Michael Cohen had testified in federal proceedings to about his boss cooking the books, how could she have ignored that and not brought, it would have been a dereliction of duty if she had not brought the case.

1:09:06So that was certainly calculated. They wrote this or rewrote it after seeing what's happened in the last two weeks against Letitia James, back to vindictive prosecution world again. And then on the other extreme is Friedman saying, why are we here? There's no fraud. She's vindictive. There's no money here. Why is the number so big? Now, the number is the thing that's also been struck because two of the justices are like, the injunction's fine. Actually, four justices think the injunction is okay to keep the monitor in place, but that's all that ever should have been granted. As to the money, it's almost like they were rewarding the bankrupt, for the size of the theft.

1:09:51They said, well, the number is just so big, the 463 million, that it is automatically excessive and a violation of the Eighth Amendment against excessive fines under the Constitution. I'm like, it's because he's dealing with billions and billions and billions of dollars. So$300 million is not really that large. And why is that a defense to a to a clawback or a disgorgement? The number is too big. But this is now what's going to show. That's why the reporting was like Donald Trump. Some some reported, including Trump. I won. I've been vindicated, but I still got to take an appeal. Right. You have to take an appeal to the Court of Appeals because Tish James is going to be asking for the reinstatement of the$463 million and a final real judgment by a real court, not these people, who say that Donald Trump committed fraud.

1:10:46He's going to try to make sure that he's vindicated on the fraud at the Court of Appeals and that zero dollars are awarded and that the monitor is removed. So that's what, I hope that helped everybody for 333 pages. Absolutely. And then if you can, Popak, NIH decision. I think that went there. NIH decision, people confused there as well. All right. That's because Amy Coney Barrett was a swing vote on two different majority decisions. The Supreme Court, let me give the headline. The MAGA Supreme Court just validated RFK Jr., who I now call the most terrible Kennedy ever, in his purge of science and technology and medicine from our public health.

1:11:34And so in the middle of firing everybody, he fired not only the people at the National Institute of Health, but he defunded them by getting rid of$850 million worth of in-progress research. So shut the door on medical breakthroughs, close your lab books, shut down the lab in the middle of the experiment because we're not going to be getting anywhere medical breakthroughs because it's now been defunded under DEI and MAGA Supreme Court is okay with it. But it was weird. Why was it weird? Because there were two major issues that came out of the judge's ruling, Judge Young up in Massachusetts. One was that the guidelines that the National Institute of Health used to defund were arbitrary and capricious, that there was no reason determination, that it violated the Administrative Procedures Act.

1:12:26They got that. Then he made a ruling and the grants that were cut, the funding that was cut was done improperly and I blocked them. Okay, in the summer, earlier in the summer, there was a case involving the Department of Education that you and I covered called the Department of Education versus California. And in that one paragraph emergency ruling, again, we're trying to like divine whatever, There was a ruling that the ruling said if it deals with funds and grants, it goes to the federal court of claims, not to a regular Article III judge. And apparently the MAGA think that that applies to every grant cut, every defunding by Donald Trump.

1:13:10And so they, five to four, with Amy Coney Barrett making up the five with Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, ruled that Young did not have jurisdiction over the funding part of it, and it should have gone and it will go to the federal court of claims. On another five to four within the same case, Roberts moved over with Amy Coney Barrett and said, no, he had jurisdiction over the guidelines, but he didn't have jurisdiction over the funding. I mean, it's a real cluster F. This is what happens when you are a Supreme Court that's reverse engineering to reach a conclusion to help the Trump administration.

1:13:54Or this is one of my favorite lines ever by Ketanji Brown Jackson. We do a lot of reporting on the Supreme Court by saying, and in dissent, Ketanji Brown Jackson said the following. Because she's speaking to law students. She's speaking to the history books. She's speaking to the future, and she's speaking to fair-minded people like our audience when she writes her dissents. They are important. And what she said is, she looked around and she said, my brethren, my majority here are playing Calvin ball from Calvin and Hobbes, except they added a new rule. First rule, there are no fixed rules. Second rule, the Trump administration always wins.

1:14:35I mean, she's calling. I mean, we've now dispensed with. Thank you. Or as this reporter said, the breathtakingly full of shit. Right. So so the fact that she's now had to to to grab on to Calvin and Hobbes to call out. She also said, I did not understand. This is a Supreme Court justice being honest. I did not understand how terrible a decision the Department of Education decision was until I see it now being applied in this case. I thought it was bad that it was unmoored from any constitutional principles or any principles whatsoever. But now I see it's being used as a bludgeon by the MAGA on any funding decision.

1:15:15And that's not right. And so that's that's this weird five to four that happened about jurisdiction and about the Administrative Procedures Act. Popak, you actually have a Supreme Court justice in the minority becoming a whistleblower essentially right now. I mean, you literally have a whistleblower Supreme Court justice, the most qualified of all of the justices out there by far, saying we this this court right now is the most corrupt institution imaginable. That that that's where that's where we are. And she's right. And you go back to what I said earlier. This is not a moment where you can mince words.

1:16:00And I think this episode just goes to show you when we highlight people who are fighting back, why we need to fight back, what we can all do, what the legal AFers can do. And so actually one of my favorite episodes that we've done on Legal AF, at least in a long time, great audience, great seeing everybody here. I want to remind everybody, if you have a case of your own, if you've been injured in a car accident or if you were injured in a trucking accident or if you were the victim of somebody else's negligence and you have a case, you've all said, Michael Popak, why don't you start your own law firm?

1:16:39He did. He did it. So reach out to the Popak firm. Go to thepopakfirm.com. You can fill out the form about your case or call 877-POPOC-AF. A real live human being picks up the call and will ask you about what your case is. Michael Popok has lawyers across the entire country who can help you out. The consultation is free, so don't worry about paying for things. Reach out to the Popok firm and they'll let you know if you have a case or if someone you know in your life was the victim of wrongful death, sexual harassment, sexual assault. you know, these horrible things that do happen. That's why you all said Popak start the firm.

1:17:19And he did. And we're getting, you know, dozens and dozens of cases now at the Popak firm and on a basically a weekly basis. So don't be shy. Lots of people are calling and he's representing hundreds of people now who are from the Legal AF audience. So reach out to him there. Also, subscribe to Michael Popak's YouTube channel, the Legal AF YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Legal AF Substack. Of course, subscribe to the Midas Touch YouTube channel. Thank you all so much, everybody. It's been a great episode. It's been great spending this time with you. Shout out to the Midas Mighty and shout out Legal AFers.

1:17:53Have a good one.