Legal AF Full Episode - 9/6/2025

24:00Ben Meiselas:Epstein always thought that when Epstein was threatening to potentially bring litigation against Donald Trump, when they had a falling out of their friendship in that 2004 to 2006 period, that Donald Trump may have told on Epstein secretly in order to get Epstein to not go after Donald Trump. Epstein told Donald Trump about a real estate deal that Epstein was involved in. $36 million purchase of a beachfront property on Palm Beach. Epstein wanted Donald Trump's advice about how to maybe move the pool or what to do with it. And so Epstein asked Donald to come take a look. Then a few days or weeks later, Epstein finds out that the seller sold it to Donald Trump and not Epstein.

24:46Ben Meiselas:And Epstein's like, what the hell? I was just asking you for advice. A few years later, Donald Trump resells the same property. All Trump does is paint it, really no additions, nothing. Resells it to a Russian fertilizer oligarch for about 2x the value. A$40 million,$41 million property sells for about$90 million. And then the Russian oligarch swiftly destroys the property and claims there was mold all over the property. Doesn't take action against Trump. Epstein thought that one of the things that could have been going on there was that there was shady Russian money entering into the United States.

25:24Ben Meiselas:He didn't know one way or another, but I think he suspected that that put him and Trump in a conflict. That's why their relationship ended. And Epstein thought because they knew each other because they were hanging out and being in all these places together. Maybe that's what happened and how, you know, and how the police were tipped off to know when to show up, where to go and where to look. But if Trump is the hero in that story, then really, then you would want to release the files. It would be, it would show, it would be great. But in the Epstein version, Trump's not the hero. He's potentially an accomplice who then ratted in order to get by on this real estate deal, which when you think about it fundamentally is, is, has a, has some logic to me that that's something like that could have happened in any event, release the freaking files.

26:13Ben Meiselas:Let's get done with it. Let the victims want the files released. Stop using the victims as the reason why you're saying you're not releasing the files and the American people deserve it. It's not a democratic hoax. I can't think of anything more offensive to say what the Epstein sex trafficking ring and calling it a democratic hoax. What the hell is even going on here? Anyway, when we come back, I want to talk about more. I want to talk about Trump's massive court losses, Popak. You'll be able to take them all down. I want to remind everybody, Michael Popak's new law firm, it's absolutely crushing it, The Popak Firm.

26:49Ben Meiselas:Go to thepopakfirm.com or call 877-POPAK-AF. One more time, go to thepopocfirm.com or call 877-POPOC-AF for a free case review today. If you've been injured in a car accident, a trucking accident, you're the victim of sexual harassment, sexual assault, if you know people who were the victims of the negligence of others, wrongful death cases, medical malpractice cases, negligent cases, call the Popoc Firm. Trusted, you know Michael Popoc for a very long time. You know the work that he does and he started this firm because you all wanted him to start this firm. We're representing right now so many of the viewers of this show.

27:31Ben Meiselas:So give him a call. If you have a case, we'd love to hear from you. And also subscribe to the Legal AF Substack and the Legal AF YouTube channel. We will be right back after our first quick break of the show.

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29:54Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to legal AF. Thank you to our sponsors right there that keep this show and this network rolling on. We appreciate them greatly. And thanks for everybody who reached out to the popockfirm.com. Appreciate it. You're in great hands. And we will keep following up about the numbers. So many cases that the Popock firm is representing. All right, let's get into it, Popock. Speaking of cases, it's been loss after loss after loss for the Trump regime. Big losses on big issues in the realm of immigration, alien enemies. Why don't you break down the Harvard case? It's always interesting because every few weeks, a rumor percolates that Harvard's about to settle and they're about to do the deal and then sell out.

30:47Ben Meiselas:There's definitely something going on behind the scenes. There's definitely a divided board of trustees there at Harvard right now. And it's probably incredibly tense behind the scenes of people who want to tap out a la Colombia and people who want to fight. But the thing is, if you can't, even for the people who want to tap out, you can't do deals with a maniac and a sociopath like Trump. Just like the big law firms have discovered, if you think you're doing pro bono, no, P now makes you his tariff lawyers. And you say you don't want to do it. He comes after you again. him. The only way you can address it, like even out of your own self-interest, assume you don't want to do good.

31:30Ben Meiselas:The only way you can deal with him is to stand up to him. I mean, just even take Canada though, for an example, right now, Canada did not do any fake trade deal. Unlike other countries that did some fake trade deals with them, Canada didn't do any trade deal at all. They didn't give them a fake one. There's only like four or five fake ones out there where there's no binding, which really aren't deals. But what happened? Nothing. He huffs and he puffs. Nothing different than would have happened with the fake trade deal. And then once he has you in the trade deal, like an abuser, he just abuses you more.

32:06Ben Meiselas:You're now in his orbit. And so you got to get the hell out of his orbit and you've got to fight, even out of your self-interest, even out of your survival. If I was their legal advisor on any of these cases, I would say, look, I understand that you may be being advised by people that your research dollars are important, and maybe you even have bad intent. Maybe you don't care about standing up for principles of law, which I disagree with, but maybe you don't want to stand up for principles of law. Then stand up just for yourself because you do a deal. He's coming back for you a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth time.

32:42Ben Meiselas:That's why you got to fight. People are fighting. Popak, a lot of momentum him this week man i mean this sincerely i feel like we came back from summer and right away whether it was the epstein survivors whether it was democrats punching back on the hill in these committee hearings rfk jr getting excoriated on on like it just felt like donald trump and thought they were going to roll into this thing and be like we're back and we were like get the

33:11Michael Popok:Democrats got their groove back. And what's leading the way are the lawsuits. I just did an interview with one of our contributors, one of our partners on Legal AF, Democracy Forward, who the Atlantic magazine said is the single most troublesome opponent of the Trump administration. I'm not talking about media now because of the lawsuits that they brought, 100 lawsuits. They're winning at a 93 % clip. There are almost 400 lawsuits, 400 lawsuits in eight months against the Trump administration. And whether it's the attorneys general, 23 Democratic attorneys general, like the one in California, Rob Bonta, the ACLU, Democracy Forward, groups led by Norm Eisen, you name it.

34:00Michael Popok:New groups you never heard of that weren't here in the first administration. and NAACP, which of course you have heard of. They are filing cases at a rapid rate because we're watching an administration that is devolving before our very eyes, tracking the de-evolution of Donald Trump's physical and mental health. I mean, the fact that we even have to speculate, is he dead or alive? If he's alive, why does he look dead? You know, what's with the makeup? Is that the cover up? I mean, the fact that we have to even do that as Donald Trump single-handedly destroys our public health system, which is going to be and is going to be a major issue to run the bastards out at the midterms.

34:44Michael Popok:But you always have to come back to the lawsuits and to the litigation. And we just had, I'm losing adjectives for like the worst round or the worst week in Donald Trump's life in court. But I've said that before. But look, we've got on major issues across six different courts. And there's been other rulings as well. These are the, if you had to rank them, like the biggest ones of the week going back eight days or so. This is in six different courts from San Francisco to Massachusetts to D.C., appellate courts and trial courts on fundamental constitutional issues, which many of them are on fast track to the United States Supreme Court.

35:26Michael Popok:But we'll have to see. You led off with Harvard, so let's lead off with Harvard. You're right about what's going on in the back room. Donald Trump pounding the table and saying, I'm not going to reinstate the$2.3 billion worth of, let's remember what this is, because I don't want these numbers just to lead to glossy eyes here. $2.3 billion in medical, scientific, and technological research. Research in America, R &D, is done fundamentally at the major university level. Sure, there are major companies that do their own R &D. But if you're looking for things that don't necessarily, can't be commercialized immediately, but may impact and help people from dying from cancer, from the next pandemic, from all of that, it's at the university level and Harvard first among them as our leading university and leading research university.

36:19Michael Popok:The$2.3 billion or so of grants that were canceled by Donald Trump that had been reinstated by Judge Burroughs in Massachusetts. The bulk of it was from the National Institute of Health, from the Centers for Disease Control. These were research grants to make people well and healthy and stop them from dying. And I've said this on a hot take, and it is true. It's unfortunate but true. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, just as they did because of his COVID policies, are going to die because of Donald Trump's depraved, unscientific quackery in public health than any other time. I mean, direct correlation to his public health policies, led by RFK Jr., the vaccine denier, science denier, medicine denier at the helm.

37:13Michael Popok:And that's a fact, just as you can put the bodies of Americans who died from COVID because of Donald Trump's failed policies related to that in containment and the rest. And just to stay on public health for a minute, because it links back to Harvard. Donald Trump, who bragged to everybody about Operation Warp Speed making vaccines, just had his head of public health cancel a$500 billion vaccine program led by some of those same entities that created the vaccine for COVID. We are not ready for the next pandemic. We are not ready for the next epidemic, which doesn't come from America. It comes from overseas.

37:54Michael Popok:We just withdrew from global public health in research, in funding. That's where it comes from. It comes from China. I'm not about blaming the country, but it comes from Africa. It comes from China. It's not coming from Idaho. It's not coming from Baltimore or Boston or Chicago. So all of that comes to a head in Harvard. The judge reinstates the$2.3 billion grants, finding that Donald Trump's administration violated the First Amendment rights, among other things, of Harvard University. That the sole reason that they were attacked and their grants were terminated had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, which is with a false flag that Donald Trump flew under.

38:37Michael Popok:It had to do with woke. Donald Trump loves that word. You know, the Department of Defense needs to be changed the Department of War because it became the Department of Defense during a woke period, when in the 1940s. So he says, well, we got to go after anti-Semitism. The research wasn't anti-Semitic. The judge was like, that's there's no link between anti-Semitism and the research. Instead, look at what Donald Trump said out of his own mouth and his own fingertips, which is liberal, leftist, woke ideology. We need to get rid of the teachers and the students and the this, the that. That is the reason the retaliatory First Amendment viewpoint based First Amendment violation.

39:18Michael Popok:And she has reinstated it. So the Harvard fight that you're so rightly pointing out is that behind the scenes, including with a new trustee that is a right-wing, respected Republican who joined that board of trustees about five months ago, who I thought when he joined was going to try to find a way to settle. Donald Trump is demanding a$500 million tithe or tribute to be paid to his administration in order to reinstate it. Now the tables have turned because they're winning in court. They're going to likely win at the First Circuit. We'll have to see what happens to the United States Supreme Court about whether they're going to allow the defunding of America's higher education institutions because Donald Trump says so.

40:06Michael Popok:And it's hard to tell with this court. You know, you and I have always, you know, it's hard to tell where MAGIT on the Supreme Court is at any given moment on any given issue like this and whether they're going to allow it to happen, even though many on the court went to Harvard. But you're right about the fight back. The easiest contrast is Canada versus Mexico. Canada doing an amazing job, elbows up with a central banker as its prime minister, fighting back and winning to protect the Canadian economy and punish, rightly so, the Trump administration in ways that they can do. tourism, for instance, there are loss of 10 % in tourism is Canada's gain and the dollars behind it.

40:47Michael Popok:Hundreds of billions of dollars of tourism has been lost in the last nine months and the jobs behind all of that, much of it back to Canada. Mexico, on the other hand, has been trying to, and I like Scheinbaum a lot, and she's been successful at getting many postponements of her tariffs. But because she is bargaining with him constantly, Trump is constantly coming back to for more and more and more and more. So she finds herself in a deadly cycle of having to constantly compromise in order to get Donald Trump off her back, whereas Canada is in the fighting mode. And I think we've seen that contrast.

41:23Michael Popok:And the world is watching that contrast of what's happening. So we have the win at Harvard, but that's not the only win. That was Massachusetts. Then you've got the Alien Enemies Act, which because of his failures in the lawsuits and because of the attention we brought to it on Midas and on Legal AF, he has not used the Alien Enemies Act to deport anybody since March. And that's not by coincidence. It's not like he forgot about it. It's because he's losing badly between the Abrego Garcia case and the losses now at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which leans to the right. Two to one ruled that after a remand from the United States Supreme Court, ruled that Donald Trump could not use the Alien Enemies Act and improperly used it, unconstitutionally used it in violation of the statute by deporting hundreds of people from Texas or trying to by claiming that there was an enemy invasion, a war, no declared war with Congress, predatory invasion or incursion.

42:25Michael Popok:They said there were none of those things. You cannot use the Alien Enemies Act. The only thing they said was okay with a decision within the decision was a two to one that his seven day notice was proper due process. Another one of the judges said 21 days. So they had a little internal fight about that. But as the Alien Enemies Act, which was the framework by which Donald Trump started deporting 200 people to the torture prisons of El Salvador and then in other places, That is now the first court up now back to the Supreme Court as to whether Donald Trump can call the Alien Enemies Act. He could just declare a national crisis.

43:06Michael Popok:Now, that day when that judgment came out is the day that he bombed out of existence 11 people without due process, without a court of law, without a conviction, who he claimed to be Venezuelan drug lords working for Trenda Aragua. That's not a coincidence. He's going to create a war. It's not the first time in American history we ever bombed a ship as a pretext to a war. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin. So he bombed a fishing boat and then claimed, well, they couldn't get their story straight. Marco Rubio, who's leading the charge here, was like, see, we did drug interdiction. When you see the interview with Marco Rubio and they caught him coming off the plane in other places, he never talked about we're at war with the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

43:48Michael Popok:He said drugs, drug interdiction. We're stopping drugs from spreading through the Caribbean. I'm like, that's our new job to stop drug interdiction in the Caribbean by bombing ships with our military? No, that's so Donald Trump can say, look, we're at war with Venezuela. So we had that bad ruling. Again, as I said at the top, look for the wag the dog moments when Donald Trump tries to start a war or dump some files on us or sues a city or federalizes National Guard and creates a federal police force that has an occupying standing army. That's off of a bad news cycle from that particular day. The posse comitatus, that was Tuesday coming off of Labor Day.

44:32Michael Popok:we get the decision by Judge Breyer in San Francisco. Now we're in our third court. Again, this is all the same week in which he rules. He made a chilling observation and finding on the way to finding that the Posse Comitatus Act had been violated by Donald Trump. And the easiest way to explain the PCA, for those that are joining late to the story, is that you are not allowed under our system of constitutional republican federalism, if you're a president, to create a standing army and use the might of the U.S. military on domestic soil for civilian law enforcement purposes. That's the Posse Comitatus Act in a nutshell.

45:14Michael Popok:Whether you federalize the state National Guard or you create your own boot jacked group of shock troops, which Donald Trump is doing through ICE and Border Patrol and through the U.S. Marshals Service, whatever you're doing and you're creating a standing army, which is the very reason we left England with the Declaration of Independence, that violates the Posse Comitatus Act. But Breyer went further in the first page or so of his decision. He said, what we are watching is a president creating a federal police force with him as the chief, all in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. So when you hear that Trump is attacking the Boston mayor or the city of Boston or the city of Chicago, we'll put up a meme related to that, or going after Cleveland or going after other blue cities or states, taking his shock forces on the road, all of that is a violation of our system of federalism, about the power of the states and their sovereignty, the role of the militia in those places, and is unconstitutional.

46:20Michael Popok:Now we have our first decision. It'll go up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I just interviewed Rob Bonta, the attorney general, about this. You can find it on Legal AF Substack as well. And ultimately to the Supreme Court, which is sad on the sidelines because they haven't been asked to do anything yet related to the Posse Comitatus Act. And fresh on the heels of that ruling, the District of Columbia filed a new lawsuit in order to get the militia, federalized militia and the Marines and others off the streets of D.C. once and for all. And that is a direct consequence of Judge Breyer's ruling in San Francisco.

46:55Michael Popok:So these things have these things have consequences. You've got you want to put up the his attack on Chicago, a sovereign state?

47:03Ben Meiselas:Yeah, let's put up the meme right here that Donald Trump posted this morning. A photo of him saying, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War. And it's a reference to, I guess, the movie Apocalypse Now, Vietnam movie. But he's calling it Chai-pocalypse Now. And the implication is, is that he's going to send in our military to what put Agent Orange all over Chicago and to and to kill the people of Chicago and and and and invade it. I want to talk about that, Popak, but I want to take another quick break. But I want to say one thing before doing that, which is all of this also hinges on the Supreme Court having given Donald Trump absolute immunity last year or two years ago at this point in that horrific ruling.

48:00Ben Meiselas:Because the absolute immunity ruling, if it didn't exist and he didn't have immunity, these are willful violations of the law, meaning he should be criminally prosecuted for this behavior. If you go and just start killing people abroad, you know, and murdering people and causing people to die and there are willful violations of the law, that's prison stuff. That's felony stuff. That's treason stuff. That's traitorous stuff. But the Supreme Court's absolute immunity is, well, if you say you were doing it in the course and scope of what your executive functions are, just tether it to a war power, which is why Donald Trump always says it's a war power.

48:44Ben Meiselas:It's a war power. it's a war power then you don't get then you don't even have the fear of being criminally prosecuted which every other president in the history of the united states would think i i could be criminally prosecuted for this their behavior was such as the president of the united states other than nixon you know and and a few and a bunch of others in the 19th century act like everything they're all great but their their behavior was such that modern day presidents wouldn't be like, oh my God, am I going to be criminally prosecuted? But like literally everything that Donald Trump does in a day, forget it being an impeachable offense.

49:19Ben Meiselas:You know, in my opinion, a lot of this stuff is just absolutely criminal and he hides behind immunity. So let's talk about some more of the Trump court losses, but let's take our last quick break of the day. A reminder, go to the popockfirm.com website if you haven't already, or call 877-POPOC-AF, 877-POPOC-AF, or go to thepopocfirm.com. Get a free case review today. If you've been in a car accident, a trucking accident, if you've been the victim of somebody else's negligence in some other way, if you know somebody who's been the victim of wrongful death, or if you know people who may have a case, just tell them to reach out to Popoc.

50:00Ben Meiselas:Sexual harassment cases, sexual assault cases, employment-related cases involving sexual assault and sexual harassment, medical malpractice, reach out to the Popak firm, get a free case evaluation. And especially, it's not some people like, well, I was in a car accident or a trucking accident and I was hit. I don't want to bother the Popak firm. You're not bothering the Popak firm. Reach out to them. That's what they're here for. They're here to help you. There's no, it's not like, oh, we're not going to do it as a car. That's exactly the type of cases they do. So reach out. Also check out Popak's YouTube channel, the Legal AF YouTube channel surging on its way to 1 million subscribers.

50:36Ben Meiselas:And also check out the Legal AF Substack surging as well. Check it out, everybody. We will be right back after our last quick break of the show.

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53:27Michael Popok:Thank you, MiracleMade, for sponsoring this episode.

53:30Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to all of our sponsors there. Thank you, everybody, for reaching out to the popockfirm.com. We're calling 877-POPOC-AF. And yeah, special shout out to those sponsors. Jordy negotiates those discount codes. And we try to make sure we're only finding sponsors who align with the brand and the mission and stuff that you would like. So please check them out if you can. It helps us out as well. All right, Popak, let's chat about the other court losses. I mean, you have what at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., right? A Memorial Labor Day weekend. You had Trump trying to deport 600 Guatemalan orphans in the middle of the night where they could go back and potentially get killed.

54:13Ben Meiselas:And then the court sets an emergency hearing there. You've got Trump rushing to the Supreme Court. Where do you want to start?

54:19Michael Popok:Yeah, well, let me back up one second. This is so bad that you've got 10 different federal judges who gave an interview to NBC in the last couple of days anonymously in which they said back to the Supreme Court for a minute that they don't feel properly supported by the United States Supreme Court, that they're doing their job. They're applying the law to the facts. They're applying precedent. They're doing the analysis. They're issuing injunctions. And the Supreme Court is sitting up on high and criticizing them and critiquing them and telling them that they did it wrong or they got it wrong.

54:51Michael Popok:And they're sort of fed up. I mean, I rarely have heard. I mean, I've been doing this for 35 years. I've never heard of federal judges, even anonymously, especially in this administration, taking to the airwaves to complain about their bosses. We saw it, however. I'm going to do the, since we let off with the 600 kids, I'll go there. Nothing says I am doing something depraved, underhanded, and in violation of the Constitution, like loading 78 children onto a plane at one o 'clock in the morning who were part of a refugee resettlement program without adults on board, without due process, and hoping to get away with it.

55:35Michael Popok:Nothing, see, that's the opposite of doing things in the sunshine. That literally is doing things in the middle of the night, hoping that a federal judge will find out about it. Well, they did, because the children, some of them I assume had cell phones, immigration rights advocates sprung into action, and then in under an hour, because they have these suits ready to go in draft, They filed an emergency lawsuit in federal court in D.C. to stop those planes. It got assigned to the emergency duty judge, who happened to be that day, Judge Sparkle Suknanen, who is an immigrant herself, came from Trinidad and Tobago, honors all the way through her career, top leader at the Department of Justice, including the Civil Rights Division under Joe Biden, clerk for Justice Sotomayor.

56:19Michael Popok:I mean, just the right judge for this. She gets it. It files at 2 o 'clock a.m., Sunday morning, Labor Day weekend. It gets assigned to her randomly. Within 45 minutes, she's on the phone trying to find somebody at 3.30 in the morning at the Department of Justice. And nobody's home on purpose, I'm sure, to pick up the phone for a federal judge who's trying to find them to set the hearing. She enters two temporary restraining orders almost immediately. She schedules a hearing. She moves the date of the hearing, the time of the hearing up, and then has, because of knowing that the planes are about to leave, and then she issues no less than 15 orders in less than 24 hours, what we call these minute order entries, to require not only that they get those kids off the plane, She then certifies a class of another 530 Guatemalans who are part of the refugee resettlement program.

57:18Michael Popok:I'll talk about that in a minute. And who are now part of this putative class, this potential class. She then, with a temporary restraining order on top of it, and then makes the government every two hours or every hour report in about getting those kids off the plane and getting them back into the office of refugee resettlement. She then sets, and that finally happens after like 18 hours. They get them all back and accounted for, allegedly. She then sets a briefing schedule that has already begun on the preliminary injunction and the class action to be certified. But the case gets kicked over because she's the emergency judge to a permanent judge, which happens to be Tim Kelly, who is her Trump appointee.

58:06Michael Popok:I wouldn't call him MAGA, but he is conservative. He is right wing. He was the protege of the Grassley, Chuck Grassley, who's the 80 year old head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. So he worked on the Judiciary Committee along with the Department of Justice. I've seen a rule against the Trump administration. I've seen a rule for it. We'll have to see what he's going to do next.

58:29Ben Meiselas:I only back check is 91 years old, Chuck Grassley.

58:32Michael Popok:I'm so sorry. It's not even the octogenarians. It's the whatever, it's the non-o-genarian, whatever they are. Yeah. The interesting thing about it, or the depraved thing about it, is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services. I just interviewed, it's going up tomorrow, a senior lawyer for the International Refugee Assistance Project, IRAP, who just argued at the Ninth Circuit, she was in the room for this on Wednesday, to try to get 125 ,000 approved refugees who have been blocked by Donald Trump from resettlement back into resettlement, some of them waiting three to four years.

59:12Michael Popok:She told me something that I didn't know. I'm not sure you knew either. Refugees who are approved by the Department of Homeland Security are the most vigorously vetted and given due diligence about their application than any other group of migrants who try to come to America. And they passed. And Donald Trump still doesn't want those. And this is refugees. This is the foundation of America. This is literally the base of the Statue of Liberty, is Emma Lazarus's poem about refugees. My great grandfather was a refugee. I'm sort of sensitive to this issue, who came to this country on a boat, but came through Ellis Island and got naturalized.

59:52Michael Popok:So this is who we're talking. We're talking about refugees, people who are worried about being persecuted and murdered in their home countries and have done everything right to come here with dignity to America to start a new life and to be a contributing member of our society. And Donald Trump blocks them and stops them, including children, and then has the balls to have his lawyers stand up in court in that hearing. True ensign of all people who has been who've been accused of lying to federal judges by whistleblowers in this about planes and immigrants to say to the judge, judge, you got it all wrong.

1:00:28Michael Popok:This is a family reunification program, a pilot. This is the Orwellian language they use. We're reuniting families in Guatemala. These are the same families that sent them to America alone because of the life that they were leading in Guatemala. So you've got that that happened. This is all the same week, just to remind people. Then you've got the Federal Trade Commission case where Rebecca Slaughter got herself reinstated, subject to a Supreme Court appeal that Donald Trump has taken, when Donald Trump just decided to fire the only Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission. And there's a problem with that.

1:01:07There's a case that you and I have talked about at length called Humphreys Executor from 1935.

1:01:14Michael Popok:Humphreys was a Federal Trade Commission commissioner, just like he was Rebecca Slaughter. And he successfully sued, creating the precedent that's still on the books that says, at least for the Federal Trade Commission, that they are not allowed to be fired without cause. My problem that the Supreme Court has been doing when they've been allowing these commissioners and other agents, board members, to be fired is that my belief, I have a working theory that when Congress, whatever Congress it was, created these agencies and commissions, that part of the material part of them doing that was that they would have a bipartisan, non-political, non-partisan board with long terms that overlapped and no one president being able, through political whim, to change its membership.

1:02:03Michael Popok:And that was a fundamental foundational requirement to set up the executive agency, then turned over to the president. But all the Supreme Court looks at is they just take a blue pencil and go, well, we'll keep the agency, but we'll get rid of the foundational governance component of it. And I'm like, how do you get to do that? Maybe Congress would not have created that agency that way or that commission had they known that you were going to say it was illegal or unconstitutional for us to require for a cause before somebody gets fired. Now, on the FTC, this is the pushback of the appellate courts and the trial courts against the Supreme Court.

1:02:45Michael Popok:Millett, Pallard, it was a two-to-one decision, wrote in their opinion, effectively challenging the Supreme Court. They said, we're not going to do your job for you. You told us as appellate judges that we need to apply the extant precedent, the precedent on the books. This precedent is on all fours. It's exactly the case. We're applying the case you told us to apply, that only you can change precedent. So we're not going to do your job for you. Literally, they wrote this. You do your job. And we're going to apply the precedent as written. And these other cases that you've done where you've let people be fired with just procedural emergency shadow dockets without getting to the substance, we're going to look at the law you've left on the books.

1:03:31Michael Popok:Now, let me just explain it quickly this way. The argument is for the Supreme Court, on a sliding scale, the more executive power that an agency or commission exercises, the more the Supreme Court wants the president to be able to fire them without cause. If you're on the other end, the least amount of executive power being exercised, then the for-cause requirement is okay. So that's the scale. And that's the fight. So Trump's arguing, oh, the FTC of today is nothing like the FTC of 1935. It exercises tremendous amount of executive power and we can fire without cause as a result. So that's going to be the push pull we're going to see at the United States Supreme Court.

1:04:13Michael Popok:Are there five votes to destroy Humphrey's executor and put it out of its misery or Trump's misery once and for all? That is the question. But it has been teed up with another loss for the Trump administration related to his ability to fire people at will, while we watch him continue to go after Lisa Cook and others. One note on that, because we just did great reporting on this on Midas Dutch Network and off of ProPublica's reporting. He's using as his for cause when he needs for cause or going after people. He's using mortgage fraud, claiming that people that have two primary home mortgages, meaning they got a little bit of a rate cut, but they have two properties that claim to be their primary when you can only have one.

1:05:00Michael Popok:That is mortgage fraud to get rid of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, to get rid of Adam Schiff as a senator from California, to get rid of the New York Attorney General Letitia Jaynes. The only problem with that is, according to ProPublica, 20 % of his cabinet has the exact same problem. So it's either mortgage fraud and Bill Pulte and Donald Trump and the Department of Justice need to go after the Labor Secretary, the Transportation Secretary, and the EPA Administrator, or it's not mortgage fraud. And the reality is, according to reporting that's gone out there, including from the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia, this is not really mortgage fraud.

1:05:35Michael Popok:That banks encourage people to check the box for primary residents more than once to make the loan. They don't really care. Sometimes it's the same bank giving the two loans to the same person. And then what is a borrower supposed to do? They get a raft of documents electronically, sometimes on an iPad. It's check, check, check, check, check. You know, they're not real estate law experts. And so they have two mortgages that maybe they would have got a slightly different rate. It's just ironic that a president who has still been a judge to be a fraudster when it comes to mortgages, loans, and real estate property is the one that's going after people for mortgage fraud.

1:06:17Ben Meiselas:And it wasn't in Trump's case, which is primary residence versus not primary residence, which the fact that Donald Trump lives in a club, which he is not supposed to live in as a residence in order to avoid paying state income tax as well and other things is its own area. Trump's mortgage related issues dealt with him claiming a certain value on the property when it came to taking out loans on the property and very different values of the property. This was when it came to insurance and when it came to property taxes and when it came to other things. And so in the case of Trump, he had to, it's an issue of intent.

1:07:11Ben Meiselas:Like the issue with Trump was never, oh, you know, you click this box versus that box. Gotcha. It was, there was a plan over decades of increasing and decreasing valuations on a property in order to extract unlawful benefits for yourself. That's what the case was about. Not, you know, did you go through a form and did you accidentally check one wrong box or whatever? And in any event, if indeed there was a criminal prosecution of somebody like Elisa Cook, there was a criminal prosecution or a civil case that went through the process and there was an adjudication after the evidence came out and there was a finding of liability of fraud when the evidence comes out, then, you know, Popak, I would think in that case, you know, okay, maybe it was more than just to check the box.

1:08:15Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump's case, when it came to business records, he's a felon. He's a felon. When it it comes to valuations, he's found civilly liable. When it comes to sexual assault, he's found civilly liable. There are actual findings. And so here, we've now learned to your point that, you know, it's 20 % of Trump's cabinet does the same thing. Bill Pulte, the fair housing administrator, his family members, you know, we're doing the same thing. If you were to prosecute Elisa Cook for doing this, you'd basically have to prosecute a lot of the country. And in that case and it would harm the banking industry.

1:08:54Ben Meiselas:It would, while already home sales are tanking right now and, and, and the housing industry suffering. So they're not prosecuted. They are, you know, I, I had on the show last night, um, uh, Lamont, Lamont, Lamont McGuire, Congresswoman who was arrested, um, and they're prosecuting her, um, out of New Jersey. So much of what the Trump regime is trying to do is huff and puff and intimidate and get you to submit based on using the full force of the federal government. But there's no there there. There's no there there at all. And so I think it's important that shows like this continue to shed light on what's really happening, break down the facts.

1:09:41Ben Meiselas:And the court system is still functioning. It's completely under assault by the regime, but it is still functioning. And you have all these federal judges, Bush appointees to Reagan appointees to Clinton, Obama appointees, and a few Trump appointees as well, who are like, what the hell is going on here? This is not law and order under the Trump regime. It's not law and order. And I like to approach the show legal AF from a very nonpartisan lens. I don't think that this should be a Democrat or a Republican or an independent issue, I think that an evidence-based, fact-based system is something that we should all want.

1:10:19Ben Meiselas:We could form our opinions thereafter, but let's go through the evidence, the facts, the documents, the tape, and let's see it. You know, I'll close with this, unless, Popak, you want to do anything else before we go. Again, this is Governor Pritzker posted in response to Donald Trump's post. I mean, Why would you want, if you're a Republican, if you're just any American, why would you want the President of the United States to post a meme of himself invading an American city and calling it Chypocalypse Now, like Apocalypse Now, and send imagery of your United States military destroying a major American city and say, I love the smell of deportations.

1:11:06Ben Meiselas:Chicago's about to find out why it's called the Department of War, to which the governor of Illinois has to respond. The president of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Trump isn't a strong man. Here, pull that up one more time. Trump isn't a strong man. He is a scared man. Illinois won't be intimidated by a wannabe dictator. And it just makes us look weak. If you think that that makes us look strong abroad, you are a very weak person. Because I can assure you that everyone from allies to enemies or former allies at this point, watch that and go, oh, they're crazy.

1:11:48Ben Meiselas:These are crazy, weak, weird people over there. Like the laughingstock of the world. As Trump used to say, they're laughing at us. They weren't. Trust me, they were not laughing at us. Right now, there's a combination of laughing at us and horror at what the United States of America has become. But we'll keep on fighting. I feel momentum. You got governors like Pritzker and Newsom and others fighting back. You've got incredible candidates that we're seeing, whether it is, you know, in Maine, whether it is in New York, across the country. And you've got those great Bernie rallies that are taking place also that we're covering here.

1:12:29Ben Meiselas:But that's all for me. Popak, anything else you want to say before we go?

1:12:32Michael Popok:No, I think we've got our groove back. I mean, people were wondering what phase we're in after waiting nine months. And I think there was a very short honeymoon phase for Donald Trump, but the crashing economy and public health crisis and Epstein scandal and personal health scandal has dashed any hopes that Donald Trump will have a successful administration. We don't pray, we didn't pray for that, as you said. if he had just golfed and left the Biden economy alone and didn't try to destroy the relationship between the federal government and the states and its people, he would be doing a lot better in every measure of a presidency.

1:13:10Michael Popok:But if you wanted to know what a failed presidency looked like, because you've only read about it in history books, you are watching a failed presidency right now. I almost laughed out loud, I think, where I had myself on mute when you showed the clip of him in the White House talking about, I think by every measure, including by a couple of people in this room, this is the most successful eight months in history. I mean, that just shows you the dementia and the delusional aspect of what he's peddling to the American people. And it's just not working. He can go on and have all of his people go on.

1:13:43Michael Popok:And they keep floating these, I'll just end it this way. They keep floating these things, like Scott Bessette, the Treasury Secretary, who I thought was reasonably normal coming in, saying, we got Federal Reserve, we got to get them out of banking regulation. We don't need the independent Federal Reserve any longer. Howard Lutnick going on television, constantly talking about how great the economy is while people are suffering. These are the words from the Federal Reserve Beige Book survey and from other surveys that came out this week. The operative words, the dominant words, vocabulary being used by Americans right now is struggling and suffering.

1:14:20Michael Popok:Those are the two adjectives that are being assigned to the Trump administration. And he thinks it's funny. And we could spend an entire show just doing the memes he's using at the Department of Homeland Security to hire people, which look like Nazi and white supremacist propaganda. What you just saw there, which is the smell of napalm in the morning with Robert Duvall from Apocalypse Now. This is a war that he's threatening sitting from his pulpit as the commander-in-chief of the United States against other sovereign states, which is part of our federalism. And if it's not Chicago, then it's Boston, then it's Philadelphia, then it's Cleveland, then it's California, and they're all fighting back.

1:15:01Michael Popok:You had a great interview with Larry Krasner, the DA for Philadelphia, where he said a version of, I don't know, we might have to start arresting federal officers who come here to try to violate our sovereignty. These are the things that are not just tabletop exercises anymore. This is what the Democrats in the major states, we got 23 states and hundreds of cities that we control, are having to sit around and talk about the break the glass moment. What if Donald Trump does the opposite of what, or he thinks he's the new Lincoln who's going to go after, renegade democratic cities and states? What do we do in response?

1:15:38Exactly.

1:15:40Ben Meiselas:We fight back. We get out the information. We organize. We bring people together. We talk about the No Kings protests happening in October. We highlight the survivors of Epstein. We interview people like Congresswoman MacGyver. We give people platforms here in Chicago. Lieutenant Governor Stratton coming on the Midas Touch Network, telling us what she's doing there. Governor Pritzker coming on. Governor Newsom coming on. Bernie Sanders coming on. Mondami getting you a wide view of perspectives and getting the information out there in terms of what you can do as well. Look, I would love if Donald Trump really did bring in 17 trillion dollars.

1:16:17Ben Meiselas:We wouldn't have needed to raise the debt ceiling by five trillion dollars. It would be great if inflation was zero right now, as he claims. But that's a lie. It'd be great if gas was$199 and everything was so affordable, but that's not true. It'd be great if there was peace in Ukraine in 24 hours and the atrocities in Gaza stopped and the hostages were returned and everything was great. It would be fantastic if all of those things happened, which he said he would do. Not happening at all. Instead, he says, I brought in$17 trillion. I stopped seven to 10 wars. The Epstein files are a hoax. And then he posts memes of himself invading Chicago when he finds it funny.

1:16:52Ben Meiselas:It's not funny. It's deeply serious, but this community is deeply serious and it's ready to fight back. Thank you all for watching. A reminder, check out Michael Popak's law firm. Please give him a call. Don't be shy. If you were in a car accident, a trucking accident, if you need legal representation, please give a call to the Popak firm by calling 877-POPAK-AF or go to thepopakfirm.com if you've been injured in a car accident, trucking accident, if you know someone who's been injured in that type of accident, any type of catastrophic injury. If you know people who are the victims in a wrongful death case, sexual harassment, sexual assault, medical malpractice, please don't be shy.

1:17:31Ben Meiselas:Give a call. Don't be like, I don't know. Is Popak one here? Yes. He's got lawyers across the country who want to be helpful. So please give a call if you can, or go to the website and fill out the form. A reminder, Michael Popak's YouTube channel on its way to 1 million subscribers. That's the Legal AF YouTube channel. subscribe there and subscribe to Michael Popox sub stack as well the Legal AF sub stack is absolutely crushing it hey thanks everybody for watching we appreciate you we are grateful for you all and we'll see you next time on Legal AF

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1:18:38Michael Popok:If you love this episode, make sure you're subscribed to the Intersection Audio Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. It's my solo ride, and we release new episodes daily, all completely free.