Melania's Dark Secrets Finally Surface

0:18We'll see you next time.

0:30That starter pistol you hear is a race to the courthouse. As journalist Michael Wolff, who has a case against Melania Trump related to defamation, he's considering whether to file a suit down in Florida, and if he does in federal court in Miami, to try to avoid Melania Trump filing her defamation case against him in front of Judge Cannon in Fort Pierce, Florida. And while all that's going on, Michael Wolff still has another trick up his sleeve. He can file an appeal with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to force the trial court judge in New York to give him the discovery, the deposition, the sworn statements under oath about, well, let's just call it Donald and Melania's living arrangement, force the judge, Judge Viscosal, to order that discovery.

1:24That's where we are as Melania Trump, as we like to say around here, tries to hide her deep, dark past. A Michael Popak, you're on, might as touch in legal AF. In the last 48 hours, a Trump appointed judge in a, how do I put this nicely? in a pissy 45-page order, dripping with venom towards the lawyers for Michael Wolff, ultimately decided that she had jurisdiction over a preemptive defamation case for declaratory judgment action that Michael Wolff filed in New York State Supreme Court, the trial court level at the state court level. When Melania moved it over to federal court to try to get it down to Florida, the judge instead took jurisdiction, finding that Melania lives in Mar-a-Lago and in Florida.

2:19Michael Wolfe lives in New York, so the case belongs in federal court under diversity jurisdiction. And all the lawyers for Michael Wolfe wanted was what's called jurisdictional discovery in order to determine where she really lives. I mean, let's be frank. Anecdotally, those that watch her coming and going in New York, comings and goings from Trump Tower, comings and goings from all of her shopping strips and spa days and lunch with the ladies, all say the base of operation for Melania Trump is in New York. And if it is, that she didn't have the right to bring the case to federal court, it should have been hammered out in state court.

3:00And that's the fight. But Judge Viscoso, who's one of the rare Trump appointees on the Southern District of New York federal court, you know, she takes umbrage at Michael Wolff filing his suit first. Well, what was he supposed to do? He had a threat of a billion dollar or else letter from Melania Trump's lawyer, who she shares with her husband, Alejandro Brito in Coral Gables, Florida, who demands a billion dollars if he doesn't retract from his journalism, from his First Amendment expression, certain facts and opinions that he's made about Melania and her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Melania doesn't like it, but it's not actionable defamation if it's true or if it's pure opinion.

3:51And Michael Wolff said, I'm not going to sit around and wait for the lawsuit to be filed against me. I'll file a lawsuit against her to have a judge declare that these 10 things that she claims I said about her in the letter can't possibly form the basis of defamation. and let's do it early. It's a good strategy, you know, and it should have been decided by a New York state court judge. Melania didn't like that. And as part of a two-step move to get the case down to Florida, maybe in front of Judge Cannon, she filed a motion to dismiss for lack of, oh no, she first removed the case, sorry, to federal court, arguing that she's a resident of Florida, Michael Wolfe's a resident of New York, and the case should be decided in federal Court.

4:34Michael Wolff's response, she's not a resident of Florida, despite her driver's license and where she votes occasionally. She really lives in New York. And I've been involved with residency battles. And there's lots of indicia of residency that have to be explored or citizenship. It's not just where you say it is. You have to look at the underlying facts. And so you go for discovery. And as far as I'm concerned in reviewing all of the motions and papers filed by Michael Wolff, they made out a prima facie case that the judge should have allowed them to explore Melania's real address. I mean, it's very simple.

5:18They had enough allegations, to the best of their knowledge, about her whereabouts in New York to challenge federal jurisdiction. So what Judge Viscosal should have done is say, you know, let's get to the bottom of it. Sit for a deposition of first lady and let's have a smaller amount of discovery, documentary discovery, and then we'll decide whether I have jurisdiction at all. No. She said instead that she didn't like the gamesmanship. I'll read to you from some of it here. She didn't like the gamesmanship by Michael Wolff's lawyers of filing first, even though she says, buried on page 35 of the order, she says out loud, I'm not ruling on the substance, right?

6:03You're not ruling on whether he's entitled to his declaratory judgment action. You just don't like that it got filed in state court in New York, and now you're having to deal with it in federal court in New York. You should take it out on Melania, because she's the one that brought the judge into the case. Here's what the judge says, again, dripping with, you know, sort of venom towards the lawyers for Michael Wolff? What's with all the pissiness? Donald Trump files dozens of defamation cases. Most of them get dismissed, but the judges don't spend a lot of spilling a lot of ink about taking on the president.

6:43Why is she taking on Michael Wolff? Well, we know the answer to that. Here's what the judge says. This case is presented to the court in a somewhat contorted posture. A would-be defamation defendant, that's Michael, sues a would-be defamation plaintiff in New York's state court. He seeks a declaration that statements identified in a demand letter from Melania's lawyers threatening litigation under Florida law are not defamatory or they have violated his First Amendment rights in anti-SLAPP law. Thereafter, the would-be defamation plaintiff removes the action to federal court and moves to dismiss.

7:20On the merits, the basic issue here is whether plaintiff's public statements about the first lady were defamatory. But that question, however much attention may have received in the media, is not yet before the court. Right. She later says on page 35 of her order, almost towards the end, that she's not making a ruling on the merits of the case. I mean, you could have fooled me the way that she writes the thing. Constantly haranguing and bashing the lawyers for Michael Wolf about having the temerity of challenging the residency of the first lady. My cat Chanel, she runs the house. I just pay the mortgage and scoop litter.

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8:40I've used Boxy Pro Deep Clean recently, and I can actually vouch that this works. Our place smells better. Scooping is easier, and Chanel took to it right away. Plus, with Boxy, you do not need to do full litter changes. You just scoop, top it off with fresh Boxy litter, and that's it. If you're tired of switching litters, looking for the one, get 30 % off your Boxy order at BoxyCat.com, backslash Legal AF, and use code Legal AF. That's B-O-X-I-E-C-A-T dot com slash Legal AF. And make sure you use my code Legal AF so they know I sent you. At one point, the judge says that the lawyers for Melania obviously are in a better position to comment about her residency than anybody else.

9:27Like, no, that's why you have an adversarial process and you let the other side have discovery and then have a hearing about it for you to decide as the fact finder. You don't just say, oh, well, the first lady has lawyers. What does that mean?

9:44In taking on the lawyer for Michael Wolff, the judge says, reading further about the first lady's domestic life, plaintiff and his counsel know nothing. Let's stop right there. Michael Wolff, you can say a lot of things about Michael Wolff, but he is an intrepid reporter that's been reporting about Melania and Epstein and Trump for a long, long time. He's the last person that ever spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. He doesn't know anything about her life. Everybody who lives in New York knows about Melania's life. It's pretty public. So that's a crazy statement. And then she just chalks off the affidavit that was filed by Michael Wolff's lawyers as nothing more than them watching the Melania documentary.

10:25I mean, no, they point to the Melania documentary as further prima facie proof that she doesn't live in Florida. There's always been reporting that she has a prenuptial, that the prenuptial agreement got amended in order to force her to go to the White House, that she hasn't lived with Donald Trump for a long time. And she basically operates in her own apartment or suite of apartments in Trump Tower and has for a long time. If that's the case, then Judge, this particular federal judge, Viscoso, shouldn't even be involved with the case. It should stay in New York state court between two New York residents.

11:06So here's Michael Wolff talking about when he learned that the judge, this particular judge had been assigned in his initial reaction once he learned that she has taken jurisdiction of the case, kept it in federal court, but declared that he doesn't, that she's going to decline the invitation to issue a ruling on the substance. Play the clip. Shortly after I filed my lawsuit against Melania Trump, we drew a judge in federal court appointed by her husband. That was an uh-oh moment in which the meaning was perfectly clear to us. we were asking the Trump judge, Mary Kay Vicosal, to rule against the interests of the family that her career depended on.

11:54Imagine if you're Judge Vicosal, the Trumps on the one hand, and because you're in New York, your colleagues, your more liberal colleagues on the other hand, and you're faced with having to make an adverse ruling against the First Amendment. Well, the judge's decision, which we waited four months for, came down on Friday, and it had two elements. She accepted Melania Trump's lawyer's preposterous proposition that she is a resident of Florida, even though she spends all of her time in New York. But that made it a federal case, and that's exactly where the Trumps wanted it, not in state court, in federal court.

12:48But that also meant the judge had to rule on the merits of the case, or theoretically she had to, because the second part of the decision was that she decided not to rule on the case itself. That in fact she abstained, that's her word, she abstained from ruling on the merits of the case, the First Amendment elements of the case, and kicked it out of federal court. Now the Trumps will take that as a victory, and I think the judge probably wants them to take that as a victory, but this notion of her abstaining opens all kinds of legal doors for us to walk through. In other words, our goals remain the same and as reachable.

13:38We want Melania Trump to testify about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which she has used her husband's power to cover up. And we want the court to rule against the Trump White House's malicious and self-serving threats against the media. So stay tuned for our next moves. Here's what should happen next. I'll give it to you from my federal court practitioner standpoint. Michael's got two choices. They're both in his hands. He can either take an appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, argue that the judge got it wrong and should be ordered to provide limited jurisdictional discovery, including a deposition of Melania for them to attempt to prove that she lives in New York.

14:31Okay? That and should be remanded back to the judge with those instructions. Failing that, Michael's second choice to get to the bottom of Melania's deep, dark secrets about her marriage is to file fast first in Florida. File it in Miami, the Miami division of the Southern District of Florida, to avoid the Fort Pierce division where Judge Cannon resides. Because you know that's where they're going to want to file. They're going to want to file in the one judge courthouse up in Fort Pierce, Florida, a part of the Southern District, and try to get her assigned as the judge. She won't recuse herself, even though she's been rumored to be shortlisted for the Supreme Court, rumored to be shortlisted to be the attorney general under Trump.

15:16She was a Trump appointee, but she never recuses or disqualifies herself. So this is the race I think we're now watching. I'm going to try to get Michael Wolff on with Sidney Blumenthal and me on Legal AF for a follow-up, maybe with his lawyers, to talk about their strategy and their case. And we'll do all of that right here on Midas Touch and on Legal AF. So in the meantime, hit the free subscribe button on Legal AF YouTube channel and on our sub stack to help support our channel. So until our next report, I'm Michael Popak. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack.

15:52Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do called, wait for it, Morning AF. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AF are there as well. We got some new reporting. We got interviews. We got ad-free versions of the podcast and hot takes. Wear legal AF on Substack. Come over now to free subscribe.

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