Motion Filed to Block Kennedy Center From Adding Trump’s Name Again

0:00Michael Popok:Donald Trump's latest attempt to rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself has hit a little bit of a roadblock in the form of a late night emergency filing for injunctive relief filed by the plaintiff, Representative Joyce Beattie, who sits on that board. She's asking Judge Cooper to find that the Trump board is in contempt, that they have violated their fiduciary duties, that there should be a stay, first administrative stay, and then a permanent stay of any attempts to deface the memory of John F. Kennedy and the only living memorial authorized by Congress in D.C. for the fallen president.

0:39Michael Popok:No, Donald Trump doesn't get to put his name all over it in some sort of bizarre graffiti and rename the plaza because that violates the organic statute that violates Judge Cooper's 96 page order that he just entered. And now we find out from the filing, they can't even get their corporate papers, their board papers straight. They supposedly have a general counsel. I've done board meetings as a general counsel. I know what you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do is have a agenda that looks like this that doesn't reference they're going to vote on a name change and a plaza change and the vote to shut down the facility.

1:18Michael Popok:When it says, oh, call to order, then we're going to approve the meeting minutes, then we're going to elect officers, then we're going to get a litigation update. Lord knows what happens in the litigation update. And then we're going to do a buildings and grounds presentation. Where is it alerting anybody that they're going to be voting on renaming the building again? nowhere. And it also turns out from our reading of this new filing that they can't even get their resolutions straight. And I thought, because of a new filing by them in the last couple of days, that the Kennedy Center went, oops, we had a resolution in which we are going to honor Trump for his current and past and future contributions to the Kennedy Center by slapping his name back on it and bigger letters than even John F.

2:03Michael Popok:Kennedy's name in several lines of text that were going to give him the title president, even though John F. Kennedy's title is not on the building. I thought they screwed up with the resolution and they're just sending in the corrected version. No, it turns out from the emergency motion that there were two resolutions that were presented to the board during the Zoom call, according, I'm sure, to Joyce Beattie, who participated in it. So which one is it? So you have corporate irregularity issues, fiduciary breach issues, contempt of court issues, all encompassed in one decision to violate a court order.

2:41Michael Popok:I'm Michael Popak. Hit that free subscribe button. Help us continue to grow our pro-democracy channel. All right. So the judge invited this motion a couple of days ago. He issued an order after receiving the joint status report of the two parties after the August 13th Board of Trustees meeting. The board is comprised of a bunch of people who are under the thumb of Donald Trump, you know, like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary's wife, Allison, and Usha Vance, J.D. Vance's wife, and Richard Grinnell is on there, and Paolo Zampoli is on there, the person who introduced Donald Trump to the House.

3:17Michael Popok:It's all, you know, sort of bootlickers and sycophants who have no backbone and are not exercising their fiduciary duties. They should be removed. Let me repeat this. At some point, the lawyers for Joyce Beattie should ask for the removal of the fiduciaries and have a receiver appointed who is a officer of the court to run the Kennedy Center because these trustees have abdicated their responsibility and are breaching their duties of loyalty and prudence. They're not loyal to the public. They're loyal to Donald Trump. and it becomes more apparent as you read the memorandum in support of the motion, which we'll post up on Legal AF Substack.

4:00All right, let's get into it. Let me read to you from pages one and two to kick this off. Page one, it is deja vu all over again by federal statute. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and site thereof is a living memorial to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Two months ago, this court issued a crystal clear decision. It was 96 pages, by the way. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it. The court made clear that Congress took pains to ensure that the Kennedy Center's public spaces honor President Kennedy and President Kennedy alone. By law, no other individual besides President Kennedy may be memorialized on the front portico of the building.

4:42The court ordered defendants to remove President Trump's name from the facade. After waiting until the last possible minute, they complied, an act of obvious petulance. Defendants hung a tarp over the building's iconic lettering, obscuring President Kennedy's name. Now, in a new and breathtaking act of defiance of Congress and of this court, defendants have voted to return President Trump's name to the Kennedy Center's facade. This time, Trump's name will appear on the building's front portico not once but twice.

5:14Michael Popok:Underneath President Kennedy's name, it will say restored and renovated by President Donald J. Trump and endowed by the Trump-Kennedy Center fund. Notice how they even elevate Trump above JFK, the beloved JFK, by giving him the honorific of president while the complex is called the John F. Kennedy Center, not the President John F. Kennedy Center. Page two, enough is enough, they write. Defendants' contemptuous behavior must stop. That means they're in contempt of court. We also call it contumacious. The court decided this issue on May 29th. Defendants do not like the law. They do not like this court's enforcement of the law, but they are not above the law.

5:56This latest move is a transparent effort to rename the center in President Trump's honor. If permitted to proceed, defendants will openly flout the law, as they apparently did the first time. Risk added damage to the historic facade as well. To facilitate this court being able to decide this matter on a reasonable timeline. They are requesting the court enter an immediate temporary stay while they are briefing. Later in the brief, in footnote two, on page six, they address the

6:26Michael Popok:competing resolutions issue, which I talked about in my first video today. Why is there more than one resolution? Why were both presented to the board? Why was the wrong one, according to them, filed with the court or was the wrong one filed with the court. Maybe the right one was filed with the court originally. Maybe the erotic sheet of disclaiming or claiming error by filing the wrong resolution with the court should be ignored. That's their argument. And when you look at the red line, which we'll put up on the screen on Exhibit B, you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to put it like in the future tense.

7:07So it's not a memorial. It's just a recognition of things that will happen in the future where they say the center desires to honor the president's contributions, current and future, with an inscribed recognition on the building. That doesn't change it from being a memorial. Here's what footnote two says. On the eve of the deadline for plaintiffs to file this motion, defendants informed plaintiff that they had provided the court with the wrong version of the resolution. At this juncture, plaintiff knows only that two versions of the resolution were shown by Zoom to the board, one of which appears to have been the version originally filed with the court.

7:46Plaintiff objects to this 11th hour errata, that means error sheet, and does not concede that the latter field resolution represents the operative one. It is possible that defendants are confused or mistaken about which version they passed, a fact that only underscores the shambolic nature of the proceedings on August 13th. What you do when you have shambolic proceedings of a board is that you, in discovery, get all of the text and the emails and the agenda package and the resolutions and in draft and the text messages between, you know, I don't know, Alison Lutnick and her husband, Howard

8:23Michael Popok:Lutnick, and between everybody on the board and Donald Trump. And then you figure out what really happened in that board meeting. How were they so prepared? Where is the agenda package? You don't want me to believe, do you people on the board, that this was your agenda, that you did not know that you'd be voting on a major name change in violation of the court's order, that you did not know you would be voting on shutting down the Kennedy Center, that you did not know that these things were going to be happening? Was that all covered under Mr. Burke's litigation update, some sort of executive session?

8:58We'll get to the bottom of it in Discovery, I am sure. Here's what they say, continuing in footnote two. Either version of the resolution is unlawful. In this motion, plaintiff focuses on the text of the original one for the avoidance of doubt. The accompanying red line shows that the second filed version changes some of the tenses of the verbs. This appears to be an effort by defendants to suggest that their inscriptions in plasic designation do not memorialize President Trump because they are honoring current and future actions. If this is their theory, it is preposterous. The inscriptions are written in the past tense.

9:34Moreover, President Trump's current actions today become past actions tomorrow, meaning that the inscriptions in plaza renaming honor past actions. Nor is the bar on memorialization limited to past acts. Oh, what's going to happen? Well, the judge has already set up a briefing schedule. Let me just read you from a couple of more sections that I think are important for the judge to light on. On page 11 of the filing, they say, May the board's recognition resolution adding two new inscriptions onto the portico in Donald Trump's honor and renaming the plaza for him is a transparent attempt to effectuate the renaming in another guise.

10:11If a patron attends the Kennedy Center, sees Donald Trump's name emblazoned on the portico, and learns about President Donald J. Trump Plaza, it will appear the institution is once again named for Donald Trump. Trump on page 18, as they round out their briefing, they inform the court, they argue to the court as follows. The bizarre and rushed way in which the board adopted this new recognition resolution, keeping trustees in the dark until the last minute, neither circulating the resolution in advance nor including the measure on the agenda, was wildly imprudent and constituted a breach of fiduciary duty.

10:49They don't even mention, I think they should have, that Joyce Beattie says that she believes Donald Trump was listening on the phone like some sort of obscene phone caller, breathing on the phone. But people knew he was there speaking up at the very end. Once again, I think the lawyers here for Washington Litigation Group like Nate Zielinski and Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders should be moving in due course to remove that board. They have abdicated their responsibilities. They are in breach of trust. The judge should be using his equitable powers to protect this living memorial, the JFK, and its public function, its public-facing function, right?

11:31Get rid of them. Assign a receiver or a court official, an officer of the court to report to the judge and take over the operation of the Kennedy Center. I think they have abdicated their responsibilities. they should be eliminated and removed and let them fight their way back in. I'm Michael Popak. You're here on Legal AF. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button as we continue to grow our pro-democracy channel. Until my next report in about an hour, I'm Michael Popak. Popak here. When life changes in an instant because of an injury or the bad acts of another, you need fighters in your corner.

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