Panicked Trump’s Lawsuit Over Epstein Secrets Instantly Backfires

0:00Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy.

0:29Michael Popok:Trump's going to regret having filed that lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, opening the Pandora's box wide open, subjecting himself to discovery and depositions, sworn statements under oath where he always does terrible. And now we've got the newest information. Basically, something that I said was going to happen during Legal AF podcast on Saturday has happened. And the judge assigned to the case of Trump versus Murdoch in the Wall Street Journal, Trump versus Sanity, is Judge Darren Gales. I know Judge Gales very well from when he was on the Florida Miami-Dade Circuit Court. It's a phenomenal judge.

1:08Michael Popok:And you may recall that he was the judge that presided over the case that Donald Trump filed against Michael Cohen for defamation and breach of contract. same lawyer for Donald Trump, Alejandro Brito, same judge, Judge Gales. I'm going to tell you why this matters on this Midas Touch Legal AF hot take. I'm Michael Popok. Let's get into it. I'm using my Florida legal experience, 35 years practicing down here in Florida. Let's talk about what just happened. As we said on Legal AF, the podcast, one of the dumbest strategic moves I've ever seen Donald Trump make was to file this particular lawsuit and take on this particular media empire in an effort to try to distract and change the narrative of his cover-up of the pedophile, predatory conduct of his wingman and one of his best friends, Jeffrey Epstein.

2:01Michael Popok:If he thought that was going to work because the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the front page about Donald Trump hand-making a birthday card that was glued into a scrapbook back in 2003 and included in a 50th birthday party Epstein birthday party gift. He thought that by filing the lawsuit, claiming that it wasn't his birthday card, this was going to change the narrative. Forget it. The headline is that Murdoch finally is severing his ties with Donald Trump and gave permission for that expose to be published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which also gave license one after another, seriatim for the other corporate media outlets like the New York Times to start publishing their own pieces.

2:49Michael Popok:New York Times is doing a hit a day against Donald Trump once Wall Street Journal broke the glass ceiling and gave permission. Permission structures operate in every location, including in the media. And once they did that, New York Times said, we're going to run our stories about all the people and all the data points that connect Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein and make it almost impossible to believe that he did not know that Jeffrey Epstein, his wingman and best friend, was also preying on and raping girls. And so we have article after article after article, all since Donald Trump filed that lawsuit.

3:26Michael Popok:Now, I also said, using my experience, my superpower experience of being a trial lawyer and being a trial lawyer who's practiced for years down in this Southern District of Florida, that I found it odd that Donald Trump did not file this case up in a more friendlier venue, a more friendlier division of the Southern District of Florida, which would have been the West Palm Beach division, which where he would have had a 50-50 shot of pulling Aileen Cannon. Why didn't he do that? You've heard me. And if not, I'll tell you straight. I think it's because he did not want Cannon for this case in case he has to elevate her to attorney general or worse to the United States Supreme Court.

4:08Michael Popok:So they filed in Miami, 70 miles south of Mar-a-Lago, not near where he lives. He has a lawyer that he likes a lot, Alejandro Brito, who works in Coral Gables, Florida in Miami. And he filed this case. He filed the case against Cohen. He filed the case against ABC and filed the case against Paramount CBS. So he's his go-to for this kind of defamation type lawsuit. And the last time we got this gang together of Trump, Alejandro Brito, his lawyer, and a judge named Judge Gales, things that not go well for Donald Trump. So they filed in Miami. There's 18 or 20 judges that he could have pulled. He pulled randomly, randomly, Judge Darren Gales.

4:54Michael Popok:And I actually joked about it with Ben Micellis on our Legal AF podcast on Saturday. He could get Gales. It's one in 17 chance, one in 16 chance, but he could get them and he got them. What does it mean? Let me tell you first about my personal information that I have from knowing Judge Gales. From years that he was on the Miami-Dade Circuit Court, my firm, full disclosure, supported his candidacy, helped him when he had a challenger a couple of times in terms of raising money for him, held a fundraiser for him. I spent a considerable amount of time with Judge Gales and I like him a lot. He is, I don't know if he's the first openly gay judge on the Southern District of Florida bench, but he's openly gay.

5:39Michael Popok:I think he might be the first. African American, appointed by Obama, supremely qualified, super smart, and he doesn't take the bait. He's got a perfect judicial temperament. He's quiet, thoughtful, but don't F with him or any federal judge for that matter in the Southern District of Florida. And in the using the Trump Cohen case as the blueprint, I think it's going to go very similarly. As soon as the lawyers from Michael Cohen, who include, full disclosure, a firm that I'm affiliated with, the Donya Perry firm, as soon as they started setting the depositions early for Donald Trump in the case, that case eventually got dismissed by Donald Trump voluntarily.

6:25Michael Popok:They called his bluff and they set his deposition because that's what Donald Trump has exposed himself to. And, you know, it's not a one way street in a lawsuit, especially when you're the plaintiff. You carry the burden of proving your case. You carry the burden of trying to get your complaint to survive a motion to dismiss, which is obviously coming from the Wall Street Journal. Because what they published about the handmade birthday card pasted into a scrapbook and they saw the scrapbook. They saw the they talked, apparently, based on the reporting to the FBI and the Department of Justice officials that were involved with gaining this information, gaining this evidence, who used it or are going to use it in some way to prosecute Epstein and or Jelaine Maxwell, who got prosecuted for being a co-conspirator in sex trafficking of girls and sentenced to 20 years.

7:17Now, she's begging for a pardon from Donald Trump, hoping that he wants to make the whole crisis and the whole conspiracy go away.

7:26Michael Popok:So they published the article about this X-rated handmade card with a doodle of a woman, a naked woman, where the pubic hair is the jagged, sharpie signature of Donald Trump. And he said, oh, it's on my card. I don't know why that is the issue. why that is his problem to file the lawsuit. I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pages and hours and videos and photos and evidence and testimony and interviews that link Donald Trump directly to Epstein, including Donald Trump's own interviews in magazines. You know, that feeling after your morning coffee, that crash, the jitters, the bloating.

8:12Michael Popok:Yeah, I was getting all that every single day. But coffee was part of my routine and I wasn't ready to give it up. Then I found everyday dose and it completely changed the game. This isn't a coffee alternative. It's coffee with benefits. I'm talking 100 % Arabica coffee combined with functional mushrooms like lion's mane and chaga, plus collagen protein and nootropics. It fuels your brain. It supports your skin, hair, and joints. It gives you clean, sustained energy all day long with no crash, no jitters. I switch between Coffee Plus, their mellow, low-acid, light roast that's easy on my stomach, and Coffee Plus Bold, a full-bodied medium roast that gives me a little extra boost when I need it.

8:54Michael Popok:And here's the best part. Get 45 % off your first subscription order of 30 servings of Coffee Plus or Bold Plus. You'll also receive a starter kit with over$100 in free gifts, including a rechargeable frother and a, get this, gunmetal serving spoon by going to everydaydose.com slash legalaf. or entering Legal AF at checkout. You'll also get free gifts throughout the year. That's everydaydose.com slash Legal AF for 45 % off your first order. Try it. Your mornings will thank you. I mean, Midas Touch is running almost on an hourly basis in social media and on its website and on its YouTube channel, information about people who connect the dots between Donald Trump and Epstein and Epstein's depraved activity, including now Ivanka.

9:44Yeah.

9:45Michael Popok:And all of these people that were ignored or the pieces were not put together by anybody but Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald who brought down Epstein with her dogged reporting. Nobody else has covered it the way that we did. So the birthday card is the thing that sets Donald Trump off to go after Rupert Murdoch. And Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family don't respond to anybody. They're not owned by outside investors, right? I mean, there are outside investors, but they control, they have the controlling stock in the company. They make all the decisions. So what's going to happen? Judge Gales, now that there's a complaint, there needs to be a response to the complaint filed within probably around 30 days.

10:30Michael Popok:I'm sure it's going to be a motion to dismiss, arguing that this is not defamatory on behalf of the Dow Jones company that owns the Wall Street Journal owned by the Murdoch family. It's not defamatory. It's true. Donald Trump can allege actual malice, which is a requirement for a public figure and defamation, which means knowledge of truth or falsity about this card or reckless disregard for whether it's true or false. And then there's other privileges that may not be appropriate for motions to dismiss that but will be raised in short order in the case. and Gales will hold, or his magistrate judge, Judge Goodman, who has been assigned to the case, will hold a preliminary, usually the magistrate judge holds a preliminary hearing about discovery, depositions.

11:22Michael Popok:When are people going to be sitting down in a room with a court reporter? When are people going to be under oath? When are documents going to be exchanged? When is information going to be required to be provided by way of written answers to questions we call interrogatories? Usually the magistrate judge who sits under the federal judge, reports the federal judge, handles that kind of mundane day-to-day experience. In my experience in federal court, sometimes I don't talk to or get to see or have communication with the actual federal judge assigned to a case for a year or two, while the magistrate judge handles everything.

11:58Michael Popok:If I don't like what the magistrate judge does, I can appeal it to the trial court judge, this case, Judge Gales. Gales may take a more active role here. He doesn't have to use his magistrate. The first conference may well be Gales, the lawyers for Rupert Murdoch who have yet to appear, and Donald Trump's lawyer, Alexander Brito, to talk about the case and to hear some preliminary comments and observations by Judge Gales. But Brito knows Gales well, the lawyer for Donald Trump because he already lost in front of him, if you will, in the Cohen case. As soon as they called his bluff after he sued Michael Cohen for hundreds of millions of dollars and set him for deposition, Donald Trump dismissed the case.

12:41Michael Popok:We'll have to see what's going to happen here. But certainly Donald Trump has waived his immunity issues. He can't, if they countersue him, which they're allowed to do, once he's been sued, Donald Trump can't use immunity as a sword and a shield. He can't say, oh, I can sue you, but you can't sue me. It doesn't work that way. He's effectively waived his immunity defenses or any argument of presidential immunity or this immunity or that immunity. When they start asking him, well, who did you talk to about this card? Oh, I can't tell you. Executive privilege. That's not going to work. We're going to have to work our way and grind our way through that with Judge Gales.

13:18Michael Popok:But Judge Gales is super smart. He's seen this kind of case before. I can't think of a better judge to be assigned than Judge Gales randomly to this case. It matters. I think for those who have been students of Midas Touch and Legal AF for the last five years, you know that the judges matter. They're all supposed to be independent, nonpartisan arbiters of the law and applying the facts to the law and just being independent umpires. But we know that where they come from and who appointed them and their backgrounds influence their jurisprudential approach. Now, Donald Trump already has his ready foil, right?

14:01Michael Popok:He's got a black judge, a black gay judge appointed by Obama. We can write the social media posts now, can't we? And ignore them. Leftist, Marxist, this is, that's us. Although he didn't do a heavy amount of attacking against him during the Cohen days. But we'll have to see what happens here. I'm going to get Michael Cohen to join me on Legal AF to talk about his experience in front of Judge Gales. And that'll better inform my reporting here on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. So look for that interview on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Thanks for being here on the Midas Touch Network. As you can see now more than ever, we need you to protect us from Donald Trump.

14:42Michael Popok:and we'll protect you the same way. Corporate media is lopping off heads to try to satisfy Donald Trump left and right, Stephen Colbert, maybe Jon Stewart next, maybe Jimmy Kimmel next, and then we start getting to the on-air reporters. We've already seen it happen. There's a reason Katie Fang is now part of the Midas Touch network and a sister channel to MyLegalAF. And so we need your support. It's easy, it's free. Hit the subscribe button on Midas Touch, come over to LegalAF, the YouTube channel, Hit the subscribe button there. No paywall, right? No censorship here. Completely independent thought, independent reporting, independent commentary.

15:21Michael Popok:All for you. We appreciate you. Until my next Legal AF Report on Michael Popok.

15:41Michael Popok:roundup that I do call, 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. Where? Legal AF on Substack. Come over now to free subscribe.

16:03Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.