The Intersection with Michael Popok Full Episode - 10/28/2025

0:00Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. 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. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank?

0:33Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining alfresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods Market, no antibiotics ever, burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill.

1:10Fire up a juicy ribeye. Grab creamy potato salad and savory flatbreads from the prepared foods department and round it all out with 365 brand condiments, chips and dips at everyday low prices. Whole Foods Market, make your summer sizzle.

1:27Michael Popok:I'm Michael Popak, and you're at the intersection of Law and Politics, the new podcast only on the Midas Touch Network. I'm expressing my First Amendment right to give you honest commentary, and you're expressing your First Amendment right to listen to commentary like this at the marketplace of ideas. in the public square. It's all under attack. It's all under attack by the Trump administration. Your First Amendment, right? My First Amendment, right? But we're here together on Tuesdays to talk about things honestly, because we got to talk and speak truth to each other before we can even hope to speak truth to power.

2:08Michael Popok:And it's working. We see it in the poll numbers. We see it in the streets. If there were giant statues of Donald Trump, like any other dictator, they'd already been torn down by the public with ropes. He's down to 38 percent approval rating, 37 percent approval rating. More than 63 percent of America is against Donald Trump and his dictator tendencies. They're against his militarization and federalization of the National Guard to go into blue states. He's against him cutting funding to important programs, to those that help give people dignity and honor and the ability to live, whether it's welfare programs, it's SNAP, supplemental nutrition programs for children and the like.

3:00Michael Popok:They're against his immigration policy. They're against his tariff policy. They're against how he abuses fellow Americans, how he abuses our global allies. And we get to talk about it once a week. When we come together here, it is that important. So I have four or five stories, probably five stories that I want to cover with you here at the intersection. And we'll just do a Rorschach test. I'll say a name, you tell me what you think of. Armando or Kilmer Armando Abrego Garcia, one. Lindsey Halligan, two. Snap lawsuit led by 23 attorneys general just filed today. the auto pen and pardon debacle or scandal or report of the oversight committee trying to undermine once again Joe Biden and an appeal filed in the middle of the night by Joe Biden.

4:03I'm going to pull all that together with you here at the intersection.

4:07Michael Popok:Let me start with Kilmer Abrego Garcia, because it's not just about him. Yes, he's being tormented by the federal government and all of its resources. It's about all of us. It's about all of our civil liberties, all of our due process rights. We are Kilmer. And he's fighting a fight in two battlefields. One in Tennessee, presided over by Judge Crenshaw, criminal matter. The second, Judge Zinnis in his civil rights case. This is the person who was illegally deported to El Salvador despite having an American court order in his pocket saying he could not be removed, especially to the torture prisons of El Salvador.

4:51Michael Popok:It took Judge Zinnis several orders, the Fourth Circuit several orders, and the Supreme Court 9-0 to bring him back. When the government brought him back, they trumped up some manufactured charge of human smuggling in Tennessee. And now we've got two worlds colliding in the last 24 hours with a new order by Judge Crenshaw and some findings by Judge Zinnis about Abrego Garcia. So the motion to dismiss his indictment for human trafficking, smuggling in Tennessee is coming to a head. And the lawyers for Abrego Garcia let it be known that they want to put on the witness stand, Todd Blanche and other members of the Department of Justice.

5:43Michael Popok:That triggered the Department of Justice, who within days of that, sent Abrego Garcia's lawyers a notice in the court, a notice that they're sending him 3 ,000 miles or more away to Liberia in Africa. He said he was willing to go to Costa Rica. At least it would be near his U.S. citizen family and children. And it's Spanish speaking. You know, he speaks Spanish. We've seen him on the courthouse steps speaking Spanish. He doesn't speak English that well. Sending him to Liberia is not going to be a great idea. That was in retaliation to the lawyers for Abrego Garcia embarrassing the Department of Justice as they move forward with a November 4th and 5th hearing about whether his indictment will be dismissed for a vindictive prosecution.

6:30Michael Popok:Judge Crenshaw has already indicated that he's likely to grant that motion, but he wants to hear further evidence. And in the meantime, in the last 24 hours, Judge Crenshaw issued an order, which we have up on Legal AF Substack, that gags the federal government from continuing to bash Abrego Garcia and undermine his ability under the Sixth Amendment to have a fair trial. And the judge cited several video attacks of Abrego Garcia, like people like Pam Bondi. Here's a clip of Pam Bondi that got the judge upset. Let's play the clip. Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and they agreed to return him to our country.

7:16We're grateful to President Bukele for agreeing to return him to our country to face these very serious charges. This is what American justice looks like. Upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador. The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring. They found this was his full-time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country. MS-13 members, violent gang terrorist organization members throughout our country.

8:16Thousands of illegal aliens were smuggled. This is especially disturbing because Abrego Garcia is also alleged with transporting minor children. The defendant traded the innocence of minor children for profit. There are even more disturbing facts that the grand jury uncovered. It is alleged this defendant is part of the same smuggling ring responsible for the death of more than 50 migrants in 2021 after the tractor trailer overturned in Mexico. This is part of that same ring. The defendant abused undocumented alien females, according to co-conspirators, who were under his control while transporting them throughout our country.

9:11This defendant trafficked firearms and narcotics throughout our country on multiple occasions. They were using vehicles, SUVs, with added seats in the back, floors that had been ripped out, guns, narcotics, children, women, MS-13 members. That is what the grand jury found. a co-conspirator alleged that the defendant solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor a co-conspirator also alleges the defendant played a role in the murder of a rival gang member's mother these facts demonstrate abrigo garcia is a danger to our community now

10:03Michael Popok:Now, having now gagged them, meaning they can't continue to talk about the case, it was interesting to me that nobody, including the lawyers for Abrego Garcia, didn't raise in the criminal case that they're about to deport him to Liberia. They knew it at the time. I'm surprised they didn't do it. The judge also said he wants more details about the senior lawyers in the office, the middle district of Tennessee, U.S. Attorney's Office, who quit because they wouldn't bring false charges against Abrego Garcia. So Brad Edwards, for instance, he wants more information, the judge, to be sent to him for personal review about that issue.

10:45Michael Popok:So he ordered that as well. That's on the criminal side. Same 24-hour block, Judge Zinnis pulls everybody together about Liberia. And during that hearing, she says to the lawyers assembled, I don't want him going to Liberia. He's currently in Virginia under her watchful eye in an ICE detention center. I don't want him going to Liberia. Make a representation to me that I don't have to worry in the next few days or hours for him going to Liberia. I'm sure Judge Crenshaw, the criminal judge, doesn't want that either. We're still waiting for the new filings that will give the judge that assurance.

11:24Michael Popok:She was not happy in the court during that. And she's trying to consider whether his due process rights are continuing to be violated. it. I've said, and I'll say it again, I think she has the power to grant him asylum for the abuse of his constitutional rights and as a way to compensate him. That's what I think she should do. And I'll stand by that. But we'll have to continue to watch as the government reacts, overreacts, and is vindictive towards Abrego Garcia in both courts. speaking of prosecutors for the department of justice but maybe not for long let me turn to lindsey halligan lindsey halligan is in another scandal of her own making i reported and i had the pleasure of in the honor of interviewing anna bauer reporter for lawfare who received a series of unsolicited signal app messages from somebody named lindsey halligan who was prosecuting the Letitia James case.

12:30Michael Popok:Turned out it was Lindsay Allegan. Turned out she wanted to have a dialogue with a reporter, apparently on the record, about the case in real time, including about evidence, including about grand jury information. And Anna Bauer, as any intrepid reporter would do, good reporter would do, published it. And that led to not only the article, my interview with Anabauer, but it led to that event being the centerpiece of a couple of different motions and lawsuits. Now, firstly, because Lindsay Halligan admitted that she used the Signal app and its disappearing messaging feature for official communication, she's destroying federal public records.

13:13Michael Popok:She's destroying federal public records. And she should know better because she was on the team with Todd Blanche, her boss in the Department of Justice and others, when they were the defense lawyers for Donald Trump. And they know what the defense lawyers were able to do to pick apart every little mistake or misstep of a prosecutor, whether it was Fawney Willis or it was Letitia James or it was the office of Alvin Bragg, these various places where he was prosecuted, Jack Smith. they wrote the playbook on how to go after the prosecutors. So why are they surprised that the signal app use and messaging to a reporter would be used by the defense team to seek to gag Lindsey Halligan in one of the motions filed by Letitia James?

14:04Michael Popok:Let me show you a clip of the interview I just had with Anna Bauer up on Legal AF. and she's hopefully going to be a regular. If you don't know her work, you really need to discover it. She's a reporter's reporter. She's one of the inputs and sources of information that I rely on for my reporting. Really, really insightful work. But here she is in the interview. Let's play a clip. I think it just kind of underscores that when you're in this like high profile pressure cooker environment, of course, defense counsel is going to like seize on these kinds of public statements, which made it so surprising to me that she was on the record speaking to a reporter about an ongoing case.

14:52You know, for all the reasons that we wrote in the piece, that's just so unusual. And so, again, I just think that the fact that this motion was filed kind of speaks to the unusualness and why it seems to be something that was at best misguided in terms of her choice to reach out to a reporter about an ongoing case.

15:20Michael Popok:And a couple of days later, you did an update where you said that the DOJ communications person contacted you for the sole purpose of correcting the typo in Lindsay's name. Yeah. So it was it was I you know, it wasn't too long after we published the piece. I was like two hours, I believe it was. They reached out and said that they had realized that they misspelled Miss Halligan's name. Yes. But other than that, I haven't heard additional commentary from DOJ. As I understand it, I believe that they gave a comment to a different outlet in which they described me as a blogger as opposed to a journalist.

16:11But other than that, you know, we have not had any additional commentary from DOJ asking for a correction. It was just that misspelling that they provided in the state. But that's not the only thing that happened bad

16:27Michael Popok:to Lindsay Allighan based on the single signal messaging. Again, this is a government who at the start of its administration had another signal gate problem. When Mike Waltz, the national security advisor then sent to Iceland as an ambassador now, accidentally or on purpose included Jeffrey Goldberg, another reporter, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a signal chat to talk about whether they were going to bomb the Houthis in Yemen or not, a military action. Now, I hope people aren't getting too fatigued by all of Donald Trump's 15 different attacks in Venezuelan waters, Caribbean waters, and Pacific waters against people without due process.

17:12Michael Popok:But back in the start of the administration, there was this entire signal chain about the bombing that included the reporter and J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. And it was the subject of a lawsuit by a group called American Oversight. And a judge said, you can't use signal. You need to preserve signal. You can't use the disappearing messaging feature for public records. Apparently, Lindsey Halligan never got that memo. Maybe it was on a disappearing app like Signal. So American Oversight has made a demand, and we have the rumblings of a new lawsuit, sent to Marco Rubio, who's the ethicist for America.

17:59Michael Popok:No, he's the archivist. Couldn't be the ethicist. He's the temporary archivist in charge of public records, not just the Secretary of State, in which they're demanding all signal messages and all her use of signal messages not only be preserved, but that it be shown to the American people what she destroyed. And they also point out that she effectively threatened the reporter by telling her, you're getting your reporting wrong. You know, if I were you, it was sort of a not so subtle threat to try to chill her First Amendment expression. And now we bring it, since we're still talking about Lindsay Allegan and James Comey, because she's the prosecutor for the former FBI director, and Letitia James.

18:54where we had just had the arraignment of Letitia James, in which he very valiantly and with great

19:02Michael Popok:conviction and courage said, in effect, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going to let them crush me. I'm going to stand up for the American people. There's a motion bending about whether Lindsey Halligan lives or dies. No, it's not Hunger Games. in being a prosecutor, in being a, was she properly appointed as Eastern District of Virginia prosecutor or not? And everybody that's looked at it, including me, says she wasn't. She was illegally appointed because there was already an interim U.S. attorney named Eric Siebert, a Republican who Donald Trump didn't like because he refused to indict how Lindsay, sorry, he refused to indict James Comey and Letitia James.

19:49Michael Popok:He got fired, but he was the one and only interim U.S. attorney. The next stop is he's, Donald Trump's got to get somebody through the Senate. And in the interim, there needs to be somebody appointed by the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia. That's how it works under a statute we call Section 546. So the motions are both almost identical, Comey and Letitia James. And the issue is there's a conflict of interest with the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia because they would pick the next U.S. attorney if she gets bounced. So the motion has been sent off, as I predicted, through the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge, Judge Diaz, who sits over North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, to a South Carolina judge to decide.

20:45Michael Popok:And the motions have been consolidated, so they're going to be heard together. Who's the judge? Judge Curry, senior status judge in her mid-70s. She was appointed by Bill Clinton. I just think it's so perfect that they sent it to South Carolina, the home of the other Lindsay, Senator Lindsey Graham. They picked a federal judge that he probably supported because he had to have given his blue slip to support her, oh, those many years ago. She's been on the bench for a million years. She's a resident of Florence, South Carolina. She worked in the Department of Justice in D.C. and in South Carolina.

21:21Michael Popok:She's a very confident, incredible judge. Judge Curry's going to be making this decision sooner rather than later, because the trials of Tish James and James Comey are in January coming up. So we're going to be doing a lot of reporting about that. But if you're Letitia James and James Comey, you got to be happy with the pick of the Clinton appointee, Curry. The rest of the motions on vindictive prosecution and on the gag orders, they stay with the two trial judges, Judge Nakmanoff, the judge who's a Biden appointee for James Comey, and Judge Walker, who's a Biden appointee for Letitia James in the Eastern District of Virginia.

22:06Michael Popok:Just this one motion to DQ, disqualify, goes off to South Carolina and all of that. So that's where we are with Lindsey Halligan. Maybe you shouldn't appoint a novice with seven years legal experience and having never been a federal prosecutor, let alone being in federal court, maybe you shouldn't appoint them to be the top five federal prosecutor in America. How about that? Let me move on. Got a lot of interviews. You just saw one that I did with Anna Bauer, and I've got one coming up. Actually, I'm going to be recording it tonight, late, with Attorney General Rob Bonta, who I had the distinct pleasure of doing the interview with on No King's Day in California.

22:50Michael Popok:And A.G. Bonta is back to talk about today a powerful new lawsuit filed on behalf of tens of millions of impoverished Americans or whose children need nutrition. It's the Supplemental Nutrition Program, the SNAP program. Between 20 and 40 million children and babies need this in order to survive. And Donald Trump is playing politics and Russian roulette with their lives because he wants to blame the Democrats for taking food out of their mouth and nutrition out of their mouth when nothing could be further from the truth. There's a secret memo, which I actually got my hands on. I'm going to put it up in Legal AF Substack.

23:33Michael Popok:Back in September, before the shutdown, every agency had to come up with a contingency plan. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is part of the food distribution, nutrition distribution apparatus of America, prepared a report that said they had a rainy day fund of up to$6 billion, that they understood that Congress wanted the SNAP program and other welfare and food stamp type programs to be up and running. And then somebody, if I had to guess, Russ Vogt, who's the chair of the Office of Management and Budget. He's the director of Office of Management and Budget. He's the creator of the Project 2025.

24:15Michael Popok:He, along with Stephen Miller, said, let's screw the Democrats and their efforts to try to ensure that 22 million Americans, many of the same overlapping families, don't lose Obamacare, don't lose their health care. We're talking about Americans here. Every time I say anything in this segment, we're talking about Americans, not illegal immigrants. and so they're holding it hostage and they're holding babies and children's lives hostage and threatening to shoot and not release the six billion. So there already was a secret memo that was taken down from the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

24:54Michael Popok:We have it. We found it because that was in September. Beginning of October, they said we got the six billion. It's rainy day. We're going to be distributing it to cover the payments for November, which is about$8 billion. Then somebody thought better of it. And two weeks later said, there are no more funds, and then posted a callous message that we would like to distribute the funds if only the Democrats and the radical Democrats would stop holding the government hostage. Talk about inhumanely hitting the government or hitting Americans and making them suffer. In fact, I have a clip from a Midas Touch simulcast or broadcast of a press conference just today about the lawsuit filed and led by California by 23 attorneys general, got filed in the District of Massachusetts in order to get those funds, that rainy day fund paid out to Americans.

25:58Michael Popok:Let's play the clip. I'm gonna kick it off here today to announce California's latest lawsuit against the federal government, and specifically the U.S. Department of Agriculture, also known as USDA, and Secretary Brooke Rollins. Using the current federal shutdown as a scapegoat, USDA has unlawfully suspended funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, for the first time in the program's history, informing state agencies that the federal government will withhold all November benefit payments. Trump and Rollins are cutting off benefits from more than 41 million Americans. 41 million Americans, red states and blue states, folks who rely on SNAP to put food on the table, even though there are billions of dollars in contingency funds and other funds that could be used to provide SNAP benefits during the shutdown.

26:53They are doing this on purpose. It is deliberate. It is intentional. They have the funds. They're just not using them. The vast majority of SNAP recipients are families with kids, elderly individuals, and people with disabilities. These are our most vulnerable. Society should be judged on how we treat the most vulnerable. Trump gets an F for what he is doing here to our kids and to our most vulnerable Americans. Here in California, our SNAP program, CalFresh, supports 5.5 million Californians every month, including 1.9 million children. All of them are counting on this program. They're counting on their government to follow through on its promise and to provide the support that they need.

27:37In abruptly suspending SNAP, Trump and Rollins have broken the law. They have forced states to scramble to try and clean up the federal government's mess. And worst of all, they've left 41 million Americans unsure of where their next meal will come from. With today's lawsuit, our coalition of 23 attorneys general and three governors who are standing up for the people in their state have made it clear that we refuse to stand by and allow the Trump administration to arbitrarily and unlawfully do away with a decades old safety net program, the country's most important tool for fighting against hunger.

28:19And as I said, we had the Pam Bondi clip.