The Intersection with Michael Popok Full Episode - 9/30/2025

30:29Michael Popok:We're going to get rid of woke. We're going to get rid of beers. We're going to get rid of dresses. We're going to, oh my God, let's play the clip of him going after women. Today at my direction, each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat MOS, for every designated combat arms position, returns to the highest male standard only. because this job is life or death. Standards must be met and not just met at every level. We should seek to exceed the standard to push. And if you thought that was bad, here's his clip talking about what he's going to instill in the military. And note here, there's no applause.

31:13Michael Popok:There's he's just he's just talking of stone faced military men, men mainly, some women, smattering of women, who would rather be doing their day job of protecting democracy and being on the wall because we need them on the wall protecting us. No, we pulled them all out of all military theaters and stuck them in a room. If he wanted to do a TED Talk, he could have just signed up. If he wanted to do, right? That was just a TED Talk cosplay. Let's watch another clip of Pete Hegseth, our defender. What is he? the Secretary of War. What war is he the Secretary of? While Donald Trump is trying to win the Nobel Peace Prize, why do we have a war department?

31:57Michael Popok:Let's play the clip. This also means grooming standards. No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We're going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards. Because it's like the broken windows theory of policing. It's like when you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes. So you have to address the small stuff. This is on duty, in the field, and in the rear. If you want a beard, you can join special forces. If not, then shave. We don't have a military full of Nordic pagans, but unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refused to call BS and enforce standards, or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards.

32:42Both are unacceptable. And that's why today at My Direction, the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos. The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done. Simply put, if you do not meet the male level physical standards for combat positions, cannot pass a PT test or don't want to shave and look professional, it's time for a new position or a new profession.

33:10Michael Popok:But it got better when Donald Trump, you know, the commander in chief couldn't miss up an opportunity to march around like he was some sort of general Patton. I feel like I was watching a bad ripoff carbon copy of like George C. Scott in the famous movie Patton. I mean, all he needed to have was a helmet on his head and and jodhpurs and like a whip under his arm. It was just really sad. Except I woke up when Trump said he wanted the military to attack U.S. cities. I mean, what he said was, and I'll play it for you in a second, is I want you to consider using military operations. We're at war with our cities.

33:55Michael Popok:We're at war with our cities. Who's on the other side of that? Americans. and to use the military and National Guard on Americans as practice run for the military trying to take down the enemy. So now Americans are the enemy. That must be based on recent polling. The 61 percent of Americans who don't agree with Donald Trump is now the enemy. Let's play that clip. Very important mission. And I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military. because we're going into chicago version that's a big city with an incompetent governor stupid governor stupid they threw him out of his family business he was so stupid i know the family he becomes governor he's got money not money that he made but he ran for governor he won and now he criticizes us all the time last week they had 11 people murdered 44 people shot the week before that they did.

34:57Five people murdered, 28 people shot. Every weekend they lose five, six. If they lose five, they're considering a great week. They shouldn't lose any.

35:06Michael Popok:And in the same breath, he gives license to the military to get out of their tanks and go beat the crap out of people and violate their civil liberties. Let's play that clip. I was watching during Biden, And there were troops standing up like this, brave, standing up at attention, the way I should stand all the time. And I'm like this. And people are standing, and their mouth is this far away from their mouth. And they're spitting at them, and they're screaming at them. And that soldier standing there, he wants to knock the hell out of the person. But he's not allowed to do anything. So they just stand there, and they get abused.

35:49and a woman was this far away from his face and she starts spitting in his face and he's not allowed to do anything. If it's okay with you, generals and admirals, I've taken that off. I say, they spit, we hit. Is that okay? I think so. They spit, it's a new thing. They spit, we hit.

36:10Michael Popok:See, that's the problem. The problem is the military is not, based on the Posse Comitatus Act, supposed to be turning its turrets and its rifles and the barrels of its guns against Americans and others on domestic soil, because they're not trained to protect our civil liberties. They're not trained in our constitutional protected rights. And so only bad things are going to happen from an ill-trained rabble military who are not trained for de-escalation or for civil rights protection being used to beat the crap out of protesters and people who are exercising their civil liberties. We've already seen it, right?

36:56Michael Popok:We've already seen the ICE officer who doesn't care that he's on a body cam, apparently, or it's being filmed by others in the room, which Pam Bondi and others have said, that is a violation of federal law. You're interfering with the government and a federal officer because you're filming them. No, no. We're trying to hold you accountable. What's the new line out there now? When you have an ICE problem, apply heat. We're trying to apply heat in our protests. He just threw this poor woman to the ground in a courthouse. And this is all the fault, of course, of the United States Supreme Court. so while that's going i thought i thought that was a an interesting set of clips about where our thinking is as donald trump says things out loud like you know i like the shutdown because it'll allow me to cut the umbilical cord between the american people and its federal government even more and fire even more people which leads us to a lawsuit i'll cover at the end and then Then we've got LaMonica MacGyver, who is a congresswoman from my home state of New Jersey, who's firing back with her own motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution.

38:15Michael Popok:The indictment brought against her because she was exercising her House oversight powers to look at a detention center in Newark, New Jersey. and got arrested. And apparently, based on the clip I'm going to show you, it was at the orders of the Department of Justice that LaMonica MacGyver be arrested. This clip is going to be used not just by her, now that it's found its way to the public docket, but is going to be used by other targets of Donald Trump's administration who are being targeted by the Department of Justice, like James Comey, former FBI director, like Armando Abrego Garcia, like Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, you name it.

39:01Michael Popok:Let me show you the clip now. Well, we are arresting him, so. Guys, all right, I'm getting a team because he has cops around me, so.

39:15All right. No, no, I got it. I got it. We're taking them right now. All right. Let me just let me let me talk. This is bullshit. We've been waiting an hour now. Okay. Yeah. No problem. I'm going to take them right now. Okay. Let's do that. Okay. Come on. Okay. Even though we stepped out, I'm going to put them in class. We've been waiting for over an hour. And we have the right to be in there. All right. I'm talking right now. All right. Guys, listen. We're going to walk out of the gates. I'm going to place the mayor in handcuffs. Okay. We are arresting the mayor right now. are the deputy attorney general of the United States.

39:50Anyone that gets in their way, I need you guys to give me a perimeter, lighten, puff them, and get them on there. If you have body cams, turn them on.

39:57Michael Popok:This is all to support Representative MacGyver's motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution and because she has speech and debate legislative immunity because she was doing her job when she was looking at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey. so all of that leads us to the comey indictment and the reason i believe that james comey in his late night uh video to supporters effectively and literally said let's go to trial bring it with this amazing batman voice which i loved now what i know and i'll i will talk about tonight is that he's loaded for bear, right? He's got Pat Fitzgerald, former hard-nosed prosecutor in Chicago, 12 years as the Chicago U.S.

40:56Michael Popok:attorney, put two governors in jail, a donor for Barack Obama in jail, a New York Times reporter for not revealing resources in jail. Think Jack Smith turbocharged. And then he went into private practice and joined a law firm that I was a member of called Skadden Arps in their white collar department based in Chicago and a good friend of James Comey. And that's in one corner. And in the other corner, Jamie, insurance defense law. I've been a prosecutor for 72 hours. I'm an instant prosecutor. Just add water. How again? What could go wrong? You know that nostalgic feeling of sitting at the breakfast table as a kid and pouring a giant bowl of cereal that just tasted amazing?

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42:20Michael Popok:Here's how you try them. Get$5 off your next order at magicspoon.com slash legal AF, or look for Magic Spoon on Amazon or in your nearest grocery store. That's magicspoon.com slash legal AF for$5 off. Welcome back. Thank you to our pro-democracy sponsors. Thank you for being a loyal supporter of all things Legal AF and a card carrying member. Now on our Legal AF sub stack as a member and subscriber on our Legal AF YouTube channel. There's something that warms the cockles of my heart and renews my faith in our democracy, our constitutional republic, much the way that when Biden was still in office, my wife and I, when she was carrying our daughter, she was about the six or seven month mark.

43:10Michael Popok:We went and drove to Washington, D.C. and went to go look at in person the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all under glass to sort of water our tree of liberty. I feel that way having read and now talked to you again about Judge Young's decision rendered today, his love letter to the American people and to the Constitution. and when I see James Comey in a one-minute Instagram. Talk about two different ends of the spectrum, right? Old school Judge Young. It looks like he typed in on a typewriter an Instagram IG message from James Comey. And I love the voice that James Comey inadvertently, I think, adopted for his Bring It.

44:00Michael Popok:It's a combination of the one where he says, let's go to trial. It's a combination of like Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies. and did I fire five bullets or six or whatever the line is. It's like Clint Eastwood, old cool Clint Eastwood, not the current yelling at an empty chair Clint Eastwood, combined with Batman, probably the, you fill in your favorite Batman and Batman voice for that one. I have one in mind. See if you can think what I'm thinking of. And I'll just tell you, Christian Bale. And lastly, this is, wait for this one. The Rorschach character from the Watchmen movie. Got that one?

44:47Michael Popok:Where he's taken away to prison and he yells out, they're not locked in here with me. No, I'm not locked in there with them. They're locked in here with me. And then they take him away. It's sort of like that. And it makes me feel better about the defiance, about the resistance, about the First Amendment post Charlie Kirk slash Jimmy Kimmel world. Let's talk about the things that Justice Judge Young talked about. The intimidation factor of Donald Trump, his attempt through raw brute power to make us lose hope. I think that's one of the reasons we're all here together on Intersection. We'll never lose hope.

45:26Michael Popok:We'll never lose confidence in our position. Might doesn't make right. Right destroys might. There, I finally got it out. James Comey's indictment, he'll go down as the poster child of how to fight a vindictive, vengeful prosecution and defeat it right where it stands. combination of James Comey is smarter than Donald Trump and lawyer trained. Pat Fitzgerald, I'd want on, if you were picking an all-star team, you know, your starting center would be Pat Fitzgerald. Okay. He's that good. And so then we look at the new information coming out about the indictment. Like, I have a query that hasn't really been covered.

46:22Michael Popok:I'm going to do a hot take on it. It's not just that Donald Trump forced the short straw into Lindsey Halligan's hand, a willing hand, to become the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District in Virginia. It's why wasn't this case prosecuted by Maine Justice? Why didn't Todd Blanche do it? Why didn't Pam Bondi do it, although she's never been a federal prosecutor either. Why didn't Judge Jeanine Pirro do it from her perch as the U.S. attorney for D.C.? I mean, yeah, I get that Comey gave his testimony from his home in the Eastern District of Virginia because it was COVID, and he phoned it in or zoomed it in to the Senate, which is the subject, which is the foundation of this bullshit perjury charge.

47:15Michael Popok:It's so confusing. I'm not even sure what the perjury charge is. You won't either. And that's another defect in the indictment. But why didn't they? But he phoned it into the Senate. And the Senate, last I looked, is still standing, despite Jan 6th, right where it was built in Washington, D.C. sounds like main justice could have brought this case in D.C. In a D.C. grand jury. Had Janine Pirro's office do it. No. They decided to have Lindsay Halligan do it. And they sent no help. Todd Blanchett didn't go down with her. Janine Pirro. No one from the office went down with her. Stan Woodward from the Department of Justice.

47:55Michael Popok:Nobody went. She went in by herself with another lackey named Meg Cleary, who has little or no experience as well. And they effed it up. I mean, Pam Bondi's bragging today about, or the last couple of days, see, we were able to get from a liberal, hold that thought, liberal Eastern District of Virginia grand jury. That district is where they're going to have to try the case. and while they were able to get an indictment on probable cause, it's a relatively low standard, and even then it was 14 to 9, which makes for an interesting baseball score or maybe even a unique football score. But it is not indicative of a good day at the grand jury for prosecutors that they were only able to get two of the three counts, not even the main count, which is count one.

48:49Michael Popok:That's why they put it as count one. only two out of the three and just barely, and 14 to nine. That's not great. You just barely got over simple majority. Sure, you needed 14, but that's all you got. How are you ever going to get 12-0 of a federal jury in a liberal district like the Eastern District of Virginia? You're not, which brings me to my next point. I'm going to go through and catalog for you all the defects in the indictment. I'm going to tell you why the magistrate judge and all of her confusion is going to play into the hands of Comey when he files his motion to dismiss the indictment for its irregularities, for the grand jury's irregularities, for all the things that Halligan did wrong.

49:37All right.

49:38Michael Popok:He'll also have a defense of vindictive prosecution. The video I showed you by MacGyver could be used by him to show the animus of vendetta. I'll do that. is Lindsay Halligan even properly appointed? I say no under the two different ways she can be appointed. And that would also be a defect to have the indictment dismissed. But we're missing the point. I don't know, I'm leaning in now. For those that are watching me, I'm leaning in. We're missing the point. Donald Trump doesn't care whether he wins. His definition of winning the indictment is not the same as yours and mine. He wants to treat these people like playthings, force them to defend themselves, put a shadow on them, make them get legal defense funds as a pound of flesh for what, quote unquote, they did to him.

50:33Michael Popok:He already's gotten his pound of flesh because of the headlines. He's headline driven, right? He's brute force, right? So he already got the headlines. Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff knew federal probe about whether they committed mortgage fraud. He got his pound of flesh. Lisa Cook, board of governor on the Federal Reserve. We're still waiting for that decision, by the way. Committed mortgage fraud. Did she or didn't she? Did she or didn't she? He doesn't really care. He got his pound of flesh. James Comey, former FBI director, indicted for perjury. The vagaries of all the screw-ups and the infirmities notwithstanding, he got his headline and his pound of flesh.

51:27Michael Popok:He doesn't care. And while he's got our attention with the probe and the indictment and the whatever, However, he then piles it on in an abusive fashion with using his Department of Justice to do the same thing. His FBI to do the same thing. His social media influencers who are controlled by the rapid response team within the administration do the same thing. And they get weeks and weeks and months and months of mileage out of the pound of flesh. Sorry to mix metaphors. He doesn't care. These are human beings. These are people that have constitutional rights that have been violated. But he's immune.

52:13Michael Popok:He's literally immune from any criticism. Not to say the people that he's using as his henchmen have immunity. They have better be, they better have pardons in their back pocket already, which are not going to help the lawyers with their bar licenses, by the way, because of the things that they are doing, willingly, complicit with Donald Trump in the most corrupt Department of Justice we've ever had. And we had a pretty corrupt Department of Justice under Nixon with people going to jail. John Dean, the Attorney General Ehrlichman went to jail for 17 months. I'm looking at you, Pam Bondi. I'm looking at you, Todd Blanche.

52:55Michael Popok:FBI directors can go to jail. There's no immunity for the rest of these people. Well, if you have a bar license like Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, it's up for grabs. You'll just join that long, unbroken list of Donald Trump lawyers inside and outside the government who were who've lost their bar licenses, had them suspended, been indicted and or convicted. And are felons. Some of them are felons today. so yes the indictment has infirmities on its face for james comey yes pat fitzgerald is going to destroy it yes halligan screwed up by having competing indictments that had one had two counts the other one had three counts they had signatures on both the grand jury looked confused about whether they really indicted on two of the counts or not when i see a proofreading carrot being used by the jury in handwriting on an indictment of this magnitude?

53:56Michael Popok:I know things have gone awry in the grand jury room, which the magistrate judge commented on. And then you get to the perjury. This will never stand. First of all, they didn't want count two. They wanted count one. Count one was about the Russia collusion that Hillary Clinton, according to Lindsey Graham in the question, were trying to get dirt on Trump and they didn't care if it was manufactured and they used the Steele dossier to do it, which has been discredited. And somehow Comey's complicit in that. That's what they wanted the perjury to be about, Trump and the Russia hoax. But the problem is, Lindsey Graham couldn't ask a clear question.

54:49Michael Popok:There was technical difficulties between the question and the answer, literally because of the Zoom. And all he said was, I don't remember getting a memo about Hillary Clinton trying to go after the Trump campaign. You don't? No amount of umbrage or pearl clutching by Lindsey Graham. memo. Oh, I do declare. Sorry to my Southern friends for that. Oh, I have a mint julep in one hand and a fan of the other. Oh my God. You don't remember the memo? I don't remember the memo. Oh, but you must remember it. I don't. That can't be perjury. How do you have perjury or something perjurious when it's based on memory and he says he didn't remember?

55:35Michael Popok:Unless you have evidence that he signed for it. Well, you definitely got it. I mean, that doesn't. So they didn't get that. What did Lindsey Graham get? Sorry, Lindsey Halligan. Too many Lindsey's. Too many Lindsey's spoiling the party. What did Lindsey Halligan get from the grand jury? The, we think, we're not sure, it's the Cruz-Comey exchange in the same Senate hearing about whether there was a leak by the FBI about the Clinton Foundation being under investigation, which we always said was the October surprise that killed Hillary Clinton's campaign to the Wall Street Journal. Yes or no? And if so, who did it?

56:13Michael Popok:It was a whodunit. But about Hillary, like he's now trying to profit off Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton. If anybody has a lawsuit against Comey or it's Hillary Clinton. So she screwed that up. That's the one she gets. If that's even the perjury. Cruz says you you didn't leak to the Wall Street Journal he says no Andy McCabe your number two says he didn't do it either okay you stand by your testimony I do and then he screwed up the question a couple of times uh in framing it he called the instead of the Clinton Foundation he called it the Clinton administration which also undercuts any perjury you got to have clear margins around your question and your answer, which he didn't have.

57:05Michael Popok:So it's either that exchange, which I can't even believe the grand jury indicted on that, or it's about other leaks that Kobe's already admitted to back in 2017. He leaked to the New York Times his memo about his meeting in which he got fired by Donald Trump for failing to pass a loyalty test. Be loyal to me. Get rid of the Michael Flynn, General Flynn, Colonel Flynn, whatever it is, investigation. No, you're fired. And he leaked the memos through Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor, former U.S. attorney, assistant U.S. attorney in New York, who's a buddy of his. He's admitted to that in 2017.

57:45Michael Popok:Now, Richman was recently re-interviewed by the Department of Justice. But if it's that clip and not the other clip, look, that's another grounds for the dismissal of the indictment? If we can't figure it out, how is Comey and his lawyer going to figure it out, which violates their right to, you know, their Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial and to have a proper indictment against them? Sure, they can make a bill of particulars request to get a more complete indictment, but the indictment has to stand where it is. So, but remember my working theory. Donald Trump doesn't care. Pound of flesh plus months of his ability to lie in social media along with his enablers is enough for him.

58:31Michael Popok:Now, I want to move to the next topic here on the intersection. I call it the revenge of the senior status judges, right? We talked about at the top, Judge Young. And now I want to talk about Judge Lamperth, Royce Lamperth, also a Reagan appointee, also senior status in D.C. And he just issued a ruling against Carrie Lake. You know, Lake is sunk, I guess is the right way to put it, in which based on her own deposition testimony, which he found to be completely incredulous or straining credulity, he's blocked the continued dismantling of Voice of America, which used to be our way through diplomacy to get our brand of democracy into communist and other dictatorships, to give people reason to believe in our brand of democracy.

59:27Michael Popok:I thought that's what Donald Trump was all about, our brand of democracy. Nope. He wanted to defund all of it because he found a liberal DEI bias. So where there once was, as the judge commented. Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free fill in the blank, where we were doing programming to get democracy's flames spread across the globe. You know what it's down to now under Donald Trump? Despite hundreds of millions of dollars of funding by Congress, Congress demanding that there be radio free fill in the blank voice of America in China, North Korea, Africa, and Russia. You know what the entirety of the Voice of America operations are right now based on Royce Lampard's decision?

1:00:19Michael Popok:Two 15-minute segments every day in an Arabic dialect, and that's it. Okay? Nothing in North Korea, nothing in Russia, nothing in China, despite congressional obligations. And even Donald Trump saying, I have to continue with its statutory band-aids. Well, you're not doing it. And so Royce Lampert even said, how about in the deposition where Carrie Lake was asked if the African continent, where there's no content, South America, where there's no continent, represent significant interests of the United States or significant interests globally? She said she didn't know. She never gave it much thought.

1:00:57Michael Popok:So Royce Lampert put an end to the complete dismantling. He stopped the reduction in force, the firing of 500 more Voice of America employees. He wants on his desk in the next month, a list of how to restart Voice of America and get back to what Congress wanted.

1:01:25Michael Popok:And at the end, He said, I will grant effectively a motion for contempt based on the abuse of this court's orders if the plaintiff asked for it. But the plaintiff didn't ask for it. So I'm not going to grant the sanctions and I'm not going to do them on my own. Wink, wink. Bring the motion, plaintiffs. Lampert is going to set up an evidentiary hearing and he's going to find the Trump administration in contempt. while they run off to one level of appellate court and then the United States Supreme Court to try to reverse what Royce Lampert has done. And we'll continue to follow that on The Intersection, on Legal AF, on YouTube and all of that.

1:02:11Now, let's talk about precedent

1:02:14Michael Popok:for a minute because it's all the rage right now. Stare decisis is the foundation of our constitutional framework for what the Supreme Court is how they're supposed to, from a jurisprudential standpoint, make their rulings. It effectively means that which preceded is used to create the new law. Precedent. We are not a civil code country, where some of our followers and listeners, where they have the civil code, where you just look at the code book and then every judge, it's a free for all, you do whatever, every judge interprets it their own way. They don't recite and go back to any other cases or any other opinions.

1:03:01Michael Popok:That's not us. We're supposed to be building a model of precedent to be used in the courts, both at the lower court level and all the way up to the Supreme Court level. In fact, when a judge like Judge Young, who I just talked about at the top of this podcast, did not think that the United States Supreme Court's one paragraph decision in a matter involving the Department of Education on an emergency docket without a full opinion represented precedent to apply to a wholly different department about a wholly different thing, although funding was also involved. he got chastised by Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh who said defiance of Supreme Court rulings will not be tolerated by federal courts.

1:03:49Michael Popok:Judge Young was like defiance? I was supposed to interpret from that one paragraph, which had nothing to do with my case, did not give me factual background, did not give me the jurisprudential logic behind it. We call it the radio decedendi or the gravamen. How am I supposed to apply it to future cases? I was not being openly defiant. I just think it's funny now that he just wrote a 161 page love letter to the Supreme Court. If they thought he was being openly defiant then, you know, he got his groove back now. Even Royce Lampert, who I just told you about in the Voice of America case, took time out to chastise the United States Supreme Court because Donald Trump in that case argued, you can't block, you can't block our firing.

1:04:38Michael Popok:And the judge said, effectively, why not? Because there's already been five or six cases that the Supreme Court, like the Department of Education and other departments, has said that federal judges can't block firings. And he said, that was on emergency docket. I don't have, again, I'm going to repeat what all the judges are saying, I don't have binding precedent in front of me that gives me the intellectual, legal and factual logic that I can apply in your case. And you're trying to fill in the silence in a way that takes away the right of a federal judge to apply the law. And I'm not going to allow it.

1:05:19Michael Popok:Yet again, another resistance move by the lower courts telling off their bosses at the Supreme Court. You want to run this Constitution and this Constitutional Republic by one paragraph, emergency orders that aren't really orders on the merits? Then don't blame us if we don't follow that precedent. The precedent isn't even being followed by the MAGA 6 on the Supreme Court.

1:05:46Michael Popok:Justice Clarence Thomas must have forgot his mic was on. It's not a hot mic moment. He was being interviewed at Catholic University, and I guess he got all cozy comfy with a warm cup of cocoa with the Catholics at this interview and let it rip about, I don't think precedent is gospel that needs to be followed. You don't? Let's play the clip. You see originalism and stare decisis as intention with each other, and what factors do you bring when you write an opinion that suggests maybe a line of cases should be revisited? Well, if I find it, it doesn't make any sense. I think we should demand that no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.

1:06:39I don't think that I have the gospel, and I don't think that any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel. And I do give respect to precedent. But the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition and our country and our laws and be based on something.

1:06:59Michael Popok:So if he's not following the precedent, then why are they chastising and how can they chastise the lower courts from not following theirs? Right? So I love that Clarence Thomas just said the quiet part out loud. We know you haven't been following precedent, Clarence. Most of the MAGA 6 on the Supreme Court haven't. You've created, as Judge Young pointed out today in the First Amendment case I discussed at the top of the Intersection podcast, that under your originalism interpretation, you just, which only popped into pop culture and legal culture about the late 1980s when Robert Bork was trying to get on the Supreme Court, carried forward, the ball carried forward, like lateraled to Antonin Scalia.

1:07:55Michael Popok:And now they finally got the numbers. For a while, it was just like Alito and Clarence Thomas and Roberts. And now it's Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett, all originalists. What the heck does that even mean? Well, the Constitution is a brittle document. It's not, or as Antonin Scalia once put it, it's not living, breathing. It's dead, dead, dead. That's what he literally said, Antonin Scalia. I'm getting over a cold, I'm sorry. Not how I was taught the Constitution at, where am I? At Duke Law by Walter Dellinger, the late Walter Dellinger. It's a living, breathing document.

1:08:41Michael Popok:It can be changed by amendment, and we have to move it forward with respect for the words, but given the mores of today and evolve it through the Supreme Court interpretation, consistent with our historical norms and traditions, but understanding that they shift. 100 years ago, gay marriage would not be registering a 60 or 65 % approval rating. It does today. Things change. We're not wearing, you know, we're not wearing or using, we're not firing muskets. We're not wearing old-timey clothes. You know, things change. But to the originalists, because it gives them a way to avoid liberal, and I mean that in a lowercase l, liberal, it avoids liberal progressive ideas to say, well, that's not what our founders would have thought because I have a dictionary from 1787, and here it is.

1:09:51The problem with originalism is that it's a fraud and it's not true.

1:09:56Michael Popok:And it's not what the historical underpinnings of the United States Constitution are about. I just obtained a copy. Just again, we talked about watering the tree of your own liberty. I picked up at my local bookstore the Constitution of the United States. but really what it has is the compilation of the Federalist Papers and other writings, which I want to reread all the major Federalist Papers, some written by Alexander Hamilton and others that led to the Constitution and the principles of the Constitution. So originalism is a fraud. Unitary president model is a fraud. uh that was a fringe theory through the 1980s and 1990s but the federalist society pushed it and then it's like it and then oh you got these guys like roberts and kavanaugh and gorsuch who all worked in a white house and so they love the power of the president they think after nixon when we had our last corrupt president that the pendulum swung too far away from the power of the president's got to be reclaimed.

1:11:11Michael Popok:And now look what happened. They created Frankenstein, Frank and Trump, right? So against all of those backdrops, I'll just leave on that topic, I'll leave it at this. To the originalists out there, and if you're out there in the audience, you can comment. If you're always looking for the text and the meaning of the words, and everything is at its original meaning in the Constitution, then how do you explain your own powers as a United States Supreme Court, because it is nowhere to be found in the original text of the Constitution. No matter how hard you look, your powers to lay down the law based on cases and controversies and to interpret the Constitution and to interpret it as a co-equal branch of government?

1:12:08Michael Popok:That came from a person, John Marshall, our most influential and revered chief justice, the first chief justice, who in 1807 or so in Marbury versus Madison, declared that that was going to be the role of the United States Supreme Court. It doesn't have an army. It doesn't have a police force. So it has to govern because by the will of the governed? And how do you explain that your own position, your own power comes from an interpretive model adopted by John Marshall? And for those that are interested, go to Washington, go to the United States Supreme Court, see if you can go when oral argument is out, which is first Monday in October until around the end of May, and look at the giant statue of John Marshall, you know, three times, four times life-size, sitting in the middle of the rotunda of the Supreme Court.

1:13:14Michael Popok:And you'll know the importance of that person. So let me just touch on a couple of cases that I'll be following on Legal AF, the YouTube channel, and Legal AF Substack, Both filed by Democracy Forward, who are with us on Legal AF. They actually have their own playlist. Sky Perryman, its founder, meets with me regularly. They filed two cases in the last 24 hours. One, I don't know if you remember, but among the many bad things that Elon Musk and Donald Trump wanted to do and have done, is try to create a giant database, AI-driven, of all of your and my personal financial and medical information.

1:13:56Michael Popok:What could go wrong with Chinese hackers trying to find the mother load or Russian ones in hot pursuit? And so that has been addressed in a new lawsuit that's been filed to both discover its essence and to destroy it. At the same time, there's a new lawsuit that's been filed about what Russ Vought, who's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who's also the architect of Project 2025 and is effectively the head of DOGE, what he's going to do during a government shutdown, which is, let me put it this way. The government we come back to, no matter how short the shutdown is, is going to be a lot smaller than even the government is today.

1:14:48Michael Popok:That's why I think the Democrats are incumbent upon the Democrats to try to fight to keep the government open. Because it'll just give a cover to Donald Trump and Russ vote to destroy further the relationship between the federal government and the states, the federal government and the people, government programs that keep people alive, will all be wrecked and destroyed and a brain drain will go on because of the shutdown in a way that in past shutdowns, it never was. So we'll follow these lawsuits. I've done a whole hot takeover on Legal AF about Russ Vote in particular. You need to know who this gentleman is.

1:15:30Michael Popok:We'll continue to follow it. I'm so glad you're here with me at the intersection. Take a moment, slide over to the audio version of the intersection. Use a little love there, a little hummingbird theory. Let's go over and leave a comment on the intersection. Plug it in on Apple or on Spotify. Kind of give it a little bit of a, breathe some life into it. We could use some more audio lessons. We're doing great on video, on YouTube. where we're in the top, last week we were in the top 70 of all YouTube podcasts. Pretty impressive considering this thing wasn't here eight months ago. It's all because of you.

1:16:09Michael Popok:And then you know I do my regular work on the Midas Touch Network, do about 14, 15 videos a week there. And then I'm the curator, founder of the Legal AF YouTube channel. Become a subscriber there. You'll get reminders. We got some great interviews, amazing playlists, some great contributors from Court Accountability Action to Civil Action to Pragmatic Optimists. I mean, we have something for everybody. To Adam Klassfeld, All Rise News. I said Democracy Forward is there with us. Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz of Court of History. I mean, every week we get fantastic interviews. You can't get anywhere else.

1:16:50Michael Popok:So become a member of Legal AF, the YouTube. And of course, finally, you want to invest in Legal AF. Here's how you do it. You become a member and a paid member of Legal AF Substack at the intersection of law and politics with live reports and commentary and writing like no other. I think it's$7 a month. And that's the way people say, how can we invest in Legal AF? You can't. But you can become a subscriber and that goes a long way. Thank you. See you next Tuesday. And for those that observe Lashana Tova, I'm Michael Popak for Midas Touch and Legal AF on The Intersection. I'm Michael Popak, and I got some big news for our audience.

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