Trump Ready to Throw Blanche Overboard after DOJ Disaster

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2:24Michael Popok:Mark it down in your calendar, May 22nd to May 29th, 2026, Department of Justice Todd Blanche's career, RIP. I did not want another week to go by without explaining from my perch as being an over 35-year trial lawyer how devastating last week was, 22nd to 29th, in the history of the Department of Justice. And I don't know how Todd Blanche or any attorney general would survive such epic losses all across the country, in Tennessee, in Florida, in the District of Columbia, in the Eastern District of Virginia, and let's throw the Northern District of Illinois in there just for good measure. and it has a cascading impact and has opened the door to certain new strategies that defense lawyers will now be allowed to use.

3:22Michael Popok:They've been given license and permission by the results of these four cases that I'm going to discuss, really five cases that I'm going to discuss, all cabined within that same one week time period. So let's get to it, right? Without further ado, and we can create a betting pool, a predictive market in the chat. How long does Todd Blanch have before he's canned? How does he get confirmation votes at the Senate after a week like this? Have we just seen a nail or close to final nail in his coffin? We already have an ethics complaint having been filed against him to try to get his New York bar license and ticket pulled because of his conduct in one of the cases I'm going to talk about, really all of the cases I'm going to talk about.

4:13Michael Popok:And again, I want you to remember I'm talking about one seven-day period, right? Fireworks aren't usually fired off at Memorial Day, but they were against the corrupt Department of Justice. And it all, everything I'm going to talk about, just to make this a a teachable moment, a TED Talk meets a law school class, all stems from certain decisions made and conduct of the Department of Justice observed by judges since the last 19 months. It used to be you never had the ability as a defense lawyer to get the grand jury transcript because that was shrouded in secrecy and there was always a presumption of regularity that the Department of Justice was presumed to be acting in good faith.

5:02Michael Popok:That presumption is gone. And now there's been so many examples of prosecutorial misconduct inside the grand jury room that if you're a defense lawyer, here's my teachable moment and CLE for defense lawyers, if you're a defense lawyer and you're not arguing for the grand jury transcript of your indicted client. You're doing something wrong. You're committing malpractice. Second, new world order is that since the Department of Justice has been crushed by 6 ,000, 7 ,000 people heading for the exit and not being replaced by a flattening of the hierarchy of the organization where main justice and mainly two people, three people in main justice, Trump, who runs his own DOJ, Todd Blanche, Stan Woodward, and a guy named Akash Singh, who's the right-hand person for Todd Blanche, that is the decision-making tree.

6:06Michael Popok:They're calling the shots for local prosecutions. What does that mean? That means your ability as a defense lawyer to argue that your client is being vindictively prosecuted just went up astronomically. Your ability to make that argument because of the flattening of the hierarchy. It used to be, you know, Maine Justice was sort of in a silo that you had your local U.S. attorney, really your assistant U.S. attorney. Maybe you got to talk to the U.S. attorney on a really big case on a really big issue. But unless Maine Justice was part of the prosecutor team, you weren't talking to Washington. You weren't lobbying anybody there.

6:45Michael Popok:But when you collapse all of it and you start controlling it centralized from Washington, then defense lawyers, you got to bring motions for vindictive prosecution and your hand has been strengthened. Now, let's go through the week that Todd Blanche wishes wasn't and will come up in his confirmation hearing, no doubt, especially if the Democrats get control. If I was Donald Trump, I'd hurry up and get Todd Blanche into the Senate for a confirmation hearing if that's where he wants to go. Because when the Democrats take control, it's going to be a tough sledding, if you know what I mean. May 22nd, May 29th.

7:21Michael Popok:Here's the magic trick. I'm going to start it now. Let's start in Tennessee. Judge Crenshaw decides that because effectively Todd Blanche does not testify to refute and rebut the presumption that the judge has already determined exists, that the government vindictively prosecuted Kilmer Abrego Garcia. You remember him as the poster boy for due process and civil rights violations, for torture in El Salvador. He's now a free man because his indictment was dismissed, because the government never put up the right witnesses, because they were scared to put up Todd Blanche. They were scared to put up Akash Singh.

8:01Michael Popok:and therefore the court had no choice but to find vindictive prosecution was properly established by the defense. That now opens the door in a cascading way to other motions to dismiss for vindictive prosecution. That may have been the first order, but it's already paying dividends. The Southern Poverty Law Center, two days later in Alabama, filed their motion to dismiss for lack of, for vindictive prosecution, citing back to the Kilmer Obrego Garcia case in Tennessee. And I interviewed the lawyers for Kilmer Obrego Garcia. And here's what they had to say. Play the clip. I have a theory, and you tell me if this holds any water.

8:45Michael Popok:When you have a Department of Justice that's been captured by the president, when you have a flattening of the organization in the way that we've now seen it. I mean, a complete flattening of the hierarchy where you guys have been doing this as long as longer than me and you have your federal prosecutor backgrounds as well. I mean, you've got Maine Justice. It's not hard now for defense lawyers to argue that Maine Justice and maybe even the top two or three people in Maine Justice are calling the shots on local prosecutions. Whereas in the past, how hard would it have been? Have you ever in your careers filed and or won a motion for vindictive prosecution before this one?

9:27Definitely not. Nor in my time as a prosecutor did, I mean, did any whiff of that ever come into any practice that I was involved in or frankly, that my whole office was involved in. I mean, look, you know, David and I were talking about this earlier. I mean, the hearing, the sort of final hearing on this was handled by the number three at the department. I mean, it's like unheard of. And all of it was sort of a trimming down of what they were actually going to put in front of the judge. And, you know, we did argue that it was clear out of the gate that it wasn't going to be adequate.

10:07Michael Popok:Okay. And now every political enemy or target of Donald Trump has a motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution now in their back pocket. That means James Comey, the former FBI director, in his North Carolina Seashell prosecution. That means E. Jean Carroll, the sex abuse victim who Donald Trump wanted to step and rain on her parade of her having a documentary about her life in the last couple of weeks by having his Department of Justice announce a criminal prosecution that seems to be phony. She's got a vindictive prosecution motion in the in the future, as does any other person prosecuted by Donald Trump after he's done attacking them.

10:50Michael Popok:Now, let me move forward to something that happened on the same day. Judge Brinkema, Eastern District of Virginia, on a lawsuit brought by our friends at Democracy Forward, she blocks the anti-weaponization fund, you know, the$1.776 billion fund, until at least June 12th while she gets briefing in. But she has blocked it from being established, being operated, a commission being appointed, funds being distributed to anyone, including all you Jan Sixers, with your hundreds of millions of dollars of claims that are lined up. That was brought by Democracy Forward. And I talked to the lawyers for Democracy Forward and its founder, Sky Perryman, about the interaction or the interrelationship between what's going on in the Senate, what's going on in Miami, with a case there that started the settlement and the fund in front of Judge Williams and her case.

11:43Michael Popok:And here's what she had to say. Play the clip. And then, of course, back in the Florida suit where we filed and you and I talked about this amicus brief that we filed on behalf of former government officials, both Republican and Democratic, a bipartisan group that outlined all the things the court could do, including appointing specific neutral amici to come in, which the court was doing and was handling those those briefs, as you'll recall, said, we don't think you have jurisdiction here. And immediately before the court could even act, the president seeks to dismiss his claim because he knew he was going to lose there.

12:14So yesterday, I think you're going to talk about this later today, or earlier this week, there was a filing on behalf of 35 judges back in that Florida case saying like, take a look at this. This wasn't really valid. So this is the kind of thing that should be mired in litigation. It is mired in litigation, but it's also the kind of thing that every single American, you don't have to be a lawyer. You don't have to be a politician. This is just, this should be off limits. I mean, this is rank corruption. And I think that that's what you hear people expressing to their elected representatives expressing in the streets we're seeing.

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14:11Michael Popok:That's Q-U-A-L-I-A life.com slash legal AF. And then use code legal AF. Thanks to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. Now, let's move same day. That was Eastern District of Virginia. Let's move to the District of Columbia with Judge Chris Cooper. Chris Cooper, in a 94-page opinion, blocks many things about the Kennedy Center. One, he permanently blocks and calls for the removal of Donald Trump's name from the top of the center. In a scar of the legacy, the only living memorial to JFK in D.C. will no longer bear the name Kennedy, according to Judge Cooper. He also got the ex-officio member, Congresswoman Beattie, back onto the board as a voting member for consideration of all things that impact the Kennedy Center.

15:04Michael Popok:He also stopped preliminarily for now the closure announced by Donald Trump, likely because he's embarrassed because just like his birthday party, nobody wants to perform at the Kennedy Center while Trump is president. Well, I'll close it down for the next two years while I'm president. Right. Because any link between the two year period of time they were going to close for repair and Donald Trump's presidency. And Judge Cooper said, no, you're keeping it open until you do better fact finding, more prudent record keeping about that issue. Then we get, I mean, these are all bombshells. This would bring down any attorney general in any other era, any one of these things.

15:44Michael Popok:But let's go to Judge Williams. Why not? She heeds the advice and the request of 35 former federal judges who asked her to reopen the IRS case that Donald Trump filed against his own agency, who he then used in a phony way in an illegitimate lawsuit to settle in bad faith a case through the Department of Justice, who has no power to settle a phony claim to set up the fund and to wipe away 16 years of audit and tax liability. for Trump and his family. And Judge Williams says, based on the filing, I'm going to reopen the case. I want to know by next week in a filing by Trump, this is Trump in private capacity, and his lawyers, did you deceive the court?

16:33Michael Popok:Did you commit a fraud on the court? Is your settlement and trying to take it away from the court a fraud on the court? Is the settlement document deceit and fraud on the court? And should I be sanctioning people as a result? If she finds that the case had no merit, therefore the judgment act or judgment fund that the Department of Justice used to set up the account for the almost$2 billion is illegal, then you pull the pin on the whole argument and the whole fund collapses. So we're going to watch carefully what happens with Judge Williams there in my backyard of Miami. And we're not done. Same week.

17:19Michael Popok:Judge Perry is presiding over a case involving the Broadview Six, the protesters during Operation Midway in Chicago. one of them being, I think, a podcaster, a media influencer who was running for office. Anyway, they're about to go to trial when the grand jury transcript finally comes out. And there for everyone to see, including the federal judge, is prosecutorial misconduct at the highest level inside the grand jury room, a place we never normally get to see in which the prosecutor is violating the most basic concepts of being a proper prosecutor following the Department of Justice manual and the principles of federal prosecution.

18:05Michael Popok:Particularly, particularly, they are, she's vouching for the evidence. She's saying, well, trust me, it's a lot of evidence. I've been doing this a long time. You haven't. This is good. You can't vouch for evidence. You can't bolster witnesses. You can't say, that guy, that's an expert. You got to listen to an expert. You got to just present it straight to the grand jury. She also did other things, including talking to the grand jury outside, grand jurors outside the presence of the grand jury. Can't do that either. It was so bad that even the handpicked prosecutor in Chicago, Boutros, came into court and said, we're going to have to dismiss the indictment.

18:40Michael Popok:This was a scandal. And now he's trying to clean house in Chicago. The reason that's important is not just because Judge Perry made a statement that she's open to award sanctions against the Department of Justice and the prosecutors there for misconduct, the most egregious she's ever seen, she said, but because it's now, I think, pinned down Boutros to stop him from going after E. Jean Carroll. because the DOJ let it leak out that they were going after E. Jean Carroll, the person who was judged to be a sex abuse victim by nine jurors, nine zero, federal jurors in New York, because she's got a new documentary out.

19:21Michael Popok:In the same week, you hear, oh, the DOJ is investigating whether she lied under oath to Alina Habba about a question about who's paying for her legal fees. I don't know. Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn gave her lawyer a fund to use to defray costs for certain of her lawsuits. Who cares? Doesn't mean she wasn't sexually abused in a dressing room by Donald Trump. What does it matter? And she was cleared of any wrongdoing about her testimony by the federal judge, Judge Kaplan, and by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. This is not going to help Donald Trump. He just did it to crap all over her. And when they went back to Boutros and said, hey, tell us about E.

19:59Michael Popok:Jean Carroll and whether you're prosecuting her out of Chicago, he said, I'm not prosecuting her out of Chicago. I think it's related to they are now inflamed in scandal in Illinois, in Northern District, and he's not taking on that hot potato anytime soon. So that's some of the dividends that are being paid here. You take that body of work, you put that in front of the Senate confirmation hearing, for Todd Blanch, he's going to be flamed alive. It's going to be a live autopsy. First time in history. you know you've already got Pam Bondi also last week but even behind closed doors she threw Todd Blanche under the bus and said I it's a big agency I didn't follow everything about the Epstein files Todd Blanche my right hand he did talk to Todd Blanche okay at the same time you got a bar complaint filed against Todd Blanche because of what he did in the vindictive prosecution case of Kilmer Abrego Garcia to pull his law license.

20:57Michael Popok:That's a week. That's not a week. What I just described should be legal AF for a six-month period or maybe a couple of years, not a week. I didn't want another week to go by without telling you the historic importance of it and its impact on Top Blanche's career. I'm Michael Popok. Where are you? You're on the Midas Touch Network. You're on Legal AF. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button, help us to continue to grow our pro-democracy channel. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack.

21:36Michael Popok:You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily 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.