Trump Stunned by SCOTUS in Multiple Rulings

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1:00Michael Popok:That sounds you hear. That's fireworks that have started to go off already in Washington, courtesy of the United States Supreme Court, who in three decisions dropped today, took a bite out of Donald Trump. major setbacks for Donald Trump. First, on mail-in ballots. Second, about the Federal Reserve and his ability to fire people at will. And third, about his sex abuse judgment obtained by E. Jean Carroll. All coming together here on Midas Touch and Legal AF on Michael Popok. Let's roll up our shirt sleeves and get into it, shall we? Let's start with mail-in ballots. It's a decision that was rendered five to four written by Amy Coney Barrett in Watson versus Mississippi.

1:44Michael Popok:The Republican National Committee wants to take away your right to vote, wants to destroy mail-in ballots as we know it, but the Supreme Court is not going to allow it because they found as in a matter of statutory interpretation that states are empowered under the Constitution to count ballots that are marked post-date of the day of the election, even if they're counted after, recognizing that no state in their right mind can tabulate all of its votes on one election day, which is what Donald Trump wants. They also made a ruling, and I'll read to you from parts of it, that I think undermine many of the things that Donald Trump is now trying to do as this assault on mail-in ballots and on elections in advance of the midterms.

2:34Michael Popok:Particularly, they said, if there's fraud, if there's integrity problems, that is not for the court. That is for the legislatures. I think they're referring to the state legislatures and certainly not for the president of the United States through executive order to try to take away our rights to vote, all in a case called Watson versus Mississippi. Let me touch on the Lisa Cook case, who's serving a 13-year term on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, which is the seven-member group that runs this independent organization that's been around since 1913, but traces its lineage back to the 1700s with banks of America, original banks of America.

3:21Michael Popok:In that case, which has been written by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan Jackson, and Kavanaugh, that five-person group, they said that Donald Trump cannot on his own just fire people claiming it is for cause on the Federal Reserve, that that undermines the independence of the Federal Reserve, that if he could just fire them for any reason or all reasons, then it would be no different than being able just to fire somebody at will. And particularly the statute which they are upholding that created the Federal Reserve by Congress says it has to be for cause. Now, what is for a for cause reason to terminate?

4:05Michael Popok:They left it a little loosey-goosey, a little mushy, if you will. They said it depends on if the allegations, when you compare them to the position and the responsibilities of a member of the Federal Reserve, if those two things are not coextensive, then you can fire them for cause. They don't really get into the due process argument. They get into his allegation and the way he fired her through social media posts and otherwise is not allowable and finds that he's not going to win. On the third ruling today, because this is three or four out of about 14 decisions we're getting between today and later this week, you've got E.

4:50Michael Popok:Jean Carroll. Now, I'm going to be bringing on, hopefully, Robbie Kaplan, the lawyer for E. Jean Carroll, to celebrate this decision. We've been talking about that for the last about five months, Donald Trump has been trying to get the Supreme Court to take on an appeal his case where he lost$5.5 million. But more importantly, he was a judge to be a sex abuser by a nine-person jury in New York presided over by Judge Lewis Kaplan. Trump argued after losing at every appellate level, he now argued to the Supreme Court in a petition that the judge let in evidence of his prior sexual abuse on other women and the famous Access Hollywood recording of him, which he's never been able to deny because it's true, where he says out loud that he would grab a woman by her genitalia and get away with it.

5:48Michael Popok:That should not have come into his case. and after 12 different conferences in which they could not get the four votes together out of nine necessary to bring that case up on appeal in Donald Trump's favor, they finally rejected the appeal and denied the petition today. There's another petition for$83.5 million because she had two trials against him and won both of those. And if I'm reading the tea leaves, they're not taking that case either. There was no dissent by anyone in the E. Gene Carroll case, not even Alito or Thomas. Let's get back to mail-in balloting. This is an action-packed video.

6:33Michael Popok:Let's get to it. Let me read to you. Let me set the stage first. Mississippi in 2020, around the time of COVID, along with about 30 other states, set a deadline. as long as your ballot was, you made your electoral choice, you elected who you wanted. That's the election, by the way. You put that in an envelope, you mailed it and had it postmarked on the day of the, by the day of the election. It could be received up to five days after grace period and be counted in that election. Well, Donald Trump likes to say that's fraud. There's going to be fraud. It's not fraud. It's just counting. It's just tabulating.

7:14Michael Popok:He doesn't like the fact that he loses often on mail-in ballot and absentee ballots. Now, they had a weird position because they didn't want to be against absentee ballots, the Republican National Committee. They didn't want to be against military ballots. They just wanted to be against mail-in ballots. But that tied them up in knots. And so even at oral argument that we covered on Legal AF YouTube channel, they were just completely spinning with irreconcilable legal positions. They were pointed out by people like Amy Coney Barrett, and she ended up writing the majority opinion. Now, what they have now declared is that a federal set of statutes about what day the election is does not undermine the ability of states under Article 1 to make decisions about the time, place, and manner of elections.

8:09Michael Popok:If they want to give a five-day extension, California has a seven-day extension for mail-in ballots. That doesn't undermine those statutes. Now, they purposely said in the ruling, which we'll post up on Legal AF Substack for paid members today, that we're not making a constitutional analysis. We're focused on whether a statute about the day of election means you can't have a grace period for mail-in ballots, and we're finding that that does not compute, that that does not apply. States can still give a grace period. It doesn't violate the setting of an election day. They also recognized, Amy Coney in the decision that it is virtually impossible to tabulate all votes in one day.

8:55Michael Popok:And so that is an unreasonable position to have taken. Let me read to you from certain parts of this, which I think are important, particularly undermining Donald Trump's attempt to federalize elections. On that note, this is what the court said on page 19, written by Amy Coney Barrett for the majority. Plaintiffs, that's the Republican National Committee, assert that requiring ballots to be received by election day protects election integrity and increases voter confidence in election results. As we've said time and time again, policy arguments are properly directed to legislatures, not the courts, citing a couple of cases from the United States Supreme Court.

9:44Michael Popok:The question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea. The question is whether the idea has made its way into the United States code. So the way I interpret that is they are not going to be happy with Donald Trump's attempt through executive order to federalize and take over the constitutional right of states to regulate elections. As they said at the beginning of this opinion, the primary power to regulate elections is with the states. The ultimate power is with Congress. One of the two of them have to speak and speak clearly on this major issue, a major decision.

10:26Michael Popok:And they're not, I believe, based on this ruling, going to allow Donald Trump just to create a centralized database, make laws about voter ID or voter collection or counting or mail-in ballots at all. I think that's the takeaway for me in the case of Watson versus Mississippi, of course, with Alito and Thomas and others in dissent. Well, it's time for some life talk, life insurance talk, that is. You probably have it, but do you know how much you're paying for it? And for how much are you being covered? odds are you pay too much for too little. And did you know if you receive life insurance through your job and you're unexpectedly laid off, you could suddenly be covered for nothing?

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11:55Michael Popok:That's selectquote.com slash legal AF. Then we've got the case of Lisa Cook. Lisa Cook, upon her slender shoulders, hangs the entire independence of the Federal Reserve. There are seven members of the Board of Governors. Of the seven members of the Board of Governors, four are not really in favor of Donald Trump, including the former chair, Jay Powell. Three are either Trump or Trump adjacent. If he got a majority by getting rid of Lisa Cook and firing her and replacing her, he'd get not only a majority on the Board of Governors, but he'd be able to take over the Federal Open Markets Committee, which is a 12-member committee, seven from the Board of Governors, all seven, and five that they select who are regional presidents of the Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Bank presidents for the different regions.

12:54Michael Popok:picked by the majority. So if you get rid of Lisa Cook, you destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve. And that's what they were fearing here. How did it happen? She had a couple of mortgages, one on a condo in Atlanta, one in a house in Michigan. Okay. Oh, she lied on her application. She said she was going to live in both or she wasn't going to rent one. Or one was a second home, one was a first home, whatever the arguments were. And then you got Bill Pulte, who's now the acting director of national intelligence. That's a laugh. He's a Nepo baby who's been running Freddie May and Fannie Mac, the mortgage regulators.

13:31Michael Popok:And he comes out and says, oh, I found signatures on two different pieces of paper. Look at this, two loans on the same day. She must have committed fraud. I'm making a referral to Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice. Donald Trump gave her three days and said, you're fired by social media posts. Yeah, that's not good enough. So here's what they ruled. They went through, Roberts went through pages and pages, no surprise it was Roberts, of the historical analysis of how he even got to the Federal Reserve in 1913 and all the financial chaos that preceded it and how it was amended in 1933 and 1935 by Congress.

14:07Michael Popok:And they don't like the fact that Trump tried to fire her for cause but didn't really have a cause. Now, at the end, here's what they rule.

14:19Michael Popok:they also don't like Donald Trump's argument that whatever he does in firing a federal reserve person is not reviewable by the court they said no it's reviewable by the court and then they kind of get into this murky area which is not totally great about giving if the purpose of your opinion of the Supreme Court is to give guidance to the lower courts the district court levels, it's not great guidance because it has to do with what is for cause to fire Lisa Cook or anybody else. And it says it's got to be tied to the job. It's got to be tied to the independent position that she holds. And it has to be some sort of malfeasance that's connected to the position.

14:59Michael Popok:I think private mortgage fraud, even if it were committed, is not going to do it based on this new ruling. Here's what they say on page 13 over the 14. And this is really where the rubber meets the road in the decision. This again is the Trump versus Cook decision. Having rejected both parties' position, we need not fully demarcate the contours of cause for today. For present purposes, it's sufficient to observe that any definition of cause in this context must reflect the Federal Reserve's unique historical status and role. So they like refuse to give guidance to the lower court at all, which is sort of, it's a little bit nuts if you know what I'm talking about.

15:44Michael Popok:They go on to say that count that there should be a substantial threshold for cause. In other words, they're putting cause way up on a shelf. It is true that cause cannot be reduced to a precise set of rules. whether cause for removal exists in any given situation will depend at least in part on the seriousness of the alleged misconduct and the extent of any nexus that may exist to the governor's professional duties. The key issue is whether the cause assigned truly implies an unfitness for the place or whether it simply represents an effort to secure a more congenial replacement. Our review is deferential, but we are not required to exhibit naivete from which ordinary citizens are free.

16:26Michael Popok:Without such constraints in place, any perceived or alleged misstep could provide a ready pretext for a governor's removal, a fact he would surely know and that would surely weigh on him as he decided what to say and how to vote. Nothing could be more corrosive to the independents. So they're going to look at, like, what is the crime that's being alleged? And if it's so bad that it would compromise independent judgment, then they can be removed. I don't know. Signing two mortgage documents about two separate properties that they own? I don't think that fits. Lisa Cook lives for another day. The independence of Federal Reserve, at least for now, has been preserved.

17:00Michael Popok:Let's round it out with E. Jean Carroll. E. Jean Carroll alleges that in 1996, and she proved in court in front of a 9-0 jury, six men, three women, presided over by Judge Kaplan, federal court a few years ago, that she was sexually abused in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman Department store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue, diagonal across the street from Trump Tower. that she knew Donald Trump, she bumped into Donald Trump, and that he sexually assaulted her, abused her in a dressing room. That was proven at trial. As part of the evidence, she brought in the Access Hollywood audio tape and played it for the jury, her lawyer Robbie Kaplan did, and brought in at least two other women, Ms.

17:48Michael Popok:Leeds and Ms. Stojanovic, who claimed that in and around 1996, they were sexually assaulted and abused by Donald Trump. Ms. Leeds said she was upgraded to first class, sat next to Donald Trump, and he started to grope her on the plane, not knowing her. And Natalia Stoyanovich says that she was a People magazine reporter doing a puff story, puff piece about Melania and Donald Trump's marriage, and Donald Trump attacked her in Mar-a-Lago in a bedroom. Donald Trump doesn't like that that evidence came in. E.G. Carroll argued to the Supreme Court. It was already reviewed by the by the appellate court in New York.

18:27Michael Popok:The Second Circuit found to be non-reversible. It was a harmless error, if anything. There was such an abundance of evidence against Donald Trump. And the court kicked it around since February, 12 different meetings in which they considered the petition but didn't vote on it, although that's not a great sign. In order to get up, get your petition up to be considered. You need four votes and then five to rule for you. That means they couldn't even get four votes. And now they've kind of given up and rejected the petition. This also applies to the, this also bodes well for the$83 million judgment she obtained for punitive damage and otherwise when Donald Trump testified in a second trial involving her.

19:11Michael Popok:That That petition is up with the court also on an immunity issue, although the immunity there obviously waived or had been waived by a combination of Alina Habba and other lawyers. So I think this is great for E.G. Carroll. Programming note, I'm going to get, I hope, Robbie Kaplan on to join me on Legal AF for an exclusive interview about this great win for justice and for E.G. Carroll. All right. That's my breathless report about three different bombs. You don't have to wait for 4th of July for the fireworks to start of the United States Supreme Court. And we're still waiting, still waiting on later this week, I believe, birthright citizenship, which should be another loss for Donald Trump, where the Supreme Court says, no, you can't by executive order change the definition of who gets to be an American in America.

19:59Michael Popok:Until my next report, take a minute, hit the free subscribe button on Legal AF YouTube channel, by the way. This is Michael Popak. 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. 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.

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