Trump Whistleblower Goes Directly to Judge

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2:20Michael Popok:Download today. See, when a whistleblower from deep inside the Trump administration and the Postal Service brings the receipts and they're in the form of 14 single spaced pages and a diagram about how the Postal Service is working overtime to deny you your mail-in ballot, it may get the attention of a federal judge who's about to hold a emergency preliminary injunction hearing this week. That would be Judge Talwani up in Massachusetts in Boston Federal Court. And just as I predicted, as soon as that whistleblower came forward through Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut with a letter to the Postmaster General of the United States, what did the plaintiffs do?

3:05Michael Popok:In the case, knowing they were about to step into a courtroom on the preliminary injunction to block the implementation of the post office's rules? that could lead to millions, millions, this is not hyperbole, millions of your mail-in ballots not being delivered to you by the post office. So you never even get to vote by mail-in ballot. They play God. They decide who lives and dies. Thumbs up and thumbs down on mail-in ballots. The Postal Service. I thought they were supposed to be through rain and sleet and dark of night. nothing stops the postman from his appointed rounds, whatever that phrase that's engraved, the slogan for the post office engraved on the giant post office in Manhattan.

3:47Michael Popok:What happened to that? I guess there was fine print. Unless Donald Trump is the president and the thing in the postal carrier's hand is a mail-in ballot to blue states, and then, well, bad things could happen. The bad things that could happen under the postal rule that's been set to implement Donald Trump's executive order requires the use of a scan code, a barcode, a certain type of envelope. And when they get the batches of mail-in ballots from the states, that's where they come from. That's who decides who gets a mail-in ballot. It should just be a ministerial act by the post office to deliver the mail on the address that's been provided.

4:24Michael Popok:Oh, no, you got to use our envelope. You got to use our barcode. We've got to scan it. We got to check it against a citizenship portal that we just made. Oh, what time is it? In the last hour and a half. I mean, they've been working on the portal for 30 days. Any IT person will tell you it's a year project. Oh, and then we got to scan your ballot. And what the whistleblower declared is now in front of Judge Talwani because it's been filed with her. You know, that testimony has gone directly to the judge. What that whistleblower, who's anonymous, said is that, well, here's an example. If a state delivers 10 ,000 mail-in ballots to be delivered to its residents, its citizens, you know, lawful voters in a batch, which is how they do it.

5:08Michael Popok:The post office gets that batch in some processing center somewhere all over the country. Check the envelope. Got to make sure that there's no bent corners or no problems with the name. Maybe the name doesn't match, for instance, because the person got married and is using their maiden name or different name. Or there's a typo. You ever had a typo or a a slight typo in your boarding pass at the airport. How has that gone for you? Not well. They feed it into the scanner according to the whistleblower. And if there's one ballot out of 10 ,000 or 100 ,000 or 50 ,000, that's rejected because of one of the problems I just identified or something else gets stuck in the machine.

5:45The whole batch gets returned to the states,

5:49Michael Popok:meaning my vote, your vote, just went back to the states and I'll never get it in time to vote. That's what Trump wants. He wants the chaos. He wants the changes in the rules of the road right now. to sow discontent and chaos to make people not have any confidence in the legitimacy of the vote. He's been doing that since Stop the Steal back in the 2010s. And now you've got the whistleblower. So when I saw the whistleblower and I arranged to have Senator Blumenthal come on and talk to me with 14 pages, single spaced notes here, and it's up on Legal AF Substack. Here's the whistleblower from Whistleblower Aid, an organization that's devoted to helping whistleblowers and submitted by Senator Blumenthal to the Postal Service.

6:33Michael Popok:I said, this has got to get in front of Judge Talwani. She's holding a hearing. And right on cue, we've got a filing, just as we expected. Now, this filing is directed to the court. It is a notice of factual developments. It's telling the court something big just happened. A whistleblower from deep inside the Trump administration has come forward and is saying bad things about the post office in advance of your hearing on preliminary injunction. Now, Judge Talwani has already blocked by temporary restraining order the implementation of that rule. But the whistleblower says that rule has already been violated.

7:09Michael Popok:Her order has already been violated. They're still building the database. That sounds like contempt of court for me. Trump's even tried to appeal the temporary restraining order, even though on the food chain and the hierarchy of injunctions, Temporary restraining order is down here, not appealable. Preliminary injunction up here, appealable. Final permanent injunction up here, appealable. So she's now trying to convert temporary restraining order into preliminary injunction based on briefing. All the briefing is now in, including from friends of the court, mainly against the Postal Service rule.

7:43Michael Popok:Here's what the new notice says. plaintiffs respectfully submit this notice to inform the court of a whistleblower disclosure regarding the Postal Service's implementation of Trump's executive order. Attached is the whistleblower correspondence and the correspondence of Senator Blumenthal. Plaintiffs submit this notice because the whistleblower disclosure supports the plaintiff's arguments in support of the preliminary injunction, which this hearing is going to be on Thursday, including the likelihood of mass rejection of batches of mail ballots based on technological errors and or minor and inevitable errors in data.

8:18Michael Popok:See, Trump wants inevitable errors because he wants these ballots bounced because he spent the last 10 years scaring the crap out of Republicans and independents voting by mail, even though he votes by mail. And then they talk about the 10 ,000 ballots that could all be kicked back to the states if there's one error in one ballot and could delay by thousands in repeated verification cycles, preventing states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots. The whistleblower complaint includes a federal ballot mail diagram, which we're going to put up on the screen. It's on page 20 of the whistleblower's actual attachment.

8:59Michael Popok:It starts with points of failure in red in the middle. First verification fails, election officials need to update statewide list and portal or batch manifest in legacy system. Then it shows you the different arrows where it's coming from. Legacy bulk mail systems goes through legacy system batches, which then goes into the election mail batch drop-off locations, which then goes to storage and creation of statewide mail-in and absentee participation list, and then has to be checked against this new federal ballot mail portal. There's several points of failure. They are in red, which would lead to a rejection not just of that ballot, of that mail-in ballot, but of all the ones it's attached to.

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10:22Michael Popok:So here's what to do. Go to ironwall.com slash legal AF, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com slash legal AF. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The links are in the show notes. Here's what Judge Telwani is going to do. Let me give you a reasonable expectation. She's going to hold the hearing tomorrow. The briefing is in. The government has already said, we're not trying to take over elections.

11:01Michael Popok:Oh, that's ridiculous. We're just doing, you know, housekeeping, just logistics, informational logistics that need to be followed in order to deliver sensitive mail. Why? Why? We've had decades of mail being properly delivered until a president like Trump, whenever he's in his office, tries to screw with the mail delivery of state-run elections. And then they say, well, it's also constitutional because we're not screwing with elections, but you are screwing with elections. You are de facto putting yourself into a position of God as the postal service for the executive branch to decide which mail-in ballots get delivered and which don't, which live and which die.

11:38Michael Popok:And they say, well, no, the states get to decide who gets the mail-in ballot. Right. But you are the instrumentality to deliver that ballot. And if you don't do the delivery, then their selection of who gets a ballot is meaningless. You're making the ultimate decision. You're the final mile in the delivery, the final inch, the final yard in the delivery. And if you're not delivering, you know, it's not like the states have their own post service carrier pigeon. They're not going to spend 20 bucks for FedEx overnight for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of their voters bankrupting the states.

12:16Michael Popok:So that is a complete canard. It's a complete lie to tell a federal judge that you're not controlling elections and mail-in balloting just because you're handling delivery. You're making delivery so difficult and almost so impossible. It is as if you are controlling mail-in balloting, and that is the argument that Judge Talwani understands well. She's going to grant the preliminary injunction to the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and other public interest groups led by the ACLU. She is going to grant the injunction in favor of the 20 or more Democratic states that are there as well. And that is going to go up to the First Circuit Court of Appeals on an emergency application by Donald Trump.

12:58Michael Popok:That appeals court sits in Boston. Two to one, three zero, they're going to rule for Judge Tawani. I'd be shocked if they didn't, which will give us a round trip on an emergency docket to the United States Supreme Court. When I say round trip, just 10 days ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the states who brought the appeal or or that the states who had brought the initial case were too early. Their case wasn't ripe. Has to do with standing. You may be injured, but you're not injured yet. If you're not injured yet, you can't be in our courtroom because you don't have standing. If you don't have standing, then you can't give the court jurisdiction.

13:39Michael Popok:The court doesn't have jurisdiction over the case. We don't want drive-by plaintiffs. We don't want plaintiffs who will be injured in the future. We want right now injured parties. So come back to us when you're injured. That day later, they were injured. They filed their new suit. Immediately, Judge Talwani, immediately scheduled for hearing, immediately issued a second temporary restraining order, immediately set a preliminary injunction. And now, just less than two weeks later, we may be at the United States Supreme Court by Labor Day, by Sunday Labor Day, by Tuesday after Labor Day, that quickly.

14:09Michael Popok:so they can decide on the merits if Trump can use the post office to screw with mail-in ballots, yes or no. And you know who's going to follow it closely? Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button, help us to continue to grow our pro-democracy channel on Legal AF YouTube channel. And if you want to read all these filings, come over to Legal AF Substack where you can read it on filings AF for paid members. Until my next report, I'm 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.

14:49Michael 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. Wear Legal AF on Substack. Come over now to free subscribe.