Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Is Back…

0:00Michael Popok:You can count on many things in this life. You can count on death and taxes, and you can count on Todd Blanche and the Department of Justice making misrepresentations to a federal judge, lying to a federal judge. And they were caught again, busted again by Katie Phang's lawyers and Public Integrity Project in her case against Todd Blanche related to the Epstein files on two separate matters. One, the federal Department of Justice and their lawyers misrepresented to a federal judge that they had properly filed a redaction log required by the Epstein File Transparency Act. That means you catalog each of the 200 ,000 pages of blackout that you failed to produce the American people of the Epstein files.

0:49Michael Popok:You do it on a spreadsheet. On each line, you put the name of the document, the sender, the receiver, the subject matter, and the reason for the redaction. So that a higher authority like a judge can decide whether the redaction was right or wrong and produce it to the American people if it was wrong. You know what they filed and told the judge, don't worry, we did our redaction log, judge. You know what they filed? Yeah, a cover letter. A cover letter saying this is generally how we did the redactions. That's not the redaction log required expressly by federal law, by an act of Congress. And that's now back in front of Judge Sullivan.

1:26Michael Popok:And in addition, Katie Fang's lawyers have said they're hiding the handwritten notes, probably totaling 25 pages or more, of the four interviews conducted of a victim who claims that she was sexually abused by Donald Trump when she was 13 years old. We've got the typewritten. Where's the source material? Where is the handwritten notes of the agents? Let's see what they left out. Let's see what they distorted or changed, intentionally or otherwise. when they wrote or shaded when they wrote there and typed up their type written notes. The Trump administration and its Department of Justice says, can't do it.

2:04Michael Popok:It's too hard. It's too hard. It's 25 pages. As Brendan Ballew, the lawyer for Katie Fang, said in the filing, the attorney general commands the largest law firm in the country. They can't handle looking at 25 pages and blacking out appropriately anything that would reveal victim information. Are you kidding me? Where are the documents? and you've been misled, judge. I'm going to show you in the filing where the judge was misled about the redaction log and certainly about the FBI notes. In this new filing here, I'm covering it on Midas Touch. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button. You know where, over on the Legal AF YouTube channel.

2:42Michael Popok:All right, let's get to the reply that was just filed in my hands. It's posted to Legal AF Substack as well for paid members. Introduction. The defendant, the Attorney General Todd Blanche, objects yet again to complying with this court's order. See, he filed on the 27th a one and a half page opposition. He's staring down the barrel. He's on the business end of getting held in contempt, of having a former federal judge take over the process and take it away from the Department of Justice. And they file a page and a half repeating the same nonsense. I mean, I don't normally speak gibberish, but I can translate it here.

3:23Michael Popok:Judge, we don't want to do the FBI notes because we don't want to do the FBI notes because we already did the printed and we don't want to do the handwritten. Well, you've said that before and the judge has ordered you to do it. We did a redaction log, Judge. We did it. We published it. We just published it. You didn't publish a redaction log. We looked at it. You published a cover letter. Should be, let me tell you the difference, Mr. Block, for the government, having done this for a while. You take, it would probably be a hundred pages or more, probably hundreds of pages, to list in a spreadsheet each individual page of the 200 ,000 pages that you redacted.

4:02Michael Popok:And it'll take you some time, so get ready. I know you've complained before. Oh, people worked during their holidays and around the clock, Judge, the last time, you know, mistakes get made. Well, you're going to blow on other holidays, the judge is going to order you to do and find that you are in contempt and in violation of a federal law about the redaction log. Just to give you a little color, I interviewed Brendan Ballew in the last week or so, and here's a clip. And the order here is directing the government to explain exactly what they're going to do about the redaction log. And so that way, we have some clarity about what they're planning to produce or what they're not planning to produce.

4:43Just to remind your audience here, what needs to happen under the law is the government needs to actually explain each one of the redactions that it's made, the same way that you do in FOIA cases, Freedom of Information Act cases. The government obviously failed to do that in the initial production. It seems like it is fighting tooth and nail not to do that now. Oh, and so we need to really pin the government down on what exactly it proposes to produce here. And then Judge Sullivan's going to be able to decide whether or not that complies with the law. And the reason why I think that this is so helpful is that that short circuits a lot of argument that we could have where we just wait for them to produce something.

5:23And then it's completely noncompliant. And then we have to have all this follow on litigation. Here we can just figure out, OK, what are they going to do and can we address it now? So I think that this is going to be something that speeds up the process a bit. Yeah.

5:35Michael Popok:And then ultimately for the merits of the case, which are beneath it all, the millions of Epstein files that have not been reviewed or produced, the oversight over the original process. You know, I know that your argument is that the Department of Justice has forfeited their right to do this process themselves and that there should be a officer of the court in the form of a special master that needs to be appointed. And all, I got to believe that all of these missteps and erroneous assertions, you know, not telling the judge the truth, what he should have said is, I don't know, and I'll look into it, I'll get back to you, but he didn't.

6:13Michael Popok:All of this stuff kind of goes into the milieu, right, the stew of the judge's decision making about what to do ultimately in this case. Yeah, I think, you know, and, you know, ultimately, thus far, we've only been fighting over the preliminary injunction, just the really early stages here of just trying to get a small sliver of the documents that they're supposed to produce to actually produce it. As you said, we need to get to the merits of the case and ultimately get the kind of relief where you get some adult supervision of the Department of Justice. Now, here's excerpts from the transcript.

6:42Michael Popok:And here's another lie that I caught by the government in the transcript that was reproduced here by Katie Fang's lawyers on page one over to page two. This is an exchange between the judge, Judge Sullivan, and Andrew Block, who I call the pinata of the moment. He's ill-prepared. He's underprepared on purpose. They don't tell him anything. you know they treat the government purposely treats mr block like a mushroom they keep him in the dark and they feed him shit manure okay so he can't answer any questions for the judge now he puts himself in that position so i don't feel sorry for him i'm just pointing out what's going on here so the judge says um the defendant was directed to show cause why the fbi notes should not be produced.

7:32Michael Popok:What's the answer? Mr. Block, the answer, Your Honor, is that they are duplicative documents, which is not an exception in the Epstein File Transparency Act, by the way. The court, well, that's what the defendant says. The court doesn't know that. Mr. Block, again, Your Honor, it, about the redaction log, it, the redaction log, is forthcoming. I don't have anything to say to the court beyond I know it's in the process. The court, I mean, Christmas is forthcoming. Let's be realistic. There's the lie. Because when they finally published it two weeks ago, a week ago, it was just a cover letter that they had already shown us before, an old, stale cover letter.

8:16Michael Popok:This is the process we used. It's not a line-by-line, individual document redaction log. So what were they in the process of creating? That was a lie to the federal judge to get him out of that moment, get him out of a hole for the moment. But of course, it didn't work because Katie Fang's smarter than they are. Because Katie Fang's lawyers are smarter than they are. Do you snore? Did somebody hand you a CPAP and did you quietly stop using it? The mask that never quite seals, the hose tugging at you every time you roll over, and a machine sitting abandoned in a closet. Packing it for a trip and then deciding it's not worth it.

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9:37Michael Popok:They then attack the redaction log. They say on page two, the redaction log that was published is unpersuasive. It's a cover letter. This court should direct the defendant to submit for in-camera review the handwritten notes of the FBI interview four times of that witness. To show you the credibility of that witness, they interviewed her four times to determine whether the defendant's objections are well-founded, as they clearly are not, and direct the defendant to produce a redaction log that complies with the law. Why is it that the only set of FBI interview notes in handwriting that haven't been produced involved Donald Trump?

10:18Michael Popok:I mean, Katie Fogg's lawyers proved a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn't refuted, that hundreds of pages of interview notes that were in handwriting were produced under the Epstein File Transparency Act. The difference? They didn't involve Donald Trump. as to the well the handwritten notes are substantially similar to the typewritten notes that they already have here's what they say about that page three a little bit tongue-in-cheek a little bit snarky but but well deserved the Epstein Act does not list substantially substantial similarity as one of the basis for refusing to produce the documents as the court repeatedly observed it is not sufficient for the defendant to merely assert without evidence that documents are similar.

11:05Michael Popok:For the court, here's Mr. Block, the department has determined that these documents were duplicative, so they fell outside. Judge Sullivan, the department may well be correct, but the court needs to be in a position to say the court either agrees with the department or disagrees. Something more is required to comply with the court's order. The second argument that the handwritten notes cannot be reviewed for risk of accidental disclosure of victim information is unpersuasive. At oral argument, counsel for the defendant incorrectly asserted that no handwritten notes for FBI reports had been produced.

11:42Michael Popok:There's a hundred handwritten notes, so they were able to do it there. In his opposition, the defendant does not even try to argue that the handwritten notes mentioning the president at issue are more difficult to review than the hundreds of pages of handwritten notes already produced, nor can he. The attorney general commands perhaps the largest law firm in the country, in America, and can find a way to reliably review approximately 25 pages to ensure victim information is not revealed. As to the redaction log, this is on page 4, section 2c2, 2 little c, 2 in the hole, that's how I refer to it.

12:19Michael Popok:The Epstein File Transparency The Act requires that the defendant explain each individual redaction, not a summary cover letter, directing that all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress. The Attorney General has merely republished a summary. It's on page 5. He already made public this is painfully insufficient. The court should direct the Attorney General to publish within 10 days a written justification of all redactions made. Now let's stop right there. You know they can't do that. Brendan Ballou knows they can't do that.

12:55Michael Popok:They'd have to, I mean, even using AI and having, you know, 10 ,000 people, you know, 10 ,000 monkeys working on typewriters, they're not going to be able to produce Shakespeare or a redaction log in that short amount of time. They should have been doing it all along the way, but of course they didn't. And now they don't want to admit they weren't doing it all along the way. So now it's impossible for them to do it on any kind of reasonable timeline. It's not my problem. It's not Katie Fang's problem. It's Todd Blanche's problem. Maybe you should stop, you know, to paraphrase the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, maybe they should stop trolling with memes and they should do the work that's necessary to comply with the Epstein File Transparency Act.

13:40Stop sending in flunkies like Mr.

13:43Michael Popok:Block, ill-prepared mushrooms, who don't know what they're talking about on purpose, so can't be trusted, and start taking this case seriously because the clock is about to strike midnight. We're probably two ticks away from midnight. And at midnight, the Department of Justice goes dark because that's when Judge Sullivan is going to order millions of pages of Epstein files be reviewed and re-reviewed by an independent officer of the court, a special master appointed by the judge, answering to the judge, an officer of the court, former federal judge likely to handle this process because the Department of Justice has forfeited their right to be trusted.

14:23Michael Popok:I'm Michael Popak. You're here on Legal AF and Midas Touch. Take a minute, come over to Legal AF Substack, hit the free subscribe button. You can read the filing for yourself and Legal AF YouTube channel as well. Help us continue to grow and build and get robust over this long Labor Day weekend. Until my next report, I'm Michael Popak. 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.

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