Karen Freeman (3:27)

No, I was just going to say if I were her, this is like exhibit A, you know, in my answer, when she, when she answers the defamation

Michael Popak (3:34)

case he's handing out. We were joking with the production team before we started. I was like, yeah, this is like Mad Men, which I'm rewatching. This is like Mad Men. They all went home drunk. They didn't have to get drunk after work. They were already drunk at work. And Battelle was born in the wrong era. He should have been born and should have been a 1960s Madison Avenue ad man. Instead, he's supposed to be the chief law enforcement officer of America. And that is the problem. Well, that was a fun way to kick off the episode. And we're going to tie that together with all of the attacks on the media by the FBI, including going after reporters like you see up there now, like Natenson, the reporter for the Washington Post. And Hannah Nathanson should be thankful. She should thank the gods that the Trump administration went after her because she just got awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I'm not linking those two things together, but she literally, in the last 48 hours, I mean, it's no Webby, but she did win the Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting about Doge and mass firings within the Trump administration. And at the same time, we just got a tremendous order out of a George W. Bush appointee, Judge Tranga, in favor of Hannah Natenson. So we got the New York Times that the FBI went after because, Because Cash Patel didn't like the stories about his girlfriend. You have the Washington Post, where they raided Hannah Natenson, who has her own estimate, over a thousand confidential sources. She calls herself the government whisperer. And they grabbed up all, all of her electronics in order to look for the needle in the haystack, which is some communication she may have had with somebody who leaked about the Venezuelan war. So you have all that and then you've got the Atlantic, which continues its intrepid reporting against Cash Patel, even while there's a defamation case pending by Cash Patel. So we're going to talk about all that. Speaking of FBI raids today and Fox News being tipped up, tipped, tipped off for it. Nothing says this isn't political like having the Trump administration's FBI raid the Senate. The president temporary of the Senate in Virginia, the state senate in Virginia, Louise Lucas and her marijuana dispensary and her massage parlor and her offices looking for who knows what. Now, to be fair, the Biden administration started that investigation. The reason I say it's political or it's been made to be political is that Senator Lucas has been Senator 80. She's been a senator for 30 years. She also was one of the power brokers for Virginia's redistricting led by Virginia Governor Spanberger that led to a 10 to 1 Democratic advantage. Coincidence. And Fox just happened to be there to break the story. Coincidence? Yeah, I don't think so. So we got that. And then I thought, Karen, we would talk about the Supreme Court. It's been a couple of rulings lately in the last few days, but a full fledged war has broken out between Alito the Maga 6 and Ketanji Brown Jackson. And it has to do with voting and maps. It was only a one and a half page firefight, but in it encapsulated the existential, existential threat to our democracy and voting and the heart and soul of a threat against the heart and soul of the Supreme Court all in two pages. And we'll cover that and the resulting lawsuits on the midweek edition of Legal AF with Karen Freeman, Nickniffalo and Michael Popak. Hi, Karen.

Karen Freeman (7:41)

Hi, Pope. How are you doing?

Michael Popak (7:43)

Doing good. What's going on with you? Catch us up.

Karen Freeman (7:45)

You know, nothing much. Excited that the Webbies are next week. I think that's a great thing. And you're coming to New York and that's just wonderful. And it's just a huge milestone for us. So it's an exciting time.

Michael Popak (7:57)

Absolutely. And Mother's Day Sunday, early Mother's Day to all mothers. And, and however you became a mother. And I, I love my dearly departed mother. And it's a big, this is the first one I've had without her. She died. My mom died several days after last year's Mother's Day. And we were fortunate enough that she got to meet my daughter both when she was born and even right before she passed away. And so, you know, be a little bittersweet on Mother's Day weekend. But we will, we will celebrate my mom and all moms and those here in the audience as well. So really want to do a shout out there. So we've got one other story we're going to cover, which because I got so caught up in the bourbon, I mean, I was thirsty. Eugene Carroll is fighting to keep her $83.5 million judgment in her favor for defamation after sex abuse by Donald Trump alive, while the Department of Justice, which has been captured and corrupted by Donald Trump, files a new piece of paper today with the United States Supreme Court. Got it right here. That asks for them to consider in the future whether Donald Trump was a just doing his job, which is part. They don't deny that a jury found him to be a sex abuser. They don't deny that a jury found that he defamed her. They don't deny that a jury awarded her 5.5 million in one trial and 83.5 million in another. That's not denied. It's just that I just did that while I was doing my job under an immunity doctrine called the Westfall immunity, which is not presidential immunity, it's Westfall immunity, which is for civil damages, if you were a federal employee. And so we'll dive into that filing, which has already been kicked around the Second Circuit Court of Appeals like half a dozen times. But now they're making the effort to lob it into the Supreme Court and throw it in there. And we'll talk about private action like sex abuse and defamation and why that should not get Westfall immunity. But we'll have to see what this United States Supreme Court has to say about it. All right, let's dive in. Why don't we start with Cash Patel, and we'll come back to Eugene. Carol. So you got Cash Patel as the FBI FBI director. And we'd always heard rumors of his drinking. He also is very public about it. You know, we've seen, we've all seen the video and the pictures of him chugging a beer and who knows what else with the Olympic hockey team, men's hockey team. You know, just what I want my FBI director to be doing on the company dime. You know, flying around on personal jets with his girlfriend who fancies herself to be, get this, country singer and political commentator like, okay, and Cash Patel girlfriend and squiring her around in government planes at our expense at $15,000 an hour, you know, giving her FBI agents to go pick her up at the airport or to guard her house. And, you know, knew the news media has reported on this, of course they have. That's not off limits. That's on limits. That's part of the fourth estate, to expose public corruption and abuse of power. And so New York Times runs an article about Cash Patel's girlfriend. And we learn right away, and this is the good part, because we caught him in the media, that the FBI had opened up an investigation against the reporter for possibly stalking the girlfriend in tracking down her whereabouts and talking to her friends. No, she's not a stalker. She's a reporter with constitutionally protected First Amendment rights and doing her story. You know, if she was a freelancer, that wasn't really a freelancer and she just was trying to stalk the girlfriend, that'd be one thing. But she published an article in the New York Times about her reporting. So we had that going on and the abuse of power related to that. And now we've got, Karen, the new reporting that he's using his FBI, of which he's a public servant, to go after the Sarah Fitzpatrick, the writer for the Atlantic, who wrote the article about his excessive drinking, sourced with 24 two dozen anonymous sources, including many within the FBI itself. And why don't you take it from there?

Karen Freeman (12:58)

So, you know, I'm looking at the federal stalking statute really quick because it's really interesting to me that that's what they're choosing to look at, assuming this is going to be brought in federal court. And I happen to have a little experience with the federal stalking statute. And it's basically. It's 18 United States Code 2261A, and it says basically whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce or is present in the United States with the intent to kill, injure, harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance with the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person and as a result of that person, places the person in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury or. Or causes or attempts to cause or reasonably be expected to cause severe emotional distress. So I think they would talk about the emotional distress one cause. I don't think they could ever possibly get close to the injuring, et cetera. But I just don't see how it makes out any of these elements. Right. Because it's intent. Right. Obviously, the reporter's not there to harass the. It. Right. With the intention to harass, intimidate, or place under surveillance with the intent to harass or intimidate. And it just doesn't. It seems like such a stretch to me for federal stalking. This is a reporter who has the intent to report. So I don't see how they would ever even get over the threshold to make out any kind of stalking statute. So let's just start with that. And Hannah Natenson, who I think, as you said, has won Pulitzer PR, has over 1,000 confidential government sources. According to her, they seized her. Over 1,000. They seized her documents. Right? She has all of this information about her confidential sources on her hard drives, on her computers, on her Apple Watch or whatever electronic devices she has, and they took it all. And that's an extremely unusual thing for, for a law enforcement to do for a reporter because you know that they, most of the stuff that is in their devices has nothing to do with your investigation. And they're First Amendment protected. These are privileged, right? These are, these are, there's, there's all kinds of privileges when you're a reporter with your sources. So there have been a few times when law enforcement will take devices, but they immediately take it and has it go through a taint team, right, where you have another team that looks through it and only isolates what is responsive to the search warrant. Now here in this case, they're saying this has to be done by the court, not by a DOJ team. And DOJ is not having it. They don't like it. They don't like the fact that this is happening that way. They don't like the fact that they are going to the federal courts to get a special magistrate appointed. So they went to the magistrate judge, which is like the first level in the district court, and the magistrate said, no, no, no, you can't just rifle around through her stuff. I'm going to appoint a special magistrate or a special judicial person appointee to go through it. And of course, the DOJ didn't like that and went straight to the federal district judge. But I'm not surprised that they are putting the brakes on it because this is such a highly unusual thing and needs to be done with the utmost care to make sure that you don't get access to things that are privileged. But how's she supposed to do her job in the meantime? I mean, they've literally taken all of her devices and all of her information. This is an incredibly intrusive, invasive warrant that they have issued. And they're really, really, I think, upping the stakes here by going after such a recognized reporter and somebody who is somebody who has, like you said, she's not just a commentator or somebody who may or may not want to write a story. I mean, this is clearly what her job is. And she's very well respected for it. So I think what they're going to end up saying is, oh, no, no, we're looking at the person who leaked the information, not at her. She's not under investigation. And so we're only going to find those documents that might be top secret. And again, that would just be a handful of documents. And that's where the judges fell and said, look, you have thousands and thousands and thousands of pages worth of stuff in her devices will isolate for you the handful that may or may not be responsive to your investigation.

Michael Popak (18:11)

Yeah, I mean, judges in the Eastern District of Virginia or Maryland or D.C. they handle top secret classified documents all the time. They not only have their own security clearance, but they have facilities to review it. And the problem is that the tr. That's not why the Trump administration grabbed everything of hers. They grabbed everything of hers because she is known as the government whisperer. They know she's got thousands of confidential informants, and they didn't do anything surgically to try to figure out if the guy, the leaker in the Department of Defense with top secret clearance who's been indicted, whether he, what he communicated to her. They just know there were some text messages. We, you know, and there's doctrines that protect her not, you know, not from him being indicted, but for her, you know, there's a doctrine of First Amendment law called prior restraint. There's First Amendment privilege, there's attorney client privilege. The extent that she was communicating with lawyers that for the work for the Washington Post, I mean, this is how, I mean, I guess the way to put this in, in perspective, this would be the equivalent of Nixon using his Department of Justice and FBI to wiretap and search warrant Woodward and Bernstein while they were in the midst or at the beginning of the Watergate investigation before it hit the paper. That's what we're watching. That's the difference between the last criminal, President Nixon, and Trump, is that even Nixon wouldn't think to do that. But Trump's like, why don't we go after the reporter? And he has nobody around him that tells him no Merrick Garland. I know people have their issues with Merrick Garland, but he immediately issued a rule that he had the Department of Justice and FBI follow that made going after a reporter and their sources and reporting and confidential information like the last resort. Not the first. The first resort. And then Pam Bondi comes in and she rescinds Merrick Garland's policy. And that's where we are now, under the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Nothing's off limits. The FBI works for the Department of Justice. If Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche implicitly approves Cash Patel using his own agency in a conflict of interest to abuse power and go after reporters. And it's disgusting and it's depraved. And it's another chapter in the book of the fall from grace. Have you ever had any grace for Todd Blanch that he's allowing this to happen? Now, good news is that all of these media outlets, New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, are hardened media outlets with, you know, amazing First Amendment lawyers who are battle tested and are ready to protect. And each one of those papers is standing behind their reports and their reporting. And we stand behind them as fellow journalists and commentators. But this needs to be exposed. And that's why we're platforming it and talking about it until people like Kash Patel are drummed out of the FBI completely. I mean, I still believe he's holding on by a thread. And this is the last gasp efforts of a desperate person. And we support in every way, shape and form reporters like Hannah Natenson and Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter for the New York Times. And it just goes to show you what courageous, intrepid reporting can bring about real change. Sometimes you are the story, sometimes you have to go to jail for the story. But you have to protect your confidential sources. And fortunately, judges know the law and they know the First Amendment protections. We've had reporters, not in this time around, but in the past, go to jail rather than give up a confidential informant, you know, somebody that's helping them with a story. And, you know, reporters get a bad rap from the Trump administration. But think about worldwide. How many journalists have died since the Trump administration the second time around started in worldwide conflicts, not so much at home, but around the world. It's a dangerous, dangerous job to be reporting against the rich and the famous and the powerful, especially in countries like ours now and in dictatorships. And we recognize our role on Midas, Touch, pardon me, and on legal Afghanistan. And there but for the grace of God go I. This easily could be us. You know, we've gotten attacked as a, as a channel, as a network, as. I mean, I've been criticized on Legal af, on the Legal AF has been criticized on Fox. Fox has gone after Midas, Trump's gone after Midas. They made reference to legal AF topics and subjects. And yet we persevere. And not because I like to pick a good fight, which I do, but because of our audience and the community, the fellowship that we've built here. And this is an important story. The defense of the fourth estate, the fourth branch of government. They're not the enemy of the people. We're not the enemy of the people. We're the fourth branch of government as designed by our founders and framers, many of them who were writers and publishers themselves and understood and put it first. It was top of mind when they drafted the Bill of Rights, you know, for a reason. I mean, the, the amendments are not rank ordered, so to speak, but it is, number one, the first thing they thought about. And I think those, that's, that's important. These kind of stories are important. Kara, what do you think's going to happen next? You think the Trump administration, because of this kind of reporting at all, is going to back down from going after reporters? Or what do you think the next phase is?

Karen Freeman (24:41)

Well, look, I wouldn't be surprised if all of her devices are heavily, heavily encrypted since she has 1000 government sources. I'm sure many of them are people who are well versed in encryption and how to prevent the government from being able to get into your devices. My hope is that reporters are doing that, frankly, to protect their sources and to protect their information because the, this, because the Department of Justice really is not showing any restraint whatsoever and just casting a wide net. And I think about what it would be like if, say you are investigating a doctor for a particular crime and then you take all of their computers and suddenly now you have access to everybody's confidential health information. You can't just go rifling through that because you are suspecting one particular thing. And obviously people would be offended and upset by that because there are protections, there's privacy issues, and a reporter's information is just as, I think, sacrosanct. And it is so important to protect confidentiality and to support the press and the freedom of the press and the confidentiality. So I do think that this is going to be a hard fought fight and I wouldn't be surprised if the lawyers work out some kind of deal where she gets her stuff back and agrees to turn over just a handful of documents or items. But the judge is going to keep a tight rein on this. But I think all reporters now will be really thinking about how they keep their information and protecting their sources and their information even, even better because she has ongoing, ongoing stories. Right. And she has her own ongoing investigations. So I think the press is, if they haven't already, is going to really think long and hard because they really kind of stepped into a place that you typically don't step as the Department of justice.

Michael Popak (26:49)

Yep, 1,000%. Absolutely. So we will pick up when we come back from our first break with what's happening in Eugene, Carol, sex abuse and defamation cases. Will she get her $100 million? How will she get it? And why is the Supreme Court even entertaining stepping into this fray? Want to talk about Louise Lucas, the Senate president tempor in Virginia and why her businesses were raided? Is it legitimate? If so, why was Fox there to film it? Or does it have more to do with redistricting and a political attack by Trump against Democrats? And then we'll pick up with the United States Supreme Court and things that have happened in a fast moving story this week, including in states like Louisiana and Alabama and other states as we try to get the musical chairs to stop and the redistricting remapping to stop so that we can get to primaries. We'll touch on election night in America last night and some eye popping results that are not favorable to Donald Trump from last night. 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But the only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com LegalAF and then use code LegalIF at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com LegalAF code Legal AF. Welcome back to Legal AF at the midweek. Thank you for your fervent support. E. Jean Carroll, we've had her on Legal af. Friend of the pod. We're friend of hers and supporter of hers. What is it with this administration and sex abuse scandals? You know, I can't. The amount of times I got to talk about Epstein with Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, testifying today behind closed doors about the closeness of his relationship with it with a, with a convicted or a convicted child abuse and indicted child sex trafficker. And Jeffrey Epstein. Now, again, we got the original one. The original sex abuse scandal wasn't Trump and Epstein. It's Trump and his attack on E. Jean Carroll, which was proven in a court of law by preponderance of evidence in front of nine jurors in two separate, well, one particular federal court. And so now the Trump administration is trying to argue that for the larger of the two judgments, he's not or both. He's not liable because he was an employee of the federal government. Well, first of all, he wasn't an employee of the federal government when he sexually abused her, as the jury determined he was in the 90s. Okay. Now, when he defamed her, he both defamed her before he was president and after he was president the first time. And so in the second trial, first trial, they determined sex abuse, and it awarded her pain and suffering and other types of damages. 5.5 million. Trump did not testify. He famously kept threatening to testify, but he never testified. And the lead lawyer there was an outlandish character, almost a cartoon figure named Joe Tacopina, who I just saw in an interview recently. He's getting bigger and he's about to burst. He's getting bigger and bigger physically. Just every time I see him, he's filling the screen with his head. And I don't know. I mean, he wasn't the right fit for the first case. I was surprised they picked him because in an interview before he was picked, he said that Trump didn't have the right to be the defamer in chief against E. Jean Carroll. And yet Trump picked him to be his defense lawyer. In the second case, he did testify. His lead lawyer was Alina Haba, and the jury hated him and awarded e. Jean Carroll, 83, at a half million dollars, primarily for defamation and punitive damages. Those cases went off after appeals bounced around between the Second Circuit and the D.C. court of Appeals, state or district court of appeals in D.C. about this issue of civil immunity, which is called Westfall after a name of a case, immunity. And the main argument raised at the Second Circuit, raised with Judge Kaplan, was that Alina Haba and Donald Trump waived the defense because they didn't raise it. And you have to raise defenses. It's not like a mental telepathy. I'm thinking of a defense that doesn't work in courts of law. You have to raise your defense timely or they're stricken. And 2nd Circuit told Alina Haba exactly that the first time and the second time, the number of appeals back and forth. Judge Kaplan said it in his ruling. After he got it back, he said, I could do the substance, and you're outside of the Westfall immunity doctrine, but you also are untimely and therefore cannot raise the issue. Trump didn't like it. Asked for en banc review of all 10 or so judges of the or more of the 2nd Circuit. And I'll let Karen, you take it from there.

Karen Freeman (36:29)

Yeah. So they declined to step in and reverse the decision. And now the Department of Justice is now asking for a stay of the mandate, if you will, so that they can consider going to the Supreme Court. And that's what they're going to do. They basically said, we plan on going to the Supreme Court. Eugene Carroll said, I have no problem waiting as long as you add to the bond that you've put up interest for this period of time and this case. You know, I'm 100% sure the Supreme Court's going to hear this case because it's Donald Trump once again, using the Supreme Court as his own private personal court. And the question's going to be whether this, these defamatory statements where he basically called her a liar and said that he, he didn't do these things, that he's not a rapist. And he denied these claims whether that was something that he was doing as the President of the United States. And. And therefore, the Department of Justice gets to substitute the defendant. Right? Substitute themselves for the defendant. That's what Westfall does. It basically says if you sue somebody and they're an employee of the federal government, the Department of Justice comes in and substitutes themself for the defendant. And you're not allowed to sue the Department of Justice civilly for defamation and some other things, and therefore the case gets dismissed. So that's why this is the, the kind of, you know, golden ring or whatever it is that they're trying to get to the Supreme Court because if they can get the Supreme Court to say yes, you are acting as president, it was in your right to act as president, to make these statements and to defame E. Jean Carroll, that somehow that was in your job description and part of your presidential duties. If they can say yes, the Department of Justice can substitute themselves as the defendant, therefore you're immune and the whole thing goes away. I mean, it's, it's really just, it's a Hail Mary, but it's a good, it's a, certainly a smart play for him. It's the only play he has since every lower court has rejected this so far, not just on procedural grounds. I mean, I think he's going to be hard pressed to argue that this was part of his presidential duties. Although you could imagine seeing the Supreme Court, the very conservative right wing maga Supreme Court, twisting themselves into a pretzel saying, well, he's president and if the president is being accused of these things, of course he should defend himself. And you know, you could imagine that that's what, that's what they're going to say. And I don't see how they would ever. The $5.5 million judgment, I think is, is solid and I don't think that one falls anywhere near this, but this 83 and a half million dollar one. There's, there's an argument that the Supreme Court, if they want to once again do their bidding on behalf of Donald Trump, I think they're going to find a way to do it. But we'll see. You know, it's always we'll see. But I'm so just given their rulings recently and just seeing how the court has, has really just fallen so far away from what they're, what they've always been in the past, even if they were, there were conservative justices, liberal justices, they were so you could at least understand were doing and the things they were doing didn't seem so partisan and political. All of that veneer has gone away from this particular Supreme Court. So if they want to continue to do things to basically support Donald Trump, I guess he's taking his shot.

Michael Popak (40:21)

Yeah, I mean, when you do the math, you know, Alito and Thomas will find a way to argue something like something along the lines that you did, which is, oh, of course, a president charged with the heinous crimes and accused of rape needs to be able to defend himself and otherwise the whole institution of the presidency, you know, could be undermined. Yeah, you can just, you can hear it. That's Alito and Thomas. We know that on the other side, Kagan, Katanji, Brown, Jackson and Sotomayor are going to be less inclined and find that it falls outside the outer boundaries of presidential conduct, presidential responsibility even stretched to its outer boundaries. You got to draw a line somewhere. What is it? Is it, you know, short of murderer, I had to murder him. Does that fall within or outside of immunity? And so I see. So now you're at three on one side and two on the other. You got to count to five. And now it. Now you got this up for grabs, this jump ball with Gorsuch, Amy Coney, Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh is completely unreliable. I mean, really. I mean, I mean, he's just such a free radical. You don't know what he's going to do at any given moment. Even though I've read hundreds of opinions involving him, I still don't know what he's going to do. I'm not sure he knows what he's going to do. Amy Coney Barrett I don't think is going to be. She has no problem taking on this president for personal conduct that she finds to be unsavory and not giving him a win, you know, against great political headwinds. She defeated the tariffs for Donald Trump. I'm sure she's going to do the same thing with birthright citizenship and a couple of other rulings that were clearly anti Trump. And I don't think she's. I don't think she's thrilled to have to rule about a sex abuse or rape case. So she could be. Potentially, depending upon the oral argument and the briefing, she could be a fourth vote against finding Westfall immunity, which the Biden Department of Justice already found. He was outside. It's just that when the Department of Justice changed, he had his new Department of Justice. How convenient. Certify that he was inside the course and scope of his duties at the time. How convenient. So that's four. Now you have to look at Kavanaugh and Roberts. I'm sorry, Gorsuch and Roberts. And Gorsuch generally, depending upon the issue, sides a lot with the maga. Maga. Right. He likes to fancy himself to be a little more. A little bit more independent minded, but his. His voting says. Doesn't say that. And then Roberts. Is Roberts going to be. He's already the Supreme Court justice that led the Supreme Court to rip away a woman's right to choose. Ripped away and destroyed voting rights, destroyed the separation of church and state, and gave a president criminal immunity, writing many of those decisions, is he going to also go down in history as the Supreme Court justice that allowed a sex abuser to avoid his ultimate, the ultimate justice for the victim and give him a pass by way of Westfall immunity? Again, they are not arguing in their brief they didn't do it, that he's not a sex abuser, that the judgment should be vacated because anything is wrong with the judgment. All those appeals are over. They're not arguing that the money's too large or anything. They're arguing that even if all that's true, I did it while I was, I did it within this course and scope of my job. It was my job to defame E. Jean Carroll and say she was a loser and a money grubber and a, and a con artist and not my type and disgusting looking. All the defamatory things, even Joe Tacopina, as I said earlier, which was Donald Trump's criminal defense lawyer before he got appointed to that said out loud, he can't be the defamer in chief, you know, from his bully pulpit of the presidency. So very interesting. And the Supreme Court can very easily stay out of this by just not granting the writ of certiorari, the petition that gets filed for the appeal. But I think you're right. I think there only has to be four votes to bring this case up. And I think there's four votes for it. The way I've just described it, is there five votes to give him what he wants, which is to get out from under and have them live with themselves that they let a sex abuser go, Scott, go free? I don't know. We'll have to, we will do what we always do. We'll follow it closely. It will be a 26, 27 term event for the Supreme Court. It will not be an emergency docket motion or hearing over the summer. It'll be second half of next year. You know, we'll have to see what happens between, between now and then. Right, Karen?

Karen Freeman (46:02)

You know, as I, as we were talking about this, I'm thinking of two things. Number one, this Supreme Court is the court that gave him presidential immunity. So they already want, they've already signaled that a president should be free to be unencumbered and be free to do whatever they need to do. And so that's a principle that they don't want a president to have any kind of constraints. And I think you can imagine this Supreme Court, it's not a bridge too far saying, look, a president has to be able to speak on topics, especially if they're being accused of things and they don't want to open the floodgates of, I mean, does anyone defame people more than Donald Trump? I mean, he is the defamer in chief, right? Like, he, he overtly and outright lies about people all the time and ruins careers and ruins their lives. And, I mean, I could see them saying, you know, we don't want to, we don't want in any way clip the wings of a president who is going to speak. You know, they're going to use, they're going to use big, fancy words. You know, they're going to, in talking about pushing the outer boundaries of speech and debate and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the president is constantly under attack. Of course he must defend himself. I just, I see them contorting them themselves into this pretzel and essentially giving him immunity. Again, this, this court, this, I just see it on this court. It's so depressing to me. But, but that's, that's how I, that's what I predict they're going to do.

Michael Popak (47:41)

Yeah, I'd love to get Robby Kaplan, the lawyer for aging Carroll, back on the show. She's been with us a number of times. I'll reach out to her so she can brief her audience when the timing's right. I'm sure, I'm sure she will. She may wait to see the petition before she comes on, but we will get Robbie back on, which will be a very unique perspective about what's going on and what her feelings are about the merits of the appeal. In fact, I'll make a note to do it tonight when we're done with tonight's live show to reach out to her so we have that. When we come back from our last break, we'll talk about the Supreme Court again in the context of voting and congressional maps. And they're playing fast and loose with purported constitutional principles that, as Ketanji Brown Jackson laid out, seem to have yielded to raw exercise of power by the Supreme Court. And by that, she means the fact that the ma, the right wing, have six votes and they're going to shove many, many things down our throats and up our bodies that we're not comfortable with. And we'll cover all of that, bring everybody up to speed so they know when we talk about maps in shorthand, voting in shorthands and Supreme Court rulings like Calais, you know what we're talking about. And you can use it in your own, you know, to reach your own conclusions and to bring it into the marketplace of ideas in your own life and social media with friends and around the kitchen table and all of that. Just important, important things that we need to talk about. We'll do that. But first we'll take our last break, support the show that's really important, keeps us on the air you have for the last six years and we appreciate that. Subscribe to our show on and follow it on on Spotify and on Apple here. Let people know about it. 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IQ Bars plant protein Bars are the smarter snack choice with plenty of plant protein, tons of fiber and no added Sugar. With over 20,000 5 star reviews and counting, more people than ever are fueling their busy lifestyles with IQ Bars, Brain and Body Boosting Bars, Hydration Mixes and Mushroom Coffees. Their Ultimate Sampler Pack includes all three IQ Bar has become part of my daily routine, whether it's starting my morning with IQ Joe or grabbing an IQ Bar when I need a quick clean snack. And right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, including the Ultimate Sampler Pack, plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text legal AF to 65 text legal AF to 64,000. That's legal AF to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. Welcome back to Legal AF at the midweek so, Karen, we covered this, but I want to get your view. We get the Calais decision. Turns out from Democracy docket that Bernie Calay is an election denier of the first order. He's. He's the non white, sorry, the non black voter that had a problem with Louisiana adding one more black congressional district and challenged it under the 15th amendment and the Voting Rights Act. It's now known as the Calais Decision and issued by the Supreme Court last week. We've been wringing our hands over it, figuring out what the silver lining is. There probably is one. I mean, it's mainly the dummy mandering of the Republicans over mapping and over districting to try to try to obtain a Republican advantage at a time when they've miscalculated about where the political will is and where the political winds are blowing since there's been such a tremendous change and rejection of the Trump administration in the last 16 months. I mean, mapping sounded like a good idea when Donald Trump's approval rating was in the 40s. It's a terrible idea as it heads for the 20s and as Hispanics and Hispanic Catholics and women and voters under 30 and black and others, independents, all run screaming from the House of Trump. And it's that missed change in demographics which could lead not to remapping, giving the Republicans an advantage, but making unstable and insecure a number of those districts so that the Republicans get less, not more. You know, it's the law of unintended consequences. I was on with Mark Elias yesterday from democracy docket and first rate voting and map litigator who's involved with about 70 cases right now. And he and I both agreed that just because you redraw the map in Texas to give yourself five more doesn't mean you're going to get the five. You can probably not. You're probably going to get one, maybe you get two. But where the Democrats did their vote change, their seat changes, it's like rock solid because they did it the right way. They went to have the voters vote on ballot initiatives and proposals and referendums. So California's plus five, you can take that to the bank. That was Mark's comment. You know, Florida's another four or five. I don't know about that. Virginia. Virginia voters voted on it 10 to 1 advantage to the virgin to the Democrats. So be careful what you wish for because you might get the opposite. Less seats, not more. So we're banking on a little bit of dummy mandering, but we've lost the Supreme Court as any type of protector of voting rights. And that led to a very interesting what should have been a straightforward rejection of a request became The Supreme Court's MAGA 6, sacrificing their principles, whatever's left of them, in order to enter the fray of a political dispute, which they've always said is wrong under the political question doctrine or untimely under the Purcell doctrine. We'll talk about those doctrines. But here, because it's Republicans that they're benefiting, they're like, where can we put our big fat thumb on the scale? Oh, over here, Louisiana and Democrat and Republicans, let's do it. But when they don't want to do it, like when a minority voting rights are at issue, then it's like, oh, we're a Supreme Court. We can't get involved with politics, we can't get involved with primaries, we can't get involved with voting that way or it's too close to an election, we can't get involved. That violates the political doctrine, except when it doesn't. And so Louisiana asked the court to shorten the 30 do the 32 day window on the Supreme Court rule to have an A decision opinion recognized or rendered to speed it up. And Katanji Brown Jackson pointed out that in 25 years they've only done it twice. But here Alito, writing for the majority, shortens the time to a day enters the fray in Louisiana where there is active litigation being led by the ACLU and Mark Elias, about 80,000 voters who have already voted in the primary based on the maps that were already in place that now they want to toss. And yet the Supreme Court weighs in which led. I'll turn it over to you, Karen. It led to this fight broke out in the open, not that civil between Alito and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Take it from there.

Karen Freeman (59:05)

Yeah, look, this is what this boils down to and what people are seeing and Supreme Court experts are seeing is the intellectual dishonesty of the Supreme Court. And that's one of the reasons people are so outraged. People are outraged for two reasons. Number one, this is a, an utter attempt, bold faced attempt to essentially gut the Voting Rights act completely, take away just decades and decades and decades of just strides that we've made in this country to really give people of color in this country a voice and the ability to vote. And gutting the Voting Rights act last Wednesday by ruling that you have to prove that you intended to disenfranchise people of color or black voters. That's what you have to show. It can't be that it had the effect of diluting their vote or disenfranchising them. You have to show that that was the intent. People were already upset about that. But what's happening here and the intellectual dishonesty of this Supreme Court court is that five months ago, three years ago, and every other time they've been asked to weigh in to something that involving an election, if it's too close to an election, they always say, and they've always said we're not getting involved. There's two principles. There's the political questions doctrine that basically says, look, that's just a political issue, so we're not getting involved in that. But even if it's not just a political issue and it's a question court issue, we're still not going to do something to interfere that close to the election because that now we're wading into politics. And again, five months ago, in a case, they said that. And why? Because it was about the Democrats, right? And so they're saying, okay, I'm sorry, you know, the Democrats, you're going to get an opportunity to have more votes. You're five months away or six months, eight months away from primary votes. That's too close. So it can't happen. Now, this one just absolutely throws that doctrine out the window because, as you said, they are in the middle of voting. Their primaries have opened, people have cast their votes. People are running for office from particular districts. Their whole campaign is, I'm running in this district. And people have voted. They're in the midst of voting. So it's not that we're too close to an election. We're in an election. And if they were to adhere to their own principles, their own rules, how they ruled five months ago, this exact court, they would say, this is not happening now. Okay, we will hold on to our mandate. We will hold onto our order, right? Because the decision has come down and usually it takes about a month, 32 days before they send the mandate down to give the parties a chance to kind of, okay, what do we want to do now? And to give people a chance to, maybe they want to ask for the case to be reheard or they, you know, whatever it is. And so it doesn't become official until the mandate is entered. And Louisiana stopped their election, declared a state of emergency, Right? Things that are normally reserved for things like a hurricane or a tornado or a terrorist attack or a flood or fires or whatever it else is a state of emergency. No, there's a state of emergency. Why? Because the Supreme Court said we are allowed to redistrict based on party, and we're going to, and therefore we are stopping the election. And they rush over to the Supreme Court and say, can you issue your mandate now so that we can use that to redraw our maps? And Ketanji Brown Jackson said, I'm sorry, there's no reason to rush the 32 days. The Purcell principle, meaning, you know, don't get too close to an elect, don't fiddle with an election, too close to an election doctrine. Let's wait. Let's wait. And we should wait like we have in every other case when it's a Democrat, right, not a Republican. It's not the party that you support, it's the other party. Let's Wait, and, And accused the right wing MAGA majority of essentially doing the bidding for the Republicans, going straight into party politics, tipping the scales in favor of Republicans. And Alito knew that this is what she was going to say, saw her dissent and called her out and said, you just want us to wait 32 days? For the 32 days you're just, you know, sticking with a procedure that doesn't really matter, a technicality. Totally missing that. That's not the procedure she's talking about. She's talking about the Purcell Principle. She's talking about the fact that this is going to affect an election and that. And that essentially she called them out for being intellectually dishonest and completely throwing off the robes and going straight into politics. I mean, there is no more. Justice is blind. And we're just going to call balls and strikes. Right? This is not a court that calls balls and strikes. This is, I think Mark Elias even said, I think I saw him on a podcast, said this would be like the umpire telling the pitcher what pitches to throw. I mean, that's what's happening here. And sure enough, they enter their mandate in very quick order and we. Louisiana declares a state of emergency, stopped the election. They're redrawing their maps and I hope to God it backfires on them and that you're right and that what happens in November is that they lose more Republican seats because this is dishonest, this is unfair. And my opinion, if this alone doesn't show why we should get rid of gerrymandering, why we should consider whether or not the Electoral College even makes sense anymore, and we should go with popular vote whether we should go and do something with court reform. This Supreme Court is just illegitimate at this point. And I think we have to really consider major Supreme Court reform. And I just. They go against their own precedent, they go against their own norms and they go against themselves. And I think the American people are losing faith in this Supreme Court and frankly, what this means for people of color in this country. I hope they show up in huge numbers in November and really fight back against what's happening.

Michael Popak (65:53)

Yeah, I think they've miscalculated. I think that they fell in love with what they saw as the Trumpification or magnification of the United States. You know, all these districts went red and pink and they used to be for blue and he beat Kamala Harris by double digits in places where that used to be competitive. Forget all that. Donald Trump used to be popular. The, the, the. Because the reality is the. For the Republicans And MAGA and even independents at the time. The, the fantasy of Donald Trump is a lot better than the reality of Donald Trump back in office. And if they thought it was just going to be a version of the way he was in his first administration, sprinkled a little with a little more criminality, it is so much worse than that in terms of his full frontal assault on the rule of law, on our values and dare I say, his unpatriotic policies, which are completely out of step with the American voter, the American ideal, and has, based on polling, has been borne out in polling. I said during the presidential transition, after we were done licking our wounds off the election, that eventually this recognition of the American people rejecting Donald Trump and his policies and his criminality is going to seep into the water supply. Supply. And it has. It's finally may have taken 16, 17 months, although it's been showing up month after month after month in polling. But you know, I talked about it last night on the intersection on cnn. They had a good graph. And you can tie Donald Trump's shedding of 16 favorability points to about six different data points that he can't fix because he won't grow a brain or morals or judgment between now and the midterms. You know, he's at a high February of 2025 at a approval rating of 46%, which is good for him. And then what happens in April of last year? Tariffs get announced. Oh, how does that go? Knock off three points. It's like a, it's like a game. It's like a kid's game. Go back three steps. Then what happens? Then we have let's roll out the National Guard and the militia and the state police for the feds to crush Americans where they live in Democratic and blue states. Four more points down. Then it's the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy and all that it represents on the streets of Minneapolis, down. Then it's Epstein file scandals. Down. Then it's now we're in. Now we're at February of this year, a year later, Iran war, okay, Down. And then the ultimate nail in the coffin in terms of his favorability and unpopularity, gas prices, which is a proxy for affordability in this country. Because if you can't fill up your gas tank or you are robbing other parts of your budget to put gas in the car, then you're going to find ways not to drive very far or spend money or take vacations. So it impacts tourism and business, people's ability to spend money and have disposable income. Remember that phrase, there is no disposable income of the Trump administration, so nobody ever talks about it. Disposable income, you know, free discretionary income you can spend on things other than just living. People have very little of that. And so all that has now shown up. You can't turn around a 23% approval rating, a 77% disapproval rating on the economy. You can't do it in a term, you can't do it in a year. You certainly can't do it in half a year to the midterms. And Trump knows it. That's why he's spending his time with all of these, you know, oh, I had a bad news cycle. Oh, let me go rob the Internal Revenue Service. Oh, I had a bad news cycle. Let me go shut down the historic black golf course in Washington D.C. oh, I'm having a bad day with Iran. Let me pick a fight with the Pope. None of this makes any political sense. You know, as I said at the top of the show, there was an election night last night in America and he decided he was going to flex his muscle, whatever's left of it. Muscles built on Wendy's and McDonald's. Based on reporting from today, this is what the President was ruminating about, lamenting the lack of Wendy's in his life. I'm like, what is going on? And he's flexing his muscle. Oh, you're gonna oppose me in Indiana? You state senators, you know, you're not gonna redistrict, you're not gonna dummy mander for me. I'm gonna, I'm gonna primary you, I'm gonna send in MAGA Republicans to take your seats. How does that help him in the midterm general election to make Indiana voters choose between a normal team normative and a MAGA MAGA Trumper who had to kiss the ring in order to get the job to take out somebody that they liked. Originally, it was a very low voter turnout as well in Indiana. So he might have gotten a short term ego bump of dopamine in the brain. But for electoral, it was terrible. The one real race last night, he lost the again 32nd time special election, turned the Michigan state House Senate chamber blue with the win of a special election. I think it was in District 31 or something for the state senate and now that chamber is 20 Democrats and 18 Republicans. Otherwise it would have been knotted at 19 a piece. And that's another special election where a seat got flipped from red to blue. Continuing the string of over 300 races since the start of the administration at every place on the, on the ballot, on the ticket, state and federal, in which Democrats have outperformed Kamala Harris and or won the seat. And that's what the Republicans have failed to grasp. And I don't know who their pollsters are that they are missing the sea change in the electorate in its mood, in its opinion of the scandal scarred Trump administration led by Donald Trump. And that's where dummy mandering as I as we let off this segment with comes into play. Because if we mobilize the vote and it comes out and millions of people who sat out the last election come back to the democracy and vote, it's a wipeout of epic proportion. You know, we're talking, we're talking 1993 Republican contract with America, Newt Gingrich wiping out Clinton. Wipeout, that's the word. That's and then you know that that's, that's what happens and that's what probably needs to happen. Hopefully the American people recognize that. Why don't we touch base, Karen, on continuing our map theme with what happened in Virginia today. Now, Louise Lucas is well known to Virginia Virginians. She'd been there for 30 years. She's in her early 80s. She's an entrepreneur. She owns a bunch of stuff, marijuana dispensary, I don't know, massage parlor, her office, all in the same shopping center. Now, according to reporting, the Biden administration was looking into her possible corruption. She also was one of the leaders and power brokers about Governor Spamberger's redistricting plan that won, which gave the Democrats 10 out of the 11 seats in Virginia. And suddenly today, FOX is on the scene. The FOX Bureau of Investigation shows up to conduct the raid. So what are you hearing and what do you know?

Karen Freeman (74:44)

I mean, look, the fact that Fox was there and no other reporters I think tells you a lot. Someone tipped them off in the administration, which leads always me to think, okay, what are they trying to distract from? Right. Why do they want this in the news today? This is an investigation that's been kicking around for years. As you said, under the Biden administration, prior attorneys who looked at it didn't think there was anything there to bring a case or certainly not enough to bring a case. And here we are, we have Todd Blanche trying out to be the next attorney general. So he's trying to flex his muscles and bring cases and bring cases against Democrats, frankly. And that's what she is and who she is and what's going on today what are they trying to distract from? Why today? And sure enough, Howard Lutnick was testifying today in a closed door session, of course in a hearing in front of Congress because why we all can't see it or see what he has to say to answer for. Why did he lie about his contacts with Jeffrey Epstein? Why is it that someone who's a cabinet member in this administration who swore during his confirmation hearings that he met him once and never spoke to him again because he was so creeped out from him. She, it turns out he actually visited him on his island, he had business dealings with him and he had an investment with him, he had multiple contacts with him and he has to answer for that. And so we're not hearing a lot about that, or at least they're trying to make it so that we don't hear a lot about that. And I think they're, they're throwing these distractions out so that Fox News, instead of reporting on Howard Lutnick, is instead going to report on this and they're going to say, oh, another corrupt Democrat and you know, all that kind of stuff. She's a woman, she's a woman of color, she's a prominent Democrat in, in Virginia, which can go purple sometimes. And so that, that is just so typical. I think in this administration that's, that's what I think. That's what I thought when I saw that.

Michael Popak (76:56)

I think you're right on target. I've said that they purposely keep investigations and indictments on the shelf and they, it's like programming and they program it. Oh, we got a bad news cycle. Somebody from White House calls up the Department of Justice. What do we got? Oh, we, we're about a week away from maybe executing on a search warrant. Oh, can you do it today? Because Lutnick is going to be testifying and we need to step on the news cycle. You got it, boss. Does anybody out there in our audience think that didn't happen? And it happens all the time. Every time there's a bad news cycle for Donald Trump, even a micro news cycle, he conjures up something else for us to talk about. Some shitty thing happened in the Epstein files. Start putting up my name on the Kennedy center, right? Some, some shitty thing happens with the Iran war. Let's send down a couple of lawyers for the Department of Justice to go look around the construction site for the Federal Reserve and see if they can find a crime over and over again. And so you're totally right. This has been the dirty little secret of the Trump administration that they time, they cook the timing so that it rolls out not because justice demands it, putting aside even starting these investigations, but they do crazy in order to say, look at me, look at me. Look over here, look over here. And then, you know, the, the media dutifully, we try not to dutifully goes after it. You know, I had, I did an interview, it's up on Legal AF YouTube from yesterday, of a star of Sky Perryman. Sorry, sorry, Sky. A major star. You are a star. Sky Perryman of Democracy Forward about her leading the case, her group leading the case about the attempt to take over of an a famous municipal golf course that sits along the Potomac with the Washington Monument in the background, was also the scene in 1941 of a famous integration moment in civil rights where black golfers, with much derision and booing and hissing by white golfers, played on the golf course. And it's been a model of for municipal golf courses, you know, which are relatively cheap and make golf available to the masses around the country. And so, you know, on a bad news day, he suddenly tries to take over the golf course. And she said in her interview with me, and I'll paraphrase, it's almost like let we got this. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We know what he's doing. That these are distractions done intentionally by the Trump administration to take us our eye off the prize of protecting civil rights and civil liberties, constitutional rights, First Amendment rights, voting rights. And what I think she was trying to communicate to our audience is have confidence that we know what he's doing. And yes, we have enough resources and public support to do both, to do it all, to go after him for the distractive events while not losing focus over here about things that matter to our body politic and our democracy. And that was very comforting for me because we can flip from one story to the next. We try to have continuity and drill down on things so that people can follow a story from beginning to middle to end. But don't worry that the ACLU or Democracy Forward or the attorneys general or Mark Elias's group or Norm Ison's group, or any or Abby Lowell or any of the people that are fighting this out, duke it out for democracy in the courtrooms every day and every hour. They're not distracted. They may use those events and put them into their filings as examples of things in their case, but that's the good news. The media may take the bait, the mainstream media may take the bait, but the lawyers Many of whom we bring on to our show are not. And I think that's the, that's the moral to that story, Karen.

Karen Freeman (81:27)

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree with you. And we have to keep doing what we're doing.

Michael Popak (81:33)

Absolutely. And thank you for being here on Legal AF at the bid week and supporting our show from its infancy into it. We're now out of the toddlers, toddler period. But what is it when you're six, you're a child. We're a child. I've been accused of being a child before, so.

Karen Freeman (81:49)

Or children.

Michael Popak (81:51)

We're not just children, we're your children. Thank you very much. Thank you for supporting us. Hit the free subscribe button on Midas. Do the same thing on Legal AF YouTube channel. It really does help. Otherwise, you know, I wouldn't ask for it. Support us on legal AF, the sub stack which we have running there with a 40 sale to encourage you to become a member. Now, now's an amazing time to do it. Be a great time to do it. And, and thank you in advance. I'll do a live report from the Webbies probably on Substack Live. We'll post something up on the Legal F YouTube channel. And next time we get together, next midweek, we will have. I think I'll have at least one. Give me one. One of the Webbies. We can, we can, we can hold up and accept on, on the behalf of our audience. And again, best wishes to everybody that celebrates mother, all the mothers out there, grandmothers out there, and anybody who's mother to child. We appreciate you. We're glad you're here with us on Legal af. Last word, our resident mother, Karen Freeman.

Karen Freeman (82:57)

Well, you know, I think everyone has to really think about. Just keep your eye on all the times that Donald Trump lies to us. And I really want to call them out as much as possible. And the thing that really is sticking in my craw this week the most is the fact that he said this ballroom was going to be paid for by private donations and that he's trying to now put a billion dollars through the budget bill to pay for the ballroom. And so when we talk about things like affordability, we talk about gas prices, and we talk about why people don't have enough money to buy your mother a present for Mother's Day, Think about the fact that he's asking for a big billion of taxpayer dollars to fund his ballroom. And it's always like that. Whenever he says the war is over, it's still going on. The Strait of Hormuz. Is open, it's closed. It's these lie after lie after lie. And we have to constantly call them out and we have to talk about them and remind ourselves of them so that when November rolls around, we all vote and we can be done with this period in our life, at least this part of it, and then two years from then, hopefully vote in a Democrat or just somebody sane. So that's my final word because I really want to focus on those issues. And happy Mother's Day to your beautiful bride, Popak.

Michael Popak (84:28)

Oh, thank you very much. It is, as I said, bittersweet. Lost my mom last Mother Day about a week after we got to celebrate Mother's Day with her. But that was the last time. And but we do have our my wife is a mother and we have our two year old and we will be celebrating in the city this weekend in New York and all of that. So thanks everybody for being here. Shout out to the Midas mighty and the legal A effers.

Karen Freeman (85:01)

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Michael Popak (85:05)

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Karen Freeman (85:07)

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