B (3:17)

Oh, I love this period between Christmas and New Year's with you and our audience. We have so much to talk about. One thing we didn't have on that list, which we will add, which is the we're, we're one major giant leap closer to a federal judge ruling that the Trump Department of Justice is vindictively prosecuting somebody to allow for the dismissal of their criminal indictment. The person's name happens to be Kilmer, Abrego Garcia, who's had a pretty good week in a couple of courts. Major development there. But also has a cascading impact, domino effect on things like the other vindictive prosecutions Donald Trump is currently going after. Like James Comey, who will talk about Letitia James, New York Attorney General Adam Schiff and Senator of California Lisa Cook eventually, maybe sort of, kind of. And I have my own working theory about many of these indictments which Donald Trump I'll share now, which is that Donald Trump has no real interest. He's actually bored by the process of an actual proper good faith indictment leading to some sort of conviction of his political critic. All he cares about is naming and shaming. In fact, he says it out loud in the Epstein files matter. This is how he when we get into that segment, he's the charade that there is any separation between the Department of Justice, which is completely captured by Donald Trump as its chief legal officer, and Donald Trump, you know where he says, well, I'm going to be on my social media account for Donald Trump and give directions to the Department of Justice. We had reporting just a couple of days ago that Trump's White House took over the Department of Justice's social media accounts in order to immediately in real time clear Donald Trump minute investigations of any wrongdoing or corrupt act. Every time his name shows up or a photo shows up in the Epstein release, how they can conduct, how does anybody think the Cash Patel and Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, FBI DOJ could clear anything within an hour or two. It would take months or years to clear Donald Trump. And if they're clearing Donald Trump, why Are they clearing anybody else? Why aren't they clearing Bill Clinton or why aren't they clearing thousands of other people that are in there? No, they're just clearing Trump. And now we know why they're clearing him. Because Trump's writing the social media posts for the Department of Justice. And all we saw and when we get to that segment in a minute, is this naming and shaming attitude. He literally said we should just name them and shame them. Well, that's not appropriate under the Department of Justice manual, the principles of federal prosecution. That's not how the Department of Justice works. And that plays into the hands of everybody who's going to argue that there's vindictive prosecution. So once again, Donald Trump manufacturing evidence that'll be used against him and his Department of Justice in courts of law. One last ticker or counter that. I'm keeping track of it as you are for legal AF. We're up to 500 lawsuits against the Trump administration in 11 months. 500, most of them successful. And that is doing a good job of holding Donald Trump back. We'll talk about several of the cases today at while in the election side, the politics side of our podcast, while the Democrats and in the House and the Senate get their groove back about how to beat him and shellack Donald Trump and the Republicans in the midterms. And aren't we happy to say that we're almost at the 2026 year turning in the midterms. They seem so far away when he was busy issuing 200 executive orders back almost a year ago, but now it's right around the corner and that's all you and I can think about, is the midterms and how we return the House and the Senate to the Democrats and separation of powers and checks and balance to the American people.

A (7:17)

When we talk about the Abrego Garcia case later in this episode, what I think is going to be an important thing to mention and we'll highlight it here, is just this idea of transparency. And what the federal judge in Abrego Garcia is really ordering is either be transparent Trump regime or dismiss this case. Right. And this is just a theme that pervades this Trump regime because they engage in criminality and scams and treason and traitorous behavior and then they want to cover it up. And then the COVID up gets worse and worse and worse. And the American people are like, we're not stupid. Like we see what you're doing here. And so it's just an interesting thing that in the Abrego Garcia case What you have Judge Crenshaw Jr. The judge from the middle district of Tennessee basically saying is, is, look, there is a burden shifting analysis that the courts do that Abregos put forward evidence that there was a vindictive prosecution against him by the Trump regime. But look, you can rebut it. You can rebut it. You know all those people who go on Fox News, which I call state regime media, you know how like Todd Blanche and Kristi Noem and you know, and Pam Bondi, the whole crew, okay, so if you think it's not vindictive, have them show up in court. We're going to cancel the trial, we'll do an evidentiary hearing and you can have them explain themselves. And if they don't rebut the presumption, what else am I going to do? So they could show up in open court and testify or they could run. And I think that's the right framing of all of these things because you have the Trump regime constantly hiding, doing things in the dark. Same thing with the Trump gop, right? Whenever they try to push forward these disastrous budget bills, whenever, they always do it at like 1am or 3am hoping nobody is looking. And on the other hand, you got people like Jack Smith who are like, can I testify publicly, please? Like, I want to let the world know. Unlimited time. Let me speak to the American people. House, Senate, anybody, by the way, even like last year, a year and a half ago, this guy's been in the news a lot more lately. Hunter Biden, Remember Hunter Biden even showed up before the House. He's like, I'm here to testify. You want me? Let's do it.

B (9:26)

Now.

A (9:26)

They remember Moskowitz was like, all right, let's take a vote. Who wants to question him? He's here. This is what you've always wanted. And nobody wanted to question him in public. They wanted to do it in private. Same thing with Jack Smith. They want to do it in private. Just think about it in those terms even less about this, politics or that or even the issues. Who wants to do everything in secret and private and on Fox and on regime media? And who wants to talk about things publicly and transparently that oftentimes tells you who's right and who's wrong in these situations? Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes. So Popak, here's the post that you reference right here that Donald Trump posted on Christmas. This is one of Donald Trump's Christmas Day or Christmas Day messages right here, right now. One million more pages on Epstein are Found DOJ is forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired hoax. When do they say no more and work on election fraud, et cetera. The Dems are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them and get back to helping our country. The radical left doesn't want people talking about Trump and Republican success only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein, just another witch hunt. And you think about him retraumatizing victims here by again calling it a hoax and and saying that this is just a witch hunt and saying that this is a Democratic thing. Let's be clear whether it's Democrats or Republicans or independents or people from foreign countries, people from royal families, we don't care. The law said release the information by December 19th, all of it. Redact the name of the victims other, redact their face of the victims.

B (11:13)

That's it.

A (11:14)

Otherwise everything gets released. And remember back in February, that's when Pam Bondi said that she had everything on her desk and ready to go. Then we know from Jason Leopold's great reporting at Bloomberg that since March there were about 1,000, I think it's 937 to be precise, but roundup 1,000 DOJ and FBI officials who have been working around the clock billing tens of thousands of dollars in overtime hours going through these files. So for there now to be 1 million pages, aha, suddenly discovered, you want to talk about waste, fraud and abuse, then what were these people billing overtime hours for if they were not going through these documents? You certainly don't need a thousand people to go through a few hundred thousand documents. And popak that I'm going to toss it over to you. But that was the first red flag for me. You and I have both been in cases and you and I, back when I was litigating had been in cases together where we dealed with document production cases that have hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of records. And it's fairly easy to go through all of this stuff. Yes, it's time consuming. But you and I have worked on cases with millions of records where you've had to comb through millions of just financials going through in a tedious fashion, line by line to try to flag. Is this transaction suspicious? Is that transaction suspicious? Financial reports are generated on weekly monthly annual basis. So you compare the weekly to the monthlies. There's a lot that goes into those reviews. So one of the first red flags that I had was when they were saying this is a few hundred thousand documents to begin with that never made sense to me because there's all of these LLCs. There's billions of dollars in money laundering and financial transactions taking place. There's coconspirators. We now know there's at least 10, even though cash Patel testified and said.

B (13:13)

There were no try. The case against Maxwell would have taken up a tractor trailer worth of material. Electronic format.

A (13:20)

Absolutely. So I was going through these records and I saw this one right here, dated October 30, 2020. And it talks about. This is exactly how you and I would talk about documents. This is when the DOJ was working in a way that made sense. Like, this is my language, right, Popak? Like, this is the language that we speak to each other in.

B (13:39)

Holy shit. We need bigger boat.

A (13:41)

But we'd be spending messages to each other, right? I could. I could imagine myself sending this exact email to you. This is October 30, 2020. Good afternoon. And good afternoon, Popak. Following up on our earlier phone conversation, a hard drive with the following production is being sent to the Southern District of New York via FedEx with the following production in the US vs Epstein workspace. Then it lists the Bates numbers as we call them, or the document labels. SDNY is the prefix production pro D008 to 0014. 0011 has six subparts and it says there are approximately 1.2 million records, not documents records currently being imaged. The images will be available in such and such a date. So, Popak, I'll toss it over to you, but I saw that document and I said, that makes sense to me. And that's on just one hard drive. And what about production 001 to 007 also was there 0015 to 0030? I don't know. That's just the workspace, meaning the electronic discovery tool that's being used in USA versus Epstein. What about USA v. Maxwell? What about the Southern District of Florida? What about the civil cases? What about the Treasury Department? So when I say there's got to be at least 5 million, 10 million, 15 million records, that makes sense to me based on cases like this, Not a few hundred thousand. I'll toss it over to you.

B (15:04)

Yeah, well, I'm going to throw that back up in just a second. But you're totally right, because when Pam Bondi said. We thought. You and I, our eyebrows often go up around the same time. When Pam Bondi said files are on my desk, we're like, the files are on your desk. You and I have been involved with you Know, back in the day before electronic discovery, when I started my career, we. We used to have file rooms, war rooms with just paper boxes filled with documents, you know, that you'd have to somehow organize in a case of this size. Now, documents have gotten more voluminous in cases, not less, with digital electronic. And so things end up on gigabytes and terabytes and on thumb drives and on optical servers and all sorts of things. So we were like, how are they defining the Epstein files? The Epstein files should be everything that's in the executive branch, never in the legislative branch. Everything in the executive branch from its Department of Justice and all the cases that it tried and prosecuted. You can't try the Maxwell case, as Maureen Comey, James Comey daughter, did, and get a five count conviction on child sex trafficking for a 20 year sentence with a couple of scraps of paper. There's binders, there's witness binders, electronic format or otherwise. There's. There's documents, there's the results of search warrants and subpoenas and all sorts of things in and around Epstein and Maxwell's and others. We know it because there is a control pile that you and I often refer to. I call it the control pile. It's the keep the government honest pile. It's the stuff that we receive that the oversight committee and other committees received by subpoena to the Epstein estate. Who has his email inboxes from 2007. Remember all the stuff you and I did. Lots of hot reminding our audience. Lots of hot takes, lots of analysis about. Look at this email exchange from 2007 between Maxwell and Epstein. Epstein and how this is a lot. Puts a lie to her testimony to Todd Blanche that we've seen in video. Okay, so we have a control pile like you think the government would say, we better find at least that and produce that. And then you find the email. Put it back up on the screen for a minute. I want to make two comments about the email. Why is anything redacted in that email? The only thing that's supposed to be redacted is to protect the identity of victims, not government workers and contractors. Why I should know who Ed Tyrell is writing to right now, Right? Lack of transparency.

A (17:44)

Why does Ed Tyrell not get redacted?

B (17:47)

Or Ed Tyrell, contractor.

A (17:49)

Ed Tyrell, the contractor gets redacted, but not was.

B (17:53)

Was the contractor a sexual abuse victim? I mean, I only partially jest. And then you've got the bottom and then the way that's organized. Those are giant. Think of a we Used to call them red welds, these open red folders that you had subfolders in. These are giant electronic productions that were made pursuant to the government's obligation under a law, a series of laws we call Brady. It's Brady material. They had to make a series of productions. In the Maxwell case, this was production one, this was production eight. Within the production could be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents and pages. So don't be. I don't want people to be fooled. Like, well, there's only eight volumes. No, each volume could be the size of a football field filled with documents. And that's what you spotted when this guy's saying 1.2 million. It's not just the 1.2 million. And then Donald Trump's Department of Justice takes credit for the sleuthing done by you and Midas and says, we've just uncovered over a million more documents. No, you read Ben, myself, Dallas's social media feed, where he found a document in your own production that indicates that you got a bigger problem. And now we're into the world of the cockroach theory. And, you know, the cockroach theory, Ben, you know, if you see a cockroach in your kitchen, you don't have one cockroach. You have 50 cockroaches. We don't just have one. One million missing documents. We have, as you said, multiples of that. And now Donald Trump is telling the Department of Justice, why aren't you. Why it done. Stop. Stop work order. You know, why aren't you looking for the fraudulent election? All right, first of all, because the 0.001% of fraud in voting. In voting is. Is not the subject of an act of Congress that's been signed by the President that requires already two weeks late the production of the Epstein files. So we always come back to how they define the Epstein files and how they conflate things that confuse the American people. For me and for us, the Epstein files is everything in the executive branch that they have access to, including the things they've obtained from the court files, the permission from the court, now the courts to release files and grand jury material. It's the irs, it's the postal service, it's the money trail. It's the pictures in the Epstein safe that Michael Wolf. Sorry, yeah, that Michael Wolf, the reporter has seen. It's the results of search warrants. It's. It's all of that. It's the subpoenas, the Chase and other banks. It's. Where is all of that? And and right, talk about, talk about theft of honest service. They were working apparently in March, April and May, round the clock in multiple shifts, morning, noon and night, searching already through documents. And yet they are still searching. And had they missed the million, the million pile haystack in the middle of all this searching and then at the same time.

A (20:55)

Exactly. It's not the needle in the haystack, it's the biggest. What document could be bigger than the SDNY production in USAV Epstein? Like if you were going through the USAV Epstein, you're not aware that. Why don't you ask the people who litigated USAV Epstein for their frigate?

B (21:11)

Because. No, but, well, they fired her. Maureen Kobe. But the, the, because you and I have done. Because this is what you got to do to cut your teeth as a lawyer the first couple of years. If you're in a major law firm like I was too, you got to do document production. It sounds incredibly tedious, but you cut your teeth on it and you learn. My first business trip as a young lawyer was to go to Detroit, Michigan in February to go sit in a room at a major accounting firm to make sure the boxes were all there that we needed for a production. And then when I was a fourth year, I got sent to California all summer to go supervise an entire team of paralegals for a healthcare company in California because a federal judge was fining that healthcare company $5,000 a day for late production in a civil case because they were screwing around with it and they needed somebody like me who was organized even as a fifth year to go out there and like, and like, make sure this got fixed. And so, but here, the Barbara justice doesn't give a crap. There, there are senior people that know how to do electronic discovery and make a list. Like you and I would sit in a room and go, all right, let's, let's look big picture. What. Where are the piles of things we know exist from the public record? The Epstein file in Florida, in New York, the Maxwell, New York, the this, the that, the irs, that, that go to every one of these places and go get the files from these records custodial. No one's doing that. They're doing this half assed. They gotta wait for Ben Meisellis to tell them they're missing a million files, you know. You know, until you find the next document that says it's next million. Now here's the other thing that I didn't want to leave this Epstein story without, without putting up on the screen too. It's The Christmas. Talk about the smoke clearing from Trump's Christmas in America. God. So he puts this up and you guys repost it also. And talk about a confessional. This is. This is Projection 101. Everybody in notes tonight, you tell me when we've now verged into projection, where he's talking about himself, but he's. But he's blaming other people. Merry Christmas to all, including the many sleazebags who love Jeffrey Epstein. Gave him bundles of money. Okay. Went to his island. Well, I don't know about going to the island, but there's at least eight different trips on air. Epstein with Donald Trump, including with his kids, attended his parties. How many videos and pictures do we have to see of Donald Trump at part. Put that, put it back up so I don't have it in front of me. Attended his parties. How many pictures do we have to see of them attending parties? And thought he was the greatest guy on the earth. Oh, you mean like the guy that said it in an interview that he was a terrific guy for the New York magazine, Donald Trump about Epstein, only to drop him like a dog when things got too hot or somebody was running for the presidency, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him. Projection, projection, projection. Didn't know him. Yes. And he was a disgusting person. This is Donald Trump. This is his confessional. And then blame, of course, President Donald Trump, who did drop Epstein long before it became fashionable. Right over a land deal. And here's the thing. We can go back to me now for this. Here's the thing that always gets lost in the shuffle, and I don't want it to. About Donald Trump because there's no other way to take his revisionist history than he enabled a child sex trafficker to continue to operate as a monster and a predator on the street without doing anything about it. There's no other way to interpret Donald Trump's inadvertent confessional where he says, I knew he was a sleazebag. I knew he was taking people from my spa, like Virginia Jeffrey. I knew he was basically using the Mar A Lago as a predator hunting ground. And that's why I now here's where he should be saying, and that's why I turned him into the officials, and that's why I reported him to the police or law enforcement. And that. No. And that's why I canned him from a membership at Mar A Lago he never had. That's it. So you knew and you let this monster stay on the street to go after hundreds of other Girls and women. And that's okay with everybody in Trump MAGA world. There's that always gets lost in the reporting that he's effectively admitted. If you. There's a. It's one or the other. He either he either knew about it and didn't say anything about it, allowing him to continue when he should have been a first provider, he should have been a first responder in that regard, or he participated in it. I don't know which it is, but it's one of the two things.

A (25:58)

Instead, he posts messages like this. Remember this one back from January 9th of 2024. This is what the Democrats do to their Republican opponent who's leading them a lot in the polls. This is AI and it's very dangerous for our country. I was never on Epstein's plane or at his stupid island. Strong laws ought to be developed against AI. It will be a big and various, very dangerous problem in the future. Just taking the latter point right there. Trump is the one preventing any regulations and laws on AI to deal with this right now. And Trump wants there to be federal preemption that has zero regulation to replace state laws that are actually trying to grapple with AI. That's not the main point.

B (26:42)

What was the fake. That photo of Eric and Ivanka with Trump on the plane is not fake.

A (26:49)

Look, look at the email from the federal prosecutors, January 8, 2020. For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported or that we were aware, including during the period we would expect to charge in the Maxwell case. So look, when you're saying that Epstein is a hoax, when you say the 2020 election is the hoax, when you say Russia, Russia, Russia is a hoax. When you say, as Donald Trump, Covid is a Democratic hoax. Okay? This was the line of questioning that was done by E. Jean Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, in the cross exam of Donald Trump during the deposition, where she goes, oh, you said the 2020 election's a hoax. Got it. You're saying that any involvement between you and Russia is a hoax. Got it. You're saying that Covid is a Democratic hoax in order to hurt you. So you're saying those things are hoaxes. So now you're saying that Eugene Carroll is a hoax.

B (27:54)

Yeah.

A (27:54)

You're saying that the accusation that you had an affair with Stormy Daniels is a hoax. Got it. Okay. So your definition of a hoax are things that are true, you know, and it was a great line of questioning. And, and it's just, and it's just so true here as well that he's saying that this, all these things are hoaxes. And here's the other point that they're either doing intentionally or incompetently or maliciously or what have you. Midas Touch also broke the story about this letter that was purportedly sent by Epstein to Larry Nassar that was postmarked after Epstein's death, but sent before Epstein died, allegedly by suicide. The letter was found in the prison of where Epstein, where Epstein was. And it has indicia based on emails that were sent that were obtained by the Bureau of prisons of 2023 as being something that the FBI, let's just put it this way, they were concerned enough about that they sent it to a labor for a handwriting analysis. And nobody's ever seen the results of the handwriting analysis in that period. Regardless of what your view is on this document or not, except what the Trump says, assume, arguendo for the sake of argument that they're saying that's a fabricated document, it's a fake. Just assume that argument. So of all of the documents as you and I are talking about, Popak, if you have the haystack, all the important documents that should have been released on December 19, right, the witness statements, the FBI statements, the bank records, all that stuff which you're claiming you just now found. So again, if you even take their argument as true, right, Popak, then they're saying we've prioritized with all of our resources, that we've had thousands of lawyers and FBI agents, tens of thousands of overtime hours. We've prioritized fabricated documents. We push those ones out first, and then it's like, well, then why did you do that? Well, are you trying to. And just think about it from a victim's perspective, without any explanation or notes or whatever, you're just pushing out the fake documents first and all that stuff. Unless your goal is to try to say, look, we can trust anything in this files. I guess the whole files must be. But, and there's part of that, no matter what side you're on, it gets, it's bad, you know, regardless. Popak. And that's how I think I, I view that.

B (30:15)

Let me just on that one last. And I know we're going to take our, we're going to take our great break at this moment, but let me just say one thing about that, because there was a lot of. Should we report on it? Is it fake? Is it not fake? Listen, I don't know whether it is or it isn't. But even in the words of the Department of Justice with their Insta, Insta investigation, okay, even they used words that were quite curious in their social media posting, which I now, which we now know from Axios is controlled by the White House. It doesn't say that the question document expert, that's what we call somebody who does, you know, forgeries has, has determined beyond a reasonable doubt that this is not his handwriting. Jeffrey Epstein. Somebody took the time apparently to take to take a blue pen in handwriting that looks awfully like things we've seen of Jeffrey Epstein and write to a guy who is in jail for sexually assaulting and molesting the women's Olympic gymnastics team, who yes, he was friends with and pen pals with. Take time to do it while the guy is either hanging in his jail cell or near or near that time, seal it in an envelope, leave it in the dead letter, no pun intended, of the office of the, of the correctional facility in New York. Smell it, have it return in order to screw Donald Trump. This reminds me a lot, by the way of page 233 of volume 2 of the Epstein birthday book where everybody in the book has effectively validated the authenticity of their birthday submission except page 233. Somebody 30 years ago put in a card on behalf of Donald Trump that was obscene and made him look bad. Right. See we're back to the every conspiracy is really true that you just brought up before with this one. When they use the language about the handwriting. They didn't say, as I said definitively, emphatically, they said it's likely not Epstein's handwriting. You know, to go from likely not to this is a scandalous fake which was at the top of it in all Trump caps to. Then you look below and you're like, why is it a fake? It's likely not. Where is the report where you and I have done fake document cases? I have. You have, I'm sure you get former FBI guys, you know, from, from and, and others from Quantico and you know, they're all running around as, as, as experts because you gotta, you get a fake will a fake this, a fake document, a fake board resolution, whatever, and, but where is it? Where's the. No. So we're watching in real time Donald Trump clearing himself of any wrongdoing while they release pictures of like a half naked Bill Clinton in a hot tub. Which again is what, what you're saying undermine. What have we watched with Donald Trump from the Beginning undermine people's belief in the veracity of a process, undermine the criminal justice system, undermine the judges. Make everybody think twice. Everything's a conspiracy. Everything's a hoax. Right. Which undermines the credibility of the pillars of our society and of our constitutional republic. And it's just we're seeing that exact same thing projected onto the Epstein files. You can't trust anything in the Epstein files. Look at this fake letter from Larry Nassar. Maybe this. That everything's fake about me. And so that his supporters, which are dwindling. I'm not sure who exactly is still his. His target audience here, as based on recent polling, is, is everybody just throws their hands up and goes, oh, it's a big. It's a big mess. It hurts my head. Who could figure any of this out?

A (33:56)

That's the whole goal of everything. And it's 1984. Orwellian couldn't even have gone this far, which is just war is peace. And up is down, left is right it is. And literally war is peace. Right. Donald Trump using the line like he wants Nobel Peace Prizes for actually creating more wars across the world than ever before. So big segment we just did there. He covered a lot. We'll be right back. Reminder, make sure you check out Popox law firm. There are a lot of legal a effers who have reached out to Popoc. Don't be shy. Call 877-POPAK AF or go to thepopoc firm.com. they've got lawyers all across the country. If you forgot that number, just go check it out in the description below. If you've been injured in a car accident, auto accident, if you know someone who's been injured by the negligence of somebody else, sexual assault, harassment victim, wrongful death cases, medical malpractice, reach out, see if you have a case or refer people to Popoc would be great as well. Popak hit 1 million subscribers on the Legal AF YouTube channel thanks to you. Right after that last episode, we did 1 million subscribers. Now we're on our way to 2 million subscribers. So let's. Usually the hardest thing is that first million getting to that 2 million.

B (35:11)

We're up 10,000 already since last week.

A (35:15)

Spread the word to everybody. And also Legal AF substack, one of the most read substacks out there as well on the top of the substack charts. I couldn't be prouder. My partner, Michael Popak on Legal af, absolutely crushing it. All right, everybody, make sure you come back because you're not going to want to miss what we Discuss next Donald Trump losing in the United States Supreme Court. Donald Trump losing, losing, losing. And we'll talk about that and more. We'll be right back.

B (35:43)

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A (38:26)

Welcome Back to Legal AF. Great to see you Legal AFers Michael Popak Great to spend this weekend with you or if you're watching or listening during the week. Great to spend it with you whenever you're listening or watching Legal af. We just covered the COVID up of the Epstein files. Now let's talk about the Trump regime losing big in the United States Supreme Court this week. I always talk about like the Trump years as kind of aging and dog years because when I was thinking about our programming for this weekend's episode, I'm like, did this happen this week? Because it felt like it happened many, many weeks or months ago, but it indeed happened this week. As Kyle Cheney writes, a huge loss for the Trump administration. I call him a regime at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration lacked the authority to federalize and deploy the National Guard in Illinois or as I say, invade Illinois. You to the second page of this ruling, by the way. It was a 6 to 3 ruling where you had Amy Coney Barrett and you had Kavanaugh and you had Roberts side with the three liberal justices, thus the six versus the three dissenters. And the three dissenters you had Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch, who I think at this point are just fanboying for turning the United States into North Korea. But let's take a look at what the act actual ruling says right here. We conclude the term regular forces as used in the statute invoked by Donald Trump 12406 sub 3 likely refers to the regular forces of the United States military. This interpretation means that to call the Guard into active Federal Service under subsection 3 of 124063, the President must be unable with the regular military to execute the laws of the United States. Because the statute requires an assessment of the military's ability to execute the laws, it likely applies only where the military could legally execute the laws. Such circumstances are exceptional. Under the Posse Combatanus act, the military is prohibited from executing the laws except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress. So before the President can federalize the national guard under 12406 sub 3, he likely must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be unable with those forces to perform that function. At this preliminary stage, the government has failed to identify a source or authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. Now Popak, I also believe this would apply across the board at this point, because the same logic applies whether you're in Oregon or whether you're in Charlotte, North Carolina, or whether you're in Los Angeles. So this interpretation by the Supreme Court, and it's interesting that that's what they utilize. And I'll pass it over to you to make this ruling because to me, there was so many other grounds as well, from the fact that it required coordinate, like the very first sentence required coordination with the governor and that like it was really the governor requesting it was this whole, the whole purpose of the statute. But, you know, look, this is how they interpreted it. This is how they found it comes to the same conclusion that you and I always had about this through a method that, you know, we talked about it in the Posse Combatas framework. But what do you make of this ruling? It's a big loss for the Trump.

B (42:04)

Oh, it's a huge, huge loss. I had Rob Bonta, the attorney general from California, on the Intersection, my Tuesday night show here on the Midas Touch Network. And I, he was very pithy, which I love about Rob Ag Bonta when he briefs our audience. I said, what do you think this decision means in terms of all the other National Guard cases, including yours in Oregon and California? He says they're dead. He said, he said this should kill all of them because this is what. And now we know why they were taking a month and a half to render this decision. Didn't take a month and a half to write the four pages of the majority decision, 6 to 3, the concurrence for Kavanaugh. That reads like a dissent. I want to focus on that in a minute. And the, and the Alito written dissent joined by Gorsuch and Thomas and taken a month and a half to do that. Takes a month and a half to do a hundred page decision about presidential immunity, not this. So why? Because they weren't rushed. Because they knew they, they had the votes early on with the caucus. They knew that they had the votes to approve of what the judges were doing on the ground in the lower courts. So they weren't concerned when the 9th Circuit a week ago said, yeah, you can't have, you know, the LA National Guard or, or, or Charles Breyer, the senior judge in San Francisco, got the troops off the ground in la and that they weren't concerned because they knew they were going to be finding that regular forces means the military. Now, here's the problem. The problem is this invites a Donald Trump's use of the Insurrection act, which is one of the Limited exceptions to the Posse Combatant Act. See, the way our government works it is he's not the commander in chief on domestic soil, so to speak. He has to get a delegation of authority from Congress to use to nationalize, federalize the National Guard to the state militia and to use these kind of troops. So you have to look to statutes and delegations of authority. Posse Combata Sack says you can't, don't, don't look to the military for domestic law enforcement. So that's out. Insurrection act says, oh, you got an insurrection. The big I word that was so. That was so. What's the word I'm looking for? That was so scary that even the Biden's Department of Justice didn't use it for prosecuting the 1600 or so insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol. Remember, they the highest charge was seditious conspiracy, not insurrection, even though we all call it an insurrection. They call it a mob or a rebellion or whatever. But these have defined terms, or they're becoming defined terms within these various statutes. So when they asked the question for further briefing, what are the regular forces? There was a split immediately. Some courts, some courts argued that regular forces meant the military. U.S. military, like the army, combined with local law enforcement and federal security officers that like patrol ice, right, there's a security team there. Some said, no, it's only the armed forces and you have to look to them first if you can and you don't violate the Posse Comitatus act before you call for backup and go cross sovereignty lines and snatch the National Guard away from the governor. Which makes sense given how our country was cobbled together in federalism between state power and federal government power and the 10th amendment of the Constitution. And the Federalist Papers that are always get cited. I never thought I'd seen Federalist Papers cited so much in the last year in court cases like, well, it's Alexander Hamilton said, or as you know, Marbury versus Madison. I've never thought we'd see Marbury versus Madison as much as we have one of the leading cases from 1807, no less. So here they said they went down that road. They said, okay, we know Trump did not use the military before he grabbed the National Guard. Does he have to? And they concluded he does. And if he can, if he can't, then he, then he can go to the National Guard. Because the Posse Combata block certain things. Things. Alito's all up in arms in his dissent, frothing at the mouth because, well, of course there's an exception to the Posse Combatantus Act. It's 10 USC 12, 4 06, which says if there's an invasion or a rebellion or you can't execute the laws without the regular forces or with regular forces is not enough. There you go. You can use the National Guard. And six out of the nine said, no, you're wrong, Alito. That's not what that means. There has to still be a delegation from Congress and there still has to be that analysis. Kavanaugh raises the specter in his, in his concurrence, which I had to read twice because I thought it was a dissent. But he, in his footnote, he talks about the Insurrection act, and maybe this will now lead to more army and less National Guard being called up on the streets of America. So we got that to worry about. The other thing I didn't like about Kavanaugh's decision, remember, this is. Now when I say remember, it's really for our audience to get a handle on where we are in the procedure. We're not at the substance of this case. The question was that the 7th Circuit properly block the deployment of the National Guard in their analysis that 12406 had been violated. Subsection three, yes or no. And the court said, yeah, we're not at the merits yet, which was full briefing and oral argument, and we'll get there another time. But yeah, go ahead. Don't let the National Guard be used by Donald Trump under this formula that he's been using. It's wrong. And they wanted to tell him it's wrong now. But there's still going to be a substantive case a year from now or whenever. And Kavanaugh, even if he leaves, it may still just be a 5 to 4 decision with Amy Coney Barrett sliding over with Justice Roberts to form the six, with Kavanaugh to form the six person block. Here's what Kavanaugh says, which pissed the shit out of me. That's a, that's a legal term. Undefined. He said. He starts trolling the American people and rewriting history about January 6th. So he says, well, the court's legal interpretation is on page five of his dissent, as I understand it could lead to potentially significant implications for future crises. I'm like, all right, go ahead, consider a hypothetical. I'm like, you got me. Go. Suppose a mob rapidly gathers outside the US Courthouse in Philadelphia. So now we're just substituting the Capitol and now a federal courthouse for this doomsday scenario in response to an unpopular decision or to influence the outcome of a pending matter. Oh, you Mean to try to stop the certification of an election. Okay, go ahead. Suppose also that the mob is threatening to storm the courthouse Capitol and attack the federal judges, the legislators and their staff. And to damage or burn down the building. Check, check, check. Thereby preventing the execution of federal law. Suppose further, the US Military cannot readily mobilize to deploy to the site in time. Or the commander in chief is sitting at a dining room table watching the Capitol burn, not authorizing the National Guard nor the army to protect the Capitol. There's the rewrite of history about this particular president. President. Suppose further, the US Military cannot readily mobilize to deploy. That the local police and federal security officers are outnumbered. Oh, you mean like the Metro Police and the Capitol Police who couldn't hold the line, who are outmatched. And the president wants to federalize the National Guard units to protect the courthouse. Unlike what Donald Trump did, which we know from the January 6th Committee, under the court's order, even in those circumstances, he couldn't federalize. So, see, Democrats, that's. We're just gonna have another Jan.6 again, and then you'll want the National Guard with some president of yours, and you won't have it. Why is this necessary, this analysis? Ben, in the middle of his concurrence, where he has to show his. I'm gonna answer the question. Where he's gonna show is he's gotta show his bona fides and his fidelity and loyalty to the fearless leader Donald Trump, in the middle of his joining the majority against Donald Trump.

A (50:24)

It's one of the disappointing reflections that you have after you graduate law school and you start to realize that these Supreme Court justices, who your law professors and others put on a pedestal are actually horrible people and also not all that bright. And they need to teach you more in law school. I think, about the political maneuverings really behind all of this, versus this view of law as the best and brightest rise to the top. Because Justice Kavanaugh did something else as well. In that footnote that you referenced, he tries to act like he didn't just make a ruling that permits racial profiling. You know, and so he just made a ruling. I mean, this was what, a month ago? Two months ago, September 8, 2025. Right. In the case of Kristi Noem versus Pedro Vasquez, which was all about can ICE and Border Patrol racially profile Hispanics? You know, American citizens, too. Like, if you're. You have brown skin and you live in a certain area, can you be racially profiled and detained? And I'll Tell you this, this issue has particularly hits home for me. I mean, one just as a caring and empathetic human being who, Who. Who supports the Constitution and doesn't want to see anybody, you know, ever harmed or racially profiled, that's kind of first and foremost. But like, my. My wife's family came here from Mexico. They live in an area in Los Angeles that is predominantly Latino. They go to restaurants and stores and places where ice hangs out around and where racial profiling takes place. And they've been afraid to leave their home and they've been afraid to go to the gym and the churches where they prayed at and the places that they go because of this stuff. So back in September 8, 2025, Kavanaugh issued an opinion allowing for racial profiling. Here's how he. This was Kavanaugh's order then. To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status. The government must have reasonable suspicion. Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of circumstances here. Those circumstances include that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area generally, that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction that do not require paperwork and therefore are especially attractive to illegal immigrants. And that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. They're basically saying, if you came to the United States from Mexico or Central America, regardless of your status, if you work in construction, labor, landscaping, if you work in day labor, if you work a job, you can be temporarily detained because of the way you look. That's quite literally racial profiling. Here's what Kavanaugh says in his footnote popoc and legal A efforts, though in this decision, he goes the Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence. Stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity. Okay, didn't the opinion you just said in September basically say race or ethnicity? That people based on coming from Mexico or Central America who do not speak English, that that's one of your factors. And so this is what he said in a matter of three to four months. You know why, though? Because he didn't like that it was being called Kavanaugh stops. That's what it was being referred to, the racial profiling. It's a Kavanaugh stop. And he doesn't want to have his name as a Kavanaugh stop because it affects him personally because it's being named that way. I mean, that's why these people are so utterly pathetic. So we here on Legal, I have will tell you, okay, this is what the ruling said, but we have to dig deeper. And to your point, Popak Kavanaugh is also out there saying, okay, well, if you want to do this, Donald, there's still the Insurrection act for you. You want, you want to do, you want to have the army do this instead of the National Guard, then you can do it. Well, you know.

B (55:00)

Yeah, can I interrupt for one second? Because we're not going to cover it, but I want to just touch on it. You know, it's like the island, it's like the alien canon ruling this week that a lot of media reports was like, she's going to Release the volume 2 of the MAR A Lago report finally. But it's going to be in February. No, it's not. Read the order. I think that's why people come here. The order says she's inviting two things to happen, literally. One, Donald Trump come back into the case and intervene. Waiting for you. She literally says, I'm going to give until February to allow all parties, including those that are frequent, that were dismissed because she dismissed him, to intervene in the case. Okay, he's coming back on that invitation. And secondly, she's giving time to Walt Nauta and to Carlos de Oliviera, who were the co conspirators with Donald Trump in Mar A Lago, to file with her yet another round of papers that they already filed to argue that their constitutional rights will be violated even though they're not, not subject to any criminal prosecution if the volume two of the Mar A Lago report is released. So this is just justice delayed, justice denied. She'll, she'll come around in May or June or after the midterms with some ruling that'll have to be appealed to the 11th Circuit. Ultimately, she'll lose, but look what she's doing to favor Donald Trump. And, and, and that was, you know, I did a recent hot take about it. This is the weaponization of the pardon power. Donald Trump should have pardoned his coconspirators. He's not pardoning them because he wants to be able for them to argue as his puppets in court. I'm worried about a future prosecution. And so you can't release volume two from Jack Smith so that the world knows what we did in Mar A lago because I could be prosecuted. All he's got to do is wave a magic pardon wand, like he did with the Honduran cocaine trafficking president, and just absolve them. But that won't help Donald Trump block the release of the report.

A (57:02)

I forget if you and I talked about it on Legal AF a while back or if I talked about it with Harry Lippman on a hot take I did with him, but I know that we've addressed on the Midas Touch network. And you have on Legal AF predicting exactly what Judge Eileen Cannon's order was going to be about, releasing Volume two, where we said she's going to use the discretion that's been afforded to district court judges over scheduling to set an elongated briefing schedule to say, all right, come back in February and then file briefing about whether or not I should still keep these, this volume under seal. Then what there will be is there'll be an intervention probably two or three weeks before the ruling. You don't want to cut it too close. And then what will be requested by Trump and now to, and all of those people is then a further briefing schedule on the issue. Right. And then she goes, ah, they've intervened and now they need until May or June in order to be able to respond. Okay, I'll give them until May or June to be able to respond. So then it's extended until May or June, and then you can try to appeal that to the 11th Circuit. Except federal judges have a great deal of discretion over their own scheduling matters. And then, so it'll be hard for the 11th Circuit to say, you know, you know, no. And then it'll be delayed until. It'll be delayed until then. And then there'll be briefing and then she'll, you know, probably make a ruling denying it. Then it'll be appealed to the 11th Circuit. The 11th Circuit will then. So she's now on a path, though, to hide this until after the midterm.

B (58:42)

My daughter graduates high school.

A (58:44)

This is a, this is, put this to the end of midterms. Now, here's the thing with all of Donald Trump's plans, though, right? Whether it's the Epstein files, whether it's volume two, whether it's his handling of the economy, whether it's his fake peace deals, whatever it is. This has always been his strategy in life. Delay, delay, delay. He's always been born with the golden spoon. So he's got resources to try to wait you out, right? So he wants to delay until like, I can't deal with this anymore. That's his whole goal. But the issue is with all of these things, as you delay, delay, delay, you eventually have to confront your problems at some point in time and in Donald Trump's past. It's why he's gone bankrupt so many times, ultimately. Because when you have a small contagion and it grows into a bigger and bigger thing and it metastasizes and you don't fix it or stop it, it ends up creating a massive problem, a mega problem, a catastrophe, and then a bankruptcy and an utter destruction. That's his life. So when we come back, I'm going to talk about that with Michael Popak in real time, which is Abrego Garcia is a perfect example of this. There were so many opportunities. Just facilitate the guy's return. Deport him anywhere other than El Salvador and it's done, finito. But what does Trump do? He keeps on digging and digging more and more and more. Criminal charges in Tennessee, tries to deport the guy to Liberia, all of these things. And when the guy fights back, Trump could delay, delay, delayed. But eventually, you meet your judgment day. That's the thing. A reminder, Michael Popox law firm representing a lot of legal afers. So if you or anybody you know has been injured in a car accident, a trucking accident, victim of sexual harassment or assault, medical malpractice, if you know someone who's died in a horrible injury, a horrible accident, it's called a wrongful death case. Call 877- POPAK-F or go to thepopoc firm.com go to thepopoc firm dot com or call 877 Popakaf. Subscribe to Michael Popak Substack. That's the Legal AF Substack. Check that out and subscribe to his YouTube channel. The Legal AF YouTube channel, now on its way to 2 million subscribers. We will be right back after this quick break from our sponsors who make this show possible.

B (61:00)

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A (62:59)

Welcome back to legal af. Thank you to our sponsors who make this show possible. Jordy and Popak work very hard with those sponsors to get you great discounts, as always, so check them out. The discount codes are in the description below. Right? Popak. Let's talk about Abrego Garcia. Remember, there's two things going on here. There's kind of the civil injunctive constitutional violation case. That's the one taking place in Maryland before Judge Zinnis and in federal court. She's the one who originally ordered facilitate his return after he was sent to the El Salvador seacot terrorist concentration camp or detention center, however you want to refer to it as. And then ultimately the Supreme Court agreed with the federal judge facilitate the return. He was returned, but then he was returned to the Middle District of Tennessee where he was federally prosecuted by Trump's doj based on a traffic stop that happened four or five years ago where the Trump regime alleged he was driving with other migrants in a vehicle and that he was transporting them from different work sites, which the Trump regime tries to claim as human trafficking. He was never arrested at that stop. There was, there was nothing that there was not, there was no arrest made the highway patrol officer ask questions, let him off. And that's basically the extent of it. But they are trying to charge him based on that traffic stop and it's been an utter disaster. The prosecution that's been taking place in the middle district of Tennessee. And I could tell you how it's a disaster because rather than try to actually bring the case to a trial, the Trump regime has been trying to do, deport Abrego to various African nations that he has no attachment to. And they've been lying to both the federal judge in Tennessee as well as the federal judge in Maryland that Costa Rica refuses to take Abrego. And Costa Rica officials said, no, no, we'll take him. Like, we're happy to take him. And, and every time witnesses from the DOJ are called to testify at both proceedings, the DOJ ends up sending, like, very low level people who have no clue about the case. And like, the evidence has shown, as these people have been forced to show up to actually testify because their, their declarations were not believable, they would then have to like, admit, and this happened like, repeatedly in these different court cases, that they were basically told what to say in their declaration by DOJ lawyers in like a five minute, like Google Meets or like Zoom call, but they know nothing about the case. Then they'd show up and testify and like, within five minutes they'd be asked a few questions like, do you know anything about this? No. Like, okay, well, how'd you write your declaration now? They wrote it for me. So the DOJ basically wrote your declaration and you have no clue what's going on? That's right. And then you'd have the federal judges in both cases, they don't even know how to, like, deal with this. Because if it was any other litigant, not the doj, they would obviously like, immediately hold them in contempt and like, take away these people's bar licenses. Or like, they're just, they've been very methodically, these judges, though, moving this up, moving this forward in order to have like a showdown which is like, who's really behind this? Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem. And what can we do to, you know, deal with the issue of Abrego so he's not deported somewhere and gets killed? And what do we do with this criminal case? So the criminal case was set for trial end of January, but the judge just canceled the trial, having previously made a finding that there's sufficient evidence to raise a presumption of vindictive prosecution. Meaning that the whole basis of this prosecution is to attack Abrego Garcia and retaliate against Abrego Garcia. And the federal judge has set a hearing the end of January an evidentiary hearing for Abrego Garcia to put forward his claims of vindictive prosecution. Let's bring in Popo. You know the way these cases work, it's a burden shifting analysis. Abregos already made the showing that there's vindictive prosecution. That and so what the judge has now said in Tennessee is before this case even goes to a trial, we have to determine if this is an unconstitutional vindictive prosecution. So the judge says, look, why does, why doesn't the DOJ just make it simple? The people who were involved, you know, Todd, Blanche, Christine, you know, whoever, they could show up up, right? They could testify and they could rebut the presumption. But if you're just going to say wrong, there isn't a presumption. There's sufficient documents to show bad things happened here. So show up. Because you sure show up on propaganda videos on Fox, which I call state regime media and all these things. So show up or not. So Popak addressed that. But then I think there's the broader issue that you should be addressing too, if you can for the audience which is just this Abrego Garcia thing. If they just handled it the right way, this is a non issue. They could have deported him anywhere at first other than El Salvador. The only order that existed was you can't bring the guy to El Salvador so they deport him to El Salvador. That's unlawful. Then when you bring him back, facilitate his return, you could deport him anywhere, just deport him to Costa Rica, deport him to Mexico, deport him. As harsh as. What I'm saying is if you're the doj, you have the ability to do that, that they then arrest him, federally prosecute him without any evidence, put him in horrific prison conditions, make him fight that lie that Costa Rica doesn't want him, try to deport him to small African nations and then later say no, no, we met Liberia and all of these things and now lie, send bad witnesses. So they've now, oh, Donald Trump goes and says that he has MS.13 on his knuckles. Pam Bondi says that he's a sex trafficker and defames him him and defames his life. And now they've actually given him all of the foundations for asylum basically. But it's like where does he, he needs asylum from the United States government at this point and he needs protection because how they're treating him. So they've created all the issues too.

B (69:11)

Popak so earlier agree. So I agree with everything you just said, Judge. We got as you said, there's two judges. You got the habeas corpus, due process, constitutional violation, judge, judge sentence. We had the appearance earlier in the week, just before Christmas, of Abrego Garcia breathing fresh air, breathing, breathing freedom in a courtroom with Judge Zinnis and to determine whether she was going to extend her block of him being deported in the middle of the night and disappeared to Liberia or Uganda or wherever else they want to punish him and retaliate against him by sending him 3,000 miles away from his family. To your point, his, his lawyers, there's two sets of lawyers. One in the criminal case led by people that I know, Sean Hecker used to be Robbie Kaplan's law partner. And others and Quinn Emanuel that are handling the case in front of Judge Zinnis. They've made it clear, the lawyers, to this moment of our Tonight podcast, that he is willing to go today to Costa Rica and Costa Rica is willing to accept him, and that would be the end of it. Costa Rica is a place where lots of people go who want to stay kind of close to the United States and Spanish speaking and the family can visit. He's got a U.S. wife, a U.S. children. They can fly from Maryland to Costa Rica as opposed to Maryland to Liberia, which is where the punishment comes in. And they said they would send him to Costa Rica. If for people that are following this case, coming in late, the government said, well, we'll let you go to Costa Rica. It's like the mob boss tactics again. But you got to, you got to confess to your crime that you didn't even get a broken tail light ticket for four years ago in Tennessee, that you were trafficking humans because there were seven guys packed in a van going to a job site or whatever they were coming to. And every judge that's looked at things related to Abrega Garcia, every judge, Article 3 judge or magistrate has, has cast doubt and basically refused to accept the Department of Justice's evidence or witnesses. He's won everywhere. This guy is like, you know, he should have a championship belt. Abrego Garcia, they should make one for him. He wins at the United states supreme court. 9 0. You can't get the United States Supreme Court to come together on a lunch order. Nine zero, you know, one o' clock in the morning, whatever it was, he, he, he wins twice at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. He wins a dozen times with Judge Zinnis. He wins with Magistrate Judge Holmes in Tennessee, who looks at the evidence and says, I'm not keeping this guy in prison based on this flimsy case of yours with these flimsy witnesses I don't even believe, who are all corrupted by a desire to get out of jail themselves. No. And then Judge Crenshaw, who's ruled in his favor, not yet on the vindictive prosecution, but we're getting awfully, awfully darn close. So a couple of little points here to just fill out the, the, the puzzle pieces that you put together. In October, Judge Crenshaw said, let me look at your vindictive prosecution affirmative defense. All right, what is it? There's two ways to prove it in the middle district of Tennessee. Actual vindictiveness. Like you gotta, you got a smoking gun email that says this guy, pardon, pardon my French, we're gonna prosecute him to pay him back for driving his crazy. Judge Zitis's office, courtroom and you know, like, boom, right there. And by the way, the defense thinks they have those emails, they're just, just waiting for them to be produced. Or a presumption of vindictiveness, almost circumstantial evidence that's pieced together that shows it. Once a defendant makes out his burden of proving a prima facie case, which is a fancy Latin way of saying you got the elements present, the burden, as you say, as you said, shifts to the government to prove that they're not vindictive in the prosecution. See, it puts the shoe on the other foot. That's great for the defense, but in order to carry your burden in the government, you got to have testimony, you got to have documents, you got to have witnesses. The testimony has to be people with knowledge. Now this all stems from an October ruling by Judge Crenshaw in which he said there is one piece of evidence that stands out for me and for me is awfully darn close to actual vindictive prosecution. And he pointed to a one minute clip of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's criminal defense lawyer, masquerading as the number two in the Department of Justice who got on Laura Ingraham in an interview which the judge was given as part of the evidence in the case. And we got the receipts. We're going to show you the clip right now. Todd Blanche on Ingraham Show. And this is the very moment that is still referred to in current orders as the moment when the judge believes that Kilmer, Abrego, Garcia might have even gotten beyond a prima facie case into proving actual vindictive prosecution. Let's play the clip.

A (74:37)

This case, we had a judge in Maryland tell us that, oh no, there's not any evidence that he's a member of Ms. 13. You had no, no right to deport him. And so we. What should we do as a Department of justice when a judge is accusing us of doing something wrong, we have an obligation to everybody, including you, to investigate it. And that's exactly what we did. And so the reason why he was returned and the facilitation that brought him back here is not a judge. It's an arrest warrant issued by a grand jury from the middle district of Tennessee charging him with two counts of very serious charges involving nine years of smuggling aliens all over this country from Texas to Maryland and other states. That's why he's back and that's why the government of El Salvador agreed to bring him back.

B (75:23)

And for the judge. And for the judge that was a confessional that showed actual vindictiveness. Zinnis rules against them. Judge Zinnis in Maryland about habeas corpus. And she gets the 90 ruling in her favor from the Supreme Court requiring her or upholding her order. Pardon me, to facilitate the return from El Salvador. Requiring the government to do that. The government waits two months. Does it under the a, a vindictive. So the theory goes, prosecution based. And by the way, what he just said, just to show you the lying department. Corrupt Department of Justice, that's you and I have seen the indictment. That is not what the indictment says, that he's being arrested for nine years of trafficking. Okay. It's about one traffic stop, eight guys that are. And one 16 or 18 year old who's in the van and them. And then. And re looking at the file in the security tape there or the cam, the dash cam or whatever it is, the body cam video saying, oh, oh, this is human trafficking. These. They have nobody in the car that testifies to that. They don't have anybody in. No witnesses. This is why he was released from ICE from federal detention in Tennessee and ultimately released from. By Judge Zinnis from ICE detention. And he's out for the holidays pending other rulings. But that is the video and here's. Let me read to you from the order. It's a very short order, but it's powerful. What the judge did, did very smartly and it was and it really adopting the defense's posturing which was. Judge, we not only carried our burden on a prima facie basis, we're there on actual, as you noted with the video that we just played, actual vindictive prosecution. If they don't put Todd Blanche on and they're the Reason this order came out is the government moved to quash the subpoenas for trial to have Todd Blanche, Akash Singh talk about. In a minute, Deputy Attorney General and James McHenry, who is the principal associate Deputy Attorney general, who would have had all the knowledge of the, of the interaction between the local prosecutor and main justice in Washington, requiring them to pick up the reins and go after Brago Garcia on purpose as payback. Right. That these are the people that would know it. The government says, you can't have these people. We're not going to put on these people. So the lawyers for Brego said, then how can you carry your burden of showing it's not vindictive prosecution? We're going to put on other people. Well, how are the other people who are not in the Department of Justice? How are you going to prove it's not vindictive prosecution? By bringing Homeland Security people in. So the judge says, I got an idea. Let's cancel the criminal trial.

A (78:12)

All.

B (78:14)

Let's focus on the second factor of vindictive prosecution, meaning your prosecution's ability to carry your burden. To prove to me that this is not actual or presumptive vindictive prosecution, you pick your own witnesses. You don't want to use the ones that are obviously, I'm interested in, like Todd Blanche. I mean, he didn't write this, but this is implied. You pick your own. You put on who you think. But you better carry your burden at that evidentiary hearing, because if you don't, you know where I'm going with my ruling. Here's what the judge. Here's what the judge said. He talks about the burden shifting framework for the analysis, talks about the prima facie case. He talks about the Todd Blanche video in its own way. And he says on page two, because Abrego has already affirmatively satisfied the threshold question of whether he is entitled to a presumption that his prosecution is vindictive. His subpoenas of Blanche, McHenry and Singh serve to support the third step of the vindictive prosecution inquiry, whether he can establish pretext and actual vindictiveness. But we don't have to go there because there's a second step the government has to prove. Carry its burden. Go ahead, show me how you cover your burden. Carry your burden without Blanche. I'm going to let you. So he says on page two. Over to page, page three. He said, based on this record, Abrego argues that the court could rule on his motion now without an evidentiary hearing, but that the government asserts that it can rebut the presumption. So we'll see you in January for a, for a hearing effectively with. You want to put on these other people? Go ahead. The judge is basically casting a jaundiced eye at this saying, I don't know how you're going to do that with these people, but you tried. You fail, case over. You don't fail and you carry your burden shifts back to Abrego Garcia and then he can try to bring on these other people to prove vindictive. Now, what came out of the record, you exposed it on Midas is that there is a memo. We don't know exactly what it is, but it's reflected in the filing by Abrego Garcia's lawyer between Singh, who's like the, he's like the, he runs all the U.S. attorney's offices. He's, he's the underling to probably the number seven in the Department of Justice, but he's in charge of the 93 U.S. attorney's offices. It's a 33 year old guy who has a DUI conviction who is elevated because he's maga bonafides through the Department of Justice at this top level. And there is a memo. We don't know what it says because there's a redaction tape over it, but there is a memo or correspondence between Singh and the local prosecutor at or around the time that it looks like there's an order from them to the doj. We don't know what it says, but the defense knows what it says and the judge knows what it says under that black tape. And so now we're going to see what's going to happen in January. You and I will cover it carefully. Adam Classfeld, who does a lot of work with Legal AF with All Rise News, I think he's going to Tennessee for this particular hearing and we'll be able to do some live reporting from the courtroom.

A (81:25)

I want to cover this as well though, because I think this rounds out this episode where you see both how incompetent and corrupt the DOJ is. And it's not a matter of Democrat, Republican, independent. It's just quite humiliating from the perspective of anyone who's worked with for, against the Department of Justice that they would have to file an emergency memo like this on Christmas, that they don't have the technical capabilities of deleting records that they're required to delete by court order. So back on December 12, a federal judge made a ruling and an order saying that the DOJ had to delete documents that it obtained between James Comey's lawyer, a guy by the name of Daniel Richmond, and Comey. These are what's called attorney client privilege and attorney work product communications between a lawyer who happens to be Comey, Comey's friend, but also his lawyer. If you recall, one of the issues, the problems with the grand jury that ultimately indicted Comey is that Lindsey Halligan brought in a FBI agent who was exposed to attorney client communications and attorney client information. And so the federal judge made this ruling saying, FBI agent, you unlawfully got these records, by the way, that. That would have been another independent ground, I think, ultimately to dismiss the Comey indictment had the judge not ruled that Lindsey Halligan was not appointed and not qualified and not appropriate. She was an unlawful United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and she knew that she never should have been holding that position. She was the only person in the room. So that's what it was, dismissed. But it would have been dismissed, I think, on other grounds, including that the only witness who testified got this attorney client information. So after the grand jury situation and after the case. Case was dismissed, Daniel Richmond filed this lawsuit against the Department of Justice and said unlawful search and seizure. A federal judge on December 12th found, yes, it was an unlawful search and seizure. And the judge made a very basic order, doj. Delete the documents that are attorney client communication from your servers, return the documents to Richmond, and then you can also place another copy of the documents with the Eastern District of Virginia. And to the extent you think that there is probable cost for these records, you can go at some later time, ask the magistrate judges in Virginia for the records, but go about it in the right way. Pretty basic order, right? Delete it and then return it. Okay. Basic. Basic.

B (84:09)

So.

A (84:09)

So, as Popak and I said before, you know, having had experience with cases like this, these documents are likely in a folder somewhere on your server, right. And for you to delete it. This order was made on December 12, Popak. You would highlight them, you would press delete, you would put them on a hard drive, and then you would, you know, return them, delete them, and then certify that you've deleted it. This is not a hard task. Well, for the doj, it was because right before Christmas, they filed a memo regarding emergency motion for partial extension of time to certify compliance. And it says the court on December 12 ordered that the President's. That the petitioner. Sorry. That the petitioner's motion for return of property was granted. As to the image of his personal computer. Then it said that it ordered that it be returned. Okay, so then on paragraph seven, they go.

B (85:05)

However.

A (85:06)

However, because of significant operational constraints caused by the imminent Christmas and New Year's holidays, that is lack of sufficient technically qualified government personnel in Washington, D.C. for the remainder of this week and next, which make the current compliance deadline fall a mere one business day after the court's revised clarifying order, the government anticipates that it will not be able to review all electronic storage devices containing classified information, delete that information, and return those devices to Richmond's council by December 29, 2025. And Popoc, who do you think signed this document? If you guessed, Lindsay Halligan.

B (85:49)

Lindsay Halligan.

A (85:50)

Todd, Blanche and Lindsay Halligan. And Lindsay Halligan signed it as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Not even interim for which she was disqualified from being. She signs it as though she's the U.S. attorney. So the precise reason why the case was dismissed against Comey. She's now representing to another federal judge begging for an extension. That she and Blanche are incapable of meeting a Christmas deadline. That she's the United States Attorney. It's. And she's not. She's unlawfully representing that she's the attorney.

B (86:27)

Attorney.

A (86:27)

This is the craziest, craziest, incompetent stuff that there is in Popo. I'll toss it to you to comment on that and then talk briefly about what happened on the national security front as well.

B (86:38)

Yeah, yeah, that's easy. Yeah, she's impressed. She should be prosecuted for impersonating a U.S. attorney. And there are judges that are questioning why she's continuing to show up on pleadings. And I'm also questioning why Judge Curry hasn't done more in her original order disqualifying her and why the judges of the Eastern District of Virginia haven't filled her spot. I mean, there's a lot of weird things going on. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. I will. And we'll bring it back here. I think it's even simpler than what you just said, actually. The judge made it clear she's not requiring much deleting, so they keep talking about deleting. She said in her order, I didn't tell you to delete. I told you to make a deposit copy. I told you to return to Daniel Richmond. And the deposit copy that goes to the Eastern District of Virginia. Go back to Virginia and go get a judge to give you a search warrant, and then you can search through the deposit copy. But I'M not here. But. But that's all you need to do. Instead, the Trump administration, in a series of emergency motions, shot themselves not in the foot, but in the head because they confessed that they violated the Fourth Amendment of rights of Richmond, the lawyer for James Comey, who was subjected to an unconstitutional illegal search and seizure because they said in it, she said, okay, 2017, 2020, you had a bunch of subpoenas. I'm sure you have a file like we saw earlier in the Epstein reporting. I'm sure you have a file that says 2017 search warrant response. You got another one. 2019. 2020. Right. You got them all segregated. Right? Right. And they had to confess. And this is during the first Trump administration, so it's on them. They had to confess. Nothing segregated. She's like, what? It's all smushed together in one place and at the same time, out of the other side of your mouth. You want me to make you the custodian of these documents instead of the. The clerk of the Eastern District of Virginia. So it stays with your litigation security unit. Or as Daniel Richmond's lawyer said, it's like putting the hen in charge of the Chicken house. In other words, in the famous case of Hen v. Chicken House, which is a famous law class, you know, a law case that you and I studied where. Yeah, we're not going there. So she. But they keep, as you said, the law of holes. They keep digging and digging after hitting rock bottom and they're starting to dig, so they keep going back, trying to get interpretations and clarifications of plain English. English language in her order and also try to make her look stupid. Judge, there's classified documents. Don't we need a classified documents person to look at? She said there's one classified document. I'm not even sure it's classified. We have public records responsibilities. How do we destroy. She says, I'm not even sure these are public records. And I'm not. I told you, don't destroy anything. Don't delete anything. Give him back his materials, give him back his devices, make a deposit, copy, stick it in the court. Let the future judges in Virginia, because she's in D.C. deal with whether you can ever get a proper search warrant. So I'm not making it all go back to him. So don't tell me about. You're having trouble and you need more time. And frankly, as a very beloved judge in Miami judge, the late Judge Shockett used wrote at a bulletin board outside of her courtroom, your bad planning is not my emergency because half the people that come in on emergencies, when you hear it, you're like, that's not an emergency. That's because you fucked. You effed up and you didn't like, have enough people staffed or you didn't want to work over the weekend or whatever. So for them to come in and say, judge, it's the holidays. We don't have enough qualified people in Washington D.C. who can handle what you want, the entirety of the Department of Justice. We just can't do it. Well, maybe you shouldn't let 5,000 people walk out the door, paralegals and lawyers in the Department of Justice and not hollow out the Department of Justice. And you won't have trouble in yet another case where you need more time to produce documents. You're two weeks past the Epstein deadline and now in a run of the mill case case involving one Blu Ray disc, apparently of material, they can't find enough people who are willing to work for the Department of Justice over the weekend. Here's what the judge says about their admission about the the court. That's on page five of her order. The court promptly granted the government's request for an extension and clarified some of the government's obligations. It then ordered additional expedited submissions from the parties to help resolve the other remedial issues presented in the emergency motion. In response, the government provided additional factual information that means they confessed by accident about its execution of the four search warrants issued in 2019 and 2020. The government's response establishes that it, quote, cannot currently point to a segregated collection of material that was identified as responsive in the 2019, 2020 warrants. That means they can't tell you which material came from which warrant. That's a big problem when you're in a document production. And so this whole, oh, there's classified judge, and there's this. It's just delay, delay, delay. But now she's come out and clarified her order, making it worse for the government because she starts the order with.

A (92:16)

With.

B (92:17)

In her memorandum. After concluding. This is page one. After concluding that the government violated Daniel Richmond's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, this court ordered the government to return various unlawfully seized materials. The government suggests in this motion that the court order may require it to delete or destroy evidence. But the court's order does no such thing. The court has ordered the government to return certain materials to petitioner Richmond. Just return them, don't delete them, just return them. The court has allowed the. And then the deposit copy, and yet they still talk about we need more time to do deletions. Your honor, she this got filed on Christmas Eve. You and I are digging out from what I refer to in Hot takes all the things under the Christmas tree that came in on the 23rd or 24th or the 25th. We had an injunction issued against the Trump administration on Christmas Day to stop the deportation of somebody who's in the hate anti hate speech business. So the Trump administration now in the pro hate speech business, apparently that's who they're trying to deport at this moment. But Robby Kaplan's firm, Eugene Carroll's lawyer stepped in and stopped that person from being deported on a Christmas day. So we got to do in Trump's America, Trump's, Trump's Christmas. We got to get federal temporary restraining orders issued on Christmas Day by federal judges or Christmas Eve order orders being issued at all. So where are we? Judge hasn't ruled on this yet. It's not going to be good for the Trump administration. And, and one thing we should keep an eye on is they still, according to reporting and people on the ground have not gone back into a grand jury to try to get an indictment against James Comey because I think the only grounds they have is that quote, unquote comedy made during the September 5, 2020 congressional testimony. They don't have anything else on him that isn't time barred. And so they really need these files. It's one way or the other we're going to see what's going to happen and then if that happens, we're off into the world of vindictive prosecution, motions to dismiss and the like. Last thing, Mark Zade, friend of the show, friend of Midas, been on Midas Ken Harbos show, been on Legal AI with Professor Ray Brescia recently. He is the probably number one lawyer dedicated to people who either are in the government or who have been retaliated against outside the government, having left the government in the areas of national security, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, military and the like. When you, when you get fired and you're a whistleblower in one of these areas, you go hire Mark Zaid. That's it. And the way to get back it, not just Mark Zaid for having represented Colonel Wittman and his brother. Who were the whistleblowers about Donald Trump trying to shake down as an impeachable offense a very young and new President Zelensky in Ukraine withholding a $400 million congressionally approved and allocated defense package. Where would we be unless he Agreed to open up a Biden family investigation in Ukraine. Vitman was on the call, turned him in, led to an article of impeachment. And he, after Trump went after Vitman and others, Mark Zayd represent. Zayd represented these people. Trump hates him, said Zayd should be tried for treason. But if you don't have the Mark Zayd's in the world, then you don't get these people with proper counsel, aggressive, successful counsel into federal courts. So federal courts can't control the lawlessness of an out of control rogue presidency. So that's why it's not just about, hey, Mark Zaid got his security clearance back. I left out that part. So Donald Trump tried to take away the security clearance of Mark Zaid. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Biden, Biden family, our former Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, his assistant, a whole bunch of people, 37 members of the intelligence community, with a memo In March, by May 5, Zayd's like, how am I representing these people? If I, if I don't have a national security clearance to be able to look at their documents, then I'm, then I can't represent these people. And these people never see the light of day in court. Court, that's the problem. And courts that have now ruled against Donald Trump time and time again for going after law firms always say the same thing. They said it again with Mark Zayd, with Judge Ali, which is we can't do checks and balance. We can't do judicial oversight of the, of the executive branch if the lawyers are being sidelined because they don't have national security clearance. This is a First amendment violation. This is retaliation. This is due process violation. And we just had the issue. Judge Ali just issued a preliminary injunction subject to an appeal to give Mark Zaid and people like him back their security clearance.

A (97:28)

There you have it. Hey, Popak. We covered a lot of topics, legally efforts. We covered a lot of topics, pretty much every topic that's, that you could cover on this holiday weekend. Merry Christmas, everybody. Hopefully you've been able to spend some time, you know, with friends or family or, or with us because I think we're both friends and family. So we appreciate you whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just celebrating being here and part of this community. We're grateful for you and everything you do each and every day to fight for our democracy. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A reminder, hit subscribe here. Help us get to 6 million subscribers, but more importantly, get that legal AF YouTube channel to 2 million subscribers right now they just passed 1 million subscribers. I think it'll be a quick 1 million to 2 million. So check that out. Also check out the legal AF sub stack. It's a rapidly rising sub stack, one of the most read sub stacks out there. Go search Legal AF on substack. And then finally if you or someone you know has been injured in an auto accident, a trucking accident, if you've been injured by the negligence of others, if you know some someone who was the victim of a wrongful death place or negligence or sexual assault harassment, call 877 Popocaf or go to thepopocfirm.com 877 Popak AF or go to the popoc firm.com the consultation is free. POPOC has lawyers all across the United States. So regardless of where you are, they can give you the consultation you need for free. Let you know if it's the type of case that they can handle. Popak represents a lot of people who here who have watched the show and so I know it's a, it's a privilege and honor of him to be able to do that. So thank you everybody for watching again. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Popak, will we be back before the New Year's to see everybody or midweek?

B (99:13)

Midweek will be back midweek.

A (99:15)

So Popak will see you before New Year's. I'll be here every day doing videos as always on this channel. But happy New Year's as well for everybody as well. Who's if you're taking to if if if you're taking some time off. So great to see y'.

B (99:27)

All.

A (99:28)

We appreciate you. Shout out Midas Mighty Shout out Legal A efforts. Have a great one everyone.

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