C (2:18)

It's the midweek of Legal af the podcast. So pleased to have everybody here. We curated for you some of the top stories at the intersection of law and politics. And let me just so there's a big reveal here. I've got two guest hosts in Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves, who you all know from various other shows. Some of them have been on with me in a combination with each other, filling in for me or Karen when they were traveling. Karen's not feeling well tonight. And I thought this was a perfect opportunity to bring in both Dina and Lisa as our regular guest host on Legal af. And I'll tease a little bit. I got an announcement I'm going to make closer to the first break in the show. Another incentive to stay here. Stay here with us. Thank you for being with us on Legal af. I want to kick it off, Lisa and Dena about the Iran war. Iran, as we came on the air rejecting Trump's negotiators because they see what we see, that, that the son in law and the golf buddy are not who they want to be negotiating against. And they've hand picked, apparently, J.D. vance. And I don't think they're picking J.D. vance because they think he's going to take them to the cleaners. I think they want J.D. vance because they think, oh, we could take advantage of JD Vance. They've rejected the 15 point plan, which is an old stale plan from before the bombings that happened over the summer. Many of the points have already either been accomplished or Donald Trump lied to us again about the Iranian nuclear program and that war and Donald Trump's inability to figure out a way to legitimately declare a win. And while the strain of Hormuz for almost the fourth week remains shut down as Iran charges a million dollars as a toll for anybody passing through has an impact on this side, right on the, on the polling numbers, on the economy. So why don't we kick it off with the Iran war update which we just sort of went through. And then what is its impact on the electoral, the electoral powers or probability of Donald Trump for his party at the midterms? The so let me turn it over to we'll kick it off with Lisa this time. Lisa, you've served all three branches of government in your career. You know a little something about people getting elected and all of that. Poll numbers out 36%. I think they're going to go lower than that. People hate what Donald Trump's doing in his presidency and Iran is not helping. What are you observing so far as it relates to Donald Trump's conduct of the war and his impact on his domestic and electoral possibilities?

B (5:13)

Well, first of all, for a while, Donald Trump wasn't even willing to say that it was a war. It was some sort of excursion, like a weekend event. And then in one press conference, I think he declared that he won, that we haven't won, that he needs help, that he doesn't need help. It has just been just extraordinarily ineffectual. That would be the kindest thing I suppose I could say about it. And the notion that they didn't have a game plan for how to get in and get out, didn't have congressional approval, didn't even have a fresh negotiating document for the terms of concluding this hot war that has resulted in the deaths of American soldiers as well as civilians and others in Iran and has resulted in the basic closure of this fundamentally important waterway for the shipping of oil around the world. And so Donald Trump has had no plan. His plan, the non plans, the sort of murmurings of plans or suggestions of plans have been not apparently recently developed, but recycled. And so it's not surprising that Iran has rejected the out of date plan or proposal that came through. And at one point, Trump even suggested that he, alongside the leader of Iran, who we call the Ayatollah, just generically would control the, the the Straight or Hormuz, like they were two trolls of a toll. And so there is no plan.

C (6:45)

I like the imagery there. The trolls under the bridge controlling the Strait of Hormuz. One is Donald Trump, who looks like a gargoyle who climbed down from a building, and this Ayatollah, who's either AI in hiding or both.

B (6:59)

Correct.

C (7:01)

So, so I agreed with all of that. And you have. And so people, just to bring them up to speed, you know, the 15 points include you'll give up your nuclear program. It's five different versions of you'll give up your nuclear program. It's really a five point plan. I thought we bombed away their nuclear program except for one of the major nuclear sites, which we for some reason avoided and didn't bomb the first time around. When Donald Trump declared mission accomplished, war over in the summer. I mean, who is the guy that was standing there saying, we never have to go back to Iran again, we're done. We bombed their nuclear program back to Flintstones time and we're done. And now we're not done and we got to do it all again. Dina, what do you think?

A (7:44)

I mean, I think this is. I can't. We are in this crazy position where you don't know whether or not the Iranian regime is somehow speaking more truthfully than us. Normally you would think that whatever they said were lies and propaganda, but Trump lies so much that you have, it's this weird. You have no idea what the truth is at any time, which is just devastating.

C (8:09)

It's a Sad state of affairs. We gotta trust Iranian propaganda over our own president, right?

A (8:15)

Absolutely. I do want to say I Love this for J.D. vance, okay. Because he was trying so hard to go under the radar. Because as you previewed, this is extremely unpopular for Trump and it will be. This is going to be devastating for the Republicans in the midterms and Trump overall. And Vance was trying to hide and Iran knew that. And so I kind of love that they're naming him as the negotiator. It cannot go well for him.

C (8:43)

And one day we'll see the photo of the short straw that J.D. vance holds in order to be. No, but and talk about it's a sad state of affairs and shows you that Donald Trump thinking that he was going to make America this awe inspiring, powerful superpower. I have to agree with the Iranians. It's hollowed out America because we look like we're just this feckless, run by a guy who's gone bonkers. Everything we say is going to happen doesn't happen. The shifting hourly is not proper diplomacy. As, as Lisa, you said, what was the plan in order to have 90 million people take over their own country? I don't really understand that plan. He doesn't explain that plan. And then how do they, and maybe this is for Lisa, how do they explain to whatever's left of their base? I mean, the hard deck of that base has got to be about 30% now. And how do you explain to even them that going to war with Iran for four weeks at a million dollars a minute is America first? How do you explain that to them?

B (9:47)

I don't think that it's a thing that they can sell because the cost is enormous. And just this past week, the Trump administration has been talking about going to Congress, which it rebuffed in the initial activities, not letting Congress know that it was planning to go to war, let alone the fact that Congress acts as the power to declare war under our Constitution, not the president unilaterally, and certainly not in a situation in which there is not an imminent threat. But Trump basically with his team was saying they need more money, billions and billions of dollars. Meanwhile, they're starving America. They're starving Americans, they're starving infrastructure. They, you know, this, this administration has made the situation worse for so many Americans, whether it's on Medicaid, you know, Medicaid, SNAP benefits for poor children, you know, all sorts of cuts to our health infrastructure. And so you have this situation where basically Trump suggests that there's unlimited funds for this folly. This disaster where basically anyone who had ever looked at an actual map of Iran or would understand that if you attack the country of Iran, the Strait of Hormuz would close, which is why it has not been affirmatively attacked in the modern era because of that very risk. And so Americans are seeing the impact in terms of gas prices. And that has been one of the touch points for Trump's claim about the economy was gas prices down or gas prices less. And everyone is taking it at the pocketbook, and not just the pocketbook on your daily basis of putting gas in your car, but also in our pocketbook in terms of our overall budget, the budget for the things that Americans need. Instead, it's being squandered abroad. And there look like other ways in which the Trump family may be trying to profit from war as well as profiting from other things. And there's been insider trading revelations in terms of someone making big stakes just in advance of Trump's announcements. So there's, it appears that there's manipulation of the market going on, that some people are benefiting from information. We don't know who they are. Congress needs to investigate that. But beyond all of it, like you said, Michael, the fact is, is that Trump is sinking in the polls. The Republican Party has been losing an array of special elections across the country, including this week, the seat that is the seat on Mar a Lago. And he's at, he's, he's not at rock bottom yet, but he certainly is sinking like a rock, like a stone.

C (12:17)

And to unpack some of that $200 billion they add, they're going to ask, or they have asked Congress for, it's a million dollars a minute. Just to put that into sharp contrast. And something that happened, a disaster that happened this week, you've got Air Canada plane crashing into a fire truck because of many reasons, but one of them being the outdated technology from the 70s and 80s that runs our, our airline system to update our air traffic control system, which they promised when Elon Musk was running around on ketamine or whatever, he was hopped up on talking about reimagining and re imagineering the government. And he was the technologist. He was going to redo all. Well, he never did all of that. The cost to redo our air traffic control system to make our sky safe for employees all the way down to business travelers, leisure travelers and Cargo is about $20 billion. It's 1/10 of the amount of money he's already wasted in Iran while He's busy giving $1 billion back to the French. So they don't go forward with a wind turbine project. That billion dollars could have done a lot of good for the American people in red states included. Right?

A (13:28)

Yeah, absolutely. And he's also, as you were saying, Lisa, about the profiting off of insider trading. It seems as if he is really trying to manipulate the market. Right. He put a pause five days. It seems like they're really engaging the most in Iran on the weekends. And then he says, oh, things are going to resolve that way. When the markets open on Monday, they go up and they go down. I mean, I was a corporate attorney and filed with the SEC all the time. Now that Trump has the head of the SEC that looks at insider trading, I mean, they're never going to bring a prosecution against Trump or son or whatever. And they are taking advantage of it. And that's the thing American people don't like. American people don't like cheaters. You know, us here, we care about democracy. But as we saw in that 2024 election, saving democracy was, fell flat. It's shocking, but it did. But the thing that American people don't like are cheaters. And the fact that we are not only, as you said, not using that money here for our infrastructure, but he is profiting or people very close to him are profiting off of it, essentially cheating. And that message should go out more. It's really disgusting.

C (14:43)

Absolutely. I think that 36% is being kind to him. Now, look, races as, as Lisa knows well from working on Capitol Hill, races are one. As Tip o' Neill once famously said, all politics is local. So we're, we're talking about taking a, a national poll and converting it into 435 separate races for Congress and 100 for the Senate and all of that special elections that we just saw. But the mood of America, the right direction, wrong direction, consumer confidence, the popularity or lack thereof of the President, all goes into the mix historically of, of and we're seeing it because as I said in an earlier, an earlier video today, you know, there's been close to 300 races since Donald Trump has been in office of various types. You know, from state houses and congressional races, Senate and all that. When you add them up, the Democrats have overperformed in over 90% of those races from where Kamala Harris was. And as of last night with the Florida 2, 2 state House seats in Florida in Donald Trump's front yard and backyard in, in Palm Beach County, Florida, both going to Democrats, including the one that Donald Trump endorsed and supported, the Republican with His mail in ballot, no less. We'll talk about mail in ballots later. Yeah, that is now 30 and oh of Democrats flipping red seats. They're running at about almost a 30% win rate in flipping seats from red to blue. And you know what that means. That means Republicans haven't flipped one Democrat seat by contrast.

B (16:19)

Right.

C (16:20)

So there is this, there is a mood, right, Lisa, in America, I've said it's a pent up demand to vote, right?

B (16:28)

Yeah, well, that's true. And also some of these seats are seats where the Republicans, these are districts where there are more Republicans registered to vote than Democrats. And so the assumption is that some number of those votes going to Democratic candidates are coming from Republicans as well as Democrats. And so that flip is really significant in terms of the unpopularity of Donald Trump, the unpopularity of people who are aligned with him, of the MAGA Republicans, of people he's endorsed. You know, they are in real trouble with this electorate. And that is in part because of the way the economy has stump has stumbled and really tumbled under Trump job creation numbers, you know, at one point they eliminated having the official statistics and they sort of worked out a way to assert that there was job growth. But when you look at the real numbers, we have, you know, a real stagnating private sector. And of course, Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Russell Vote have devastated the public sector in terms of layoffs and firings of the federal government. And so you have an unfolding economic nightmare for many families, a lot of bankruptcies and more happening. You have farm closures, foreclosures in rural America in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, these places are suffering too. You have a lot of rural voters who are not seeing the promises that Trump, Trump made come true. In fact, the opposite happening in terms of most prices going up. And so I think the American people get that we are on the wrong track. And this Iran debacle is only aggravating those things while also risking the lives of our soldiers for a guy who doesn't really seem to have any real plan. And just like two days ago, I think Trump declared that now that we've beaten Iran, which hasn't happened, the real next enemy is the Democrats. So he wants to basically try to poison people against the Democratic Party as the Democratic Party is making gains against him. And I will say, Michael, that one of the things in looking at the polling overall historically, when Nixon left office after the revelations of Watergate, when he basically resigned in disgrace, he was at between 30 and 33% polling when George W. Bush left office after the economy crashed. Wall street crashed in 2008 after revelations of 20 torture and the lies about the war in Iran. George W. Bush left office with a rate again of about 33%. And so he really, Trump really is in that bottom figure within the margin of error.

C (19:03)

Absolutely. Dina, talk about as if everything that Lisa just outlined was not enough. This is like the old joke about asking Mrs. Lincoln about what happened and, and then the guy saying in response, oh, well, but how was the play? You guys know that old joke? You know that old joke? Things are going, things are going from bad to worse for him. Four hour lines at airports. I've, I've traveled in and out of Atlanta airport. My late mother lived there for years. And I read today that the line stretched out of the airport and onto the sidewalk. You're talking about five hour delays as Donald Trump has ICE flex its muscles and try to, according to him, rehabilitate their reputations today. So bring it home for the American people who are travelers. The summer travel season is about to start. You've got half of ice, sorry, half of TSA has thrown in the towel when they're not living in their car because they haven't gotten paid. Do you blame the Democrats for that? Is it right for the Democrats to hold steady here and to make sure that there's reforms at ICE before they let money flow to other aspects of the DHS Department of Homeland Security, including tsa, or do you think that could backfire on the Democrats? Will Trump be successful in pinning the blame on the Democrats?

A (20:29)

You know, who knows? But it's the right thing to do because Trump always says how Iran murders protesters on the street. Well, we in fact, just did that. So it's absolutely the right thing to try to get some sort of ICE restrictions. And as you know, the Democrats have put forward board many bills to try to just fund tsa. I actually just flew yesterday out of the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and there were ICE agents there just hanging out. And evidently TSA agents are really upset because they're not getting paid, but ICE is getting paid for literally doing nothing. And sure enough, on that conveyor belt where you put your suitcases, there were three ICE agents just sitting there staring as if maybe the suitcases needed to get twisted. But they did nothing other than, frankly, seem really intimidating. They had their, their vests, their guns. It felt like some sort of dictatorship. It was really jarring, intimidating. That's frankly the point. Trump is trying to say you don't want to fund a Department the way I want you to fund it. Because actually the Republicans and the Democrats almost came to a deal and Trump said, no, no deal with Democrats. Senator Kennedy kind of slipped that info out there. This is his bully technique. He says, okay, then I'm going to basically scare you. Nobody wants to see militarized airports. This is not a dictatorship, although dictatorship countries spend most of their GDP on war. And it certainly seems, as we've talked about before, we're doing that more and more, but frankly, very disturbing to see the Ice Age.

C (22:06)

Well, you have Steve Bannon reinforcing your point. He says out loud that this might be a test run dress rehearsal of Donald Trump using ICE at the airport for how he's going to do it on election Day, just as, just as Donald Trump said aloud to the military brass at Quantico that do dress rehearsals on Americans when we send you into cities, you know, through the National Guard. I mean, so they've been. But do we think, let's just add, keep all the, all three here for a minute. Do we think this, this version of the beatings will continue until morale improves? You know, he. Right. Do we think this is going to work like scaring the crap out of people? Is that going to get Donald Trump elected, bombing his way to popularity? Is that it didn't work for Nixon?

B (22:55)

No, I, I don't think so. And, and I think that when people see what's happening at the airports, when they hear about it, when they see it on TV or they experience themselves, this is a president who's claimed the right to redirect money in all sorts of ways, but somehow cannot actually make sure that the TSA agents are funded with all the supposed superpowers. He has to redirect money without congressional authorization. And as Dena said, you see picture after picture coming in through the news, through social media of heavily armed ICE agents just standing around while other people at the TSA agents are actually doing their job, which is screening passengers and making sure that the people aren't carrying contraband items onto the plane. We don't need this sort of militarized presence in our airports or our polling places or quite frankly, anywhere else in America. This is a crisis that Trump has created and in many ways manufactured through the rhetoric that he's deployed around immigration and other issues. And I don't think it's going to sell well to the American people. What is clear and what's been reported widely, as Dena said, is that Democrats have brough up several bills to fund TSA to fund the TSA agents at the airport while having some constraints and important constraints on the activities of ice, which have been demonstrably dangerous to American citizens and our communities and neighbors neighborhoods. Not just in Minneapolis, but in Chicago, in Maine, in Washington, in Oregon, in California, like across the country, we've seen these abusive practices deployed under Kristi Noem, who then lost her job after some more scrutiny of her activities. And what's been happening. And it's just not popular. Even on immigration, when you look at the polling, when you go down to poll tabs, Trump's policies, immigration, are not actually supported because it's too extreme, it's not helpful, it's super costly and it's causing us real harm to our civil liberties and our freedoms.

C (24:52)

I saw polling numbers as 70% of America rejects its immigration policy.

B (24:56)

Yes.

C (24:56)

And it's even higher as you go into subgroups like Hispanic Catholics and, and all the coalition that he needed to get elected. He's completely shit on and destroyed.

A (25:07)

Yeah, well, this is why, this is why he's pushing so hard for the SAVE act, because they know they cannot get the votes that they need and they want to fundamentally change the way we vote. And I know we're going to talk about the Supreme Court mail in ballot case, which is stay on SAVE now. So the Supreme Court just heard a case on Monday contesting a Mississippi, of all places, allowing ballots to be cap to be counted if they were postmarked by election day, which is the law in many states in this country. But they contested it, the Republicans contested it, saying federal law requires election day to be a certain day and you cannot count afterwards. And appears that this MAGA6 is going to change the way we count mail in ballots and require them not just to be postmarked, but them to be received by election day, fundamentally. And the really big problem with this is not just the fact that you are making it harder for people to vote mail on ballot, but to let people know that it's all about getting information out there. Getting out the vote is like the hardest part of any campaign. Now you also have to tell millions upon millions of people who frankly are barely pay attention to elections that they now have to send in their ballot like two weeks out of their election day in order to get there in time. That's just not happening.

C (26:34)

But yeah, I want to, you know, I want to dive, I want to do a whole segment on the Supreme Court. That was a very good preview of it when we come back from a break. But I do want to touch on the SAVE act for a minute. Because a lot of what we're watching with Donald Trump and his and his chest pounding and thumping and trying to get the Republicans in the Senate and the House to support him, have to do with the SAVE act, which is not about photo id, although I may be okay with that. It's about citizenship papers. Show me your papers. And many people, huge percentages of Americans don't have citizenship papers the way they're defined in the SAVE Act. They don't have a passport, they don't have a birth certificate with their proper name on it because they got married or they got adopted or whatever you want to call it. It. And so that's what Donald Trump's going after. And that, that impacts Republicans as well. But in order to get the SAVE act passed, because the Democrats have already said they're going to filibuster in the Senate, meaning they're going to block either by a technical procedural filibuster of saying we're going to filibuster or actually standing on their feet for weeks at a time, a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Well, hopefully we don't. They happen. I don't know. But the Republicans, this is really for Lisa, too. The Republicans know, they got to know that they're likely to lose at the midterms at the rate they're going. And are they going to want to give up the filibuster? The only procedural tool that a party in the minority has while they're in the minority to do anything to stop bills they don't like. They're going to give that up when months away from now they could be in the minority?

B (28:14)

Yeah, I mean, I don't think they will. I mean, there's been pressure from Trump to, to Thune, the majority leader, for the Republicans to abandon the filibuster that only right now applies to legislation. It doesn't apply to nominations that, you know, has was ended a few years ago by both Biden and by Trump. But for legislation to give up that last ability to thwart legislation you don't like with a filibuster, it seems it would be really irrational for the Republicans to go along with Trump, especially because what Trump wants is a bill that would make it harder for tens of millions of American women to vote, including Republican women. It doesn't just affect Democrats, it affects everyone. Because if you don't have a certified birth certificate, you don't have a certified marriage certificate or a divorce certificate, you know, changing your showing your name change or a second marriage certificate with a name change, you may not be able to vote in the states. And it is really like 1-800-Big Brother. Because the fact of the matter is that there are fewer cases of voter fraud than the number of felonies Donald Trump has been convicted of. When you look at, you know, when you look at the.

C (29:21)

Nationally.

B (29:22)

Yeah. When you look at the data.

C (29:24)

Less than 34.

B (29:25)

Yes, yes.

A (29:26)

You.

B (29:27)

And when you look at the data and that. And that's an array of, you know, of fraud. When you look at the actual data of voting in America, if you think about, you know, 100 million in this election, 100 million in election, et cetera, 200 million. You know, you can get to a billion votes and have fewer than a handful of people who were convicted of any type of voter fraud, meaning voted. You know, maybe they voted the wrong place, maybe they voted twice. We've seen a number of Republicans who've been recently convicted of actual voter fraud, but it's so Rare, it's like 0.0000001. And so you don't have an actual real problem of non citizens voting, in part because you can be deported if you vote without having citizenship in an election for Congress or for the.

C (30:08)

This is not their number in elections. They're trying to stay in the country. But to your, to your point, in Georgia, which drives Donald Trump batty, right. Because he got indicted there. He just, he just sees the Fulton county boxes of voting materials there. Fannie Willis was his arch enemy in his own mind. Five million people or so voted in Georgia during the election. I'll buy lunch if anybody gets it right. Do you know how many confirmed cases of voter fraud in the state of Georgia that year? Out of 50 million. Sorry, out of 5 million votes cast were.

A (30:45)

I think it was 11.

C (30:47)

What do you say, Lisa?

B (30:48)

Two.

C (30:49)

Between. It's between two and 11.

B (30:53)

So we're good. We averaged.

C (30:54)

Out of 5 million.

B (30:56)

Yeah, yeah. You know, and that wasn't necessarily, not. That wasn't necessarily immigrants.

C (31:02)

Oh, right, right. The immigrant thing is lower than that. Yes.

B (31:05)

Someone might have had a felony, thought it was expunged or thought it was finished sentence and voted. Someone may have. May have voted twice. We've seen some Republicans convicted of voting twice or committing voter fraud. It's so rare, though, and it's certainly not an issue of citizenship. And so like, to your point, Michael, the fact is that all of us have recently, almost everyone other than probably a bunch of New Yorkers who don't drive, but most Americans have gone through this Real ID process, where they're hounded and hounded and hounded. You got to get rid of real id. People have gone in to get the real id, but the real ID does not show citizenship. It doesn't have a checkoff box. Only five states have that checkoff box for citizenship. And so you may think you have a license that would allow you to vote, but you don't. 45 of the 50 states, that Real ID license is not enough. And as you pointed out, half the American population don't have passports. And Donald Trump has made it harder to get a passport. They recently closed down thousands of passport offices at libraries. Meanwhile, Louis Dejoy, the Postmaster General that Trump installed, has, has actually changed the process for processing mail. So you don't get your mail postmarked at your local post office unless you walk in. If you put it in the box, it gets shipped hundreds of miles away to some processing center. Because, by the way, Louis DeJoy wants to sell off our mail service to the highest bidder in privatization. And so they're creating these little mail processing centers. And I, everyone I know knows their mail is going more slowly. And so between the SAVE act and this Watson case, the Supreme Court case, you have a series of forces really being instigated by Republicans, by the Republican president, by, you know, potentially by Congress, by the Republican appointed attorney general that are coming together to actually try to put a sort of vice grip on our voting at a time when Americans are probably voting more, you know, more than ever in these little special elections where you don't usually have a lot of turnout. The turnout has been strong and that has been strongly against the president and his party.

C (33:05)

You're on, you're on Legal AF on the Midas Touch Network. You got Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves, a guest host today sitting in here. When we come back, I'm gonna have, of course, Dina, why don't you take the lead on. Trump steals two big documents, including one that only six people in the entire of the United States had classified clearance in order to review. Did he do it for profit motive? Well, Jack Smith thinks he does. We'll do that. We'll do what happened at the Supreme Court with back to back oral arguments Monday and Tuesday on mail in ballots and on asylum, the dignity of our immigration policy, if you will. I want to talk about what happens, what could happen with birthright citizenship. And if we learned anything from the oral arguments. Wet foot, dry foot. Talk about that in a moment. And that new revelations coming out of a hearing in an a now unsealed transcript about the fact that, yes, the government does not have any real evidence that Jay Powell committed any crimes as the Federal Reserve chair. And Donald Trump, again, talk about a blockade of his own making. It's not just in the Strait of Hormuz, it's in the Senate Banking Committee because they're not going to allow Kevin Warsh to become the next chair on May 15 because Thom Tillis doesn't like the fact that there's a criminal investigation that's still potentially ongoing. We'll cover all of that here on the midweek edition of Legal af. So many different ways to support what we do on the Midas Touch network on Legal AF. We've got Legal AF the as part of the ecosystem, Legal AF, the YouTube channel which I founded a year and a half ago. We're going to hit 1.1 million subscribers, I think this weekend with your help. 12 new videos a day, including sometimes the likes of Dana Dahl and Lisa Graves over on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. And the way you can. So people are like, how do you, how does this thing work? This whole, what's the business model for my, for my Legal af? Right? How do they, are they all volunteers? No, they're not. And our, especially our, our illustrious team, I got, I got Salty with me today as a producer. We have producers and editors and lots of other people that need to get paid and not live in their cars like the tsa. So the way that you do it is just with your thumb or finger. If you like the content that you're watching, you want to support it and promote it and vote for it and you've come to rely on it, then just become a subscriber. It's free. If you want to switch over, become a paid member. Okay, that's great too. And then we've got Legal af, the substack. That's a whole nother world. But it's, it's, it's co extensive with and collaborative with the YouTube, legal AF and podcast world. There's eight or 10 new pieces of Lisa writes for it a lot. I do a couple of lives a day, including Today with live reporting and interviews, all sorts of things. We got Scott McFarland, who just joined Midas Touch as its DC bureau chief and to do a weekly show or daily show on the news. He's going to be on there with me. And so it's really amazing things. And then the show's six years old in the making. We've got our pro democracy sponsors as well. Now here's What I teased. See, people are here now at the 33 minute mark. This is well worth it. Okay. I know everybody loves Dean and Lisa and they like them separately. They like them together. And so we're gonna do a Monday night or Dina and Lisa are gonna do a Monday night Legal af. We do it on Wednesdays, we do it on Saturdays. We're gonna do a Monday night over on the Legal AF YouTube channel as a live podcast there. They're going to lead it. I'll come in and out, but it's really their show and it's going to be starting hopefully sometime in April. We're working out the logistics of it now. And I thought with Karen being ill today, this would be a good opportunity to sort of put, put the band together and let people know about it. And here you are. What do you guys think about that?

A (36:54)

I mean, so excited and honored. Lisa and I were one of the first contributors on the Legal AF channel and so honored to bring the marquee podcast. Legal AF has been there since like day three maybe of the Midas Touch Network to bring it now to a home, a second home, original home of Legal AF Channel. So honored, so excited. We cannot wait to do it.

C (37:21)

And Lisa and Lisa who, who people who don't know are looking her up right now. Lisa runs True North Research and is a founder or one of the leaders of court accountability action. There's a whole playl list we have on Legal AF related to that. And a little known fact, besides she and I becoming very close friends as I am with Dina, Lisa introduced me to Sydney Blumenthal and that begat the the Court of History podcast. There are resident historians, Sean Wilentz and Cindy Blumenthal. And that was because, you know, Lisa said, hey, can I give Cindy your number? He wants to, you know, nobody's watching him over where he's at now. And I'll go, yeah, let's do it. And now look where we are now with amazing podcast called Court of History. Thank you, Lisa.

B (38:09)

Thank you so much. I agree with everything Dana said. And Michael, we're so thrilled to have the chance to be part of the official Legal AF lineup on Monday nights. We're looking forward to seeing you all as you tune in not just on Mondays, but Wednesdays and Saturdays and other times as well. And really honored to have a chance to be part of this Midas Touch Network and the live shows in addition to recording. And again, a big shout out as well to the production team that makes all this work so well. And to you our audience. Just honored to have the chance to join you. Thank you so much, Michael and Dina. You know I adore you so really, really happy to be part of this with you.

A (38:46)

I adore you too. We're going to have so much fun. Lisa, Mike, Paul, Pac, you're going to want to just come visit because we're going to have so much fun.

C (38:54)

I'm already, yeah, I'm really into that. I'm really into the visiting part. But now we've got thank God we've got sponsors that's appreciate what we do and want to talk to our audience. And here's a word from our sponsors. When it comes to dog food, people often think they have to choose between fresh, healthy ingredients and convenience. But you don't have to choose anymore, thanks to Sundaes. Sundaes was founded by veterinarian and mom Dr. Tori Waxman who got tired of seeing so called premium dog food full of fillers and synthetics. So she designed Sundays air dried real food made in a human grade kitchen using the same ingredients and care you'd use to cook for yourself and your family. Every bite of sundaes is clean and made from real meat, fruits and veggies with no kibble. That means no weird ingredients you can't pronounce and no fillers. Compared to Kibble or other brands out there. Sundaes invest 50 times more in its ingredients to ensure premium quality. 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This podcast is sponsored by bookbyanyone.com bookbyanyone.com lets you create a fully personalized AI generated book where your friend, partner or family member is the main character in a wild sci fi fantasy thriller story or even a nonfiction book about themselves. This is not a novelty pamphlet, it's a professionally printed hardcover book with over 200 pages of completely original content. The entire book is generated around the person, the title, the COVID the table of contents, story, and even the back cover. Fake reviews I recently sent a book from Book by Anyone to a friend and they absolutely loved it. How do you make a book from Book by Anyone? It's simple and fun. You head to bookbyanyone.com, answer a few questions about the person, pick a book idea and cover and bookbyanyone.com does the rest. It literally takes two minutes and you have a professionally printed book on your choice of paperback or hardcover. I can't stop talking about Book by Anyone. For me, the reactions are the best part. Seeing a person open a book and realize they are the hero is genuinely hilarious. It's a perfect gift for birthdays, holidays or people who are impossible to shop for because literally no one expects to open a book about themselves. Plus, book by anyone has printed over 450,000 books so you can trust that they make a quality product. And shipping is always free so you can get the best book at the best price. For a gift that's truly unforgettable, head to bookbyanyone.com order your book today and enjoy free shipping at bookbyanyone.com one last time. That's bookedbyanyone.com welcome back to the midweek edition of Legal AF. Michael Popak, your regular anchor, joined by our two guest anchors, Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves. We woke up this morning to new news coming out of Jack Smith and Merrick Garland by way of a letter sent out by the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, friend of the Show I'm actually working on getting him on the show to talk about this letter soon. And Representative Raskin wrote a pretty scathing letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi about the fact that why does she get to cherry pick what was in the Mar A Lago files? That she had Judge Cannon's seal in a tomb forever, including future Department of Justices. Why does she get to pick and choose what's in the Mar A Lago file in terms of all of the documents that sticky fingered Donald Trump took with him that were top secret and classified? Not because he's a hoarder. Not because he's just keeping them as mementos. But according to a update report that we now know about, from, from Jack Smith to Merrick Garland at the time, because there was a sneaking suspicion by the prosecution that he was doing it to use, to put profit in his businesses or used for some sort of commercial gain, selling out America for trade secrets. People have been given lethal injection for a lot less in this country. And the, the part that we didn't know because we knew about the maps, we thought we knew about the war maps that he took with him from the earlier reporting about Mar? A Lago and the indictment, but we didn't know about this one document that only six people have security clearance for and how Donald Trump used it. And just to frame the issue before I turn it over to Dina, just because we have to keep our timeline straight, at the time Donald Trump left office, he had no reason to believe he'd ever be elected again. He thought his career was over. This is right off the heels of January 6th. This is Republicans taking to the House and Senate floor to condemn Donald Trump. This was the lowest ebb of his career and the prosecutions on top of it. So he thought he would just be businessman Donald Trump doing crypto deals and NFT deals and real estate deals, which explains why he kept a couple of little cache of documents for the people in the Middle east, for instance, that he was negotiating with a country, sorry, a region we are now effectively at war with at least parts of it. So the fundamental question that Jamie Raskin asked in his letter is, were these war plans and secret documents about the Middle east, who were they shown to? And who in your family, including Barron Trump, knew about these documents at the time that you left office? And how were, how are you planning to use them? And fundamentally, what is this document that you took with you that only six people get to see, Dean, to take it from there?

A (45:52)

Well, exactly. I mean, these are the questions Raskin is asking. It's really stunning. I mean, to the point that Trump was just a cheater and cheating, taking such a classified document that only five other people other than him were even able to view. And he takes it to his business, he takes it to Mar? A Lago, and it was related to his business interests. And so just trying to take advantage yet again from the American people, the most corrupt president ever, but using highly classified information for his own pocketbook. And in addition, evidently showing this classified map on a private plane. Interestingly, a new detail that he showed it in front of current Chief of Staff Susan Wiles. So she could here be implicated perhaps as well. But to your point, point, there was a cherry picking of release of documents and Raskin saying that the DOJ very likely violated the gag order that they had requested and Trump had requested. Judge Cannon, when Judge, when Jack Smith went in front of Congress, he wasn't able to answer all of their questions because he kept referring to the gag order that was in place by Judge Cannon here. The DOJ kind of doing what they want, seemingly violating the gag order. So that was the second part of Ruskin's letter there.

C (47:18)

And Lisa, what do you, what do you make of it? I mean you've got the two concepts that are in the letter, right? Pam Bondi, why do you, there's no such thing as a congressional privilege. You don't get to violate a federal court order that you yourself obtained and, and use it as a shield and a sword to release documents to try to embarrass Jack Smith, which didn't work and backfired and on the other hand, claim that the Mar a Lago volume 2 report can't ever be released to the American people because Eileen Cannon says so. And then you've got, did Donald Trump, is he, did he profit on top secret and classified information and undermine America's national interests, national security and the lives of people in the military?

B (48:07)

Yes. I mean this is so it's extraordinarily serious what the allegations are. And I would encourage everyone to read Representative Jamie Raskin's letter for themselves because it is really compellingly written and it raises very serious concerns both about the first point you mentioned in terms of the cherry picking of release of some information that Pam Bonney thinks helps him or helps them, and then the denial or the effort to hide forever other information that is very damaging. Politico reviewed the letter. You know, the underlying sort of some, one of the underlying documents, there's a map of a plane, for example, where the names of the people who are on the plane who received this information, you know, their names are blacked out. Rep. Raskin has asked for their names to be shared so the American people can know who they are, who was on that plane where this secret map was revealed. He's asked for the American people to know and at least Congress to know what country was depicted in that map and what business did these other people, who presumably did not actually have top secret clearance, let alone letter level clearance, the highest level of clearance, let alone the super highest level of clearance, where as you point out, at least one of these documents was only seen or was only allowed to be seen by a handful of leaders of Congress, if they could see it at all. And so you have a former president sharing information that is protected, supposed to be protected for our interests, the interests of the American people, our national security interests. And yet a former president is sharing this document with people who do not have clearance, presumably, and he's doing so on a private plane in these private facilities. And, and as Jamie Raskin said, he thinks that there's evidence, and certainly Jack Smith conveyed to the then attorney general under Joe Biden that this information showed that Donald Trump had compromised our national security to advance his own business interests. This is extremely serious. And this happened before. We've seen the ways in which it appears that our national security interests are also being compromised or manipulated in some ways by this president to the profit of unknown people who are getting information out of this White House, either from him or someone else and making trades on it. And so this is a precursor. But I think the American people have a right to know, and I don't think Judge Eileen Cannon had any right to suppress that evidence, to hide it from the American people. I agree with Rep. Raskin that that information should be made public. The American people should see the evidence that Donald Trump had, not evidence that, not the actual secret, secret documents that no one should see. But we should know what those documents related to, because it goes to the question of how, you know, how has Donald Trump perhaps compromised the security of the United States, and has he himself benefited or his family business with his sons or other associates benefited from his access to classified information? This is what, you know, it's an extraordinary scandal. And the fact that the Trump administration, both the Justice Department and the White House, are attacking Jamie Raskin, as you know, supposedly having Trump derangement syndrome is ridiculous. Rep. Raskin is a constitutional scholar. He's someone who has deep integrity. He's an excellent lawyer. And he is not going to give up on this fight, I'm sure, until we get to the bottom of it.

C (51:41)

Right. And so I think what that means for our, our audience is that come the midterms and the Democrats get the gavel, we're going to see impeachment proceedings against Pam Bondi. I mean, does anybody on this illustrious panel tonight think that Pam Bondi isn't going to be the subject of an impeachment proceeding and maybe Donald Trump as well, for things that happen? Think about this. The, the, because we're going to talk about, are we going to talk about this one? We'll touch on that. We know there's, there's a Grand conspiracy criminal investigation being conducted out of the Southern District of Florida, my backyard, by a handpicked prosecutor of Donald Trump called, named Jason Redding Quinones. And he's using judge cannon again, 90 miles north of his home to go run up there and get a grand jury in place. They've issued 130 subpoenas, including against James Comey, against Brennan, the former CIA director. And their working theory since these events happened in 2016 is that the conspiracy component of it means that the statute of limitations has been recharged because things have happened in furtherance of the conspiracy in the last five years. All right, hold that thought for a minute. If that's true and some of the events related to these documents and Donald Trump's use of them happened in 2023, that a 2028 ish new Department of Justice could investigate Donald Trump, I don't care how old he is at that point, for what happened in 2023, 2024, right before he became president, he doesn't have criminal immunity at that point by the Supreme Court. And this would extend the statute of limitations on many of these crimes. So I'm not sure Trump's out of the woods yet because let's, let's remember or tell our audience for the first time that he wasn't absolved in Mar a Lago. Okay. And I don't even think it would be double jeopardy. He had his prosecutor declared to be invalidly appointed and had the indictment tossed as a result. But that doesn't mean that he was exonerated. Okay. And so a new prosecutor or just the, just the Attorney General in the future. Okay. Without a special prosecutor, go after Donald Trump for 2024, 2023 events, couldn't he.

A (54:12)

I almost think that the Attorney general position in 2028 is going to be more important than even the President because there are so many prosecutions that can go forward starting 2028.

C (54:23)

Right. Or 2029. Right.

B (54:25)

Well, in the related piece is, you know, if Trump is sharing information, secret information, super top secret information, beyond top secret, with people while he is not president. Those are not the official acts, do not get immunity under the invented immunity that that John Roberts created for him with the Republican appointees on the court, you cannot have immunity for acts that he committed while he was not president. I think.

C (54:50)

Let me do a thought, Let me do a thought experiment. Let me do a thought experiment and take advantage of Lisa being with us on the panel today with her deep Supreme Court knowledge, an author of a recent book called Without Precedent. There we are about the John Roberts court. I'm not sure that Trump's out of the woods on the immunity decision because what is, there's nothing to stop the Department of justice in 2029, right. To go back after Donald Trump and test the limits of that immunity stretched to its outer boundaries. Core constitutional is taking documents and using them. Maybe even now as commander in chief, he still has them apparently, or the last access to them, you know. So I'm not so sure that the immunity decision should be such a brick wall to stop future prosecutors from testing the outer boundaries of it and, or giving the Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit the immunity decision based on some heinous conduct by Donald Trump, who doesn't give a crap about, about any of the lines of boundaries. He just does anything. What do you think, Lisa? Could, couldn't a future prosecutor test the limits and bring a case and they'll have to have Donald Trump try to argue about his immunity?

B (56:10)

Yeah, I think that could very well happen. And I actually think it should because I think this court, the Supreme Court, should revisit that decision. It was a terrible decision, a reckless decision, an unreasoned decision in terms of our Constitution, a counter constitutional decision. And even within the boundaries of this despicable decision, it's not limitless. There are boundaries and I think those should be tested because we are in an extraordinarily dangerous situation with a president who thinks that he can do no wrong, thinks that anything he does is a so called official act or official word and is, and also has the power to give pardons again. Another, another power that I think really needs to be revisited and examined because no one should be able to pardon their co conspirators, whether they're at the Justice Department or any other agency or whether they're a high official or a lower official. The pardon power should not extend that way either. And that was implicated as well in the decision that John Roberts wrote. So I like the thought, the thought experiment. I think we're going to have to put a lot of things on the table to restore the rule of law, to restore justice and to repair the damage that has been done not just by Donald Trump but also by the Roberts court. And you know, I think any reasonable person looking at the outcome of that decision back in 2024, right before the election would recognize that that decision is a disaster constitutionally. And maybe, maybe there are some on the court, or maybe it'll be a different court will revisit it and say that decision, you know, is repudiated because it was so wrong headed and, and has so many problems with it. But you're right, it's not, it's not absolute, it's not unlimited. And even within the conversation or the descriptions of the power that John Roberts invented, it's not without bounds.

C (57:56)

Yeah. And I think, sorry, you take it over data. Good.

A (58:00)

Well, I was just making the point that, yes, to that point, it was Only the Article 2 powers that were absolute. Official was qualified, private was not at all. And the reason why, you know, that those, some of those action, well, at least when we're talking about January six could have gone forward is because of the private lawsuit that's still going forward. The Capitol police officers and congresspeople have sued Trump saying that those were private actions because that speech he gave that day was paid, that rally was paid for with campaign funds. So if he had not won, that could have still been the criminal proceeding against him could have gone forward. And we know that because Trump tried to dismiss that lawsuit saying this was official conduct and he wasn't able to do that. And so that, you know, civil lawsuits always take a long time to move forward. So that's kind of still working its way through the court. But it did overcome that initial motion to dismiss because there were enough facts that that was actually private action that day.

C (58:58)

And to Lisa's point, we can't as a society just chalk off, chalk up the four years of the, of the second Trump administration as just like this funny little period where really interesting things happened and ignore the impact that our, for the good of our, pardon me, for the good of our rule of law and our constitutional republic, our not too distant future selves, have to go back and look at what should be impeached and what should be prosecuted. Even if he tries to do mass pardons on the way out, the way he did mass pardons on the way in of all the people who committed those crimes on the Capitol on January 6th. So what we have to continue to make that party expend their political capital to support and protect a lawless president. And you know, we can't just, like I said, we can't just chalk it off to, oh, just like the funny little period in our, you know, in our life. And we'll just, we need to move on from it. Look forward, not back. No, we're gonna have to spend a fair amount of time cleaning up behind this, this administration. Right.

A (60:14)

Because just real question. Sorry, just because you can argue that actually Ford pardoning Nixon allowed for Trump because if Nixon had gotten prosecuted, then perhaps Trump would have been afraid of breaking the law. So we do have to move past somehow. The president is, you know, the deference to it. I think we certainly are. I think a country, us as a country, have a lot more willingness to prosecute.

C (60:41)

So. So let's stay on the Supreme Court while we're there and with Lisa, take advantage of Lisa being with us. So two major cases and a third coming up. Mail in ballots. Watson versus the Republican National Committee. I never thought in my lifetime I'd be talking about a Mississippi case where Mississippi was defending voting rights. But we are, along with 29 other states, giving a grace period. As long as you cast mark your ballot, you elect who you want to elect. And it's postmarked by election day, five business day, grace period or some grace period, it'll still be counted. We're not talking about fraud. We're just talking about when the mails can deliver. I mailed a letter from Miami to New York. It took eight days to show up. Seriously. Okay, so we have a mail in ballot and oral argument the next day. Al Otolatos, on the other side, civic group, immigration group brings a case about how far into the United States do you have to be in order to ask for asylum? And if you're blocked from ever putting your toe on US Soil purposefully by the Border Patrol and by the policies of a president, does that deny you the ability to ever ask for asylum? Or if you, or put it another way, if you sneak in and you're in the United States, apparently you can ask for asylum, but if you come in the front door and nobody opens it for you, you can't apply. This was all up for grabs and a couple of oral arguments and then one that's coming up in April on birthright citizenship. Lisa, why don't you try to tie it together a bit? Even though they're on different topics, these are statutory interpretations, not constitutional. That's one good thing about them. So as I've joked, Congress, future Congress, can fix what the Supreme Court has broken. But why don't you tell our audience what all this mail in balloting business is all about?

B (62:43)

Well, I think a lot of people don't realize that mail in ballots dates back to the Civil War. Soldiers in the Civil War who were, who were voting during the Civil War voted by mail. This is not some new process. This is not some newfangled Democratic conspiracy. This is a long standing way in which Americans have voted for more than 150, more than 170 years in this country. Now, some states have made it easier to vote by mail. Some states like, like Oregon have exclusively vote by mail. In the last presidential election, for example, in 2024, tens of millions of Californians voted by mail. And it has been the practice in almost all the states that there's a grace period where if you vote and the post and the vote is postmarked before the election or by election day, that vote is counted. That's because what we see on election night is just sort of the public statement about who won the election, but it's not the actual certification. So people have a chance to cure ballots if they voted provisionally. There's a chance to recount those ballots before it's certified. So there's a period of a couple days, typically after the actual election day, where ballots are counted and recounted and then finalized and certified. This isn't abnormal. This is normal. There's no indication of fraud of any kind through this process. And yet you have the Republican Party and the Republican Party apparatchiks attacking this process before the Supreme Court. And at the oral argument that just recently happened, the question was raised, I think, toward the end of oral argument, about whether if the Supreme Court were to rule that Congress can set one single day for voting, meaning that no vote that arrives the day after, even it was postmarked eight days before, like your mail, Michael, that that can't count despite the voters intent to vote, despite it being a legitimate ballot by an American, that if the Court were to rule that way, it may well invalidate all early voting for tens of millions of Americans.

C (64:49)

Yeah, which they said. Which when that came up, that was the only moment I thought, oh, wait a minute, let them run with this. Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts. You know, Roberts at one point said to Sauer, I don't understand. You're, you're not logically consistent. If you're saying there's an election day and it has to be respected and mail in ballots would never been contemplated by 1845, the 1845 Congress. How do you explain. And Amy Coney Barrett said the same thing. How do you explain early voting? Early voting wouldn't have been contemplated by them either. Are you here, Are you here trying to quash early voting? Oh, no, no, no, we're not. Early voting is okay. We're okay with early. So I don't even. They're going to have to ignore the arguments, apparently, of John Sauer and Paul Clement, who argued for the RNC or one of the other groups the libertarian group. And they're going to have to come up with their own crazy convoluted theory as to why mail in ballots have to be received on election day in order to be counted. Right. Because I don't see how they can do it based on the logic of the argument.

B (65:47)

No, they can't. And also, in the middle of all this, Donald Trump just voted by mail in the Mar A Lago election where his candidate lost. And so it's all, you know, it's just all manufactured efforts to try to make it harder for Americans votes to vote and have their votes count. And then meanwhile, you have an argument coming up next week on April 1st. On April.

C (66:07)

Before you go on that, before you go there, let me have Lisa comment on the mail and penalty. Yes, yes, I said, Dina, Sorry.

A (66:12)

That's okay. Well, speaking about convoluted, you know, Justice Gorshutt got super convoluted. He didn't like the fact that Mississippi was saying that, you know, having an official carrier mail, it was safe and should be respected, that the state law was willing to have that official carrier. And so he gave this convoluted example of, well, then could a state say that a notary republic, as if you submit your ballot, would it be the same to mail your ballot as to submit it to a notary republic? Who would, you know, say what day that you sent it? And what if the Supreme Court justice was the notary republic? I mean, his examples were absurd. You know, the Supreme Court usually always says, we are going to decide a case based on the facts in front of us. But Justice Gorsuch tried to use these examples, like as if a state was ever going to authorize the use of a notary republic. No, no voter is going to go to a notary republic. These convoluted ways that they. And a Mississippi lawyer just, he just was, was in circles. He was, he was tied into knots trying to answer Justice Gorsuch. Justice Sotomayor jumped in a few times to try to save him and coach him through these kind of convoluted examples Gorsuch was giving.

C (67:38)

Yeah, I don't think that, I don't think that advocate did very well.

A (67:43)

I know.

B (67:44)

Yeah. Well, and also it just goes to show the desperation in some ways of someone like Gorsuch to try to posit such a ridiculous set of examples. And I think, you know, so it may be that they do not invalidate this long standing practice. But I also think that that could then give them cover for the other maneuvers that John Roberts is orchestrating, attacking the Voting Rights act, his long standing antipathy toward the Voting Rights Act. So we might survive in part because it is absurd from a historical matter to be attacking vote by mail when it's been with us for over a century. You know.

C (68:20)

So let's hope that we're all sort of wrong. Yeah, let's hope we're wrong. And then in June when we get the decision, it's not as bad as we think. But you're right, Lisa. It'll just be sort of COVID for a terrible Voting Rights act decision coming out of the Calais case in Louisiana. While while we're here, before we take our next break, Lisa, why don't you frame what happened with asylum, which is at the southern border and other places. If you get to a port of entry and you there you see the border patrol, you should be able to ask for asylum. But The Supreme Court Maga 6 seemed to have a different view of what it means about arriving in or being physically present in the United States. Again, just so I frame it for our audience so they don't get confused, the Supreme Court is the final say on what the Constitution says. But not every case involves the Constitution. And some cases only involves federal statutory interpretation. Sometimes there's a mix. There's a hybrid. There's a statute. It's about power. It's about the extent of the statute, whether it violates the Constitution in some way or an executive order violates the Constitution in some way. But in this case, it's really a statutory analysis about a statute related to asylum, a statute that if it goes the wrong way in this decision, could be fixed by a future Congress. Right?

B (69:44)

That's right. Although I will say to you, Michael, I am working on the important effort of raising questions about whether the court actually should have the final say on some of these matters constitutionally, which is. We'll have that debate.

A (69:59)

Yes.

C (70:00)

You're doing another book. I love it.

B (70:03)

But the fact is that statutory interpretation matters are typically matters where Congress has a much freer hand to try to redress a decision of the Supreme Court. I think that there are constitutional decisions that do need to also be redressed by Congress, given the way this court has been captured and the problems with just the inherent inconsistency and politicization of these rulings by this court. But in this instance, you have a there's longstanding international law on refugees, people fleeing persecution. This came out of World War II, where ships were turned away and people were then killed, persecuted because they could not seek refuge in another country. The, you know, Jewish, Jewish citizens of Europe perished because they could not, in some instances, get refugee status. They could not get accepted by other countries. And so there was a whole set of international laws, including domestic laws, that were counterparts to those laws on refugees and on the issue of persecution. And so, you know, back in 1980, which seems like a long time ago, there was a set of US Laws on refugee status. But what happened was not to get too far into the weeds on it, but what happened was in 1993, the Rehnquist Court issued a ruling involving Haitians seeking asylum or seeking refuge in the US that allowed the coast of guard to stop them in the waters. And that was seen by that Rehnquist Court as a correct decision. Justice Blackmun dissented. So there's this precedent in the sales case involving Haitian refugees. That is the foothold, the toehold for John Sauer and the Trump administration to say they can, you know, move that from the waters into just feet from the border in Mexico, for example, and block from seeking asylum. And the fact is, is that the United States, typically, with few exceptions, actually has honored those asylum laws because it is a commitment of human rights, that we do not send people back to their death, that we embrace people who are fleeing persecution and allow them the opportunity to seek asylum and have a process for doing so. But what the Trump administration did in the first term and has reversed Biden's policy now in the second term to do this again has been what they try to call metering, meaning that they are trying to stop people before they get to the actually put their foot on the U.S. territory, like right outside the border. Those are U.S. agents, agents of America being deployed to try to block people from seeking asylum. I think those cases should be revisited. I think that we need to have a process for honoring those commitments to human rights. But the fact is that this administration has taken an extremely harsh stance against people seeking, you know, seeking freedom from persecution, seeking to escape possible death or injury or torture by their home governments. And this court may well end up ruling in favor of the Trump administration, in part because of that bad precedent from 1993, even though that precedent really is contrary to the actual statutes in the United States about seeking asylum. People arriving in the United States, and it seems like a real technicality to say, you didn't arrive if I blocked you 1 foot outside the border or 10ft outside the border. That seems like a real gaming with people's lives in a way that is really unjustified.

A (73:30)

Yeah. And the ninth Circuit had said that presenting yourself to a border official was the same as being there because of the fact that you were being stopped, not because you didn't walk two extra feet, but because that official was stopping you. And so that's what the Ninth Circuit had ruled. Now this metering law is actually suspended. It's not being used right now. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tried to bring that into the oral argument and say, isn't this case moot because this law is not in effect? And I think that was her way of kicking the. Hoping to kick the can because it looks like they are poised to basically overturn the Ninth Circuit and allow this metering. And so. But the Trump administration came back saying, well, it's paused now, but we can restart it at any time. But that was her one chance, I think, to try to stop it. And we've talked about this. This is not about you do not seek asylum and then automatically get citizenship. Like I did pro bono asylum cases at my law firm. It's very complicated. People are often don't even know English and are trying to go through this very long and difficult process with multiple court hearings. This is just about giving people a chance, people who have traversed from sometimes hundreds, thousands of miles away in the most horrific conditions to try to just present their case there. And it's not because of their own effort. It is because of literally somebody locking the door.

C (75:04)

I want to talk about that for a minute as it relates to the birthright citizenship. Okay. You, Lisa, raised the Haitian case, you know, the interdiction case, where they wouldn't let Haitians get what's called in the business, dry foot. It used to be called a wet foot, dry foot policy. Right. Dry foot meant you made it to American land. Cubans in Miami were often allowed to get dry foot. But if you were a wet foot, meaning you couldn't get in, you were still at sea. In other words, then you were not put through the immigration process or asylum. Let's play this out. We just had a case in which the Supreme Court seems hell bent on saying you got to get your foot in the door and touch American soil or beyond American soil in order to apply for asylum. Do we all agree on that, that that's sort of where this or this oral argument seems to be going with the Supreme Court? Lisa? Yeah.

A (76:02)

Yes, yes.

B (76:04)

Yeah. Sorry about that. In fact, I was just double checking

C (76:06)

them, researching on the fly. That's fine.

B (76:10)

Did I pronounce that case right? But that's exactly where we are. Yeah.

C (76:15)

All right. So now let's play that. Let's stay on. Let's stay on together here. Birthright citizenship. 14th Amendment effectively says, if you're born here, touch US soil, where you're born in US air as a baby, no baby is hopefully not immediately on US Oil unless something's going terribly awry in the process.

A (76:36)

This is getting bad. This example is going south.

C (76:38)

No, I just had a baby two years ago. I was in the room. I know what happens. But you got to be on U.S. soil or U.S. territory for that to happen. And then you're given, by way of the Constitution, citizenship, so you're not stateless. Like, we don't have people babies who were born where the government looks over the shoulder of an American hospital or whatever and says, hey, you're now a citizen of Honduras. Like what? Like, you know, or you're stateless, go live at the airport like Tom Hanks in that movie. Okay, so if, if you gotta be on U.S. soil and. Okay, and they just made a big deal out of not making it, you know, getting to the last mile, the last meter and not getting to the door. Okay, what are they gonna do when they hear oral argument about babies, forget their parents, babies who were born on U.S. soil or territory, and the 14th Amendment being changed by an executive order. Having, having heard, it's a completely different thing. But having heard the oral argument, how do you think birthright citizenship, how do you think the numbers pan out there for the April oral argument out there? In other words, is this Roberts slash Amy Coney Barrett led Supreme Court going to rip out the beating heart of birthright citizenship from the 14th Amendment during this term? Lisa?

B (78:03)

Oh, I'll go. Well, I mean, listen, this is, this is a dog of a case. This is a case where the Constitution is crystal clear that if you're born in the United States, you're a citizen. It's in the first paragraph. It's right up front. It was part of the, you know, the core language getting adopted by the Republican Congress back in the, in the post Civil War era and in Supreme Court rulings dating back to the 1890s, it's been clear that it applies to, that people who are born in United States are citizens. Even the statute, you know, in the 1950s about the immigration Nationality act, it, you know, it also has been interpreted and was interpreted then as. That's exactly what it says. If you're born in the United States, you're a citizen. That's. There's a Latin term like US Terra J U S T E R. R, A, which is you are born, like, that's your citizenship. You're born here. Trump's effort in early last year, a year ago, to assert that he could just declare people not to be citizens if they're born here is totally unconstitutional. It should be a 90 decision against him. They should be rebuked. When you look at the groups that are on board siding with Trump, it's like John Easton Eastman, who was the guy at the heart of the effort to basically try to subvert our election in 2020. They have right wing groups that are tied to Stephen Miller, who's no lawyer, plays one on TV apparently, but who has also asserted a whole array of things that are not constitutionally true or valid. And they're the ones advising Trump that he could do this. He can't. But Thomas and Alito are particularly in the tank for Trump. Kavanaugh seems to be there, you know, quite a bit. Certainly even in the tariffs case, which was ridiculous. That should have been a 90 decision. We may end up with a decision that is 5, you know, that is 5, 4 in favor of the Constitution and against Trump. And that would just be because this is a ridiculous set of claims by Donald Trump backed by fringe theory scholars, rejected by every real, you know, every major scholar who's looked at this. You know, it is an outrageous thing that we're even having a debate about this because it is so basic to American history. And yet here we are with Trump, you know, putting another trial balloon up about this power. And as you point out, Michael, having just heard argument about where the line of territory is and why it matters for, you know, the size of U. S. Jurisdiction or due process rights.

C (80:35)

And then now it doesn't matter.

B (80:36)

No, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a really outlandish, inconsistent position the administration is taking.

C (80:44)

Let me just read, Let me just read for our audience and what they're hanging their hat on. I'll bring Dina in.

B (80:50)

Yeah.

C (80:51)

Section one of the 14th amendment, which is one of the Reconstruction amendments in, that came out all kind of in a row, if you want to watch a great movie about some of them. Lincoln. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. All persons born. Now, what they're hanging their hat on is comma, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, comma. There's commas there, by the way. And so they're arguing. Oh, because Their parents are illegals. They're not the baby is not subject to the jurisdiction of this country. They're the subject to the jurisdiction of Honduras or Mexico or Somalia. I mean it is such a bad faith argument that any other lawyer or group would be sanctioned for this bad faith. It's not even a. It's not even it would be Rule 11 sanctioned for a bad faith extension of the law and a misreading of the language. Dina.

A (81:58)

I mean this Supreme Court is not afraid to reinterpret or change the interpretation of the Constitution. They're the most activist Supreme Court ever changing, you know, overturning Roe, Humphrey's executor that had been a hundred year case getting rid of it. I mean we called our our Supreme Court show unprecedented Pocahont because it is they don't care about precedent. The fact is this is what they're going to hang their hat on. And also the fact that the Supreme Court took this case at all is very disturbing because of how settled this law is. But they're hanging their hat on the fact that the 1898 Supreme Court case had to do with a baby born in the United States and his parents were Chinese immigrants, but they had legal status here. They were permanent residents. The holding did not say that that was why they that young Kim Ark actually had birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court didn't hold that in the decision but it mentioned in the opinion that and you tie that with their philosophy as you said in the reading of that, that subject to the legal jurisdiction. And what I'm afraid of is that there's not going to be a complete overturn of birthright citizenship but the incremental change with Chief Justice Roberts likes the incremental change. He did that with Humphrey's executive. He started to ch way at it. He was against the overturning of Roe not because he didn't want to overturn it but he doesn't like to do anything all at once. And my worry is that the incremental change they're going to do here is say that a baby born here to completely undocumented residence does not have citizenship. But if you can be born here to somebody with legal status but not a citizen and still change it and that's how they're to going going to incrementally change it. And I think there is a real risk of that happening.

C (83:53)

Yeah, I thought, I thought his parents were in that case. I thought his parents were still Chinese Nationalists. I didn't. I didn't. Is that right? Lisa Weren't his parents still, like, still kind of.

B (84:05)

Yes, yes. Yeah.

C (84:07)

All right. The emperor of China was still their, their guy?

B (84:10)

Well, in part because there, there were other cases and other laws of the time and Chinese exclusion to try to deprive Chinese rail workers building the railroad across the country from getting access to citizenship. But, you know, this question of the, the, the, the absurdity of claiming that a baby born here is not subject to US Jurisdiction or that their parents aren't subject to your US Jurisdiction is outlandish. When you have anyone in the United states subject to U.S. jurisdiction, the only people who are actually not are diplomats on their, on diplomatic soil or the

C (84:48)

American aboriginal people when they're on certain things, depending upon whether they're on tribal land or not. But that's a very good point. Like, for instance, are you saying then, Donald Trump, that that baby born from parents who are not here with proper status can go out and commit murder, can double park? Right. Can it violate the laws? But they're. Because they're not subject to the jury

A (85:10)

or tourists coming and committing crime, that somehow we couldn't prosecute them.

C (85:14)

Wait till, wait till Tanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor Cake and start running their thought experiment during the oral argument.

A (85:21)

Exactly.

B (85:22)

Because. Because anyone in the United States is subject to the US Jurisdiction, period. Unless it is those rare instances, for example, where you have indigenous people with sovereign land, that is their sovereign land, in which you have to have agreements. And similarly, when ambassadors are here

A (85:40)

in

B (85:40)

their, you know, residence.

C (85:41)

That's why you see cars parked in New York in front of embassies with all parking tickets on it with diplomatic rights.

B (85:48)

Yeah, but everyone else. Yeah, everyone else is subject to US Jurisdiction, period. It is a ridiculous argument. And John Sauer. It's not the first ridiculous argument John Sauer will make. We saw him make arguments about, you know, Seal Team 6 and whether the President could assassinate an opponent. They are willing to do anything to do the bidding of Donald Trump. And as Dina points out, the fact that the court took this case, the Roberts court took this case is a bad sign that they may in fact try to rule in favor of Donald Trump in a way, in a case in which no one should be ruling in favor of Trump's interpretation. It is counter, historical, counterfactual, counter legal, counter constitutional. It's absurd, and it would cause chaos in our hospitals. Like, and, and like you said, Michael, at the beginning, who, where, where would, who would these kids be citizens of if not the place in which they're born?

C (86:43)

You don't understand. But this is we we gave you a bonanza, a cornucopia of Supreme Court information here. Taking advantage of Lisa being with us here as a guest anchor on Legal af. We've got to take another break. So many ways to support what we do here. Legal AF, the YouTube channel needs your help your love, your support to get to 1.1 million this weekend. We will do it with your help. Just take your thumb or your finger, just hit the subscribe button. Legal AF Substack. Same thing. If you don't know about substack, come over and learn about it. If you're there already, keep us in the top five of of news all news on Substack and you'll see the writings of Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves and my live reports on Substack. And then we've got our pro democracy sponsors. And here's a word. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. 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Tushy bidets can also help reduce irritation, prevent micro tears caused by wiping, and many people who switch end up using up to 80% less toilet paper. Make going to the bathroom the most comfortable thing you do all day. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first bidet order when you use code LEGAL AF at checkout. That's 10% off your first bidet order at hello Tushy.com with promo code LEGAL AF. Again, for a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first day order when you use code LEGALAF at checkout. That's 10 percent off at hello Tushy.comwith promo code Legal A F welcome back to the midweek edition of Legal af, the podcast. Michael Popak. Here, of course we've got Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves sitting in both for Karen Friedman. Nicknifalo Lots of things. You know, these shows are great and I love being on with you guys. We could do this, we could do a three hour show easily and we try to curate for everybody. There's so many things that happened today in the last 48 hours, even some that fell off the continuum. For what we're going to cover today, like as we were coming on the doj led by Donald Trump is going to settle with Michael Flynn who was convicted by Robert Mueller who just died a couple of days ago for crimes that he committed. But now we're going to pay his him for being convicted. Just like we paid Ashley Babbitt and her family because she tried to break through the speaker's corridor and do whatever she was going to do with murderous rants during Jan.6. This is what Donald Trump, Trump tries to do. He's tried to make heroes out of the Jan Sixers. He's, he's given them pardons, even ones that have now have committed other crimes. I mean we got the guy that bought, tried to bomb the DNC and the rnc. He's claiming he was pardoned. And you can't go after him for mail bombing either. I mean for, for setting up those bombs as well. So lots of different cases that of course we could have covered now. But the one that I liked for today is this one about this ongoing saga of Donald Trump's fight to the death, although it's a one sided fight because he's fighting on his own with Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell. And Jay Powell by natural expiration of his term would be out of the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve on May 15. But Donald Trump didn't want to do that. So since he Scott in office, the guy that he appointed back in 20, that was Donald Trump in the rose with, with appointing Jay Powell and complimenting him. Now he's late and he's stubborn and he's stupid and he won't cut interest rates and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so we had a federal judge a week ago, two weeks ago, Jeff Boseberg, chief judge over all things grand jury in D.C. who declared after seeing things that we didn't see, including evidence that he demanded that the government provided. He did the extraordinary thing of intervening in a prosecution investigation and quashing the subpoenas against Jay Powell for crimes related to construction cost overruns and or statements that he made in January of 2025 about those cost overruns. I mean, look, you want to show me the bank accounts that Jay Powell has money from bribes from suppliers and contractors related to the, the multi billion dollar renovation of these hundred year old buildings. Great, bring it. But if you don't have that short of that, Jay Powell's got a day job and that is to connect the American economy to the world and tether it to reality against much headwind from Donald Trump. His j job is not being the owner's rep on the construction site, nor the gc, nor the inspector general, nor any of it. And the fact that there's cost overruns, including the ballroom that Donald Trump is building and every building ever built in D.C. is not an indicia of fraud. And now we've got the bombshell report that came out of a new transcript that just got revealed that Jeanine Pirro's right hand person, the head of the criminal division for the Department of Justice's U.S. attorney's office in D.C. admitted to Jeb Boasberg, the judge, that they had no evidence to support the criminal case against Jay Powell. Yet they continue to go after Jay Powell. Lisa, what do you make of it?

B (94:57)

Well, I mean, this is just more misuse of the prosecutorial power. The power of the prosecution power of the just government is vast. And being wielded by this administration against Trump's enemies or people he doesn't like or people he wants to replace it is really a travesty. I'm afraid that we're actually going to have to end up, we the people, the taxpayer end up paying, people who were, who were harassed by Donald Trump without our consent as he deploys the Department of Justice this way. And I think that when you, when you see what happened in this case, you see a judge saying you cannot prosecute someone where there's no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That's just prosecution 101. That's law 101. That's justice 101. And yet that has not been an impediment to the people that Donald Trump has handpicked to do his bidding, like Jeanine Pirro, like Pam Bondi and others who are really his hatchet people doing basically his political agenda, trying to use the awesome powers of prosecution against people, whether they're powerful people or not, in order to advance Trump's agenda. And I will say to you both, again, this is partly John Roberts fault because in that terrible immunity decision, John Roberts asserted that a president can direct the Justice Justice Department in ways that it has not been directed for basically in our lifetime since Nixon tried to, you know, got Bork basically to fire the, the prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was investigating Nixon and his men. And so, you know, the fact is that we only have someone like Judge Boasberg to stand in, to stand up and say this is impermissible, this is illegal. In essence, you cannot use the prosecutorial power to harass someone where there's no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Chairman Powell. And as you point out, Michael, I don't even remember the last building in D.C. that wasn't subject to a cost overrun.

C (96:50)

Well, One of the interesting, before I turn it over to Dina for the final word on it, one of the interesting things that came out of the unsealed filings, many of these filings had been sealed because they related to grand jury work, is the lineup of lawyers that you and I are paying for. All three of us are paying for representing the Federal Reserve and Jay Powell on the Federal Reserve side, they hired Robert her, who was the special counsel against Joe Biden on his, on his handling of documents. He's the guy that put the final nail in Joe Biden's coffin, that of the debate about, well, he's a frail old guy with failing memory who couldn't remember who he was or where he was. So I'm not going to prosecute him that Robert her, but he's also a Republican. And so to insulate, I think the Federal Reserve to say, look, we hired Robert her. You guys liked Robert her when we, when he went after Joe Biden. We're using him. And then on the other side, Jay Powell hired, listen to this. He hired a guy, one of his many lawyers who used to be the general counsel at News Corp, Fox News. Therefore, he was the legal boss for Jeanine Pirro when she was at Fox. She knows this guy. Well, I don't know if he's the Janine Pirro whisperer or just as giving the team information about how Janine works, but I don't think it's random that the general counsel for Fox and News Corp, who probably hasn't tried a case in 30 years, is on the trial team for, for Jay Powell, I think a brilliant strategy in this lawyering part. Dina, what did you make of this new revelation that just came out as you, as we close?

A (98:33)

I mean, the fact that Janine Perro admitted that she didn't have any events showed that there was absolutely nothing. Because if they even had a shred of something that they could spin, they would have. And most likely she admitted it because people might wonder why on earth she admitted it was because she saw what happened with Trump's lawyers the first time around. All the lawyers in the 2020, you know, election where they tried to say that there was fraud, Rudy Giuliani and others who basically lied or misled the court that there was evidence when there wasn't, all got disbarred. She's an attorney, and that is a little bit more of a check than perhaps a Trump official's not an attorney, because they can think, well, maybe Congress will never prosecute us or the doj, but we are seeing a lot, I mean, hello, Lindsey Halligan. We are seeing attorneys getting to see barred or investigated by their bar associations. So, you know, poor Jerome Pal. I mean, my gosh, talk about a public servant just trying to do his job and really getting harassed for, for it. It's really disgrace.

C (99:41)

Absolutely. And we'll continue to follow it. It actually, it wasn't Jeanine Powell. It wasn't, it wasn't Pirro, but it was her number two who admitted it in a court hearing that the judge held once again reinforcing the great work that Jeff Boseberg is doing against his own personal attacks by Donald Trump. They've tried, I mean, I mean, if, if this was Salem, I mean, witches in Salem have been put through less tests than Jeb Boasberg. I mean, they've, they've tried to, one representative in Texas tried to defund just Jeb Boasberg's court. Another one tried to impeach him. Another one, the Trump administration filed a judicial complaint against him. And yet who's still standing on the other side of the rule of law, Jeff Boasberg doing his job. Now we'll have to see what if. I'd like to see finally, my last comment here is to have the, the appellate court for the DC Circuit affirm finally something that Jeff Boasberg is doing. They haven't supported him, you know, they didn't support him on the JGG case related to the Venezuelan, the El Salvador, the Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador's torture prison. They didn't support him on the probable cause to find criminal contempt in that case. A couple of times they got to step forward and start supporting these district court judges who know what they're doing and support them here. Now, I know there's going to be a whole argument, right. We saw it with when, when Eileen Cannon got slapped by the 11th Circuit when she tried to interfere in the executive branches investigation of Donald Trump, Trump back in the Mar a Lago case and she was told by the 11th Circuit to back off. That's not the role of trial court judges here. However, Jeb Boasberg made it clear, if I find that the primary intent of the prosecution is to harass and intimidate the target and not because they believe in reasonable good faith that he committed a crime, I can quash the investigation. Yeah, that's going to go up on appeal now. We'll see. It will follow it hour by hour, minute by minute here on Legal af. I'm glad everybody's here in our audience thank you for being such fervent supporters of what we do. Hit the subscribe button on Legal a podcast on the audio side, Apple and Spotify. Tell your friends about our video version here, our legal AF and on Midas touch on the YouTube side. Support us on YouTube for legal aforementioned by hitting the subscribe button there. We'll get to 1.1 million subscribers with your help. And of course we've got the Legal AF sub stack as well where you can become a member and a paid member and get live reports every day. A big shout out and thank you and hug. Group hug for Dina Dahl and Lisa Graves who starting in April will be doing a Legal AF on a Monday night on on the Legal AF YouTube channel as well as we kind of extend the brand bit a little bit there and I thought it'd be a fun idea with Karen not feeling well today to bring in Dina and Lisa. Thank you for being here tonight.

B (102:40)

Thank you for having us.

C (102:42)

Absolutely. And shout out to the Midas Mighty and the Legal A effers.

B (102:54)

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