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- [00:00]
William Goudge
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- [00:53]
Michael Popak
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Karen Freeman
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Michael Popak
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- [02:13]
Karen Freeman
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- [02:45]
Michael Popak
It'S legal af it's the midweek edition. That's why Karen Freeman, Nickniffalo and Michael Popak are together once again, a dynamic duo. We had three fat topics all of which matter and at least two of them are major setbacks or will be major setbacks for the Trump administration, which is circling the drain of history before our very eyes. Teapot Dome scandal leading to cabinet members departure. Forget that. We're going to talk about Signal Gate or the Breach Brigade as I like to call it, or HuffPost called it. That's where every major member of the national defense and national security part of the Trump administration all got together and violated the Federal Records act and also violated national security by communicating on an app you can get in the app store called Signal, which even its own owner, its own CEO said it's gold standard for private communications. Except this is Pentagon level discussions about war plans against a Yemeni focused terrorist group called the Houthis that including Target packages. And then to add insult to injury, the national security advisor, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the Department of Defense had all basically lied during their testimony. And the Atlantic, which was involved because it was their editor in chief who got added to the Signal chain for four or five days. They decided, well, we're going to release the texts right split screen at the moment of her testimony, which showed they were liars. And it got very heated in the hearings. Midas has done a great job following all that. But hearings are so yesterday, Karen. Federal court filings are so today because a public interest group who frequently uses foia, Freedom of Information act request to get to the bottom of what's going on in our government with their transparency, was scratching their head for a while saying how come we're not getting any documents? Now we know why. Because they were using Signal with its magical disappearing deletion component to communicate about high profile the business of the public, which you're exactly not supposed to do. So they filed a new emergency temporary injunction case which has been assigned to. Wait for it. Jeb Boozberg, Donald Trump's favorite judge, the one that he calls a lunatic and corrupt and a lefty and all bashes of left and right. In the Alien Enemies act case, which we're going to talk about, he's back because he just got the case assigned to him. So we're going to talk about the hearings. What happened to bring everybody up to speed? The new filing, the new federal Filing. Then we'll move to another Jeb Boasberg case. As the chief judge of the district court in D.C. which is. God, it's hard to believe it's only been 10 days since this started. But 10 days ago, Jeff Boasberg entered an emergency temporary restraining order, really two of them, against the Trump administration's use of the Alien enemies Act of 1798 to deport undocumented Venezuelans, not even to Venezuela, to El Salvador. We'll talk to you about why they're putting them in the deep, dark hole of killer El Salvadorian prisons in a moment. But the judge took a look at the fake phony proclamation of Donald Trump declaring war against Venezuela and this terrorist, narco, terrorist gang and said, yeah, I don't see the enemy invasion, incursion or the war declaration by Congress, which we, 10 days later, we still don't have. And, no, I'm going to block you from doing that, at least while we're litigating. They didn't like that. They attacked him. Justice Roberts had to step in up to the appellate court. We just got a new ruling for the appellate court. We'll cover all of that today. And then Donald Trump made good on his promise right out of the playbook for Project 2025 to try to change how we vote. There are certain things that the federal government can do about voting rules, and there's certain things they can't do because it is delegated to the states. And one of them is how states run and operate their absentee balloting, their provisional balloting, their mail in balloting. But Donald Trump hated all of that because we all know that Democrats ate his lunch when it came to one thing, mail in ballots, special ballots, veterans ballots, you know, military ballots and all of that. So he tried to, he's trying to pass some new rules about when ballots can arrive and be counted. Here we go. To try to undermine the Democratic advantage. And, and as well as having some sort of voter id, maybe even a passport, maybe at the polling places. I mean, it's just getting ridiculous. We got a lot to talk about in all of those places. We might even touch if we have time on some United States Supreme Court decisions that have come down or some oral arguments that have come down. But let's bring in Karen, who's in one of her favorite happy places, which is the law and order set where she is a legal advisor for those that didn't know. Right, Karen?
- [08:13]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah. No, this is not. Again, this is Lieutenant Brady. She is the lieutenant in charge of the Detectives who are at the Law and Order, they're in the order part of Law and Order. So I, for some reason I've always liked her office the best and I always use this whenever I need a place to do things like podcast or do work when I'm on set.
- [08:38]
Michael Popak
Early in our podcast relationship history, you do it from there and people would tune in. I remember the comments. We still get them sometimes, which is Karen has a terrible office. What's going on in New York?
- [08:49]
Nick Nifalo
Look at that.
- [08:50]
Michael Popak
Look at the grill on her window. I know, it's a set. She's a. Oh, show off.
- [08:57]
Nick Nifalo
Well, but they do such a good job.
- [08:59]
Michael Popak
I know it looks like a real crappy office in a, in a police precinct.
- [09:05]
Nick Nifalo
Having spent much of my career in police precincts, they really do an excellent job at making it look legitimate and real.
- [09:14]
Michael Popak
So yeah, absolutely. They have that half drunk Grecian blue cup of coffee nearby that's only. It's a New York thing. Along with the My favorite part of learning about New York production is that I didn't realize that that that steam pipe that's in the streets of New York to relieve the steam, the heat of our that all the TV producers and movie production houses, they all want in their photos or their movies, they want that steam stack and they don't get it unless they actually are needed. But that's another new a little inside New York thing.
- [09:52]
Nick Nifalo
Very classically New York. Speaking of the New York coffee, my husband makes fun of me all the time because my favorite coffee is police precinct coffee from a bunomatic coffee maker. I have the apparently have the least sophisticated, least fancy coffee, pal.
- [10:11]
Michael Popak
That burnt burnt dirty water coffee, there's nothing like it. Yeah, well, let's blow off some steam ourselves. Why don't we turn to signal gate breach brigade and what happened? You want to lay out what happened? I'll turn to the hearing and the lawsuit.
- [10:29]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, well, this is just a scandal of epic proportions. What is signal? Signal is one of these chat groups like WhatsApp or other places that people get together and have text messages. Text message chain signal is considered one of the leading encrypted end to end encryption, secure text chat groups that you can use. That being said, it's not infallible. It is not approved, for example for things like national security, security or classified information or even when you are in foreign countries, places that might be hostile to the United States. There are certain countries you wouldn't use that in because they can read that information as well. So although it is more Secure than using, for example, a regular text message chat. It is certainly not up to the standard of, of national secrets, national state secrets. Well, so what happened? You had literally every single person who was in charge of national security, whether it's the head of the CIA or it was Treasury Secretary Pete Hegseth, Tulsi, Gabbard, you name it. They were the who's who on there and they were texting about the war plans essentially, and that date, time, location, the setup, the plans of who, what, when, where they are going to drop a bomb. And if that's not classified, if that's not secrets, if that's not endangering military people who are, who, who could be flying the planes, et cetera, in our military, I don't know what is. And they accidentally added the editor in chief of the Atlantic, which is a extremely reputable, well, well read article or sorry, magazine publication, and he happened to find himself on there. I don't know how he got at it. And he had a bird's eye view into what was happening and where they were going to drop the bombs and when and on who. And talk about a huge breach. When I saw that, I saw that the editor, first of all, they said what happened, they didn't publish the details in an effort to not jeopardize national security. But when I saw that, I thought to myself, these are the same people who complained about Hillary Clinton's emails and her server that she had at home, right, with classified, allegedly classified information, but her emails, you know, and these people are doing this and they're so fast and loose with national security. I mean, we already know that Donald Trump is fast and loose with classified documents and national security. When we saw how he kept all those classified documents at Mar A Lago, but his current administration, that they would do something like this is just outrageous. And then of course, there were hearings about it and everybody lied about it. And so now he had to get, come out and actually publish what was said and show that it's absolutely, it was absolutely highly classified. And this is stuff shared by Pete Hegseth. These were operational plans because the operation hadn't even been started yet. So pretty big deal. Of course, Trump and everybody's downplaying the sensitivity of the information, denying that it's a war plan. I mean, the fact that we're parsing words here, but it was extremely detailed strike information, including again, the airplanes, the drones, all of that. And if this had been anyone else in the military who'd done something like this, but I'll Bet you anything they would have been court martialed. So to say this isn't classified is outrageous. First of all, I had top secret clearance. I've had access to classified information. Certainly nothing at this level. I mean, this is beyond. And so, you know, I think, I think this was a huge, huge mistake. A huge misstep. And rather than owning it, they're lying about it.
- [14:36]
Michael Popak
And speaking of lies, we got new reporting as we're on the air. That Mike Waltz, who's our allegedly. What time is it? 6:00 or 8:00, whatever it is, Eastern time. He's currently our national security advisor. They try to whisk him off to Greenland. He left his Venmo account open and on. You know, when you use Venmo, you can see Billy paid for a haircut for Molly, $12 or whatever it is. Yeah, he left his open with all his transactions. And there's a lot of reporters listed there. I don't know why he's paying reporters, but for those people that jumped to his defense yesterday and said he doesn't even know Jeffrey Goldberg, I'm not so sure about that.
- [15:14]
Nick Nifalo
By the way, I saw a picture of them together. I saw someone posted a picture of them together.
- [15:18]
Michael Popak
Yeah. And how do you like your national security advisor keeping his Venmo open? This is the guy. And I ran it on a hot take. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. And we'll talk in a minute about him being the acting archivist for America. That's hard to believe. Mike Waltz and Hegseth, when he was on Fox and Friends, attacking, not only attacking Hillary Clinton, calling for her to be prosecuted, calling for her to be jailed, calling for her to be hanged from the highest tree. Okay, let's just turn it around. I agree with all that then. But. So that was about email servers and a couple of emails just like every other Secretary of State had ever done on her personal, you know, Hillary email account. How about discussing war war plans? You know, you got Hegseth who's barking out as if he's had a couple. Let's be frank. No, no war plans. They're not war plans. And the Atlantic said, you remember I was on the actual chat, right. I saw all of it before some auto deletion and take a look. And so they were forced, they were basically goaded into releasing the information as part of the First Amendment and freedom of the press to show that they basically lied to Congress. Congress is trying to get to the bottom, mainly the Democrats, only the Democrats of what happened here. And why it happened. And instead you've got John. They're all disqualified. They all should resign. I have a friend that's the best man of my wedding. He's not a Trumper, but he's. But he's Republican. He wrote me, had been in the military. Every one of them should resign. Every one of them should resign. And I was like, okay.
- [17:00]
Nick Nifalo
They had the exact times that aircraft was taking off from Yemen two hours before it was supposed to happen. I mean, this is unbelievable.
- [17:09]
Michael Popak
The vice, what's his name, the John Ratcliffe, who's our chief spook, who's our head of the CIA. He said, well, I don't. It was Biden's fault, which is exactly what came out of the text chain, which is we got to come up with messaging about attacking the Houthis, which is effectively Hamas's air force and navy. They were attacking the Suez Canal shipping lanes. Really impacted the Europeans more than us. But Trump decided I gotta be a tough guy, bomb somebody. Well, the Houthis are good. Biden had done it. So he said, well, I was told that it was okay at the CIA. You're now the director of the CIA. May I remind you to use signal for a non classified. Right, but this is not non classified. This is. And then when they were pushed about it, both Tulsi Gabbard, who is disqualified as being the head of anything including intelligence, she said, well, it's really not up to me. Would be really up to Hegseth at defense to death. It was really. They both. It's really Hegseth. It's really, you know, hospital path to Hegseth. Questioning today in the hearing was over whether Hegseth was drunk. I'll just say it out loud because it would happen in the hearing whether he was drunk while he was using Signal. And they said, and when, when, when Ratcliffe came to his defense, I said that's really out of line. And the, and the Democrat on the committee said, really? Because he held up a drink while he was in Europe in February. So. And he has a long. And he's admitted to a long history of being a public drunk. So how do we know that that wasn't part of that in use in the impaired judgment of using effectively an open app that the Chinese can peer into. Why is it that an appropriate question to be asked Donald Trump's use. You see, Donald Trump's kind of silent lately. You know, it was a glitch. It was just a glitch. But according to internal reports by the media, his first Reaction. Trump's first reaction was, they did what? Which is the only fair reaction you can have to that particular thing. Now, heads should roll. In any other administration, somebody would fall on the sword and take responsibility. We know it's not going to be J.D. vance because the egg got placed on J.D. vance's face. Because in the signal chat, which has been confirmed as legitimate by the White House, not by the Atlantic, he says, I'm not sure if the boss at POTUS really understands the ramifications of taking out the Houthis to benefit the Europeans. And it seems to be inconsistent with our attack on the Europeans and they really hate the Europeans right now. So I think we should pump the brakes on this. So he got sideways and offsides with the president. So now all of a sudden, he's got to go. Suddenly he's going to Greenland to get away. Talk about it. Siberia to get away.
- [20:00]
Nick Nifalo
Is he going with his wife?
- [20:01]
Michael Popak
Yes. He wasn't originally, but ever since, he's got to find a way to get back in Trump's good graces. You know, he already had a fight with Musk. Now, now he's, he's publicly outed as being opposite to Donald Trump. And I'm not even talking about the fake, deep fake audio from earlier in the week where somebody cribbed, likely, likely that he was attacking Elon Musk. This is real. And so he's like, I better. I'm sure, I am sure that the West Wing called the East Wing or whatever, wherever the vice president sits, and the two staff said, we gotta get J.D. vance out of here. Let him go to the dog race in Greenland with his wife.
- [20:43]
Nick Nifalo
Did you hear?
- [20:44]
Michael Popak
Yeah, go ahead and start making amends with Donald Trump and get him out of this media cycle and get them off to Greenland. And that's exactly what's happened.
- [20:54]
Nick Nifalo
But did you see the people in Greenland are selling MAGA hats that say Make America go Away.
- [21:01]
Michael Popak
It's a perfect MAGA acronym. I love that. So that. So the hearing has gone terrible for them. And as and has shown what you and I and Ben and others on the Midas Dutch network have said from the very beginning, which is this is not ready for prime time players. They are incompetent, they are unprofessional, they are sloppy with our secrets and with our public documents, and they. And they should be disqualified from serving in office. Now, Trump's not going anywhere until we get the House and the Senate. The J.D. vance isn't going anywhere unless Trump fires him as vice president. Question is is Rubio, who already screwed up and should have resigned over the treatment of Zelensky in the White House. And is he going anywhere? The natural sacrificial lamb here is Pete Hegseth does a press conference that says he's got a drinking problem, he needs to spend more time with his family. You know the old sports coach that needs to leave. We'll see. But you know Trump, he circles that wagon tight, as you've said before, around Republicans and he'll go down cuz he's not going anywhere. Trump knows I got nothing to lose. It just makes his administration look like a bunch of jokers that they are. When we come back from a quick break, Karen, let's dive into the lawsuit that's been filed. We knew one was coming. I think this lawsuit is genius because it doesn't even have to get involved with was it classified? Was it top secret? Was it military? Was it intelligence? Was it any. It doesn't matter. It's all public records that needed to be preserved. And that's the focus of the new lawsuit we'll talk about when we come back. Along with the I thought the biggest news of the week was the declaration, a phony declaration of war last week and Boasberg being supported by Chief Justice Roberts who had a step out of character and protect him. No, we've got new reporting about what's going on in the Boseberg case on the Alien Enemies act right up to the minute with a new decision against the Trump organism Trump administration for the by the appellate court for D.C. and then you and I will talk about the Voting Rights act, maybe some other things if we have time related to the United States Supreme Court. But we've got our sponsors and thank God that we do for those that are like, oh, we got the sponsors again. Yes, we've got the sponsors. Because without it, all of these things that we're doing are really not possible. To be frank, there's many ways to support our channel. One of them is if you got the disposable income and I'm not asking you to spend money you don't have. We like these products. We test these products. We reject certain products. Jordi curates it for us and we're like, no, I don't want to do that one. We don't. And we really love the sponsors and they know what our point of view is. They know we're pro democracy. They know what our audience is all about. They want to be here. So do that. And then of course, other ways Support US Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Come on over there. Hit the subscribe button. I got a big announcement here. We got a whole group coming over from what used to be True Crime Court Authorities led by Dave Aronberg. Dave Aronberg is coming over. The rest of the people you love on Court Authorities is coming over and starting on Monday, they're going to be doing their work exclusively on Legal af. And we'll kick it off with a Dave Aronberg video on on Monday. And then that's it. Let's start with our Take a break with our commercial sponsors. I may be very open with you on this podcast, but off the air I really do value my privacy and 2025 are your blind still from 2005 there is a better way to buy blind shade shutters and drapery and it's called three Day Blinds. 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That's 30% off your order using code legal AF one last time. Getsold.com and code legal AF for 30% off. Welcome back. Yesterday's news or today's news was the hearings about Signal Gate and now we've got the lawsuit. We've got a group called American Democracy Forward or Democracy Forward who's a public interest group who just really spends their morning, noon and Night bipartisan, in a bipartisan fashion, making public records requests, known as Freedom of Information act requests to the federal government in order to promote transparency in the government. And they. They base their existence on getting from the document information they've suspected from the very beginning that the Trump administration was hiding the ball and hiding documents and not preserving them. Of course, Donald Trump mar a Lago. Need I say more? He's not going to be respectful of the National Archives requirement, the Federal Records act requirement to preserve things. This is the guy that, that notoriously ripped up in eight pieces of paper and stuffed them in toilets as his. As his staff tried to piece them back together again. Because these are the people's documents about the people's transactions, as the Federal Records act refers to it. And you're not allowed to use Signal, a disappearing inc app with an auto deletion function for official government conversation. Really, Any conversation. It's not, as somebody said, I think it was HuffPost. It's not like they were getting a group together to decide what to order from Sweet Greens. They were talking. We're talking about bombing packages and military targets and timing of military targets for an attack on an enemy by using Signal. So the focus on the hearing side is that that's a breach of national security for obvious reasons, believe me. And if Mike Waltz hasn't changed his Venmo settings, I only half joke, but now I'm worried. Have they. I mean, I'm not the IT director for the, for the administration, but have you changed your passwords? Are you still using Signal? I mean, why? I, I joked. Why don't you just cut out the middleman and use WeChat, the Chinese WhatsApp version. Just give the Chinese everything. They lived inside of the Verizon servers and peered into Donald Trump and J.D. vance's traffic during the campaign. So of course you know. Of course. So whose idea was this? Mike Waltz decides to fat finger it and he adds Jonathan Goldberg of all people, and then tries to say, well, Goldberg, I don't know Goldberg. But he does know Goldberg. Just like Donald Trump didn't know E. Jean Carroll. And he has a whole Venmo of reporters. I don't know if he's paying them off, but there's money past changing hands, apparently, according to reporting. Anyway, so the lawsuit gets filed. What I love about the lawsuit carrot is that it's focused not on classification. The nitty gritty of classified versus top secret versus compartmented, who cares? It has to do with public records and Federal Records act violation and they nail Marco Rubio, who I had forgotten or I didn't know, is the acting archivist, because they fired the archivist. Of course, they didn't like the fact that she was considering making the Equal Rights Amendment an amendment, even though she didn't at the end. And they rewarded her by firing her. And Marco Rubio is now in charge of everything. USAID and the National Archives. But he's violated the Federal Records act by participating in signal. And Goldberg has the goods because he saw the deletions. And that means that our documents are being deleted. And it got assigned to Jeff Boasberg. Karen, what do you think's gonna happen next?
- [32:19]
Nick Nifalo
I mean, look, the law is fairly clear here. There's a couple of statutes that say, talk about the preservation of federal records. You've got 44 USC, United States Code 3101 and 5, United States Code 701, which prevents the unlawful destruction of federal records and compels people to fulfill their legal obligations to recover them if they've been deleted or to preserve them for a period of time. And it's any recorded information, regardless of the form or characteristic it's made, it's pretty clear it's black letter law. And there's no doubt in my mind that by using signal from March 11th through 15th, at least we know for sure was the dates, because that's when Jeffrey Goldberg was added to it regarding these coordinated strikes on Yemen, that that was in violation because at least one person, I think it was Marco Rubio, set it to disappearing. And when it disappears, it's gone forever. And so you're just not allowed to do it. Right. Signal's not approved as a way to maintain the records and the business of the United States government. This is how everything is done. You remember how during Trump number one, people would run, and when Trump, when he would tear up his Post IT notes, they'd run into the trash and tape them back together because you're just not allowed to do that. Right? Why do you think they're releasing the Kennedy files and all of that? It's. These things are preserved. They belong to the American people, and it's part of history, and it's part of the official record of the United States. And these people work for us, right? They're elected officials and they work for us. So you have to keep it. It's black letter law. The only question I have is will the court find that the plaintiffs here have standing to challenge it here in this particular case? That's just an open question. I have because although that is, I.
- [34:18]
Michael Popak
Thought they did a good job of establishing standing with all of their FOIA requests.
- [34:23]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, I thought so.
- [34:26]
Michael Popak
To catch people up, Treasury Secretary had a FOIA request to him, a Freedom of Information act, public. When I say foia, I mean public records request. So did Secretary of State. So did the other ones. They all said none on documents of communication. And their argument is, now we know why. Because they were using signal. How many other times did they use signal? Where did they use signal? This is fact finding that the judge would do. Judge Boasberg. So.
- [34:52]
Nick Nifalo
But it's unclear that they are. That as opposed to the archives, for example, could easily have standing to challenge their use of signal. It's just unclear whether they're going to have it. But I hope you're right. And I think it's a great lawsuit. Easy to read, very thorough and.
- [35:12]
Michael Popak
Well, the archivist isn't going to do it because it's under the control of the executive branch and it's. It's Marco Rubio. So that's not happening. I think they'll find. I think they'll find that especially in D.C. they'll find the injuries that's required for standing. And then the question is for Boberg. He's. This is going to go fast. We're going to have another fast set of hearings. I want to see what lawyer shows up the Department of Justice, this time in front of Boberg because they've asked for the temporary injunction. By the time we came on the air, he hadn't yet pulled everybody together on the docket. I'm sure he'll do that in the next 48 hours because it is a temporary restraining order request on an emergency basis. I think by this could be another Saturday hearing. He loves Saturday hearings. Did you. I read the transcript for the recent Saturday hearing.
- [35:59]
Nick Nifalo
He.
- [35:59]
Michael Popak
He was away and did not have his. He apologized. He says, I didn't have a suit. I don't have my black robe. So he was like, in soft clothes, as we like to say, as a civilian. But he said, I do appreciate all the rest of you dressing up. I love Bozberg, but I think he's gonna do some fact finding. He's gonna do some ordering. We're gonna have some assertions of executive privilege. They've already. When we get to the next segment, the Trump administration is very free to with their assertion of privileges. Oh, the state secrets privilege. Can't tell you. I think we're going to see the state secrets privilege. We're going to see the Executive privilege. You can't, you can't review us. You can't get to the bottom of this. But it's the, it's the Records Act. You either violated it or you didn't in real time. And a judge has to be able to review that. And, you know, it's not, it's not the case Jeff Boasberg wants right now, but it's randomly assigned to him. Here's what I think the Trump administration is going to try to do again. They're going to try to get rid of him. They already sent a letter to the last appellate court. Get rid of Jeb Postberg. It's not going to work. You're not getting rid of federal judges because you write a nasty letter. Yeah, hello. Oh, hi.
- [37:15]
Nick Nifalo
Sorry.
- [37:16]
Michael Popak
Write a nasty letter.
- [37:17]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it's just, it's not, it's not, it's. You're not allowed to pick and choose your judges. These are lifetime appointed judges. Every president gets to fill vacant spots of federal judges. They have to be nominated and confirmed by the Senate, and then it's a lifetime appointment. And so you don't get to. Just because you don't like them unless there's some kind of cause. You don't get to just say, oh, gee, I don't like this judge. I'd like a new one, please. It just doesn't happen that way. It's not the law. And by the way, Trump, this is their mo. How many times do you have to hear every time they get a ruling that they don't like, it's, the judge is a lunatic. The judge is. Should be impeached. The judge is, you know, like, just. They go after the attack, the judges. I can't even imagine. You know, we've been practicing law together, you know, you and I collectively, for what, 75 years between the two of us, at least. And, and have you ever seen that? Okay, what is it? Can you imagine. Can you imagine attacking judges the way they all do? I mean, I don't see anybody doing it. It's just. It's just absolutely not how you're supposed to practice.
- [38:36]
Michael Popak
No. And the judge is getting pissed off. And the Supreme Court got pissed off and stepped in to protect Boasberg.
- [38:42]
Nick Nifalo
That was unusual. That was highly unusual.
- [38:45]
Michael Popak
First time in history a Supreme Court justice issued a statement.
- [38:49]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, exactly. And I just think that's worth underscoring how unusual that is, that when people were calling for his impeachment, literally, I didn't know it was the first time in history. But I take your word for it. Okay. The first time in history, the Chief Justice, John Roberts had to come out and issue a statement, an uncharacteristic statement.
- [39:09]
Michael Popak
Basically saying, in real time.
- [39:11]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, in real time, exactly. Just this is not how we do it. If you don't, this is what appeals are for. You don't get to, you don't call for the impeachment of judges. It's dangerous what you are doing and what is happening.
- [39:22]
Michael Popak
And inconsistent. Roberts had to do it. He was almost goaded into it. You know, we, you and I covered the state of the court address that he did on the January 1st every year. And this year the topic was the judiciary is under attack. So it's very hard to watch the judiciary under attack, law firms under attack, lawyers under attack, and sit idly by. If you're the head of the other branches, you know, the Trumpers like to constantly harangue about. It's the executive branch, there's one occupant. He's got all the power. It's the unitary branch. It all resides in one person. Okay, well, the other branches have heads, too. And the head of this, of the Article 3 branch is the Chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. And let's just say he opened a dialogue with Trump. Now let's move. And there's going to be a lot of intersection of the United States Supreme Court and Donald Trump's actions. The next one we're going to talk about is Donald Trump's a Friday ago declaring, or Saturday publishing effectively a proclamation of war against Venezuela by way of a narco terrorist drug gang, saying that that's the equivalent of being at war with Venezuela and then invoking wartime powers in peacetime to try to turbocharge the deportation, not even back to where they live, to another country, into the waiting arms of a dictator wanting to abuse Venezuelans instead of giving them due process. Or as Judge Millette put it in her concurrence today in siding against the Trump administration and denying their attempt to block the temporary restraining order of Boasberg. This is the intersection of due process, the Fifth Amendment due process and the Alien Enemies Act. And you want to bring everybody kind of up to speed about what happened with Boasberg and this temporary restraining order and sort of the niceties of what's going on there. Then we'll move to the appellate, the appellate ruling.
- [41:24]
Nick Nifalo
In other Judge Boasberg news. He's certainly busy on legal AF and the Midas touch lately. Right. And these are just random Assignments, by the way, how cases get assigned to people. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of them because a lot of this stuff is going to be happening in Washington D.C. for obvious reasons, because that's where the federal government is. So essentially what's been happening and what's going on is there's something called the Alien Enemies act and there's all these history lessons that you learn when you read some of these court decisions, especially involving Trump and these laws from hundreds of years ago that they like to dig up, dust off and try to apply to modern day standards. And so you learn a lot. So what in the brief history of this is apparently back in 17, back in the 1700s, there was something first called the Alien Friends act and there was serious law, a series of laws called the Alien Friends act, the Alien and Sedition act. And it granted President Adams with sweeping authority to expel immigrants, gag the free press and purge the country of Jacobian sympathizers. So the Alien Friends act was something that gave the President sweeping powers to detain and expel any aliens deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the U.S. well, it and the Alien Sedition act said it was a crime to write, print or utter or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government, against Congress and against the President with the intent to defame or bring them into contempt or disrepute. Obviously anyone, not even a non lawyer, could hear just from me reading these laws, that these would be held unconstitutional or be derided as unconstitutional. And they were allowed to lapse in 1800. But a new law in 1798 was passed, the Alien Enemies act, that granted the President the power to detain and expel enemy aliens during times of war, invasion, predatory or predatory incursion. And so there are two clauses, one called a conditional clause and one called an operative clause. The conditional clause limits the Alien Enemies act authority to conflicts between the United States and foreign power. So in other words, you have to have declared war or you have to say there's an invasion, something like that. And then once the conditions are met, there's an operative clause. And so anyone who's part of this hostile nation or government, yet to be 14 or older, can be apprehended and removed as an alien enemy. So it basically vests the President with incredible authority to detain and deport any non citizen whose affiliation traces back to an enemy state. So, you know, it's widely been thought to believe that it only applies when we're at war. Or under invasion or some kind of real predatory incursion. It's very rarely used, and I don't think it's ever been used in the way that Trump is using it, declaring that this, this narco gang that is affiliated with the Venezuelan government is designated a foreign terrorist organization conducting an invasion or predatory incursion into the United States. And so, you know, he calls it a narco terror terrorism enterprise that is under the control of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and a cartel, et cetera. So, you know, this, this, essentially he, this was the whole scuttlebutt that you and I talked about, where they tried to turn the plane around. There was lies about whether or not the plane had already taken off. And Judge Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order, and that was appealed to the D.C. circuit. And so what's happening now is a decision, a three judge decision, two out of the three found in favor of not lifting the temporary restraining order. And it was an interesting decision because they said, look, normally temporary restraining orders aren't something that's reviewable on appeal because they are so quick. They don't last very long. However, occasionally they are when it's really important. And we're going to find that an injunction against the President of the United States is something that's important enough to trigger appellate review. Notwithstanding that, we're going to not lift the temporary restraining order because there was no, literally zero due process that was given to these individuals. They were just declared part of this group. They were swiftly flown out of the country, and they weren't even allowed or given any opportunity to appeal it. And so now they're just being held in an El Salvadoran jail, and that's where we are. So obviously it's going to go to the Supreme Court next. But, yeah, that's, that's where we are.
- [46:24]
Michael Popak
Well, we've got, you know, so there's like three different things going on, right? You got the temporary restraining order being challenged at the appellate level and a new decision there. You got Boasberg, who's trying to determine through fact finding whether there's been a contempt violation of his order, willful by the Trump administration, who, for an hour or so after an injunction was already in place, orally, continued to fly planes in violation of that order. The whole thing, he thinks, was concocted in order to deny the court jurisdiction because the filing of the lawsuit happened in the early morning of Saturday morning. Obviously, the Trump administration got wind of it. Proclamation gets published. It was secret on Friday. Plans were already in place. Wheels were already up, people, 200 people already off to this terrible prison, a prison so bad that more than 300 people have died in the last year in an El Salvadorian, in this particular El Salvadorian prison from natural causes, according to the government. If being beaten to death is a version of natural causes, then you will agree with the, with the El Salvadorian government. So why the planes were continuing to go while, while they were bullshitting with the judge in the hearing room is what the judge is trying to get to the bottom of. The Trump administration has said a, we're not going to tell you because we're going to assert state secrets. And the judge is not really sure that state secrets privilege applies when he's trying to get to the bottom of whether his order has been violated. And so they've said roadblock, we're not telling you. And the judges has briefing going on about that and will rule this week on state secrets. I think you will deny the use of state secrets and that will have to go up on appeal. He will find them, I think, in contempt. And that will be later in this week, the temporary restraining order, which again is temporary restraining order. That's what Judge Millet and Judge Henderson, who ruled against Donald Trump today in the appellate court, said. What is the rush? We're not telling you to release these people into the general population of the public. We're not telling you to stop picking them up pursuant to the Alien Enemies act or detaining them or putting them in concentration camps. You want to put them in Guantanamo, you can do that, too. But why are we deporting them out of the country when you're not even using the immigration statute to do it. Use the immigration statute, get before a judge, give them due process. We won't have a problem. And we're only talking about the short interval of time during a restraining order, which is 14 days, 20 days tops, until the judge goes to preliminary injunction, which maybe is another five days from now. What is the effing rush and you're compromising due process. Do we want to wake up in a world where people get called enemy combatants and whisked away in the middle of the night chained together? Or do we want to have them have due process? Because that's the world we want to live in. And that was the Millette Henderson position today when they ruled against overturning the temporary restraining order. Not on the merits yet, but just on the measures of when you can overturn a temporary restraining order. So for now, two of the three judges, the Trumper didn't agree. No surprise. Judge Walker, two of the three said, yeah, we're keeping the temporary restraining order in place, which means Boasberg can still find that there was contempt of that temporary restraining order. If Donald Trump doesn't like it, he can try to take an emergency, which he may do by the morning, an emergency application of the United States Supreme Court. We're in a weird area, though, Karen, because this is temporary restraining order, and appellate courts don't generally have jurisdiction over temporary restraining orders. It doesn't get triggered until preliminary injunctions, which is the next step of the food chain. So we got all of that going on at the exact same time while Boasberg presides over the new case about Signal Gate. It's a lot of fun, right? What we do.
- [50:23]
Nick Nifalo
It is, it is. It's, it's a lot. It's like a fire hose of information, though. It's hard to keep track. And as happened earlier, we do, we.
- [50:30]
Michael Popak
Say it's hard to keep track, but we do.
- [50:32]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, well, you do very well. I will say. I find it hard.
- [50:36]
Michael Popak
No, oh, no.
- [50:39]
Nick Nifalo
And things are breaking news as we are on the air constantly as well.
- [50:43]
Michael Popak
The Venmo thing, while we were, while we were doing it. So we're going to talk finally about a couple of things here. I know, Karen, you're tight for time. We're gonna, we're gonna definitely cover the voting, the impact of. On voting by Donald Trump's executive order and what that impact would be and how the states are going to challenge that, led by the attorneys general that we all love in New Jersey and in New York and in other places. And then if we have time, I'll touch on some things that happen at the United States Supreme Court, including a request by Donald Trump to have the Supreme Court intervene in an area related to hiring 16,000 probationary workers back. And a oral argument about whether two black districts in Louisiana voting districts is two too many and whether the Voting Rights act is really on life support. We're going to cover all that. But first we got another word from our sponsors, which is a great way to support the show. Comment hit subscribe Midas Touch Network over on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Legal is the other great way to subscribe. Great. I made an announcement today. Starting Monday, starting Monday, all those contributors, led by Dave Aronberg, the Florida law guy, man that you love from court, court authorities and true crime, they're all coming over. Boom. Coming over to Legal I and doing their work there for us exclusively. And that's going to start on Monday. So that's the various ways to support us and of course watching our sponsors commercials, but also if you have an opportunity supporting them that would help our show as well. So here's another word from our sponsors. So I went to my 40th high school reunion recently. While many of my classmates were excited about retiring or have retired, well, I brought my infant daughter to the reunion and I won the Youngest Child contest hands down. 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So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com legalaf and use the code legal af at checkout for 50 15% off. Welcome back. You're on legal af the midweek edition, of course. Karen, tell me, tell our audience about what Trump just tried to do is trying to do by executive order on voting and then we'll talk about what I'm sure the states are going to do in response.
- [56:17]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah, so another executive order. Trump really loves these executive orders. This one's called Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections and boy, is this one a doozy. This one rolls back what, 20 years of voting rights and everything that people have been fighting for for so long. This is a Republican's wet dream. Excuse my grossness, but it's absolutely unbelievable what they put in here. And it's quite well written in the sense that clearly they must have some good lawyers working on their team because they're trying to make it as bulletproof as possible. Now, let me explain why I say that. What's the difference between an executive order law and when can a president issue an executive order? And it's really pretty fairly simple. Okay. The only place or the only people who are empowered to make laws are Congress, right? They pass statutes and either the president signs it or if they veto it, Congress has to override that statute. But what an executive order can do is a president can essentially interpret a law through an executive order, but they can't make new law unless, except for a few very, very small narrow circumstances, but they essentially can't make new laws. So what they did here is they cited to all the laws that they claim they are interpreting and it comes from the president's Article 2 constitutional power that vests in the President the executive power to take its quote, take care that the laws be faithfully executed. And that is what, what, how they, it's justified that they can make these executive orders and they essentially shoehorn it within that part of the Constitution. So that's what an executive order is. And so I say that because that's how this was written. This is literally a, it's saying, okay, there's this law, this is how we're going to interpret it. This law, this is how we're going to interpret it. And you know, he starts by citing India and Brazil who rely on biometric data saying, you know, we rely however, on, on self attestation for citizenship. And Germany and Canada require paper ballots counted in public by local officials. By local officials. Remember that's what they tried to do in certain states where they thought that they were gonna, was going to be close calls. They wanted to slow the process and make them count. By, you know, by, by and large who are the people in the states who, who are, who are doing election related things? It's mostly, mostly Republicans because the vast majority of states legislatures are controlled by Republicans in this country. They also cite to, they cited to Denmark and Sweden that limits mail in voting to those unable to vote in person. And they, you don't count late arriving votes regardless of the postmark. It's all the things they complained about in the election until of course Trump won. And then suddenly this is the fairest, most secure, best election ever. But they were setting up all these issues basically saying we want to require identification, citizenship in person, they don't like mail and all these things to restrict people's access to voting. I mean look, nobody wants anyone who cannot vote and should not vote to vote. That's not, I don't think anyone, any legitimate person is advocating for that. Nobody should be able to vote who isn't a legally legitimate voter. But really what happens here is this is voter suppression, this is voter intimidation. This is requiring people to go over and above to get certain documents that they might not have. It's to disenfranchise people who might be on the margins of society. Right? So it's basically you need an identification and you need a certain type of Identification, like a passport or a real id, the ones that, that you have, you know, they just, they're very, very prescriptive about what kind of identification you have to have. What if you don't have an id? What if you lost your id? What if you're somebody who can't drive and you know, like, like somebody who might, like, might have special needs, you know, and can't drive? Why shouldn't they be?
- [60:38]
Michael Popak
I'll give you a real life example. My mother, my mother is in a wheelchair. For those that don't know, it has been for about nine years and she hasn't driven in all that amount of time because it's so difficult, mobility wise to get my mother to get a picture taken. I've never gotten her a picture, a non expired photo id. Now that makes it very difficult because I wanted to fly my mother to live closer to me recently, and I'm literally going to have to do it by transport, by car because I don't have a photo ID for her and she can't get one. Does that mean my mother doesn't have the right to vote? She's 90 years old. She, you know, she's voted every year since she was 18 or whatever the period was. And this, this, this callousness about the Trump administration. Social Security recipients are going to have to check in with like their probation officers on a weekly basis to Social Security, a Social Security phone line that they've cut funding for and field offices for. They got to check in because we got to get to the bottom of the 1% of fraud that's going on in Social Security. You know, it all falls into the same boat. We don't care what barriers to entry that we create, as long as it screws the Democrats and those that aren't maga. That's it. Let's just call it out. Sorry, Karen. Once my mother got in my head, I got very fired.
- [62:06]
Nick Nifalo
No, no, I get it. Look, I have a child on an ad on the autism spectrum. She's never going to drive. And you know, it's a challenge to get an identification for her. I mean, and, and it's just, it's, it's, everybody has, I'm sure, an example, a real life example of somebody who, it's, who isn't in necessarily. This is easy for. Right? Or it's, it's, it's, it's just, it's, if you read the executive order and you look at it, it's, it's, it's issue after issue that they tried to impose in the last election to create these barriers for people to come and be able to vote. I mean I was thinking of military officials who are overseas and who are fighting for our country and they might not have been. They might be in a war zone and couldn't get their mail in ballot in time in the mail.
- [62:59]
Michael Popak
Thank you for your service. But you're disenfranchised.
- [63:02]
Nick Nifalo
Exactly. I mean there's so. Or look at college students. College students don't always have, you know, don't always have a passport or don't always have their ID with them or you know, it's just. You just. It's just really we've come so far over the last 20 years of allowing more access to voting and allowing people to vote in lots of different ways. And this is just fake news to say that there's all these illegal immigrants and dead people voting. Nobody has ever found that just despite what they are saying.
- [63:34]
Michael Popak
And it is a 000. I'm almost done. One percent.
- [63:41]
Nick Nifalo
Yeah.
- [63:42]
Michael Popak
Voter fraud problem. Which means there's no voter fraud problem. And then so I'll just. This, this part of it. I'll. I'll mention the states already if they haven't already drafted it because it all comes out of the. We got the playbook before the. The he got elected. It's like. It's like the opposing team in the football and you know, in the NFL left the playbook of the bathroom right before the game. We got the playbook. We got the 900 pages of the project. 20, 25. We knew they were going to do this. So a lot of these suits are drafted already. That's how they get filed so quickly. And so I'm sure tomorrow, tonight, before the week is up, there's going to be a filing by 18 to 22 of your favorite attorneys general, we can name them, led by Letitia James or the attorney general for New Jersey or the one for California or Illinois or fill in the blank. And they're all going to come together and they're going to say you are in. This is an incursion on our rights as states given to us under federalism to control the time, means, manner and method of voting. And it's up to our legislatures to do that. And the feds can't impose this on us. And it undermines people's and it disenfranchises people. And then we're going to have to see what court they file it in. We know it'll be in D.C. or it'll be up in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, California or the like. And it's coming and it's gonna again, be, as I've only half joked, I've said to the Supreme Court justices who watch this show, cancel your summer vacations. I know you have these elaborate on the right side, you got these elaborate summer vacations. Got it. And, but cancel it because you're gonna be doing a lot of emergency hearings over the summer and the like. So Karen, as we know, as I, as I had said earlier, had a, something that kind of crunched her there at the end. So let me just wrap up the show while we're here all together. Again, we're indebted and humbled by our audience, the Midas Touch audience, the Legal AF audience. Some of that overlaps, A lot of that overlaps. Some of it's not. Some people are just legal AF people, some of them are just Midas people, so to speak. But you all come together here and support in such, I mean, I would not swap our audience and level of commitment, enthusiasm for any other YouTube channels audience out there. And I wouldn't. And I can name five or six that people think are our, our peers or our competitors. And I would, I wouldn't trade anybody for it because, you know, we know it within our, you know, in the fiber of our being, how supportive our group is, how important they find our content. And we take it seriously. And it's a responsibility that we won't let you down. We really won't. We get up every morning, all of us, from the back at back of the house, the production team led by Salty and Sid and other people, Jeremy and the rest, and the brothers and their, their shining guiding light of where we need to end up. And I kind of took that with me over to Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Lastly, I'll just touch two quick things in a two minute kind of speed chess. Okay, speed, speed dating. Here we go. United States Supreme Court still sitting on an application by the Trump administration to intervene and not make them rehire 100 and sorry, 16,000 young or inexperienced probationary workers back to the federal workforce. The administration doesn't want to comply with Judge Alsop's order up in San Francisco coming out of the 9th Circuit and we're still sitting around. It's not a good sign of the Trump administration. And yet they have not intervened yet, nor have they set a briefing schedule, which is really weird. So it may just die by lack of interest at the Supreme Court level. That's one. So again, another opportunity for the Supreme Court to Bail out Donald Trump and you know he's losing votes on the Supreme Court, bashing judges who are well respected, like Boseberg, who is the roommate of Kavanaugh in Yale Law School and friends with Chief Justice Roberts. That's not winning him any friends at a moment where he needs every vote at the United States Supreme Court. And we just covered unprecedented, Dina Dahl and me on the Legal AF YouTube channel, the oral argument about Louisiana's voting map and whether the two districts, which are predominantly black in a state that is more than at a six total, which is more than that as a percentage of the population, whether that's good enough, not good enough, just right, violates the Voting Rights Act. And here's the scary part. Kavanaugh came up with, why do we even have the Voting Rights act anymore? Isn't there a time limit on it? We're colorblind as a nation, aren't we? Said the white guy to the almost other white people that were on the Supreme Court. No, we're not colorblind. We're not gender neutral. We're not color neutral in this country. What country do you live in? So it does concern me, even though I don't think the map is going to be overturned because they're going to find, I think that it was created for political purposes to save the hide of Mike Johnson from Louisiana, the speaker of the House and Steve Scalise. That's why it looks so weird. It's shaped like a snake, appropriately, but it also it's not done for racial purposes. I think it survives. But I don't like Kavanaugh trying to lift up under the hood of the Voting Rights act again and trying to get rid of it, which came out of our civil rights movement signed by President Johnson. So we've reached the end of Midas Touch and our Legal AF midweek edition. Join us on Saturday. I do that show. We had our four year birthday. Midas had its five year birthday. We had our four year birthday, although we're really four and a half because we were doing Ben and I were doing a legal show that was the precursor to Legal af. Earlier we just called it something else. Five year anniversary for Midas. Hit the subscribe button for their Drive for five. Drive for five million. Come over to Legal AF. We just hit, we just tossed over, rolled over 500,000. We're trying to get to a million in under a year. And we're getting there with our new court authority. True Crime contributors led by Dave Aronberg who starts on Monday with us exclusively. Joining our other contributor, Shan Wu, former attorney general, deputy general counsel for the attorney general under Janet Reno and a great defense lawyer in his own right under a brand he calls under color Court Account, Court Accountability Action, Mike Sachs, Lisa Graves, Alex Aronson looking at corruption and money in the federal court system. Mike Sachs is going to be coming on with Ellie Bestel to do some work with us as well. And he's an amazing legal commentator as well. Dina Dahl does that show Unprecedented with me and other hot takes Caren free McNiffalo, which he's not busy being a practicing lawyer and a law and order commentator or a legal advisor. Come over to Legal AF, the YouTube channel and of course, support us on patreon. We have patreon.com legalaf where you get some exclusive content can't get anywhere else. So until my next reporting and my Saturday edition with Ben Mysalas, Illegal AF, the YouTube channel, Illegal AF, the Hot Takes over on Midas. I'm Michael Popox. Shout out to the Midas mighty and the legal afers.