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- [00:01]
Ben Miceli
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the US. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply hablas Espanol Spritz du Dzoic if you've heard.
- [00:34]
Michael Popak
That sound from Babbel before, I bet you do. Babbel is the science backed language learning app that actually works with quick 10 minute lessons. Handcrafted by over 200 language experts. Babbel gets you on your way to speaking a new language in just a few weeks with over 16 million subscriptions sold and a 20 day money back guarantee. Just start speaking another language with Babbel right now. Up to 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com Spotify podcast spelled B A B-B-E-L.com Spotify podcast rules and Restrictions Morning.
- [01:01]
Ben Miceli
Decisions A creamy mocha Frappuccino drink A.
- [01:03]
Michael Popak
Sweet vanilla, maybe a smooth caramel or.
- [01:06]
Ben Miceli
That white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Start your day with bottled Starbucks Frappuccino drinks. Pick up a bottle near you wherever you buy your groceries.
- [01:16]
Michael Popak
This episode is brought to you by Enterprise Mobility from fleet management to flexible truck rentals to technology solutions, Enterprise Mobility helps businesses find the right mobility solutions so they can find new opportunities.
- [01:30]
Ben Miceli
Because if your business is on the road, they want to make sure it's.
- [01:33]
Michael Popak
On the road to success. Enterprise Mobility Moving you moves the world.
- [01:38]
Ben Miceli
Find your road@enterprisemobility.com.
- [01:44]
Michael Popak
I'm William Goudge, a.
- [01:45]
Ben Miceli
Vuri collaborator and professional ultrarunner from the uk. I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55 day 3064 mile run across the US. So I know a thing or two about performance wear. When it comes to relaxing, I look.
- [02:01]
Michael Popak
For something ultra versatile and comfy. The Ponto Performance Jogger from Vuri is.
- [02:06]
Ben Miceli
Perfect for all of those things. It's the comfiest jogger I've ever worn and the Dream Knit fabric as well. Always reach for them over other joggers. Check them out in the Dreamlit collection by going to vuorie.com william that's v u O-R-I.com/william where new customers can receive 20% off their first order plus enjoy.
- [02:28]
Michael Popak
Free shipping in the US on orders.
- [02:30]
Ben Miceli
Over $75 and free returns exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. It was a busy week in the courts. It was a busy week in Congress where the MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives tried to push through and did push through in the House so far, that disastrous budget bill where they snuck in a provision trying to divest federal courts of the right to issue contempt rulings. They didn't say against who, which is also makes it extra unconstitutional as well. But they seem to have one person in mind, Donald Trump. Why? Because he keeps on losing and losing and losing. And in various cases around the country, the federal courts are getting closer to issuing those criminal contempt rulings. And I think one of the issues that's going to arise Michael Popak and legal a efforts is the extent and degree of the Supreme Court's immunity decision back from 2023 saying that Donald Trump was entitled to absolute immunity. A horrific decision indeed. One of the questions though that's going to arise, especially as Donald Trump's been doing a lot of things this week for his personal businesses to enrich himself like this meme coin dinner, is which conduct at issue is going to be viewed as personal and private and which conduct is going to be viewed as within his official capacity as it relates to him. But let's be very clear, the absolute immunity decision from the United States Supreme Court does not impact criminal immunity or criminal implications against people like Kristi Noem, people like Tom Holman. The borders are people like Marco Rubio and others. They do not have the same immunity that Donald Trump was given. You know, so you had Kristi Noem this week, Michael Popak, you may have seen it. She was making posts like suck it. She wrote suck it after different things that were happening in the courts. I mean it's just so humiliating to see the cabinet level position someone say suck it. But I'm not sure why she's saying that. I mean she suffered a humiliating loss at the end of the week and probably record time as well as a federal district court struck down the Trump regime's attempt to block foreign students from attending Harvard. The Trump regime lost their case, their executive order against the law firm Brenner Drock in front of a George W. Bush appointed judge. The another federal judge blocked the Trump regime from dismantling the Department of Education. So we'll talk about all of those cases. It was a busy week in front of the United States Supreme Court as well. A really bad decision that was reached by the supreme court that overturned 90 years of precedent case called Humphreys Executor which basically allowed for independent agencies to have provisions that would allow the commissioners of the agencies to continue on unless they were fired for cause. There had to be a justification and not allow a president to fire them. The Supreme Court on their shadow docket overruled that basically allowing Donald Trump to dismantle and fire all of these various heads of commissions. This case related to the National Labor Relations Board as well as the Merit Systems Board. But the Supreme Court created a kind of a made up exemption knowing that Donald Trump's a total maniac and said but you can't touch the Federal Reserve because that's like the initial bank of America that was created, the First national bank. So you can't touch them. Which absolutely makes zero sense. There's zero logic to it. But it shows that they create these weird compromises in their own mind, the far right wing does to basically gut the country but not gut it. So much so that we're just hanging in purgatory basically. And we should talk about all of that and more. Michael Popak but it's good to have you on. We missed you. Michael Popak of course you got you heard from all the legal afores out there on the passing of your mother, a beautiful, incredible matriarch of your family who will be missed dearly. It's just, it's great to have you back, Michael Popeye.
- [06:54]
Michael Popak
Really, really appreciate it. I gotta tell you, the love and support from the brothers from the Midas Touc team, from the Midas Touch and the legal the Midas Mighty and the Legal afers have been very, very, very important and meaningful to my family and me. And just like you and your brothers have a tremendously amazing and strong mother that helped make you who you are. I am who I am because of my mother who was a single mother twice just and in a time period in our society where that was not a fun thing to be during the 60s and then the 70s and she was there was no other than your mother equal. There was no mother in America who was more proud of what you and I have been doing on Legal AF and Midas Touch than my mother. In fact, you and you know, because we joked about it, that I was, I was able and it's now a great memory that I will carry with me forever. I was able about three years ago when I was you and I were just starting the pod, maybe four years ago, I was visiting my mother. She lived in an assisted living facility in Georgia And I, you know, I carry my equipment everywhere as you do. And I was able to sit in the courtyard of this alf and the audience didn't know it. You knew it. That I wasn't just speaking to the camera into the laptop. My mother in her wheelchair was on the other side of the table watching me actually live record it with you. And that is now. I mean, at the time I thought it was meaningful, but it's such a meaningful moment. And you know, my dad passed 10 years ago, so he never saw that last chapter in my life, in my career, marriage to my wife and my baby's arrival and everything related to you and legal AF and Midas touch. But my mother was there, you know, right until a week ago Sunday. So, yes, I do appreciate it. Sorry to take up so much time about it, but I did want, it is cathartic for me to be a part of this fellowship in this community that we put together. And I do appreciate it.
- [08:52]
Ben Miceli
I want to show some clips of Kristi Noem, what she said when it was announced that basically the Homeland Security Department was going to treat Harvard like a terroristic organization because Harvard was not allowing the Trump regime to take over all of the academic activities. That's what the Trump regime asked for in this letter. Everybody remember where this all started. The Trump regime sends a letter to Harvard. We want to basically run Harvard now. We want to know the political views of your professors and your students. We want to have hiring and firing power. We wanna let you know which students you can let in, which students you can't let in. You can have diversity. You know, it's gotta basically be the students who we want to go to Harvard. We want full control. And then Harvard hired actually very prominent Republican attorneys and they responded with a fierce letter. And then the Trump regime responded, well, we never meant to send you that letter to begin with, but now you're attacking us. So now we must attack you. You should have realized that we sent you the initial letter by mistake. So then the Trump regime has been vendetta, not just against Harvard, but against universities across the nation. And there's a pattern here, right? Like on Friday, the Trump regime targeted though the top American corporation, the most profitable American corporations. Apple caused $80 billion loss in Apple. They attacked the top university in America which attracts the top foreign students who create corporations in the United States. They attack Harvard. And the goal of all of this, in my view, is to dismantle and destroy the United States of America. So Harvard says, no, you can't touch us. And Then the Trump regime starts saying, okay, well, we're gonna take away this billion dollar grant, this billion dollar grant. The federal government's not gonna provide any support of the research that Harvard's doing that, like, save lives. That's, like, actually helpful for the American people. And then the Trump regime said, aha. We're going to use our authority to prevent foreign students from going to Harvard. And if you're a foreign student and you go to Harvard, we're going to hereby declare you to be undocumented, and therefore, we're going to have immediate deportation rights, and we'll send you wherever the hell we want to send you. Which we know with the Trump regime, that can mean South Sudan, that can mean Libya, that can mean concentration camps in El Salvador. And of course, earlier this week as well, we found out about Trump sending Burmese nationals to South Sudan in violation of a Massachusetts federal judge, Judge Murphy's order. You have to keep track of all of these crazy things and dangerous things that this Trump regime is doing. I didn't even mention that in my intro. So here's what Kristi Noem said. Michael Popak, I want you to react to it. Let's play her clip where she says 27% of their students are foreign students. So they're gonna have to find somewhere else to go. Nanny, nanny poo poo. Here, play the clip. As you mentioned, 18% of Harvard's freshman class this year is. Are foreign. They're foreigners here on student visas. What happens? Where do they go now? What do they do?
- [11:55]
Michael Popak
Yeah.
- [11:55]
Ben Miceli
We have given Harvard multiple opportunities to.
- [11:58]
Michael Popak
Give us the documentation that we've requested to conduct oversight.
- [12:01]
Ben Miceli
We've asked them for the backgrounds on students that attend their university, their criminal.
- [12:06]
Michael Popak
Activity on campus, off of campus, any.
- [12:09]
Ben Miceli
Video or audio footage they have of.
- [12:11]
Michael Popak
This violent activity, and they have just simply not complied. This is something that they need to do in order to comply with this.
- [12:19]
Ben Miceli
Program as it was established. And so, unfortunately, all of their foreign students will face the consequences of Harvard's lack of protecting the individuals that go there. So 27% of their students are foreign students, and they will have to find.
- [12:35]
Michael Popak
Some other university to go to, and.
- [12:37]
Ben Miceli
Hopefully they find one that cares about them and provides a safe environment. You know, that's what abusers sound like. That's what abusers sound like. So, Popak, walk us through what Harvard did, the filing, what the outcome was and where we're at right now.
- [12:54]
Michael Popak
Yeah. Let's start with the attack on the First Amendment that we are watching. No federal government doesn't get to, quote unquote, supervise the activities of a, of a university, a private university that has a major endowment. I may not agree with some of the things or a lot of the things that are said on college campuses, but unless there's a direct link to some sort of terrorist activity or terrorist funding, they have the right to say it. And the fact that it makes me uncomfortable or other people in our audience uncomfortable is the very reason under the First Amendment that they have the right to say it. And whether they're foreign students or they are US citizens or however they are here, if they're here on US soil, then they are allowed to criticize government policy or the actions of an ally or anything else. Again, if they're not directly linked to terrorism or otherwise, then they have the right to do that. And that's why the American Civil Liberties Union sometimes takes positions and I fund them. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU and they take positions sometimes that I kind of scrunch up my nose about. But it's that very feeling of scrunching up my nose is the reason why I need to defend the First Amendment. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my last dying breath your right to say it. And what we have is an out of control, lawless presidency that's deciding to use the power of the purse string and weaponizing all of his departments and weaponizing the Department of Justice and weaponizing voter fraud investigations and protections and all of that in order to retaliate against entities and organizations that he finds to be unsavory because of his weirdo diversity, equity and inclusion position. Dismantling the oldest university in America brick by brick is not what people voted for. Just like we don't want Republicans in our bedroom, the females and our women in our lives, gynecologist appointments. We don't want them, you know, regulating academia and how things are taught and what's taught and, and they're not the only university that has 20% or more of foreign students. And it's a, it is a little cottage industry that universities use. By charging top dollar for foreign students to come here, it subsidizes their endowment, it subsidizes the tuition of other people like the other 80% that are there and the fact that they're threatening graduate students and undergraduates who are just coming here to have an education. It is a very small percentage, very small of that 27% that decides they want to pull out bed sheets and start spray painting them and going out into the square, Harvard Square and arguing about apartheid or Hamas or whatever the scandal of the week is for the Trump administration and the rest are being tarred and feathered by the Trump administration to get back at Harvard. There's a very good reason, as you alluded to, leading into the segment that Harvard has. They've circled the wagons and there are a number of leading Republican lawyers that have come out in support of not just Harvard, but all the other institutions. All the other institutions have signed letters or have indicated their support from Yale and Columbia and the other Ivy leagues, even ones who have like bent over to try to satisfy this out of control presidency. And like University of Pennsylvania and Columbia and different places, even when they're doing that, they're still supporting Harvard. Harvard hired, as we've talked about before, Robert her, we will now all remember him forever as being the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland, who used to be a U.S. attorney under Donald Trump, who went after Joe Biden or investigated Joe Biden for the document issue. And now apparently we've gotten or about to get the audio transcripts of the interview between her and Biden, as if we need that at this moment in time. But her, who's a Harvard graduate, joined forces with a leading lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, who until about a month ago was the ethics and ethicist for the Trump Organization. So he's a Trump lawyer, but he's also now jumped off sides. He's representing Abrego Garcia and his law firm is and that kind of thing. So they joined together. It started with nasty letter writing, which you and I as litigators know well, I've settled basically, I don't know, two cases my entire life based on nasty letter writing. I may have other grounds to get a settlement, but that's not usually it. And so they went past nasty letter writing. It ended up a lawsuit that they filed as more funding. It's almost like you're dealing with the Trump administration kidnappers who just keep chopping off fingers, trying to get it, trying to get you to pay the ransom. You know, first it's the ear, then it's the finger, and then Lord knows, what's that? So they keep $30 million in funding. We're going to cut off, $60 million in funding we're going to cut off and you know, are you going to say uncle yet? Are you going to capitulate? Are you going to give in and let Kristi Noem run your faculty and. No, we're not going to. And this case is ultimately going to end up with the Supreme Court. But why don't you update them on the actual sort of legal proceedings that happened in the last week while I was out?
- [18:17]
Ben Miceli
Yeah, the legal proceedings. You had Harvard immediately file for a emergency injunction, and then in record time, you had a federal court in Massachusetts grant that injunction right away. I mean, quite literally, Popak, I don't think we've seen an injunction issued, you know, as quick as we saw here. So it's yet another loss for the Trump regime here. And then there were actually some other cases because the Trump regime tried to attack international students in other federal courts as well. So there were other injunctions that people may have heard of that related to kind of taking away the status of international students at schools. It didn't directly relate to the issue with Harvard because in Harvard, it was the Homeland Security Department kind of wholesale, basically labeling Harvard a harbor of dangerous individuals such that it was not even able to receive the certain types of visas. Now, Popak, Donald Trump was asked about, why were you targeting Harvard like this? And he gave one of the most bizarre responses as well. He's like, because they don't know basic arithmetic. They don't even know. They don't know two plus two equals four in Harvard. That's why they don't know two plus two equals 4 in Harvard. So anyway, the status that we're at right now is a judge in Massachusetts, Judge Burroughs, granted Harvard's requested tro, and now there's going to be more briefing on the issue as well. Should also be noted, right around the same time that that happened, you had Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee as well, ruling against the Trump regime. Their attack on the law firm of Jenner and Block, it says it's by attacking Jenner and Block, the law firm and trying to prohibit the law firm from getting security clearances and representing clients, because Donald Trump doesn't like the lawyers. They said it's blatant. This George W. Bush appointee says it's blatantly unconstitutional and probably doubly so. And it's one of the most egregious cases that, that, that, that, that he's ever seen. So that's the status there. You know, another case to point out as well was a federal judge's ruling as it relates to the Department of Education dismantling. It was a judge. It was, it was a federal district judge named Judge Joan. A federal judge has blocked the Trump regime from dismantling the Department of Education and ordered the administration to reinstate Employees fired during the mass termination. And I just got to read this for you because all of the rulings popo sound like this as well against Donald Trump. They always begin with for over 150 years or for over 200 years or for over. They all start like that. And if you're like, didn't you read me a ruling like this, Ben and Michael Popak before? Because a lot of these cases are saying this has never happened in our country before ever. So this is an example of that. When Trump tries to impound the funding for these departments that he wants to dismantle. The Trump regime knows that without the authorization of Congress, they can't dismantle an agency. They can't completely just destroy the Department of Education or destroy fema, which they want to do, or destroy Veterans affairs or destroy, you know, any of these agencies. So what they do is something called impoundment. They impound, they take the funds that they're supposed to faithfully execute the laws that are passed by Congress and they don't faithfully execute the laws. And they give it an interpretation. Even though Congress says the Department of Education should get the money. Well, we think that that's woke. And Congress never addressed woke money. So we can't give woke. So that's how they'll do it. And they say we're not going to give the money. But this is what Judge June had to say, also from Massachusetts. For over 150 years, the federal government has played a crucial role in education. Congress created the Department of education in 1979 to streamline federal support of education into a signal, a single cabinet level department. The department's role in education across the nation cannot be understated. It administers the federal student loan portfolio, provides research and technological assistance to states and their educational institution, disperses federal education funds and monitors and enforces compliance with numerous federal laws. Congress enacted these laws to promote equality and antidiscrimination in schools, assist students with special needs and disabilities, ensure privacy and much more. Then it goes on to talk about how since a reduction in force memo by the Trump regime, basically funding has stopped to the Department of Education. And once again here, just like the defunding of fema, Michael Popak Especially as we head into hurricane season, which starts in just six or seven days officially, and experts expect it's going to be a bad hurricane season. This is hurting red states, it's hurting blue states, it's hurting purple states. There are actually a lot more people in red states who depend on the Department of education. So, you know, if you're in the red state and why I'm combining this in this section, if you're like, yeah, they went after Harvard. Yeah, well, they stole your lunch money too. They stole your free lunch. Okay. They stole, you know, if you have a child with disabilities that would be funded through the Department of Education and grants and things like that to your school, that's going to end as well. So you're being targeted as well. And the Harvards are being targeted as well. And that's why we as Americans need to all come together and recognize that really all this is and it's further reflected in the disastrous bill that we'll talk about in the next segment is a dismantling of America and trying to create a Russian style government here in the United States. The biggest redistribution of wealth from that disastrous budget bill where they slip in provisions which are unconstitutional. And we'll explain why when we come back from the break about preventing divesting federal judges from being able to make contempt rulings. I mean, really, Article one is going to tell Article three you can't issue contempt rulings. But then you look at the distribution of wealth and I'm not even talking about the millions of people who are going to lose healthcare. I'm not even talking about yet the millions of people who are going to be kicked off Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. I'm not even talking about the cuts to HUD which is going to result in rental assistance programs being got. I'm not even talking about yet the women's reproductive rights and access to reproductive care. That's totally gutted here. Just if you look at the direct bill, it literally steals $1,000 from people who make between $0 and $50,000 will just they lose $1,000. And then if you make over $4.2 million you've now gained based on the direct result on day one, setting aside all the other kind of tax tricks you're going to be able to do, you've now gained close to $400,000 because your $400,000 has literally come from taking $1,000 from people who have made between zero and 50,000. And I haven't even got yet to how the wealthy are also getting all that money funded by the fact that money from Medicaid, Medicare and all those other programs are being taken away. So let's take our first quick break of the show. I want to remind everybody about the Legal AF YouTube channel, which is absolutely crushing it. Everybody go to the Legal AF YouTube channel. They're well on their way to 1 million subscribers there. It's doing absolutely great. Michael Popo's also got the Legal AF substack and they're doing a really good job on that sub stack. Talking about the cases and what's going on. The Legal AF substack. Make sure you check that substack out as well. And also Michael Popo's law firm, the Popoc firm, is doing really well. We've got so many of our audience members who have had cases or family members or friends who have had cases reaching out to Michael Popach. Now, the firm handles catastrophic injury cases. So bad trucking accidents, bad car accidents, wrongful death cases, sexual assault, sexual harassment cases, big medical malpractice cases. If your case or someone wrongful death cases. If your case or you know, someone who fits that criteria, reach out to Popak. If it doesn't fit that criteria, I just, you can still, it probably doesn't make sense because like POPAC has a team looking for those types. He can't handle every case. So if it's one of those types of cases, reach out to Popox firm popoc. Where can they find you?
- [27:17]
Michael Popak
Yeah. Thanks, Ben. It's easy. Come to www.thepopoc firm and the name is spelled P O P O K thepopocfirm.com or you can call a 1-800-number 1877, Popak AF.
- [27:35]
Ben Miceli
Let's take our first quick break of the show. When we get back, let's let's talk about what's hidden in that disastrous budget bill. Let's talk about whether Caroline Levitt may have actually waived immunity for Donald Trump by saying that the crypto event was in his, quote, private time. And then let's talk about these big cases that went before the Supreme Court, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk running to SCOTUS to try to get them to block any discovery in Doge. We'll be right back after our first quick break.
- [28:07]
Michael Popak
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- [32:59]
Ben Miceli
Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to our pro Democracy sponsors right there. The discount codes are in the description below. Popak I did a video on this early this week and a lot of people want to hear your perspective on it as well. We all know that Donald Trump held this meme coin dinner. The top 220 individuals or entities, most of them from foreign countries who purchased Trump meme coins enriching Donald Trump personally got a private invite to Trump resort or golf course in Virginia. I did a video on it earlier this morning as well where he gave him like Trump gave him like the grossest looking steak also and like like salad that looked like literally someone just like threw like leaves together. But you know what, what else would you expect with the, with the Trump thing like that? They weren't there for the steak and the salad. Let's just say. Let's just say that. So one of the questions was though, as Donald Trump is violating the law potentially by doing things like that, is that now in his personal capacity and obviously right now at this moment where Trump controls the DOJ and where the MAGA Republicans in the House and Senate are absolutely feckless and complicit aiders and abettors of Trump's fascism, you know they're not gonna do anything right now, but in the future with the fact that there are, if crimes are being committed, does he have a claim to immunity or not? Immunity. So Caroline Levitt, I think shot, thought she was being helpful because she didn't want to turn over any information about the guest list, about who was there, who was having access. Who are these people who paid at least a million dollars, some paid 15, $17 million to be there? I think we the people should know who the hell are going to be there, what is going on. But she goes, that's his personal time. That's his personal time. Here's what she had to say. Let's play.
- [35:03]
Michael Popak
You're welcome. Thanks for being here, Garrett.
- [35:04]
Ben Miceli
Go ahead, Caroline.
- [35:05]
Michael Popak
You guys are very proud of your record on transparency.
- [35:08]
Ben Miceli
I have two transparency related questions for you.
- [35:10]
Michael Popak
Sure. On the President's dinner tonight, will the White House commit to making a list of the attendees public so people can.
- [35:16]
Ben Miceli
See who's paying for that kind of access to the President? Well, as you know, Garrett, this question has been raised with the President.
- [35:23]
Michael Popak
I have also addressed the dinner tonight.
- [35:24]
Ben Miceli
The President is attending it in his private personal time.
- [35:28]
Michael Popak
It is not a White House dinner.
- [35:29]
Ben Miceli
It's not taking place here at the White House. But certainly I can raise that question.
- [35:33]
Michael Popak
And try to get you an answer for it. Okay. And on the Qatari aircraft, the Air.
- [35:37]
Ben Miceli
Force has said they're going to classify.
- [35:39]
Michael Popak
All the information about the work that has to get done to bring it.
- [35:42]
Ben Miceli
Up to Snuf to be Air Force One. Previous Air Force One contracts, including the.
- [35:46]
Michael Popak
One that the President entered into in 2018, are public.
- [35:50]
Ben Miceli
That's available knowledge.
- [35:51]
Michael Popak
Will the White House commit to releasing who.
- [35:53]
Ben Miceli
Who's doing that work and the cost of that work? I understand that some elements might be.
- [35:56]
Michael Popak
Classified about specific systems. Will we commit to releasing that basic information so people can see ultimately what this costs?
- [36:03]
Ben Miceli
Well, Garrett, as you know, that's a question for the Department of Defense in the United States Air Force, who is accepting this jet as part of their fleet? Declassify anything you want. Well, you'll have to ask the Department of Defense in the United States Air Force who is accepting this jet as part of its fleet.
- [36:16]
Michael Popak
Peter? The President. Yeah.
- [36:19]
Ben Miceli
Well, go and ask Pete Hegseth, who just issued his own unconstitutional order basically banning the press from even walking around certain hallways in the Pentagon that they always had access to. So the people who sell concessions and janitorial staff and others, and I think just like random visitors now have more access in the Pentagon than their reporters actually get. And then that's not to forget that the reporters were kicked out of their office space in the Pentagon. But anyway, Michael Popaki, take a look at that. Disastrous absolute immunity decision rendered by the Supreme Court back in the October term of 2023. And here's what they said about unofficial acts. As for a president's unofficial acts, there's no immunity. Although presidential immunity is required for official actions to ensure that the president's decision making is not distorted by the threat of future litigation stemming from those actions, that concern does not support immunity for unofficial conduct. The separation of powers does not bar a criminal prosecution or a prosecution predicated on the president's unofficial acts. The first step in deciding whether a former president is entitled to immunity from a particular prosecution is to distinguish his official from unofficial actions. In this case, no court has thus far drawn that distinction. Then it goes on to say critical threshold issues in this case are how to differentiate between a president's official acts and unofficial actions and how to do so with respect to the indictment's extensive and detailed allegations. The court offers guidance on these issues. Then it talks about the context, the Context on page 29, the context in which the president, notwithstanding the prominence of his position, speaks in an unofficial capacity, perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader. To the extent that may be the case, objective analysis of content, form and context will necessarily inform the inquiry. Well, Michael Popak, if speaking as a party leader or as a candidate is enough to waive the immunity, how about a crypto snake oil salesman? Michael Popak, what do you think about that?
- [38:29]
Michael Popak
Well, I think a lot about it. Let's, let's break it down. First of all, Donald Trump has made $330 million or more just in crypto sales. He does it a couple of ways. It gives access to foreigners who couldn't directly donate to Donald Trump to gain influence because that would be against the federal election laws. Half of the 220 people that attended this dinner in Virginia at a golf course for Donald Trump were from outside the United States, including Justin's son, Banana Boy, the guy that made so much money in crypto and other and other things that he bought a banana taped to a wall for tens of millions of dollars. And he is now an advisor to World Liberty Finance, a company owned and controlled by the Trump family. He won the award for a $19 million digital wallet holding as much Trump meme coins as possible to gain access, showed up in a tux, posted some triumphant video of him arriving, and all of this to Carolyn Levette's non point on the taxpayer dimension. Because unless Donald Trump is reimbursing the taxpayer for the 30 or 40 million dollars worth of Secret Service and the phalanx of SUVs and everything that went into is either a taxpayer funded private event or it's something else entirely. What we watched is one of the greatest grifts in the history of America and presidential corruption going on in plain sight. That's why you and I and others have to call it out. So you have half of 110 people in there, or so are foreigners who are putting money directly into Donald Trump's pocket in plain sight. He makes his money a number of different ways. He doesn't care what the value of the meme coins is, even though he and his family own 80% of the meme coins because they've only issued 20% of them. That's not how he makes his money. How he makes his money is controlling the market. He is the market maker for the sale of the Meme coins. He just cares about the vic. He gets a commission and his family gets a commission on the buy and the sell. So he just wants volume. He wants buy and sell because he gets a commission on each of that. In order to make this market work, to have the buyer and the seller switch off on the interface, there has to be a liquidity pool, and the liquidity pool is Donald Trump's money. So Donald Trump, he doesn't care about the value of the meme coins because he makes the money on the brokerage commission. Right. So you got that going. That's how he has made, since November, since actually since January, $350 million for the family. Just that. I'm not talking about all the other corruption scandals. I'm not talking about the $400 million cutter plane that is really a promote or success fee that should have went to the limited investors for the $5 billion Qatari development that the Trump family is doing with other limited investors. And they took as part of their fee a $400 million plane that's going to get money laundered through the US government to avoid taxes through the, through the Department of Defense. You know, with all this, and I can't even believe I don't know who that, that, that pinhead is that asked that question. I don't know what news or what news organization is that guy from the, threw the softball, the Carolyn Levette.
- [41:45]
Ben Miceli
I'll go look it up right now, though.
- [41:48]
Michael Popak
I didn't mean to stop you. All right. I mean, I'm sure.
- [41:50]
Ben Miceli
I think it was, I think it was NBC. But. All right, is there, but, but is there really a distinction right now between.
- [41:57]
Michael Popak
No, it doesn't matter who it Was. So he throws this. He starts with, I know the Trump administration is, is. Is definitely committed to transparency. That is a complete lie. You and I are going to talk about the Doge case. This is. I did a hot take on it for Legal AF today. This is the. This is the opacity of dope. They. They want to hide everything. They've been hiding everything from you. They're not transparent. They don't want you to know what Doge is doing. They don't want you to know what Elon Musk has done or what Russell Vaught at the Office of Management and Budget is doing. They don't want you to know any of that. There's no more Wall of Receipts. You don't get to know. As an American taxpayer. I thought this was our. Our government. I thought this was the People's House. Wasn't that what they chanted on January 6th? Where did that go? Pardon me. Instead, we've got open influence peddling. There's no other word for it. There is a word for it. It's called influence peddling by Donald Trump and his family. Selling access at a bullshit dinner they made Ben. They made over $2 million when they announced the dinner in their pockets. So the obvious goal of Donald Trump, back in the day, I joked about this with Dina on a hot Dina doll with a hot take. When I was a young man, when I was your age, when I was 40, they used to ask the presidential candidate, and it used to be a big, like, Gotcha question on 60 Minutes or otherwise, what is your burning desire? Why do you want to be president of the United States? And some people fumbled it, like you, like Gary Hart didn't, like, come up with an answer, and he completely tanked his presidency. Because you think, weren't you ready for that question? If you ask Donald Trump and put him under a pentatholic and truth serum and you asked him, why are you running to be the President of the United States for the second time? Why? He would tell you. If he was being honest, he would tell you, it is to avoid jail. It is to make as much money for my family and for me as humanly possible and turn the White House and the Oval Office into a printing press. That's two. It is to retaliate and exercise my vendetta plan against all the people that had their knives out for me and went out and went after me because of my criminal conduct, primarily. That's three. And to pay my debts. Not to the American people, to those that supported me. And that were a government in exile waiting for me to come back. Pardon me. Including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025. And he's done. All we've watched for the last almost less than 200 days is paying off his debts, including to the oligarchs and tech Bros. And everybody that lined his pockets making his money, avoiding any criminal liability. Of course, we've seen that already. And a retribution plan. This is the making the money part. And Right. This is the chapter that we're in right now. You notice in that list, Ben, as you've so eloquently put over and over again in your hot takes, nothing for the American people. He didn't run to help the American people. This whole dismantling thing that we're watching, this cutting the umbilical cord between America and its government. This is the showing the receipts to the people that supported him in the Heritage foundation and the maga. Right. That's all this is. And he doesn't care about the American people. All he cares about is getting. He'll. And you and I will talk about this. Three years from now. He will walk out of this presidency with over a billion dollars for his family. Like any good kleptocracy on the way out. And that is his goal. And I'm sure there's. Stephen Miller's probably counting the money. There's probably like a. Like a telethon total with like a chart in his office about how much he's making. And this that we just watched. I agree with you. I think, Carol, if they're going to put this in that there was four buckets from the immunity decision. If they're going to place this because they feel they have to in the private conduct immunity bucket, then he should be able to. But who's going to prosecute him at this moment? But he should be able to be gone after. If we ever get what you and I have been calling for and we've been yelling it from this from the rooftops. If we get accountability back in government, we get checks and balance. Back at the midterm with the Senate and the House returned to the Democrats on the way back to a return of the White House in 2028, you watch the things that you and I are talking about and we look at the camera and go vote. Is gonna be okay. Impeachment. It's gonna be investigations. It's not just shadow investigations, real investigations. And that's what we need. This needs to be investigated. The fact that he just held a private dinner with 100. They're talking about Harvard and foreign students with bed sheets in Harvard Square. I don't care about that. I care about the hundreds of millions of dollars that change hands in influence peddling.
- [46:56]
Ben Miceli
Virginia Trump golf course Unfathomable in any other era other than the fact that we have to recognize, and it's a hard thing as someone who loves law and order to admit, but that the United States currently May 24, 2025, is not a democracy. We are an authoritarian regime and we are not living in a system of checks and balances. We're not living in a constitutional democracy that does not exist. It's here now. There's not a constitutional crisis taking place that assumes that the crisis is still, it's over. We're living in an authoritarian regime. The question is, will the resistance and opposition be able to topple the authoritarian regime like we've seen in Eastern European nations, like we've seen with peaceful protests throughout the world that have been able to stop authoritarian regime? But, but we live in a dictatorship. I've, I've had some international friends reach out to me and they, you know, they said, Ben, think about it. Imagine if you heard the prime minister of Canada was doing X, Y and Z. Imagine if you heard that the French president was doing all of this. Would you say that that was a democracy? And when they framed it that way, I said, you know, it's a good, it's a good point to frame it that way because you would say, oh, my God, France has fallen. The Canada has fallen. That's how they view us. And they don't view us as strong. They also view us as an authoritarian regime that's very, very weak. They see Donald Trump and J.D. vance capitulating. This is not the political analysis show. It's the legal analysis show. So I won't go into the foreign policy stuff, but just to mention, Donald Trump's on again, off again, on again, off again tariffs just makes him in the United States look absolutely crazy. It doesn't look strong. He hasn't done any deals. He caves after he posts social media stuff. He's not even involved in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia anymore. He's said, oh, I'm going to do sanctions on Russia, and then didn't do it because he's actually rooting for Russia. No peace in 24 hours. And then he's attacking America from within. Bringing it back to the legal. Let me make it very, let me make a very simple point for everybody. Did Bernie Madoff, one of the biggest Ponzi schemers in American history. Did he announce, hey, everybody, I'm a Ponzi scheme? Do you think Bernie Madoff would have liked to get depositions? When the SEC investigated Bernie Madoff the first time, do you think he was just handing over all of the documents to them and like, here you go. Or do you think he wanted to do everything in secret, in the dark of night and not give any of the information out? They would hide it on the different floors of the building and now, not just Bernie Madoff. In your experience, using common sense or if you've been the victim of fraud, do the scammers like to tell you that they're scamming? Do they like to actually go over and give you the lists and the documents? Of course they don't. So one of the ways I analyze is someone scamming me or not scamming me is I just want to look at their basic behavior. If they say they want transparency, but then they're afraid to go before Congress and afraid to be in front of a public hearing, I don't care what political party you're from, that should raise a red flag where they're desperately afraid when they're in positions where they should have their depositions taken, where they do everything to try to avoid that. That raises red flags to me. Where Congress decides, wait a minute, we're going to do all of these amendments and changes to this budget bill at 1am Why 1am because people are sleeping and they won't get. And we could try to sneak things in. That raises a red flag to me, not as a partisan, but as a person who views that behavior and goes, what are you trying to hide? So where someone like Elon Musk goes, well, I'm posting everything we're doing about Doge on Twitter and he's wrong and lying over and over again. And then Congress says, hey, Musk, why don't you show up and testify? And then all the MAGA Republicans block that. Well, he's doing work for the government. Why shouldn't he have to testify? That's kind of a crazy thing. You're not going to testify. Shouldn't you be proud and talk about all of your accomplishments if you think you've made them? You're afraid to testify under oath. And then you're like, well, it's actually not me who runs it. Amy Gleason. All right, well, let's let Amy Gleason have her deposition taken. No, no, she can't have her deposition taken. So can we depose any but can we get any information from Doge through a legal process, through a court proceeding, through document requests, through depositions, or through congressional hearings? No, no, no, you can't do that. But, but trust us, trust me, we've created a website, and we're going to just post what we say we want you to see on our website. Again, I don't care what political party you're from, that should strike you as effed up. You should go, what?
- [52:03]
Michael Popak
No, no, no.
- [52:04]
Ben Miceli
Just give me the real documents. Go in front of the real deposition. Let's see the documents. And then when they desperately fight this like their life is on the line, I go, holy shit. There must be some real crazy stuff that they are trying to hide. And that's precisely what the Trump regime has been doing with Doge. They rushed to the Supreme Court after a federal court in D.C. and a circuit court that oversees the D.C. federal court said, just turn over the documents about Doge as part of Freedom of Information act requests. Oh, no, no, no, we can't do that. We can't do. We're private. We're within the executive office. These are executive privilege documents. You're posting something on the website, you're bragging about the things that you're doing which you're lying about. So you are publicizing some things, but the actual, real facts, those get subject to the privilege. Oh, no, no. We can't. We just can't let you know. Hey, hey. Supreme Court. Supreme Court, we need your help. Justice John Roberts, we need you to issue an injunction. Please stop. We can't have Amy Gleason, this random person who we just made the head of Doge be deposed. We can't have that happen. Why not? You work for us. There's fundamentally, as you talk about, Michael Popak, where we are heading in the future of accountability. There needs to be a recognition that public serv. Are servants. They're public servants. They serve us. They serve the public. We don't have kings, and now we do in the United States, but we shouldn't.
- [53:33]
Michael Popak
We.
- [53:34]
Ben Miceli
We. We. This belongs to us. And, you know, there is, you know, the. The authors of Project 2025 and those who have propped up authoritarian regimes have an understanding that there is a counterintuitive human reflex to suffering. And sometimes, if you can make people suffer and you torture them, there could kind of be a mass Stockholm syndrome type of thing where people then accept the breadcrumbs and they're like, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Because you make people believe they're not entitled to things. You make people think that they're worthless. You make people think that they have no shot and no chance. What was always great about America for its flaws, that it had, was there was this concept of an American dream. There was a concept that, no, we, the people had the power, not they, the kings and queens. That's what we were found in our very founding documents. So to me, when I see the Trump regime rushing to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court issued a temporary administrative stay, it's not the full stay, but they basically said, all right, no Amy Gleason Depot, they don't have to turn over their documents yet. We're gonna decide what's gonna happen. But you don't have to turn it over yet. It's a temporary thing. Justice Roberts issued it. But to me, when I see people. We'll talk about this in the next segment. Who are getting screwed by Trump's budget bill, like literally getting money stolen, losing their healthcare, getting killed. And it's the same people rooting for Elon Musk and Amy Gleason and Trump not to turn over the documents and that belong to them. I look at these people and I go, what the hell has been done to you that makes you feel so worthless in your life that you live vicariously to people who think that you're a piece of shit? Where did that happen? How did that happen in your life that you're willing to accept that bullshit? And I mean it. And I'm happy to curse there. How did that happen in your mind? It's not a Democrat or Republican issue. It's. They're playing you. They think you're stupid. They're pickpocketing you, that you're, no offense to clowns. You're. You're a clown to them. That's how they. They're laughing at you, that you're a mark. And they take and they take and they take from you over and over again. And you still show up at the rallies with your dumb red hat. We're gonna come back with our last quick. We'll do a last quick break right now. Michael Popak. Michael Popak's law firm. The Popak law firm or the Popak firm is crushing it. We've got Popak. You've signed up a ton of cases from people who watch the show. So for people who go, I don't know, are they going to take my case? I don't know if it fits the criteria. Yes. If you or someone you know have been in a catastrophic accident, a trucking accident, a bad car accident. If you know someone who's been who's a wrongful death case. Popox handling it. And Popak partners with the best lawyers in the country. Where could they find you?
- [56:37]
Michael Popak
Popak made it easy on them. There's a reason we focus on those cases. They really are life altering cases and that's where the law and your life, the rubber meets the road. And so that's why we're focusing on those cases. And I put a great team together to do it two ways, your choice. It ends up in the same place where you're being evaluated by people who know what they're doing and will handle it with tender care that's required. You can go to the website www.thepopoc firm P O P O K is the spelling on that. Or you can call a 1-800-number-1-877, Popak AF.
- [57:20]
Ben Miceli
Want to remind everybody about Michael Popak's YouTube channel, the Legal AF YouTube channel, the Substack, the Legal AF Substack. Subscribe to both. We're going to take our last quick break of the show. When we come back, let's talk about the other Supreme Court rulings, the issue about whether taxpayers need to be funding religious schools. I know you've covered that one. Popoc a divided court there. We'll talk about the implications of what that means. The Humphreys executor case. I'll let you, I'll let you take those Supreme Court cases. Popak, when we come back from our last quick break of the show.
- [57:55]
Michael Popak
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- [62:30]
Ben Miceli
Back to Legal AF. Thank you to our pro democracy sponsors. Discount codes are in the description below. Jordy spends a long time negotiating those deals. He actually does deals. Trump's done zero deals in 90 days. Jordy does good deals for our pro democracy sponsors. Discount codes are in the description below. A busy week for the Supreme Court. You've got basically Humphrey's executor long standing 90 year precedent getting overturned through a shadow docket ruling which the liberal justices were absolutely pissed off for and rightfully so. Although it seems that the Supreme Court created a carve out where Trump you can fire every commissioner or every agency head that you want. Even where Congress provided only for four cause termination. Donald, you don't need to give a for cause justification. Just file fire the National Labor Relations Board's head, Gwen Wilcox or fire the merit system board head, it doesn't matter. But the Federal Reserve, that's different. You can't do that one, Donald. I mean it is just a made up distinction that the Supreme Court's making knowing that Trump will probably destroy their retirements. So they're selfishly saying just don't do that one. All the other stuff that like the regular folks rely upon, you can get rid of those people that consumer protection bureau heads, the National Labor Relations Board. Oh by the way, great work there. To any union leaders for Trump for that one. You know, just literally destroying the National Labor Relations Board. Y' all, y' all played yourself. I'm glad that you both, any union leader who supported Donald Trump. And I'm looking at you, Sean o' Brien, the Teamsters had really fantastic work right here. I'm sure that was a great victory for labor to now have the National Labor Relations Board totally gutted. It's so offensive to me as someone who supports labor. Anyway, Popak, there was that decision, then the religious, the case about should public taxpayers be funding religious schools? Why don't you get into it, Popak? Talk to us about it.
- [64:36]
Michael Popak
Yeah, happy to. So we had a few rulings and things that have developed at the United States Supreme Court. It's quite unusual. If you look at your, your calendar or your watch right now, guess your calendar. We're heading into Memorial Day weekend and we're not where you and I are not, not normally talking about Supreme Court decisions this late in the game, but there's about 15 or 20 or more decisions that we're waiting for to drop. Primary reason they've been delayed. Something you touched on, which is Donald Trump's exploitation of the emergency docket, the shadow docket to bring or as Justice Kagan wrote, and I'll, I'll read part of it in a minute. In her decision about the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Service Protection Board. It, the, it puts the case and the court on a short fuse with a skeletal record, with insufficient briefing and no oral argument. What could go wrong when you're making major decisions like whether a 1935 Supreme Court precedent should be taken off the shelf or not? And that apparently is what we just have done. So the reason we're getting these cases so late is because they're still filing emergency applications, because even though they're not winning the ball, they're winning enough of them that they think it's worth trying. Trump administration. So, you know, we have like 15 emergency applications. So we had an emergency application filed. You touched on it about the secrecy around Doge. And just one thing, I didn't get to talk about that when you, when you did the segment, the person that's running Doge isn't any of the people you and I have discussed. Elon Musk is gone. Amy Gleason is a puppet figurehead. They literally got her off of it. She was on vacation in Mexico, I think in Acapulco when they announced that she was now the head of Doge. She had no idea that that was going to happen probably so minutes before it did. But the person is really running Doge is Russell Vaught of the Office of Management and Budget, which holds the nation's checkbook in his hands. He's also the father, self professed of Project 2025, and he's really the head of Doge. That, that is, and that is what that case is about. Trying to get to the bottom, just from an informational standpoint about who's running what. It's not about, just to be clear, because you talked about the case at length, but that case is not about in front of Judge Cooper. It's not about funding or refunding a federal agency that was defunded or reconstituting a federal department that was destroyed or hollowed out, like the Department of Education or, you know, reestablishing the relationship between the people and the federal government. None of that. Just about information. And yet that's why I laughed when I heard the guy from NBC, I guess, say out loud, you know, the Trump administration is all about transparency. They're not nothing about transparency. It's the opposite. So you have that going on in that filing and then you had sort of two things that got decided, or at least one permanent. Well, neither of them really permanently. We had a deadlock 4 to 4 on whether taxpayer dollars and the government should be in the business of supporting religious organizations running public schools. We call them charter schools, but they're public schools. Oklahoma thought that was such a violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause that even Ruby Red Oklahoma's Supreme Court said, yeah, that's too far for us. No. And they denied it. So that's how it came up to the United States Supreme Court. With, with, with that ruling. Now, when we got there and on legal af, we did one, I think it was one, I think it was our first or second live feed of the oral arguments, all audio at the United States Supreme Court. I did some color commentary in and out and during in the chat about it. And I said at the time, the best we could hope for with Amy Coney Barrett stepping off the court for that oral argument and the decision making, basically because her best friend at the University of Notre Dame and the godfather, the godmother of one of her children, it was an advisor to the religious school that brought the case. She won't ever let that happen again. They'll never bring a case through the Notre Dame Religious Institute again. But she felt, unlike Alito and Thomas, who've never seen a conflict, that they haven't decided they don't need to recuse themselves about. She stepped off now. She might have stepped. There's some speculation she might have stepped off for some other reasons. I'll leave that for another hot take. But she stepped off, leaving potentially a deadlock of four, four. And I said at the time, the best we can hope for listening to the oral argument and the questions are being asked is that somehow Roberts, who generally is very pro religion in public life, slides over with the other three and we get a 4, 4 deadlock, which results in no precedent, A P R E C E D, no precedent, no majority opinion. And the Oklahoma decision stays in place for now, subject to another law, another case coming up, maybe even this case coming up again to the United States Supreme Court for a full majority decision because Amy Coney Barrett would have been the majority vote. So that's what happened. Roberts, maybe because it's a junk time play. It's like that player after there's a blowout in basketball, he scores another 15 points, you know, even though they're 30 points up, you know, either Robert said, well, this vote won't really matter. Let me just go four, four. I'll side over here and we won't be able to issue a ruling and we'll leave it for another day. Or he really believes that this was a bridge too far in terms of the debate. Let me just frame the debate for you and the vocabulary. Every time you hear the right wing want to support religion in public life and in government life and to tear away the last brick of the separation between church and state, they will point to. To the exclusion of everything else in the First Amendment. They will point to the free exercise clause. Free exercise, we get to free exercise, we get to exercise our religion. And the government shouldn't get in the way of that. Right. But there's also the establishment clause, which says that the government also shouldn't be funding and shouldn't be doing anything to establish a religion or to keep it going or propel a religion. There's always this tension between what is free exercise versus what is the government establishing. So to the moderates and the democratically appointed wing of the Supreme Court, people like you and me, we focus heavily and we're very sensitive to government intrusion into the world of religion. Right. Because there's a lot of people in this country that aren't. We're not all of the same religion, and some of us are of no religion. And that's okay. That's why we left puritanical England to come here. Right? And not have the Anglican Church running our government. And so when you looked at the series of cases since Amy Conan has Amy Coney Barrett had been on because one of my thought bubbles for my hot take that I just put up on Legal AF YouTube is what would Amy Coney Barrett do? Because it's going to matter in the next case that comes up. If you look at the cases from 2020 forward, she generally sides for and has never found a case in which these the establishment clause has been violated. And she always sides on free exercise or first Amendment rights. Whether it's the baker who doesn't want to make a cake for same sex marriage couple or the website designer who doesn't want to make a website for it because it's forced compelled first amendment speech for a same sex couple or it's a flat Christian flag flying in Boston or it's putting gym equipment, you know, using government dollars to pay for gym equipment at a Catholic school or it's a, a college or high, sorry, high school football coach who wants to do a prayer, kneel at midfield, make his players participate in it. This is all fine with her and with other aspects of the court as well. So the question is, what would Amy Coney Barrett do when the next case comes up at 4, 4 deadlock? The Oklahoma decision stays in place. And Oklahoma for now will not be able to have religious organizations running charter schools, public schools with taxpayer dollars. It does not set a precedent throughout the country. And you know, Ben, as well as I do in our audience that we're going to get a case next term, not an emergency application this summer, but next term, starting the first Monday in October, we're going to get a case up for Louisiana from Texas, from Florida and maybe from Oklahoma. The governor of Oklahoma said we're not taking this line down. We're going to do something about it. All right, so we're going to get another case. And it's not going to come up through a consultant that Amy Coney Barrett is best friends with her bff. It's going to come up through somebody else and Amy Coney Barrett's going to be there. So next year, next term, you and I are going to be talking about this case. And some people might say, I thought that they, I thought they upheld the Oklahoma decision about establishment clause being violated. It they didn't, they just didn't have the votes to disturb the decision. And that's different. So that's the Oklahoma case, isn't it?
- [73:45]
Ben Miceli
Just funny though, there sounds like a basic point though, that the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Okay, In Oklahoma, ruby red. Ruby red. They were like, come on. Because you know why they realize that this, that there's a reason why there was a separation of church and state because a lot of this kind of the far right religious zealot type teaching is really harming the Oklahoma school district's ability for kids to get basic education. Oklahoma's like, last in education. This whole charter school thing has ripped the Oklahoma education system to shreds. And you see these laboratories of autocracy like Oklahoma and Arkansas and other red states that go out there and they want to push this on blue states. And it's like, y' all stay out of California. We're the fourth largest, we're the fourth largest GDP in the world. Okay, stop. My. Stop, stop it. You know, the same thing we see in New York and Massachusetts and Illinois, you know, these red states. And we saw this debate with Congress, you know, over the fact that, and a lot of these MAGA Republicans in the red, in the red dots in blue states promised that they were going to get rid of this state and local tax exemption cap at 10,000 or move it to $100,000. And they got it to $40,000, which is a betrayal still of what they told. It would have just expired this arbitrary cap that Trump put on to penalize blue states in 2017 had they done nothing. So they're still like harming their own states and that in other ways. But it's like the blue states, by and large are the donor states that are subsidizing the taker states. And the taker states are pushing forward this actual radical right wing ideology that's, that's just, that's destroying their states. And now they're, they're trying to use their template from within for the country. And it's like, no, it's just, just we'll do it.
- [75:53]
Michael Popak
Well, do it this way. If you take you and I talked about polling a couple of weeks ago when I last did the show with you. If you look at the states where Donald Trump is polling the highest and you match it with the states who have the highest levels of childhood poverty, the highest infant mortality rates, the lowest literacy rates, there's a direct correlation.
- [76:14]
Ben Miceli
They don't make. The correlation that they don't make, right? They go, oh, it's because of, it's because of those, those, those transgenders in the, on the volleyball team that's doing it.
- [76:26]
Michael Popak
It's, it's, it's the fentanyl transgenders coming through Canada and Mexico that are making our babies die.
- [76:32]
Ben Miceli
But you know, when you take away education from people and you also give them technology, they become susceptible to this crazy crap that they, that, that infiltrates their minds and they start saying, oh my God, you know, this is what's doing this to me. When it's like, nah, just maybe, maybe put this away and actually look around you and see who's been doing it with people. I'm sorry to interrupt you there, but Humphreys executor.
- [77:05]
Michael Popak
All right, so that's that case. Then you and I talked at length and there's something that, that got totally missed. I did it on a hot take. Totally missed by the United States Supreme Court, even by the advocates at the United States Supreme Court. About the. I'll just say it out loud. You got to curse. I'll do it my way. Donald Trump hates organized labor. Donald Trump hates workers. And Donald Trump hates federal workers who are unionized. Okay, now that I've said that, let me explain what I mean. The two firewalls that protect organized labor and workers in America, which is most of America, including me and you, is two things that were created by Congress in order because of labor strife and go watch movies about Jimmy Hoffa and things like that and the attack on patronage and the federal workers. Two different entities, independent agencies, got created by Congress, one being the Marriage Service Protection Board and the other one being the neighbor, the national, the National Labor Relations Board, sorry, NLRB and the Merit Service Protection Board and there's others too. But these are the two that we're going to talk about here today. Donald Trump hated them and decided he wanted to dismiss Democrats who had been appointed to that. But it goes further than that because he's effectively completely destroyed those two entities because they no longer have a quorum and he know and he's not going to fill those chairs anytime soon. The Merit Service Protection Board, which was headed by Kathy Harris, who was in the middle of a ten year term, had three members. It now with her dismissal has one with the one. It doesn't have a quorum. It needs two for a quorum. By getting rid of. It's not just about getting rid of her and the power of the executive once Congress because under the theory of the Supreme Court, once Congress made the baby and gave it to Donald Trump to raise, he can do whatever he wants with the baby and they can't say anything about it because it wields too much executive power. And he's allowed to fire or get rid of the baby without cause as opposed to what Congress wrote in the statute when it's bipartisan fashion created these things to protect Congress even went so far as to try to remove them from political influence by requiring that it be balanced and there not be too many Republicans or Democrats at any one time. That's all out the window now. Why so that was one. Let me stay on the theory. The thematic of he just put out a business, two entities to protect federal workers and nobody's going to make them put them back into business. And that was their real goal. The National Labor Relations Board has five, supposed to have five. When you get rid of Gwen Wilcox and the other seats that had not been filled, they're below the quorum so they can't make any decisions at all now. They don't exercise fundamental executive power. They are specialty entities that were responsible almost like hearings, doing hearings and investigations about workplace and whistleblowing and protecting against retaliation and, and abuse in the job market and in the job market in the employment pool, that kind of thing. That's what they're for. So that's what has happened. Not mentioned in the reporting, not mentioned in the case. But that is the effect. Donald Trump has trapped them in amber and they no longer exist as a result. So what happened is the Trump ran again with another emergency application through the shadow docket to try to overturn a series of decisions that came up from the D.C. circuit Court that reinstated Wilcox and Harris back into their chairs. And we thought, look, the leading case here from 1935 is a case you and I call shorthanded Humphreys executor. Why? Because there was a guy named Humphreys who was fired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he didn't like the color of his party. He was a Democrat, he was Republican. That was the only reason he'd been put on by Herbert Hoover and he was on the Federal Trade Commission and they bounced him. And the Supreme Court said even though it's an executive agency, it was created by Congress, it doesn't wield that much executive power. It's an independent body that's dealing with trade regulation and you can't do it. Humphrey's executor and since 1935 that's been the case. It was reaffirmed in 2020 in a case called Celia Law. But the Republic, the right wing on the court, has hated that because it is inconsistent and violative of their unitary president model, which is a total incomplete all curse bullshit. That is not what the founding fathers envisioned. As recently as there was a fringe theory that that Supreme Court justices like Sandra Day O' Connor, appointed by Reagan, called out just 30 years ago and said, that's a fringe theory. Nobody believes in the unitary executive branch, that he can do anything he wants and fire whoever he wants and crossover agencies created by Congress. But now that's the dominant theory of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Alito and Thomas. And so they wanted to get the thing that was stopping them from their evilness of trying to give the President whoever it is, as long as it's not a Democrat, the ultimate power is the case of Humphrey's executor. So they've been chipping away at it every year. And here in an emergency docket, we were like, well, you can't overturn Humphrey's executor on an emergency application, can you? And if you apply the law, you keep them in their chairs until the full appeal happens over the next year and the rest. No, that's not what happened. Roberts gave an administrative stay that you and I reported on. Then it went to the full court. And in a 6 to 3 decision with. I want to talk about the dissent in a minute as I grab the ruling. We now have the ruling in nine pages or less. And what they said was Humphrey's executor is out there, but because these two agencies wield so much executive power, even though the statute that created them says that they can't be fired except for cause that violates separation of powers and the power of the executive branch, and we find we're not going to overturn Humphrey's executor, we're just going to find there's an exception to it here. But they're so effing worried about Donald Trump cutting the umbilical cord between the American economy and planet Earth by getting rid of the central banker in Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve. This is the second major organization in 10 days that have both warned Donald Trump not get your greedy little hands off the Federal Reserve, cuz you're gonna wreck the economy. You and I reported last week about Moody's downgrading the American credit rating and warning Trump if he does anything to the Federal Reserve, he's gone. We're going to downgrade the rating for the bonds, the credit worthiness of American debt again. And now you have the U.S. supreme Court completely apropos of nothing. As Justice Kagan said in her dissent, out of the blue just came out with a. I'm going to read it to our audience. Here's what they said, here's what they said, finally, this is like a one liner in Wilcox and Harris's papers. And they decided, oh, there's a mention of the Federal Reserve. We can run with this. Here's what they said. Finally. It's on page two. Finally, respondents Wilcox and Harris contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee. We disagree. This is not the premise of the case. The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured quasi private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the first and Second Banks of the United States. In other words, get your greedy paws off the Federal Reserve. Here's what Kagan had to say about that. Kagan said, first of all, what are we doing? We're on the short fuse. Skeletal docket. No, no. Oral argument. World of emergency docket. Emergency injunctions and you guys are getting rid of Humphrey's executor. Seriously. But then she goes on and says this is on page seven of her dissent, which was joined by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, she says, in valuing so highly in an emergency posture the President's ability to fire without cause. Wilcox and Harris and everyone liked them. The majority all but declares Humphrey itself the emergency. Except apparently, this is all the writing of Kagum. Except apparently for the Federal Reserve. The majority closes today's order by stating out of the blue that it has no bearing on the constitutionality of for cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve Board or the Open Markets Committee. I am glad this I. The way she wrote this, this is so cheeky. I am glad to hear it. And, and she wrote, and do not doubt the majority's intention to avoid imperiling the Fed. But then today's order poses a puzzle for the Federal Reserve's independence rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the nlrb, the ms, the Marriage Service Protection Board, the ftc, and so on. Which is to say it rests largely on Humphreys. So the majority has to offer a different story. The Federal Reserve, it submits, is uniquely structured entity with a distinct historical tradition, and it cites for the proposition a footnote, footnote 8 of this Court's opinion in Celia Law from 2020. But then Kagan goes back to footnote 8 and actually reads it, and she says it's only relevant sentence that's even there, rejects an argument made in a dissenting opinion, even assuming that financial institutions like the Second bank and Federal Reserve can claim a special historical status. And so Kagan writes, an assumption made to humor a dissent gets turned into some kind of holding because one way of making new law on an emergency docket, the deprecation of Humphreys, turns out to require yet another, the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exemption. And then she quotes Alexander Hamilton about what the F are we doing with rejecting precedent willy nilly without any type of thought process? What is going on with this United States Supreme Court? That's rhetorical, but I will pose it to my colleague here.
- [88:22]
Ben Miceli
Well, look, anytime the Supreme Court starts using language of historical context in the same sentence as the word quasi, I always have my red alert up. Quasi in historical context. I'm like you remember how I said earlier in the episode, when you start doing things at 1am and you start, you know, hiding things, I go, you must be hiding something. When the Supreme Court starts talking about historical tradition and quasi, that means they've basically gone through all of their other sociopathic frameworks to justify whatever outcome they want to be. And then they've now just like, all right, some quasi historical thing. We think that we're just going to make it up basically, and just, just trust me, bro, is basically what that means. So it's funny that in the dissent, or not funny, but you know what Justice Kagan says, I'm glad we have a Federal Reserve exemption because otherwise we know that there would be the greatest of greatest depressions and America would be destroyed. But, but intellectually what you've done makes zero sense. And so I guess it'll be temporarily good for billionaires and millionaires who may be more dependent on the markets, who will be impacted first by a Federal Reserve firing. But you still now fired the person who really protects unions and also the person who protects civil servants and their ability to keep their jobs on the basis of merit. So, you know, what the hell are you doing? What the hell are you doing there? So, last point I want to bring up, Michael Popak, just super, super quickly is this disastrous budget bill. We've touched upon it at different points throughout the episode, but there was a provision that they snuck in where they're saying federal courts are basically divested of their ability to hold individuals in contempt. Kind of a fairly broad and unconstitutional phrasing of things. That's one of the things they put in. They also wanted to change the savings count for children idea by Democrat Cory Booker, and they took it. They stole it. Trump stole the idea of Cory Booker and he's calling it Trump accounts instead of like baby, you know, baby benefit accounts. Now they're called Trump accounts. They gave special tax exemptions for people purchasing silencers and suppressors and removed any regulations for reporting the purchase of silencers and suppressors to the atf. That was a hard, that was something that was very important rather to the MAGA Republicans to get in there tanning beds, get exemptions. And of course, billionaires are getting trillions in tax cuts. They have to raise the debt ceiling in this disastrous thing by at least 4 to 5 trillion dollars to pay for the tax cuts to billionaires. And it also guts Medicaid 800 billion. And it takes close to a billion dollars or close to a trillion dollars or, or, or somewhere in that range from Medicare, from Medicaid as well. You know, it's an attack on Medicaid the way, the way it's framed. And you know, we'll, we'll, I think as that now goes to the Senate, this is going to become, I think, a big deal with the Senate. And the question is then does the Senate get rid of all of these things that the House put in and then are we basically heading towards, you know, the date of a government shutdown again and we're gonna have to raise the debt ceiling and, and then we manufactured a crisis that really didn't need to happen. I'll remind everybody, the MAGA Republicans have not passed a budget last term. So this is their, I guess, next shot at it. Right now we've been going by continuing resolutions based on Nancy Pelosi's budget from 2022. And none of this is normal. Like the Democrats budget was just passed. Like it just, it's the most basic function of, like the way government's supposed to work. And you see the Republicans infighting with each other, but what they do agree on is no contempt.
- [92:23]
Michael Popak
Well, let's go back to that for a minute before we, before we end the show. First of all, they spend an inordinate amount of time wasting, wasting my time and your time, except we make a show out of it. Telling the Supreme Court about separation of powers. Everything is, I mean, this is like the kitchen magnet poetry. You know, if it's Doge, it's waste and fraud. Rooting out is being hampered by giving information and transparency to the American people. And if it's anything about the executive branch power, it's separation of powers are being violated. How is Congress telling the third branch of government how a federal judge can fashion a remedy from his tool, his or her tool bag of remedies? How it. By threatening funding? How is that constitutional and not A violation of separation of powers. Yes, they have the purse strings, but they're not allowed to reach in. And it would be like if Kristi Noem was empowered by the president to sit in the room of major cases and then overrule the judge because you know, she's using some executive branch prerogative they get to fund and then shut the legal AF up. They don't get to tell the federal judge how to rule in a case or what remedies to use or not use. And they don't even know what they're doing anyway because there's reporting, I'm sure on Midas Touch that when they asked, they asked Jim Jordan what the, what the provision was about. He said this is just about nationwide injunctions about immigration. And they said, did you read it? That's not what it says. There's no words of immigration in there. Well, it's four o' clock in the morning, right? It's four o' clock in the morning. When they're passing these bills, they don't know what they say which will play into our hands as Democrats and free thinking people because they're gonna get challenged as being unconstitutional. And then this unitary executive branch majority on the Supreme Court's gonna have to say, I think you're also judges. Right. And the chief judge runs the judiciary. So you're okay with the president telling you only because he's now the subject of one and soon to be two contempt orders. You know, we already had Boasberg, even though it was put on iceberg, finding probable, Judge Brosberg finding probable cause that criminal contempt was committed by the Trump administration. And you've got Judge Zinnis in Maryland in the Abrego Garcia case who is on the one yard line of finding contempt and she's going to punch it through by right after Memorial Day. Forget about fireworks for fourth of July. They're coming early this year, everybody. It's going to be early next week. So this is the, speaking of transparent, the transparent reason that the Trump administration even gives a crap about contempt because they're always doing something that's contumacious. And so that's going to get turned down by the appropriate, I have to think now you and I'll think through who the proper party for standing is to bring that case at the D.C. court of Appeals level, at the D.C. trial court level. And then it's going to go on. I don't know about fast track, but it's going to go up to the United States Supreme Court and there's Already a loophole in it because it just says they have to set a bond. Now, you and I, when we practice in, in private practice, when we ask for an injunction, there's often a bond that needs to be set and the purpose of the bond just to do a teachable legal AF moment here, the purpose of the bond is if it turns out that the injunction was improvidently granted by the judge based on facts that turned out to be different at the end of the case than in the beginning of the case, or new facts were developed, or, you know, an argument that seemed reasonable at the top of the case, at the bottom of the case was less reasonable and the injunction should not have been issued. This is to compensate the person or the business for the injury suffered for having an injunction against them. And so they kind of come up with a number. Could be $10, $1, no dollars, or I've been involved with cases where it's 5 million, 10 million, $15 million in bonds that have to be posted or beyond. However, when you're dealing with the public sector, and I've done those cases as well, because of the public interest that's involved, there's law that says that governments, for instance, don't have to post a bond. And if you're going for a constitutional violation argument, which is all we're seeing play out with the Trump administration, you don't normally, you don't. Judges don't require a bond. Now they're saying you got to hold a bond hearing. You got up. But they could think, but it could be a dollar, could be $10, could be $100. So they didn't set an amount because they slapped this thing together. Like you said, they, they hijacked something that was in there already, and then they don't know what they're doing. So they, so there is a way around it. But the whole concept of Congress telling the judiciary, the judicial branch, what they can and can't do in a case, including a remedy, is wholly unconstitutional. And hopefully you and I will be reporting about good judges in due time making that ruling.
- [97:38]
Ben Miceli
Michael Popak, we've gotten dozens of phone calls already. I've seen from this episode alone to your law firm, which is, which is great. And people have someone in their family or themselves who are involved in a catastrophic personal injury, whether that was like an accident, if you're hit by a truck or hit by a car or some other type of negligence that may have took place, if you went to some location and they were negligent, wrongful Death cases. If you know people who passed because of the negligence of others, medical malpractice, sexual assault and sexual harassment cases. Like I used to handle a lot of cases of like Catholic priest abuse cases 15, 20 years ago. I would do cases like that or cases involving police officers who would sexually assault people. I handle a lot of cases like that or school teachers horrific cases. And people need lawyers for things like that. So if any of those cases come to mind about you or someone, you know, reach out to Michael Popak. I mean, he started a firm because of all of the inbound requests from our audience of saying, hey, we really would love for you to be the lawyer. And Popak wasn't able to do that until he created his own law firm, the Popoc firm. Where could they find you? Popak?
- [99:00]
Michael Popak
Yeah. Thanks, Ben, for that. Yeah. And you and I talked about it a lot when even at the beginning of the founding of Legal AI five years ago, we talked about wouldn't it be great for me to ultimately have a law firm of my own that was devoted to our audience and help them in their most trying time of their life for those in their loved ones or people around them and help. And then we all kind of saw a need after the election to make sure that there was a place where people could go. And so it's easy. I made it easy for me too. The website www.thepopocfirm there's the spelling.com many many ways will get all different clicks will get you to the same place to a free consultation case review form and then we'll take it from there. Or if you'd rather do Some people don't want to fill out forms. They want to talk to somebody in person. That's great too. I have somebody standing by, as they say, 1-877-popak AF. What else?
- [99:59]
Ben Miceli
Michael Popo substack the legal AF sub stack. Check that out. Michael Popo's YouTube channel, the legal AF YouTube channel is so great to see the growth of both of those things.
- [100:12]
Michael Popak
Can I talk about that for one second before we leave? All right, thank you. Because working together with the Midas Touch and the brothers, we've done some amazing things and bolting on some new contributors in the I'll wait for the ad to run. In the last four weeks, we have the foundational contributors along with me as I curate the channel. You know, we have court accountability action, Alex Aronson, Lisa Graves, Mike Sachs, who follow corruption, the federal court system up to the United States Supreme Court. Shan Wu former Attorney General former general counsel to the Attorney General does some amazing legal commentary. Along with Dina Dahl, legal legal commentator extraordinaire. We've also got Melba Pearson, formerly of the aclu, and Dave Aronberg, Florida lawman who was the prosecutor and state attorney in Palm Beach County, Florida. And then we also had we added an in house historians. You can't ask for better ethicists and historians. Putting it all this Trump madness in perspective. Which makes me feel much more comfortable with Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz. Exclusively on Legal af. They do something called Court Court of history, which for them is the highest court. I agree with that, judging everything that's being done right now. And they do some amazing work. And here's a scoop from for my Touch and Legal layup, we got Renato and Asha who do a show called It's Complicated. No, that's the name of the show. They get together every week. He's a former FBI agent then and a an amazing litigator, white collar criminal defense litigator. She's a former special agent, FBI, FBI agent and a Yale national security. Yale professor, a national security expert. They get together every week. It's amazing. Their podcast is now exclusively on Legal AF and Midas Touch and and don't miss it. It's called It's Complicated. So we had a dozen or so contributors. I'm leading it there as a curator. Come over to Legal AF, the YouTube. You won't be disappointed.
- [102:13]
Ben Miceli
Everybody. Check that out. Thanks for watching everybody. Michael Popak, good to have you back. Good to have the audience here. We're grateful for our Legal AF audience and we'll see everybody next time. We covered a lot today, but it was a important that we cover all those topics. Thanks everybody. Shout out Legal A effers and shout out Midas Might packages by Expedia. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels and hammocks for less Expedia made to travel.