18 + DNC supply I'm so excited today for everything that's happening at the intersection of law and politics on Popoc Live, I had to wear my Iron man glasses. I'm Michael Popak. Let's get to the Intersection it's burning down. Speaking of burning down, Pete Hegseth, I've never seen a person actually thrown under a bus. And then I watched Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz and John Ratcliffe, who are at the very apex of our national security one by one blame Pete Hegseth, which is appropriate for the what I'll call signal gate, which is the one of the biggest breaches of national security in our history. When Mike Waltz fat fingered, probably typing JD Vance and added instead Jonathan Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine to a signal chat chain of all of our highest officials talking about bombing the Houthis, an Iranian backed terrorist group in the Suez area. I refer to them as the Hamas Navy or air force to try to take them out. War planning. Pete Hegsett says there was no war plans really. You had target packages, lethality, how they were gonna hit it. And the same group that was so exercised about Hillary Clinton's email server. She needs to go to J hell now. What going to break down. What's going on? The new hearings. Democrats are loaded for bear and are sharpening their knives and they're not letting this story go and therefore we're not going to either. Donald Trump heard about the result. He said out loud, they did what? I'm not making that up, John. The head of our Mike Johnson, the head of our speaker of the House on the MAGA side, he said they were just doing their job, Caitlin. They were just doing their job. Revealing confidential top secret classified information to the public. Why don't they just put everything on closed circuit tv? Why don't we just have C SPAN sit in the war room and in the tank while they discuss all these things? Why not? Then I'm going to turn to this continuing developing story. The further that Donald Trump and his administration thinks they're getting away with from the Alien Enemies act and Judge Boasberg, they're getting dragged in and now they're swirling the drain. We got two or three different stories going on at the exact same time. I want to update you on. Judge Boasberg has renewed his temporary restraining order against the use of the Alien Enemies act to deport people without due process and send them to a notorious killer jail in El Salvador where more than 375 people have died in the last two years from, from quote unquote natural causes. Cause if you think being beaten to death is a natural cause, then you would agree with the El Salvadorian government. Is this the America that we woke up in? Is this the America that you wanna live in the America where even the accused, even the ones accused of the most heinous crimes all concede that they are alleged to be narco terrorists, a part of a drug gang that rapes and sells drugs to children and murders people. I'll accept all of that. I just won't accept that we live in an America where they're not given due process or a fair hearing or a right to a lawyer or to have a judge decide whether they're sent to their death. That's the part that, that galls me. We'll talk more about the Boasberg decision. The Trump. I was called in the organization like they're a criminal, a criminal organization. The Trump administration's filing today that they're going to be asserting, asserting state secrets privilege, a judge made privilege made by the United States Supreme Court that doesn't exist in any books to try to hide from the judge whether they really violated his orders or not when they continued to deport people and put them on planes on purpose to avoid his jurisdiction. Can't tell you, Judge, you don't deserve to know. You're not qualified to know. Go pound sand. I'll do a whole act out like drunk Shakespeare of what the their filing says the basis for it. And then an appellate court. This is all the same matter. An appellate court took up the hearing because the Trump administration made an emergency application to the D.C. circuit Court. Next stop Supreme Court. And a three judge panel heard it. And the issue was whether they're going to block Boasberg's temporary injunction while they consider the appeal. And Judge Millet had some choice words that ended up in blazing on a giant 12 or 14 point font headline. The Nazis were treated better by the Americans before they were deported under the Alien Enemies Act. They lived in America during World War II. Uh, and, and let's look at, you know, the Trump administration spends a considerable amount of time talking about the unitary superpower President. The executive branch is occupied by one person. You got to defer to that one person. You can't review anything he does. All, all the judges have to bow their heads. Everybody has to look the other way, Let him do whatever he wants. I mean, this is the basic theory. Nobody can check him, nobody can balance him, nobody can stop him. Stop me if you can, catch me if you can. That's the presidency, that's their argument. And you've got Congress who has a role, I grant you, in the co. = branches of government to be a part of the checks and balance. But they haven't exercised any part of it to try to check the worst instincts of Donald Trump. Instead, what have they been doing instead? All they've been doing is they've been bending over and bending down and bending the knee to Donald Trump and letting him do whatever he wants. They don't. I'll give you an example. The Alien Enemies act, you gotta have a declaration of war. They haven't even declared war against who the gang is now. The government of Venezuela. We're in, we're in a war with Venezuela. That's news to Venezuela. So the, the, the GOP has, has said a couple of choice things about what they're going to do to supervise not the president, but the federal courts, including a comment by speaker of the House Johnson, another comment by speaker of the House Johnson, and then you've got, we've got the United States Supreme Court who is currently considering whether they're going to block or permit an injunction issued by Judge Alsop out of San Francisco to stop the firing of 16,000 probationary workers, including at the Department of Defense. Sounds like the Department of Defense, headed by Hegseth, needs all the brain power they can get, even at the lower ranked level. And the Supreme Court has an emergency application that's coming up through Justice Kagan, which I'll talk about. And then we're going to talk. Lastly on POPOC Live. I'll pick up in Greenland because now it looks like it wasn't enough that Usha Vance is going to the dog sleds because this administration's going to the dogs, going to the dog sled races in Greenland on a humanitarian tour while Donald Trump threatens to take Greenland by any way it can, including force. The prime minister's incoming and outgoing of Greenland said it's an assault on their dignity. It's an insult to the people of Greenland. 75% don't want to see Donald Trump, don't want to join with the United States. While get this, you think they're getting out of town for a reason. Two people of the breach brigade, as the Huffington Post calls it, related to the signal gate that I talked about the top secret Houthi attack that was revealed to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. Two of the major participants in that chat, Hank, Seth, sorry, J.D. vance, the Vice president and Mike Waltz are both going where? Greenland. It just got announced that JD Vance was gonna join his wife for the dog sled race. But then he, then he spilled the beans. He said it's not really about the dog sled race, truly about national security. I'm going to go visit the Air Force base and the space base up in, up in Greenland. And then I'm going to. And I'm going to. We're going to, we're going to take over this country, whether they like it or not. It's like a hostile takeover. And then finally, had you heard the news? Lena Haba is being groomed for a federal judge position or maybe to take over for attorney general. And Pam Bondi's had enough. Or maybe shutter the thought, a spot on the United States Supreme Court. We've got the grooming of Alina Haba by Donald Trump. Trump grooming Haba. Those words just naturally go together here. We've got Donald Trump replacing or repositioning people in his cabinet. He's taking the guy, Mr. Giordano, John Giordano, who just got confirmed by the Senate to be the New Jersey Prosecutor, lead prosecutor, U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. He's now sending him off to an African nation to be the diplomat, to be the ambassador. Opening a spot for Alina Haba to move from the White House. Talk about failing up to move from the White House counselor's position to the top prosecutor job in New Jersey, where she's from. Why do I think they're doing that? Because Giordano really wanted to go to this small African nation of Namibia? No, because they want to rehabilitate Helena Haba so that when, that when the time comes, they can say, you know, she was the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, even though she was fined by a federal judge for filing bad faith filings over a million dollars. She was responsible for all of Donald Trump's major losses to E. Jean Carroll in the sex abuse case. She was sanctioned by another state court judge. She entered into a shady payoff scandal to pay off somebody who claims that she was seduced or groomed by Alina Haba to settle a case on the cheap against Donald Trump. And what better way to rehab her than send her off for a year or two to be the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a state that Donald Trump hates because he keeps losing there every time there's a presidential election, but needs because his bedminster golf course is there. He loves having people in his back pocket in the places where he has golf courses, you know, or homes in New York. He puts Mayor Adams in his back pocket and he assigns Jay Clayton, who's a golfing buddy of his, to be the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. He puts Alina Haba, U.S. attorney in New Jersey. See the pattern here? Going to cover it all on POPOC Live. Now, listen, I want to tell you how humbled I am, despite the glasses, how humbled I am by what's happening here on Popac Live and on the Legal AF YouTube channel. We are not only at 520,000 or so on the LegalAF YouTube channel. In just about six months, we just added a group of amazing commentators led by Dave Aronberg coming off of another Midas Touch YouTube channel used to be called True Crime. I think it's Court Authorities. They're now with me. They're now with us together on Legal af. Dave Aronberg will be doing regular hot takes on Legal aforementioned along with some of his other contributors there here on POPOC Live, which I'm doing every Tuesday night, which we're, we're slow walking into a podcast, if you haven't noticed. Okay. That is, you know, me different than me doing it with Ben or Karen Freeman McDiffalo on, on Legal AF, where, you know, Ben sort of, you know, drives the train on Saturday and I'm sort of the color person and, you know, I'm the kind of executive producers on Wednesday. And all of that here I get just to be completely untethered. I get to be unplugged. I don't pull punches. I take questions, I give answers. You can't put me in the corner. Fill in any of your, your pop culture and movie references. And I'm enjoying it. And, and you guys are supporting it. You, my audience is supporting it, which I really, I'm humbled by it. You know, we're doing four or five hundred thousand every episode, every week here at the intersection of law and politics, Popox style. And, you know, it's just so rewarding for me to be able to interact in different ways in different shapes of our audience. So, again, thank you very much. Let's dive in. Let's talk about the breach brigade, as HuffPost calls it, and the signal gate. I'll catch you up if you've missed only or saw only parts of it. And I'll tell you where we are, why Hegseth is being thrown under the bus. Jeffrey Goldberg drops a bombshell on the Atlantic, which I subscribe, to, which he said, I was given secret war plans by the Trump administration, and I live to tell about it. Something like that. And when you read the article, it turns out that some idiot named Mike Waltz, who's our national security advisor for Donald Trump, he's the guy off to Greenland to go try to shake a fist at the people of the Greenlanders. And tell them you better come along while I'm here at the space base. That Mike Waltz, same Mike Waltz, by the way, who attacked mercilessly and called for the, the prosecution and imprisonment of, of Hillary Clinton because of her email servers being used. He apparently fat fingered creating a chat group on Signal. You may not know about Signal, think it's like WhatsApp with slightly better encryption. I mean, I know that the Signal CEO came out because she's trying to sell a product. She's like, I know people say it's not encrypted. It's the gold standard for private communications, right? Private communications, like me sharing something with a friend or a chat or discussion group. And I don't want the gold standard when you're talking about war plans and target packages at the highest level in a group chat involving the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, Stephen Miller of the White House office, Tulsi Gabbard, the head of 14 intelligence agencies and the director of the CIA. I want something more than the gold standard that I can get in the App Store. How about bank level encryption? How about Pentagon level encryption? You know, and John, John Ratliff, who's our CIA director, he said, well, I was told that the Biden administration had approved Signal for, for CIA use. Oh, here we go. One of the things that we got from the Go, from the reporting from the Atlantic is that their messaging, which they discussed on the Signal app on the Signal chat was a. The people aren't going to understand why we're attacking the Houthis. They don't know who they are. They're not going to understand why we're attacking them. To clear the maritime channel, the shipping channel in the Suez Canal area. They're not going to understand why that. Because 50% of the traffic through there is Europe, not America. America only has like 2% of the traffic, so we better come up with better messaging. Yeah, let's put on a messaging play. And the messaging that they talked about at Signal was blame Biden again, blame Biden and talk about Iranian fundraising or funding of the Houthis. And that's what they did. And then John Ratliff in his response to some questions, harsh questions during the Senate today said, well, I was told that the Biden administration approved Signal. Did they approve it for highly classified top secret weapons grade package information about bombing the Houthis. Who, what, where and why and when. And there, that's what Hegseth got blown under the bus. Got thrown under the bus. Like I said, I Never saw that before, but now I understand exactly what it looks like. Tulsi Gabbard first, who's the head of our intelligence community. She's the only intelligence director we've ever had that's lacking in intelligence. There's no other way to put it. She says, well, as far as I know, nothing in that chat would have been classified from an intelligence gathering standpoint. That may be true, you know, from their world. But she deferred it. She said, as to the aspect of the chat that dealt with the target package and the. The weapons to be used and the timing of it, what Donald Trump blithefully recalls a glitch. That's what he called it. He said that you he first. He said, they did what? And he said it was a glitch. Right. So she said that glitch was Hegseth's fault. And then Ratliff joined in because why not? And said it was Hegseth's fault. He's in charge of classifying what should or shouldn't be discussed on a Signal application. That's not for us to decide. That's for the Department of Defense. That would be the Secretary of Defense, Hegset. This is the second time in 60 days that Hegset's been thrown under the bus. You know, he already undermined Ukraine before a major negotiation with the Russians and a breach of national security and diplomacy. And here he willfully participates on Signal in a discussion about war plans. Now he's pissed off now that they caught him, so now he barks at the reporters. There's no war plans. Like, no war plans. Well, according to your colleagues on the Signal chat, whether there were, there weren't, whether they were classified or not, they are. That's up to you. And then to throw Hegseth a life preserver in the form of an anvil. John Ratliff, the head of our. Ratcliffe, the head of our CIA, said that in his view. In his view, this pre decisional information about a target, which is exactly what just happened, would be classified. Then what are you doing on Signal now? How did it happen? Mike Waltz sets up this chain. Here's my one speculation, and I had somebody text me about it recently. JG Jonathan Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. And not somebody you would normally be on a signal chat with if you're the security head, national security director. But he might have had him on his signal, or Goldberg is on Signal, so. Or he's maybe communicating with him before about prior stories. JG if you look at Your keyboard is very close to JD To JD as or, sorry, JD Vance. In other words, the G and the V. Let's try that again. The J, the G and the V on the QWERTY keyboard of your typewriter are right above each other. You could easily fat finger. Instead of doing JV for JD Vance, you hit JG and you pull up Goldberg. And then he just sat there in the chain. We've all been in text chains, WhatsApp chains, signal chains. Maybe he just sat there. All these little bubbles and he was listed as JG and nobody said, who's jg? I've been on conference calls where people have come in and I don't recognize a number. I stopped the conference call to say, who is this number? Because I'm trying to protect, let's say attorney client privilege. You'd think at the highest levels they would at least do that. Here's a public service announcement to our highest level of intelligence and national security and defense leadership. Change your passwords. You don't think the Chinese were reading that and peering into that? Your use of Signal because it was scrambled and encrypted for private conversations. The gold standard. You don't think the Chinese hackers can get through the gold standards? They were living in Verizon servers during the campaign and peering into Donald Trump and J.D. vance's traffic and text messages. You don't think they're doing it now? Does anybody think that? This administration is very confident in the way they handle top secret and military grade information war plans led by Donald Trump? How soon we forget Mar A Lago and his sticky fingers of taking the war plans for the Iranians and other people and just showing them to people and acting like it was his. Of course this administration is going to have a major security breach and scandal in its first 60 or 65 days. Of course this would never happen to Joe Biden. Joe Biden, when you could say a lot about Joe Biden, but he was an institutionalist that respected things. In 50 years of being in government, he knew not to use Signal. I know there's been some jokes like you wouldn't be able to know what SIGNAL is. I don't care. It never happened. It never would happen because he had mature adults in the room like Jake Sullivan, his National Security Council advisor, like Kamala Harris, like him, like the Secretary of State, you know, competent people. So you can't blame Joe Biden for this. So Hegseth may not belong for this world of being the head of the Department of Defense. Although Donald Trump you know, the inside reporting, which I'm sure they're trying to get to the bottom of with lie detectors, is that he said they did what, what happened, but then later said it was a glitch. I love the glitch. Like it's Westworld. Remember that show on HBO and, and a character got a glitch, you know, one of these automatronic robot people and then two guys in white coats would take them away while they were glitching. This whole entire administration is glitching. That's all we're watching is one big glitch. I demand more in my president and their administration than glitches. You know, I love this administration. The stock market, the economy, tariff policy is tanking. Everybody's checkbook, purse, wallet and the rest. And the best the Treasury Secretary can come up with is it's a needed correction. It's a short term correction. You know, the Commerce Secretary, you know, we're going to totally throw over the, the game board of Social Security. We're going to make it harder for everybody to get it. We're going to, we're going to make it. You got to phone in every week on it. Like you're calling into your, to your probation officer, like you're wearing an anklet. We're going to, we're going to abuse effectively the most disadvantaged and underprivileged in our society and the weakest, you know, older people and people with handicaps and disabilities. And his response during an interview was, you know who's, you know who we're trying to catch with being late with checks? You know who calls and complains the loudest? Fraudsters. My mother in law, 94 years old. She doesn't complain when a Social Security check doesn't show up. Right, because she's her, her son in law is a multi billionaire. I'm not. And by the way, why is she getting Social Security? Shouldn't you turn that back in because your family doesn't need it? How about that? How about mother in law turns back Social Security check. Musk thinks it's a Ponzi scheme. Why don't you turn it back? All right. So does Hegseth survive? Leave a note here tonight, we'll discuss it. Signal gate is not going away. J.D. vance thinks he can skip off to Greenland to join Mike Waltz and hope this story dies down. This ain't a story. This ain't a glitch. This is a major, one of the most major national security scandals in the last hundred years. Yeah, and we're certainly not gonna let it go. And we know they didn't let it go when it was something relatively minor like, like Hillary Clinton using a personal email to exchange some documents. They never got out, they never got leaked. She didn't hit attach and sent it to the New York Times. Even Hillary Clinton had a great sense of humor on this. She put up on social media yesterday those eyes from the emoji eyes like I see this and like, you gotta be kidding me, right? That said it all. I loved every part of that. So let's move on to Congress since we're already in Congress talking about the hearings about breach, the breach brigade. And you've got Mike Johnson who when he's not saying that the, that there was no real breach because it wasn't classified and therefore it was just professionals doing their job. If it's not classified, then put it all on C Span. I should be able to watch and listen and download all, all of the private conversations on the text message. A chain of our highest level of leaders. Right? I should be able to. It's not classified. When did war not become classified? They're using war powers to try to deport people. So against that backdrop, Mike Johnson, who's a doormat who decided to take to his microphone to try to deflect and he said the following, a version of the following. Federal judges are out of control and single judges should not be allowed to issue injunctions that bind the rest of the country. And we're going to have to do something about it. We control the power of the purse string. We control as the Congress funding for federal courts. We could eliminate district courts. Maybe he wanted to say district judges. I don't think that's going to go over very well if your way to check and balance the federal courts is to eliminate courts you don't like and to try to pass new rules in particular that federal judges can't issue remedies of injunctions nationwide. That's already going to backfire. May I remind you how many nationwide injunctions especially came out of the 5th Circuit or out of the Louisiana in favor of the Trump administration? Like blocking a woman's right to choose and use medicated abortion. That was a single federal judge in Texas binding everybody in a national injunction, all women at a national injunction. Or blocking Biden's attempt to give student loan debt relief or COVID policy. That's all right Wing maga, Trumper judges, single judges issuing injunctions. And I don't think it's going to be found to be constitutional for a court, sorry, for the Congress to limit the inherent authority of a judge to fashion a remedy that matches the violation of the Constitution or the statute. I just don't think. And there's just going to be litigation over that. Plus, I'm not sure there's political will for that either. MAGA is not as unified as people think. There are plenty of other Republicans and libertarians who won't believe in that and won't join Mike Johnson. But he's just doing what Donald Trump ordered him to do. That's all. He ordered him to take to the podium and he ordered this guy to start articles of impeachment against judges and this guy to do this and Chuck Grassley in the Senate to do that. It's all an elaborate game that's being controlled by Donald Trump in using this ecosystem that he developed between his rapid response team in the White House communications office, paying social media influencers, activating and surfing behind Russian trolls and other disinformation and misinformation campaign, activating Elon Musk to attack federal judges. The press secretary do the same. Then you move on to Congress to do the same with the MAGA people there who are beholden to Donald Trump for their political success. And that is the ecosystem and the echo chamber that we're watching. I'm going to cover this whole thing about federal judges. We're going to talk about Alina Haba and the Supreme Court on an emergency application to stop the rehiring of 16,000 probationary workers. And finally, we'll end the show on Greenland and what Usha Vance, J.D. vance and Mike Waltz are doing. They're all on POPOC Live. First, we've got sponsors, which is great. Shows that there's a real audience and a commitment to what we're doing here on POPOC Live, we curate the sponsors, we try them out, we test them out. We like them. If you got some disposable income, you think these products are interesting. They, they appreciate us and it's a way for us to vote for them with that. So we're going to do that. And while you're, while you're here listening to me take a minute, go over to that channel that I curate with the Midas Touch Network called Legal af, Legal afmtn hit us there. We're going up to eight hours a day of programing at the same intersection of law and politics. We got court accountability action, Shan Wu, Dina Dahl. I got a show called Unprecedented about the United States Supreme Court. We've got the new group coming over led by Dave Aronberg. You know this is the place to be is it's going to be the legal channel where we already have half a million subscribers in just six months. And now a word from our sponsors. 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And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code legal AF at checkout. That's an additional 15% off at fast growingtrees.com using the code legal AF at checkout fast growing trees.com code legal AF now is the perfect time to plant use legal AF to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. All right, let's turn to the United States Supreme Court for a minute. A couple of things have happened there in the last 48 hours or so. They heard a case about whether Louisiana's new maps for voting districting, which is, you know, how congresspeople and senators get or congresspeople get voted in whether. Because it created two black districts under court order out of six total, which doesn't even reflect the actual percentage of black people in Louisiana. But they created two. But that wasn't good enough for white people. And so there's a group of white people who, invoking, I guess, diversity, equity, inclusion, decided to challenge the map because it was too many black districts. And so this was a weird case where the state of Louisiana, not known for civil rights, I'll just leave it at that, had to defend two black districts against a bunch of white people that wanted to take it away. The reality, as demonstrated in the hearing at the United States Supreme Court, is that the reason for the districts had less to do about protecting black people and giving them at least two districts that are predominantly black and more about saving the political hide of Steve Scalise and Mike Johnson of the Congress because their districts were made more white, they got whiter, they got whitewashed and to create and then these kind of snake drawn, gerrymandered, political gerrymanded districts got drawn that happened to be black. So even the conservatives, mainly when I say the maga, Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts, I don't think are in favor of throwing out this map and give and taking away the two black districts. Kavanaugh has some interesting questions to him about whether the Voting Rights act has expired and whether we should get rid of it altogether. That's the goal of the of maggots, to get rid of the Voting Rights act altogether because we're a colorblind nation now where black and brown people don't need to be supported any longer to get it. Yeah. So my gut based on the oral argument this week is that the Supreme Court is going to keep the Louisiana voting maps in place and they're going to side with the state of Louisiana to keep the and find that it was political motivations, not, not racial discrimination or racial matters that led to those two districts. Those two districts. Interesting line of question raised by Amy, by Ketanji Brown Jackson. There was this back and forth about complying with court's orders. And there was a suggestion that maybe Louisiana wouldn't comply with the court's order on this. That seems to be all the rage right now. You know, red states and others saying they may not comply with federal orders. She sort of nipped that in the bud with some question and answer. And now we're going to wait on the ruling that'll probably come out in the next month or two before they go on their vacation. So let me turn to Alina Haba, not because I want to, but because I have to. Alina Haba has been failing up for a long time now. She's not qualified for any position she's ever held with Trump. She represented parking garages, small office, doing employment law and whatever walked in the door in a little town in New Jersey near Bedminster or in Bedminster near the golf course. Her biggest power move was getting in close with Donald Trump, who then apparently started grooming her. You could take that any way you want. She gets into the Bedminster golf course. She finds ways to be there when Trump's there. Trump takes a liking to her. I mean, she's Effectively been Trump's arm candy during the campaign. Whenever he went to things like MMA fighting, he spends an inordinate amount of time golfing and going to sporting events for pure adulation purposes, don't you think? You know, what time does he spend that? And signing proclamations with his big sharpie pen. It's like all he does every weekend, he goes golfing. And when he's not golfing, he's showing up at a wrestling match or an MMA fight or football, the Super Bowl. I don't really understand it. It's just his need, his vanity need. It must be his insider group. When they see his confidence flagging, they have to trot him out in front of people that they know are going to scream his name. It's that pathetic, really. So Alina Haba, speaking of pathetic, Alina Haba, she worms her way in and she helps him settle a couple of sex harassment cases. Does that surprise you? One in particular got her into trouble, and she had apparently settled it with a little bit of hush money payoff. As reported, there was a server at Bedminster who claimed that one of her bosses, not named Donald Trump, had sexually abused her. And Alina Haba got very close to this woman, started apparently grooming her. And that's the allegations in the lawsuit, to confide in her. And Alina Haba guided her towards a relatively cheap settlement. The woman believes that Alina Haba was her lawyer and, or her friend. And Alina Haba says, no, no, I wasn't any of those things. I worked for Trump. And so this woman got bamboozled. She sued, including Alina Haba. And there was like a secret, there was like a settlement. It wasn't secret because we reported on it where Alina Haba had to pay that off. Lena Haba also got sanctioned in federal courts. That's why I think it's iron that the same week that Donald Trump is going after lawyers and law firms, he just put another one on the blacklist that, you know, he put Perkins Coy on the list. He put Paul Weiss in New York on the list. He just put a new one on the list. He supposedly has a list 14 law firms long. This is all payback for the big law firms in America that wouldn't, that wouldn't be hired by Donald Trump. And so, you know, they wouldn't pick them for their, for their games on the playground. So now this is payback. Now, 17 lawyers that did work for Donald Trump, that's the actual number, got sanctioned, fined, indicted, convicted, and or lost their bar license. And Alita Haba is one of them. She got fined by a federal judge, over a million dollars federal judge. Right. She's. She's now nominated to be a federal prosecutor or appointed to be a federal prosecutor because she filed a bad faith filing on behalf of Donald Trump in Southern District of Florida in front of Judge Middlebrooks suing the Democratic Party, Debbie Wasserman, Schultz Perkins Coy, the law firm and others. And the judge said this is a political screed masquerading as a lawsuit. Goodbye. And fined them and made them pay the attorney's fees to the other side, including Robby Kaplan, the lawyer over there, who also represented E. Jean Carroll, who beat Alina Haba twice in federal court, where a jury found that she was sex abused by Donald Trump and awarded her money. This is the failing up aspect. She lost every major case for Donald Trump, including the $450 million civil fraud case. She got replaced at the last minute by Joe Tacopina, remember that guy who also failed. And so she got kicked upstairs to be a spokesperson and a lawyer for the super PAC for Trump. And I thought that's a safe rubber room for her not to get hurt. And then he moved her over to the White House as a White House counselor, like she was some sort of Kellyanne Conway or Carville or something like that. But she was none of those things. In fact, I am sure, back to my initial put Baby in the corner. I'm sure they put her in a corner because Stephen Miller is running the show as White House assistant chief of staff. He's really running the show back there. And I'm sure there's not enough oxygen for Alina Hopper to do anything. She probably was getting frustrated and Donald Trump wants to groom her. Remember, to be. I'll just leave it at that. To be something other than a White House counselor and rehabilitate her with all these losses and fines and sanctions. And what better way to rehabilitate her than to shove her into a job that doesn't need Senate confirmation at the moment, which is to be the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, a state he needs because Benminster is there and he likes to hang out there, doesn't want to get indicted there. And so he wants to have friends as prosecutors and a state he loathes because he's lost every election he's ever run in New Jersey. I mean, New Jersey's. It's got reddish bands in it. I'm from there. And you see some Republicans that get elected in certain counties like the one, I'm from Monmouth county that, that trends a little red. But the, the senators are Democrat. The, the congress people are primarily in that region. Democrat governor has been Democrat for a long time. Kamala Harris won New Jersey. You get it. So this was like beating New Jersey with both ends of the stick with Alina Haba. Yeah. And she gets to be rehabilitated in case Pam Bondi, the Attorney general needs to step down or doesn't want to last past the midterms when there's a bloodbath hopefully. And so he slides Alina Haba in or federal judgeship, there's going to be a couple of hundred of those that are going to better gonna pop up. So he slides Lena Haba into a federal judgeship on the way to a federal appellate court like the 9th Circuit that he's trying to make red in California or the 2nd Circuit or the 3rd Circuit in New York and New Jersey. And then, oh, there's an opening of the U.S. supreme Court. Now it's a battle between Eileen Cannon and Alina Haba or both. People laugh when I say that or shudder to think. It could happen. It could happen. He's not just idly placed. Anybody that thinks he's just idly placing her in a power prosecutor position that she's not qualified for, think again. And then you could see she's already political even though it's what happened. We're not going to weaponize the Department of Justice. Really. The first thing she said in that driveway portico of the White House at her press conference, Alina Haba was I'm going to the. She almost called New Jersey assessed bull. The criminality of New Jersey in the backyar of Cory Booker, the senator is unprecedented. I'm gonna go shut it down. I don't know what she's talking about. There's always crime in every place. This New Jersey has a lot of financial interests, a lot of pharmaceutical interests. It's one of the larger states economically. It's had the organized crime there for a number of years. But the last major person who was prosecuted and convicted for over 10 years in prison is Robert Menendez, the senator for New Jersey, who's a Democrat. So the New Jersey office knows how to prosecute crime. What does Cory Booker have to do with crime in Newark? There's been crime in Newark, although it's cleaned itself up since I was a child. You know, Jersey City and Hoboken too. But now they're cleaned up. Newark will be too. Has nothing to do with Cory Booker last I looked. He was a senator. He's not a municipal, municipal mayor or on the town council. He's not Senator Pothole. He's, he's got, you know, he's got to bring home the bacon to New Jersey for sure. But he's not responsible for the crime. And the crime is trending down anyway. Violent crime was trending down because of Joe Biden and the stimulus package for a long, long time. But you see how she automatically, because Trump tells her to, goes for the jugular. And it's always political. So that's my take on Alina Haba again. It's acting interim. She's not going to be there for long. The other guy, John Giordano, he was a Philadelphia lawyer, a Trump bundler. Bundler, Czech bundler. Gave him a lot of money. He was at the UN at one point. And apparently they think Namibia, sorry, in Africa is very important. And it is strategically rare earth metals and minerals. It's got one of the greatest producers of uranium around. It's democratic and we want to keep it out of the clutches of the Chinese. So it's important strategically. Which is another reason I'm sure he sent a loyalist in, John Giordano there. But the guy just got confirmed three weeks ago. This is again, another bumbling glitch of the Trump administration. They just can't get anything straight and everything looks like it's ad hoc and half ass and off the back of their, their backside, you know, off the seat of their pants. So when I come back swinging of off their seat of their pants. The takeover of Greenland. How's that going? And is anybody buying that? They're just there to check. Take in the dog races like Usha Vance. Our, our. What's, what's the first lady of the second guy called? We'll talk about it more. But first, we got a word from our sponsors here on POPOC Live. Handpicked for POPOC Live. They're great. We curate them with Midas Touch and Jordy Marsellus. 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Somebody put it in his head that it could be the greatest land grab since the Louisiana Purchase or we got Alaska. And he wants that to be part of his legacy. He knows he'll never be on Mount Rushmore. He wants Greenland. Now, we've been talking about Greenland as a strategic alliance, as a country since the 1950s, in the cold War. So I get the attraction, I get the interest and the lust. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of perfect ways to do it. They are a semi autonomous region controlled by Denmark. They have the right to vote for their own independence. They haven't done it yet. It's a huge swath, swath of land that is strategically important, has rare earth, minerals and elements, a lot of natural resources. It's got some new maritime channels that have opened up because of the greenhouse effect and global warming that the Republicans deny have existed, but have to recognize that there's new ways to navigate around Greenland that weren't there before. But the ways that you would normally do it, especially if you're the guy that ran on the art of the deal and everything's a deal is cut a deal with Denmark and with Greenland and get favored nation status for natural resources and rare earth elements and minerals. And if they have oil producing there, you can do that to get favored nation status over, let's say China and Russia for the areas above it that are used for navigation now and build some more, cut some more deals and build some more space bases and air Force bases and other bases for American troops and come up with some, you know, ways to give them some extra and get close to the, to the Danes, you know, like that, that didn't work for Donald Trump. Apparently he decided that he's not going to sweet talk them. He's going to take it by force if he has to. First, he, like Canada, like insulting Trudeau and Canadian heritage and Canadian national pride, was going to chase them into the arms of the United States and make them the 51st president with all of his, like, sophomoric, you know, Governor Trudeau. All they did was piss off the Canadians. Appointments a prime minister, elected prime minister who's got bigger brass ones than Donald Trump ever will in the area of economic and trade. And he's eating his lunch ever since. But again, favored nation status. Negotiate your way out of It. Now Donald Trump takes to the, to the, to Congress during the joint session speech and he says, we need it. It's important. It's, it's strategically important. It's important economically. One way or the other, we're gonna get it. Which everybody in Greenland took to mean Donald Trump's going to attack Greenland. Yeah. Could you imagine? Is there, is there public. Stop right there. Is there public support for attacking an ally, breaching sovereignty and taking a country by force? The Louisiana Purchase has purchase in the title. We purchased it, we negotiated it. Alaska, you know, all of that negotiation, you know, we didn't take by force anything in this hemisphere. A couple of places maybe, but so rather than cut the deal, they are threatening and shaking the sword and pounding their, their, their chest at Greenland and all that's doing is pissing off greenlanders who are 8. More than 80% of people from Greenland think this is a terrible idea. They hate Donald Trump and by extension, I'm sure America. And they don't want this deal, you know, and, and the Danes don't want the deal. Denmark doesn't want the deal, you know, and they want to respect Greenland's semi autonomous status. I mean, Donald Trump got Greenland to do something that they've never done in 500 years. Change. Or the, or the King of Denmark changed the coat of arms for Denmark. I reported on this a couple of months ago. They added the, I think it's the polar bear to represent Greenland, you know. So they changed the coat of arms to signal to Donald Trump. Back the f off and up. The outgoing Prime Minister, he said, this is an insult and we can't trust anything about the United States. And so did the incoming. What are they talking about? Donald Trump decided to send Usha Vance a delegation led by Usha Vance, but on the side, we're not supposed to notice that Mike Waltz, he of the signal gate, he of the. I accidentally disclosed war plans to the Atlantic magazine. They sent him and our energy secretary to the space base. See, we have a space base there. We had a relationship that we'd blown at the same time to go get briefed. And Usha Vance takes to her TikTok, Instagram, whatever it's gonna be, and says, I'm just going there to meet with the people of Greenland and to strengthen our relationship. Looks like a hostage video. Strengthen our relationships and go to the world famous. Whatever the name I can't pronounce. Sorry, dog races. That's all. That's all. And the Prime Minister responded, you can't. We can't just take that as an innocent visit of a spouse of an elected official. It's more than that. And now J.D. vance, who has got to get out of town. Trust me, after this breach brigade Congressional thing, I'm sure they wanted to call J.D. vance and he was on the chain, too, because J.D. vance is on that chain disagreeing with Trump. This is not the deep fake of was it or wasn't it JD Vance attacking Elon Musk that came out recently. A deep fake so good that even Elon Musk's own grok AI false statement monitor couldn't determine whether it was. He said it was likely not Elon Musk being attacked by J.D. vance. Not definitively. So. He's got that going on earlier in the week. He's got the real signal that it's been authenticated by the White House. Just to be clear, chat in which he disagrees with the President. I'm not sure the President, the potus, is actually contemplating or has contemplated fully what attacking the Houthis to help the European shipping channels will mean it's inconsistent with his policies and procedures because there's now new reporting that I'll do other hot takes on that. You think the public statements against the Europeans are bad. They're talking even worse about them behind closed doors. So you have that going on. So what is J.D. vance or what is the White House, I'm sure, pick up the phone and say, hey, J.D. you know your wife and son are going to that dog sled race. Yeah. Why don't you go there? Also, I'm not calling Greenland. Greenland, Siberia. But it's Siberia for the next few days. So J.D. vance tries to act tough in his social media post and he says Greenland is of strategic importance. It's important that I go up there and be briefed. Yeah. Is that what everybody thinks? You need to go to the space base to be briefed about the importance of Greenland and you got to go to the dog sled race with your wife. This is again, not an official visit. It's the opposite of an official visit because the prime minister's incoming and outgoing don't want them there. So there's nobody greeting them at the airport. There are no state dinner. I'm not sure what kind of palace or building there is in Greenland, but whatever there is, it's not going to be used to officially greet anybody. They just flew in, you know, aircraft, aircraft, US Military aircraft into the base. Because they can do that, because they have permission to do that. And then how they're Getting, I don't know, some Uber. Some Ubers, they. They use signal for classified. Why? I assume they use. Well, I'll give it to him. Uber black. They use Uber black. Uber black suv. Uber black SUV to get the vice president, his wife, Mike Waltz, and the Energy Secretary to the dogs. Dog race. Yeah. And all that's doing is pissing off Greenland. I think they should just challenge it. They. I think the Danes should challenge Donald Trump. Say you want Daneland Daily. You want Greenland, you got to fight us for it. Yeah. Pick up a weapon, mass your troops. We're ready. Then NATO can come in and protect Greenland against the United States. This is a movie of my own making, by the way, and it's ludicrous, except it's really not. At some point, in order to fight a bully, you have to punch the bully in the face and steal his lunch and eat it in front of him. And that's what we're watching. The most successful ways to do it. Sometimes you got to do it quietly. Like, you got to take the bully in the alley and then do it. That's like Claudia, Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. Sometimes you got to punch him right in the face in front of everybody on the. On the bus stop. That's Canada. Right? That's what. That's what Canada has done and it's doing. And Greenland is starting to do that, too, and the European Union is starting to go that way. While everybody watches and says, how do we get out from under this Trump, this problem we call Trump, I'm going to continue to follow it. We have a great community here. I'm so honored. I'm so humbled by it, what we're building together here on the Midas Touch YouTube channel. Take a moment, slide over to the Legal AF MTN channel, the Legal AF YouTube channel that I curate along with Midas Touch Network. And then, of course, we've got our great pro democracy sponsors that we can't do without. I look forward to my next time with you. I'll see you next Tuesday on POPOC Live. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories. The intersection of law and Politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at legal a FMTN. That's at legal AFMTN. 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