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Michael Popak (0:33)
Well, if I wasn't already revved up to defend our constitutional republic, our way of life, our rule of law, our democracy, before I started watching the American Revolution by Ken Burns on pbs. Yes, PBS still exists. I'm fired up now and the more I watch it, the more I'm convinced that we are in our rebellion, we, we are in our revolutionary period. And because what is Donald Trump as his grip on power slips, but a failing King George? And what are we but patriots fighting for our way of life and to fight for our Constitution and to make sure that we have a government that is aligned with our values and our Constitution. That's why we're here together at the Intersection. That's why we're here together on Midas Touch. That's why you're helping me build, brick by brick, the Legal AF community and Legal AF YouTube channel. So many amazing developments I'm going to talk to you about that are going to be happening in 2026 for Legal AF and its community. But it starts with you and I'm so glad you're here. I'm Michael Popak and we're at the Intersection. I'm going to orient us, I'm going to curate for us around four developments. One, of course, my view, my analysis of what we just watched with Judge Curry making her ruling about the illegality of Lindsey Halligan as a prosecutor, what it means for the future of the James Comey prosecution. Is that going to close the door on the James Comey prosecution? It should. What's it mean for the Letitia James prosecution for mortgage fraud? When and who will pick the next U.S. attorney? What will Donald Trump do about it? What's going to happen on appeal, the inevitable appeal and so on. And that's a good way to kick off this episode of the Intersection, as I'm revved up by thoughts of the American Revolution, by thoughts of our framers and founders of thoughts of the Federalist Papers, of thoughts of probably, as Ken Burns put it, the most influential and consequential pamphlet of our of our time, Common Sense. That's what I rely on for my commentating that's what I rely on for my audience. And I'm so glad that you're here with our brand of common sense. I'm going to then take us to Judge Chutkan Epstein and the Epstein cover up, the child sex trafficking cover up. We've been watching in slow motion by Donald Trump to protect himself and other rich and powerful people as now come to the end. This is the end of the beginning, if not the beginning of the end. And Judge Chutkan has just moved it along because you may not have saw this today, but today in the last 24 hours or so, she's issued a new order, a summary judgment, game over in favor of Democracy Forward, that public interest group led by Sky Perryman. I'm going to talk a lot about Sky Perryman and Democracy Forward tonight, and not just because I'm going to be interviewing her tomorrow on Legal AF for our regular playlist devoted to Democracy Forward. And there are more than 100 cases, but she just won. Judge Chutkan just ruled that all correspondence that that exists between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein must be produced immediately pursuant to a Freedom of Information act request. What does it mean? What does it mean for the bill that was just passed into law? What does it mean for Pam Bondi, who's at the center of most corruption scandals? I mean, there's so many scandals involving Pam Bondi. You know, sometimes it's hard for us to keep track, but I keep track. Pam Bondi's involved with another one. Is she going to use the phony new criminal investigation in New York to block the Epstein files? And how is she going to block Judge Chutkan's order that these documents, including the Epstein Trump communications, be given to the public? So we're going to talk about that. Then I need to turn to Judge Boasberg. You know, a sleeping giant has awoken Judge Boasberg back in March and April, April particularly, he issued a landmark order of contempt, probable cause for criminal contempt against the Trump administration in a case we referred to as JGG, has to do with 200 Venezuelans and others sent to El Salvador without due process on secret flights and secret planes that he grounded and that the Trump administration, and we know why now, violated his order and kept the planes flying, even though his order said ground them, return them, bring them back and those human beings back to federal jurisdiction and federal oversight by a judge and something we call due process that we hold dear. I think I'm on. I think I'm on episode five of the American Revolution. That's what they're fighting for, they're fighting for freedom. They're fighting for due process. They're fighting for the Constitution. They're fighting to defend the Constitution. Not any. And not any man. We're not a country of men or women. We're a country of laws with. Donald Trump says that he's going to court martial. Mark Kelly, the senator who served as a captain of the Navy and was an astronaut married to Gabby Giffords, because he and five other elected officials looked the American people in the eye and said, and particularly those in the military and the military brass, don't give up the ship. You have an obligation, you have a duty, you have a, a commitment, an oath that's been taken to uphold the Constitution and not to abide by or comply with any illegal order, unconstitutional order of the commander in chief of the president. You swore to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, domestic and foreign, not uphold the president or a president. And after that video went out, Donald Trump decided to have his FBI opening up a criminal investigation against them. They didn't misstate the law. They didn't misstate the law of military justice. They didn't misstate the Nuremberg principle that you can't just say, I was following orders. They didn't violate the constitutional principles. They properly stated them. They felt they had to do it, obviously, because there aren't enough resistance within the military to protect our democracy. And they were, and they were sounding the clarion call, the bat signal, if you will, to make sure that as Donald Trump gets even crazier, more unhinged, more depraved, his grip on power slips. He goes into his own personal bunker, the bunker of his mind. And we're at risk that the military stands under civilian control and stands between us and Armageddon stands between us and a rogue, lawless president. So we're going to talk about the Epstein files again. I just had the honor of interviewing Lisa Phillips. I'm going to be doing a lot of work with Lisa Phillips and a survivors group that she and others created called Survivor Strategies to help victims of Sex, Sex abuse get the political, legal, emotional, psychological and other resources that they need. Legal AF is going to stand behind this project. Midas Touch is going to stand behind this project. The POPOC firm is going to stand behind this project. And this political movement is going to be organized and disciplined and devoted to, to survivors of sex abuse. And I'm so honored. You're going to see her interview go up sometime tomorrow on Legal AF with me. Then we're going to Turn to Judge Boseberg. As I said, he's looking at criminal contempt. The case is back. He wants to hear from Errors Revenue. He wants to hear from Mr. Ensign, Drew Ensign, about what Emil Bovey now in the Third Circuit said or didn't say to them to go tell judges to go F off. I want to then move to Eric Swalwell and his new lawsuit against Mark Pulte, who's the. Sorry, Bill Pulte, who's the heir to the Pulte Construction fortune, who's the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Donald Trump's attack dog, who went after Letitia James and others claiming mortgage fraud, like Senator Adam Schiff. Now he's got a new lawsuit he's going to have to deal with. And then I want to end with Mr. Mr. Joe Schnit, 23 years in the Department of Justice. He was the head of the witness Protection program of the Department of Justice. Just got a big raise and a big promotion. Went out on a dating app with a woman he thought was somebody that was interested in him romantically, but she was an undercover journalist and recorded him saying some things out loud about the Epstein files and the Trump administration. And he got fired for it. And he wants his job back and he sued over it. I think it's a great way for us to sit at the intersection of law and politics tonight. Happy holidays. Early Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays of all time. One, my birthday backs up into Thanksgiving. Two, I just love the food. And three, this is the time to take family members who may be distant emotionally, psychologically, physically, geographically from you and pull them tighter because you don't know how many Thanksgivings you're going to have. As people know, I lost my mom in May. I didn't know at the time that the Thanksgiving prior was going to be my last Thanksgiving with her. But of course, I know it now and it leaves a big hole. And now is the time to celebrate and be in the loving embrace of your family and your friends. And if you're working, your co workers and try to make Thanksgiving as enjoyable as possible. Glad you're here at the intersection. All right, let's get to it. I'll try to give my own independent analysis of the Comey Letitia James developments. Try not to plod over, you know, fields that have already. You may already know the basics, but let me give it to you from a practicing federal practitioner's perspective, somebody I think you can come to trust about what I just noticed here. First of all, Judge Curry, who sits normally in South Carolina made the decision very smart, very smart. She peppered her her opinion with rulings by right wing conservative justices and judges. She cited to Sam Alito on the Supreme Court when she made the decision that Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed under Section 546 as a United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. She cited to Judge Cannon, Donald Trump's favorite judge in Florida, for the proposition that once she found that Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed, she had no choice but to find that everything that flowed from her illegal appointment was fruit of a poisonous tree and she had to bounce the indictment as well. Now she did it without prejudice. We'll talk about the difference between prejudice and non prejudice when it comes to the dismissal of an indictment and the findings that she made. Um, having found that Lindsey Halligan was illegally appointed under section 5 46, because under the plain reading of the statute, the Attorney General only gets one interim US Attorney at a. Not only at a time, just one. And after that, pick and then goes to the district court judges, since it has since the Civil War to pick the next judge. Some people might be asking, isn't that a violation of separation of powers? You've got judges picking executive branch officers like judges. We've been doing it since the Civil War and under the way that Vacancy Reform act was created, the President gets the ultimate right to place a prosecutor U.S. attorney in, but has to be confirmed by the Senate. And Donald Trump hasn't done that. He'll never do it with Lindsey Halligan. He'll never do it with some of the other people that he's appointed. And so he's been trying to cycle through a series of interim U.S. attorneys who serve for 120 days. But that's only a single use ticket. After the 120 days is over or before if he fires the next one, the district court Judges pick the U.S. attorney. Eric Siebert, a Republican, was the interim U.S. attorney picked under section 546. Donald Trump didn't like him even though he was a Republican because he wouldn't indict Comey and Letitia James once he was fired. Donald Trump lost the right under Pam Bondi to go bring in Lindsey Halligan and inexperienced, obscenely unqualified young lawyer with no federal prosecutor experience to go after the biggest indictments of her life with nobody sitting next to her. That's a remarkable thing. I don't feel sorry for her, but they left her twisting in the wind. If I was Lindsey Halligan and I was a young lawyer, I was an eight year lawyer. @ one point I would say, I don't want to go in there alone. Who's going in with me? Who's going to second chair me? Who's going to. Who am I going to whisper into their ear? Who am I going to write notes to? They said, no, you do it on your own. Lindsey, here's a script. And she went in there and according to Judge Fitzgerald, another judge involved with the case, she violated the fourth Amendment, the fifth amendment and the sixth amendment privileges of at least James Comey. Now, there are other judges looking at these issues. Judge Fitzgerald, the magistrate judge, Judge Nachmanoff, the trial judge over the Comey indictment, the Comey prosecution, and Judge Walker over Letitia James. But Curry was a special judge just looking at the issue of whether Lindsey Halligan lived or died as a prosecutor. And she said she was gonna rule before Thanksgiving. And she did. And she bounced Lindsey Halligan and she bounced the indictments without prejudice. Now, she also suggested in her ruling that the Comey indictment is dead in the water because they blew the statute of limitations. Most crimes, not every crime, has a period of time for when the crime was completed to when you can bring the prosecution. Sometimes it's five years, sometimes it's 10 years, seven years. But some have no statute of limitations. Perjury. For James Comey, five year statute of limitations prosecution indictment had to be brought by September 5, 2025. And Judge Curry said because Lindsey Halligan was effectively a non entity, an illegally appointed U.S. attorney, her indictment that followed, signed by nobody else, obtained by nobody else but her, cannot stand and is not an indictment and therefore didn't stop the clock on the statute of limitations. And she suggested in a footnote, case is over for Comey. Now, James Comey has come back and given us another message now that his indictment and likely his criminal case has been kicked. As we still wait for Judge Nachmanoff to rule about vindictive prosecution and rule about selective prosecution, grand jury abuse, those are all with Judge Nakhmedoff. And he can still rule and will still rule. I don't believe that what Judge Curry did mooted in any way, made it unnecessary for Judge Nakhmedoff to rule because the indictment was dismissed without prejudice. Plus, I'm sure there's going to be a new motion to dismiss for an emotion to dismiss on the grounds that the statute of limitations has run and the indictment that, that Lindsey Halligan obtained was invalid, was ultravares, was void abomination. All fancy ways of saying fancy words for saying the same thing. We're gonna see that motion. So let's hear from James Comey.