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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Michael Popak
Suit involving Donald Trump and the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, but it's not the one you're thinking of. The city has now turned around in federal court and sued the Trump administration, including its FEMA director, its Homeland Security director, because they clawed back and took out of the bank accounts of the city of New York over $80 million that was appropriated and granted to them through Congress to house illegal migrants in New York because of an overflow problem in U.S. border Patrol. Those migrants were, let's call it what it is, dumped onto Manhattan and New York City and they get compensated by and reimbursed by the federal government as appropriated by Congress. But Donald Trump got all hot and bothered because Elon Musk and his Joe said that he found $59 million being used to house migrants in luxury hotels, which is a lie. And I'll tell you about that in a minute. And that and the FEMA director who's busy flip flopping his way through the position. In various court filings, a guy by the name of Cameron Hamilton decided to push a button and pull out of and suck out of the municipal bank accounts $80 million. Not so fast. New temporary restraining order has been filed. The judge has been aside and Judge Reardon. I'll talk about her in a minute. You're here on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. Everybody sort of knows. I assume that Mayor Adams was indicted by the prior administration and the prosecutors there for corruption related to bribery and false documents and other things. In addition to that, Donald Trump decided that he wanted to make Mayor Adams play ball with his immigration policy. We'll talk a lot about immigration policy on this hot take. And in order to do that, he authorized his new Department of Justice to enter into a corrupt deal to force Mayor Adams to play ball on Trump immigration policy. In return, Donald Trump would dismiss his indictment, but only temporarily, keeping it alive long enough that if, if Mayor Adams doesn't do what Trump tells him to do as a public official, he will re indict him. So that unholy corrupt bargain was brought before Judge Ho. And it's still sitting with Judge Ho who was assigned a special counsel in the form of a former Solicitor General to get to the bottom of the potential corruption scandal. While all that was going on last week. Mayor ad the City of New York led by Mayor Adams, even at this moment through its Corporation Counsel, which is the in house law firm for the City of New York, a very fine organization. They filed their federal pleading and then their complaint assigned to Judge Reardon. They are seeking a temporary restraining order. And as a lot of these other lawsuits they have asked they have asked for a declaration that there have been violations of various constitutional principles and administrative procedures. Almost all of the cases that I talk about on Midas touch and on Legal AF can be distilled and boiled down to its essence as usually being because of the executive orders being so rogue and outrageous, usually being a violation of the Administrative Procedures act. The APA arguing that whomever has taken the money, violated the law, fired the worker, you know, defunded the the the program has arc acted arbitrarily and capriciously. That's a term of art under the Administrative Procedures Act. And several violations of the APA result. Usually it's tied to how Congress wants certain things to happen in the execution of its law and these things have not been done properly. That's one, two you will usually see and you see here in this case a an argument that there's been a violation of due process property rights under the Fifth Amendment for which there has not been appropriate due process before the money was sucked out of the bank account with some vague letter of irregularities in illegal activity in the operation of the program. What. What illegal activity? What operation of the program? When. And you can't just take the money and then make the city sue for it, although that's exactly what they've done. So you'll see Fifth Amendment violation, you'll see Administrative Procedures act violation. The other hallmarks of these types of suits that we talk about here, and there are already over 90 of them, is an argument that there's been a violation of the separation of powers, that the President is not coloring within the lines of the three co equal branches of government and has stepped across it to violate that which only Congress controlling the purse strings under our Constitution can do. So that's present in this particular lawsuit. Let's talk about Judge Reardon for a minute. I'm going to read to you from certain elements of the lawsuit. Judge Reardon is interesting. She's got a background similar to mine, similar age, similar vintage, as I like to say. She went to NYU Law School. She was actually a commercial litigator at some very fine upstanding firms in New York. Not the one that I worked at. I worked at a firm called Skadden. She worked at a firm called Davis Polk. It was a competitor of my old law firm. And she was there as a part partner at that firm and some other very top 10, top 15 law firms doing commercial litigation, not civil litigation, representing people in business disputes, that type of thing. She was actually originally nominated by Donald Trump. She was supported. Her, her, her candidacy was supported by the Democratic senator, junior senator of New York, Kirsten Gillibrand. And Trump nominated her, but it never got out of committee then because she's so qualified and sort of bipartisan. Biden nominated her and she was confirmed and she's been on the bench ever since. So she's a balls and strike kind of person, not a MAGA Republican. That's not why she was nominated originally by Trump or was pushed by Kirsten Gillibrand. And now she has the case. So what I like about this case is that it shows you that Adams, even though he's got the indictment still against him because Judge Ho has not dismissed it, while he gets to the bottom of whether there was a corrupt bargain to try to improperly influence a municipal government official by the feds, by the Department of Justice. And Donald Trump, he's like, well, we can't ignore the $80.5 million that was sucked out of our bank account. We gotta go after it. You know, it was great seeing my mother in law from abroad over the.
- [07:22]
MD Hearing Representative
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- [09:32]
Michael Popak
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- [09:34]
MD Hearing Representative
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- [09:38]
Michael Popak
And now where did that come from? It really came from. It started with doge. Where else do all these things come from? And Elon Musk. So if you particularly Elon Musk posted a couple of weeks ago on a social media platform a a posting that said this is in paragraph 73 of the complaint that was just filed. The DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59 million last week to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants. Sending this money violated the law and his gross insubordination to the President's executive order. I'll, I'll unpack all this in a minute. The money is meant for American disaster relief and is instead being spent on high end hotels for illegals. A clawback is demanded and then right on cue because this is a call in response, Cameron Hamilton, who's the acting FEMA director for Trump, said, I want to thank the DOGE team for making me aware effective yesterday, these payments have all been suspended. The DOGE team just discovered the FEMA sent okay, and then he admits something that we all know is true is that the Congress should pass the law in 2023 and 2024 for FEMA to do this. In other words, it was already authorized by Congress, which he admits in his own filing, in fact, Cameron Hamilton completely rejects and undermines and walks back the Doge theory that Donald Trump jumped on, which is the money was diverted from disaster relief because all the disasters in California and in other places were going on and went to luxury hotels. Let me unpack that. FEMA pays through these grants to house illegal migrants that have bursted out of the seams of an overpopulated border. Border Patrol facilities at a rate of $62 a day. Okay. I lived and worked in New York. You can't get a hotel room for $62 a day. The average hotel room, I think, is 300 a day more. So this is a bargain for reduced rate. Doesn't matter what hotel it is in. If the hotel is going to take them, it's $62 a day. So it's not whether the hotel was a luxury hotel. For instance, the Roosevelt Hotel, which they pointed to, may have been a Class C Hotel about 30 years ago, but it fell on hard times, which is why they take Fema money at $62 a day. Cameron Hamilton says in a filing in another case, because, remember, the funding issue is frozen by various temporary restraining orders in Rhode island and in other places. So the cutoff of funding is frozen. And to oppose that, Cameron Hamilton, the same guy at fema, he wrote that the money that was sent to New York was not diverted from money that should have been used for disaster relief. It was paid for by Congress to have FEMA administer it. But it's not FEMA money. It's congressional grants that have been authorized to shelter migrants. And he actually admits that in his own filing in another federal court in Rhode island, probably hoping that we wouldn't catch it. He said there that the money was not for. Not for disaster relief, but, quote, to provide temporary shelter and other services to aliens released from custody. Exactly. So you. The only reason FEMA's involved is because at the time, Congress appointed FEMA to be the administrator for the money, and the Biden administration used it that way. That's all you know. So here's what's going to happen. They're going to lose. This money is going to be returned by the federal government. It's also, I believe, a violation of the spirit, if not the letter of temporary restraining orders that are already out there related to not defunding programs. Clawback is just another word for defunding. Taking the money back is the same as not paying it out, as far as I'm concerned. And I think Judge Reardon is going to have to get to the bottom of that and get Administrator Hamilton before her. But it does show that I guess Mayor Adams didn't like the look and didn't like the reporting that it looked like he cut a deal of political expediency to stay in office by trading transactionally his indictment for compromised political or policymaking in the city of New York look bad. Four of his deputy mayors resigned as a result. Mayor Governor Hochul of New York, who has the power to remove Adams, is waiting patiently on the sidelines, waiting for Judge Ho to rule whether his indictment lives or dies. And then I think she sweeps in and takes him out of office. So in the meantime, I guess he couldn't ignore $80 million that got sucked out of the bank account. I'm sure he's not thrilled that the city of New York, for which he is the head administrator, had to sue the Trump administration in the middle of all this. But, you know, that's where you end up. We will follow all 90 cases that are currently going on at a rate of three a day that are being filed one place. Midas touch, the number one, the number one YouTube channel in America. It's hard to believe I get to say that. And legal AF, legal AF, also in the top 30 podcast in the world, all because of you. Putting all kidding aside, it's your commitment, it's your activation here and commitment with us shoulder to shoulder that makes us get up in the morning, do these videos, talk to each other, talk truth to each other as we try to keep the feet to the fire of this Trump administration. I'll continue to do that right here on the Midas Touch network and legal IAF. I'm Michael Popak. Follow us legal AF Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8pm Eastern Time on this Midas Touch Network. I got a new channel that's devoted to exactly what I'm doing right here, except we do six, eight, ten videos a week. It's called Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Legal AFMTN. Come over there, help us build that to half a million in the next 30 days. We're almost there. So until my next reporting, I'm Michael Popak 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 @legalafmtn. That's egalafmtn.
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- [16:35]
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