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- [00:01]
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- [02:01]
Michael Popak
Well, the Department of Justice is about to fall into the mouth of Judge Paula Zinnis, who is the person the judge assigned to administer justice About Armando Abrego Garcia because they're lying to the judge and they're lying in their discovery responses which are required by the judge in order for her to get to the bottom of whether the government is in contempt for refusing to facilitate the release from an El Salvador in jail. I don't care which jail he's in. At present, he's in El Salvador when an order from a United States immigration judge says he should not be. And now they have filed. There's a new letter that just got filed jointly by the lawyers for Armando Abrego Garcia, including Quinn Emanuel and the Department of Justice on the other side. And apparently in the interrogatories, the questions under oath that Judge Zinnis ordered be filled out by the Trump administration. They're even lying about what the Supreme Court ruled. Misquoting the Supreme Court in its interrogatory response. What is going on here? All I know is Judge Zinnis is gonna be holding a status conference very soon, and she's about to throw the book at the Department of Justice. And we are here for it. You're here for it on the Midas Touch Network and Legal F. How'd we get here? After the judge amended her order and after the Supreme Court ruled in her favor 90 about her handling of the case, they said it was fine. The Supreme Court said it was fine and it was right. And it was appropriate under the constitution and due process to order for a judge, a federal judge, to order the Department of Justice and the Trump administration to do everything in their power to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from the El Salvadoran prison that they put him in. And then the judge said, you're not complying. After a series of filings required by her by the Trump administration every day at 5 o'clock, it was obvious they were not going to tell her what steps they were taking to facilitate on a daily basis his return. Hiding behind the. It's diplomacy, it's foreign affairs. We're not going to tell you. That didn't make the judge happy. That didn't make the other side happy, who filed a motion for contempt. And the judge said, after seeing that there was not going to be compliance, but wanting to develop a full record, she said, why don't we do this? Let's develop a record through the discovery process. How? What say everybody? Let's do depositions, questions and answers under oath, in person. Let's do interrogatories, questions and answers under oath, in writing. Let's do requests to produce an exchange of documents, develop your record about possible contempt, and then we'll look at whether contempt is appropriate. And she also warned the Trump administration, and she told the lawyers for Abrego Garcia that if the Trump administration screws around with you in discovery, come back to me on an expedited basis and ask for sanctions, and they will be Granted. And that's sort of what we have in a new letter that was written late yesterday on letterhead, a joint report sent to the judge, which is a prelude to a status conference in which the judge is going to be very angry at the Department of Justice, especially when she sees the responses that they have put in place in response, for instance, to the interrogatories. And I'll just use one as an example before I read to you from parts of the letter so you know what's going on. Just to show you how sleazy and greasy the Trump administration is in thinking they can get away with anything, they actually misquote the United States Supreme Court ruling against them to change its terms so they can respond to it, creating a straw man of something that doesn't exist. How about quoting the actual United States Supreme Court decision? How about that? And getting it right instead of having typos where United States is spelled wrong. I mean, this was a lot of I'm going to wipe my butt with some paper and send it into the court. So here's what they wrote. And then I'm going to read to you from the actual orders, the first request, what we call interrogatory, a question under oath, but in writing as opposed to a deposition, was here's their objection. Defendants object to interrogatory number one, the first one, as based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate a Brago Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador. Then they quote the Supreme Court decision, or they claim to quote the Supreme Court decision, and they say in parentheses and allegedly a quote, holding defendants should take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as opposed to the release from custody. But that is exactly what the Supreme Court decision says, release from custody. Let me read it to you. So we all were all literally on the same page. On page two, let's get it right. The application is granted in part and denied in part. This was the Supreme Court and this was 9 0. The order of Judge Zinnis properly requires the government to, quote, facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador. So how can you possibly say that it's based on. The question is based on a false premise that the United States has been ordered to release somebody from custody. How can you say the Supreme Court decision doesn't say that? They say the Supreme Court decision says take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States. That's not what the Supreme Court decision said. It said exactly what they say. It doesn't say the weather.
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They said facilitate the rel Facilitate the release from custody in El Salvador. Judge Zinnis in her amended order said you got to take all available steps to facilitate the return to the United States, which is consistent with the Supreme Court's decision. Get your quotes right. It matters. I tell my people that work for me. If you have proofreading errors or bugs and you cite things wrong in your papers that you file with the court, you're just undermining your own credibility because the judge thinks if you can't spell something right, if you got typos, if you got quotes wrong from cases, you've lost all credibility. What else is wrong? I call it the cockroach theory. Because if you see one error in a filing by a lawyer, I assure you it's not just one cockroach. If you think you got One cockroach in your house. You don't. You got one cockroach that comes out one at a time. You got a dozen cockroaches. And that's what happens here. Judges go, I can't believe a word this person writes or says. But that just shows you they don't care about the federal courts. They completely have disdain the Trump administration. They don't even try to get things right. Here's what the letter says from the Abrego Garcia side and you can see where we're going with both sanctions for failure to comply with the discovery. They're trying to get ready for depositions. There's five depositions set in this case. One that's supposed to be for today, but you need documents you know properly in order to depose. Here's what they said on the eve of the first court order deposition concerning the government's failure to comply with this court's orders, the government responded to the plaintiff's discovery request by producing nothing of substance. Its interrogatory responses I just read to you one are similarly non responsive. First, the government artificially narrows the court's order to avoid complying with its obligations. We just saw a version of that. For example. The government refuses to respond to interrogatories it claims are based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate a Brago Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador. That is exactly what the Supreme Court ordered them to do, word for word. Despite. And they go on, despite the Supreme Court's clear holding that the order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from the custody in El Salvador.
- [12:04]
Which part of release from custody in.
- [12:07]
El Salvador do you not understand? They also say on page two, the government refuses to answer several interrogatories or provide documents based on an assertion of privilege, some sort of governmental privilege or some sort of state secrets privilege. But they haven't done it properly as required by the case law. And then they lay out the discovery schedule, the deposition schedule from the. Then they insert what the plaintiff. What the government's position is. Listen to the government's position. As an initial matter, the defendants have in all respects and in light of the expedited nature of this discovery, put forward a good faith effort to provide appropriate answers. Already you know that's a lie. Consistent with the Supreme Court's instructions, the discovery here is aimed at answering the current location and custody of Abrego. It's actually Brego Garcia steps taken to facilitate his return to The United States. We haven't seen any of that in any of the filings. There's been about seven or eight different daily reports filed by the Department of Justice and other people there. Not one of them have said what steps have been taken. They say, oh, he's been moved to a new jail. He slept in a bed last night. But that's not what's been required. The government suggests that. They then go on to say the plaintiff suggests that the government has refused to answer interrogatories or produce documents on assertions of privilege. That statement is at best misleading because we provided some answers, but not all answers. I've done this for a long time. This is a supremely weak response by the government that's facing down the barrel of a federal judge that's been affirmed 9, 0 by the United States Supreme Court and twice 3. 0 each. So six different judges of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. She's riding high. There's, she's turbocharged. Judge Zenis, I would you pick if you think Boseberg and Zenith in the Supreme Court are the right courts to pick on for your political agenda, then you, you, the Trump administration, are more demented than I thought you were. I'm going to continue to follow the next steps. Here's the next steps that I'll come back here on the Midas Dutch network. We'll talk about it. One, Zinnis is going to hold a status conference. Two, she's not going to be happy with the responses by the federal government and she's going to start sanctioning them. Daily fines, maybe $10,000 a day, $100,000 a day. She's going to start finding people in contempt and that's going to be civil contempt on her own accord because it's in front of her with her inherent authority. And then she's going to let give the other side more discovery, more opportunity, more depositions as she tries to bring this land this plane. And at the end of the day, she's going to find the Trump administration in contempt. Could be criminal contempt, where she makes a referral for prosecution, or certainly civil contempt, which could also end up with somebody in jail under the civil enforcement powers of a judge. And you're here on the Midas Touch Network. Take a minute, hit the subscribe button, and then on top of that, come on over to Legal A F M T n for the YouTube channel over there that I curate and help us continue to grow that channel as well. Till 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.