Advisory Opinions - That Escalated Quickly

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

A federal judge ordered the release of Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen from prison on Thursday. On July 9, Cohen and his lawyer went into the U.S. Probation Office in Manhattan to transition from furlough to home confinement. But instead Cohen was arrested by three U.S. Marshals and brought back to prison. Why did this happen? David and Sarah explain. Check out today’s episode to hear our podcasters discuss the presence of federal police in Portland, the defamation lawsuit against MSNBC host Joy Reid, and Trump’s latest executive order excluding illegal aliens from the 2020 census for apportionment purposes. David and Sarah wrap up the episode with a fiery debate over their favorite legal tv shows. Show Notes: -Check out Michael Cohen’s brief to the court and David’s latest French Press on the Crisis in Portland. -Here’s Roslyn la Liberte’s defamation lawsuit against Joy Reid, a photo of the incident, and the Fox News article David mentioned: “MSNBC's Joy Reid walks back comments on conservative David French after bipartisan Twitter beatdown.” -Trump’s executive order excluding undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census, Clarence Thomas dissent from denial in Cohen v City of Houston, Cohen v City of Houston, see footnote 19 and 20. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You ready? I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French with Sarah Isker, and we have so many topics to cover today that I had to pull up the list just to make sure that I didn't miss any.

So, listeners, this is the lineup. It's action-packed. We're going to talk Michael Cohen and why you should not get your assessments of court cases from Twitter. We're going to talk about Trump's alleged Portland stormtroopers. We're going to talk about Joy Reid's alleged defamation, MSNBC host Joy Reid's alleged defamation. We're going to talk about immigration in the United States Census and why Sarah is completely wrong

about the best legal television show in history. So that's a lot. I just want you to guess right now what David is going to say is the best legal television series. Just have that in the back of your head because it will not surprise you. It will be exactly what you think it is. Sorry,

David. What were you saying? No, you're messing up the flow here. It is Cohen, Portland, Reed, immigration, and you're wrong. Okay, so that's the flow. Before we dive in, I just want to remind everybody that you're listening to a product of Dispatch Media, thedispatch.com. So please go and check us out. We've got a lot of new listeners and we're very, very thankful for that. We've got a ton of new listeners. And so I'm not going to assume that all of you know

where we come from. So we come from thedispatch.com. And we would also ask a lot of these new listeners, if you like what you hear from this podcast, please go to Apple Podcasts and not just subscribe, but also please give us reviews. Five stars are deeply appreciated and positive comments are even more appreciated.

Hundreds of you have done this and it's just been fantastic for us. It helps us a great deal. Hey, David. Yes. Before we start, we had some SCOTUS 101 questions from the last segment with Amy Howe, our wonderful guest from SCOTUS blog that we didn't get to. And so I had Amy send me her answers. Could we do a quick SCOTUS 101 up front here? Please.

Okay. This came from a listener, and we've uh we've got five quick ones how does the court decide what cases they will take why and why not answer from amy the justice usually look for a cases in which the lower courts have reached different conclusions on the same legal issue for example the meaning of a particular provision of federal law that's called a circuit split um and And this is a great way to get Supreme Court cases. Lawyers, like my husband who is upstairs, often will just scan for circuit splits to see what's going on. So the 11th Circuit says one thing, the 5th Circuit says another thing. That's going to go to the Supreme Court in high likelihood. Although we're going to

get to a circuit split that has been hanging out there, David, for 20 years with this census question. Or B, issues that are exceptionally important. For example, the Trump documents case last term. A case needs at least four votes before the justices will grant review, called certiorari review, or granting cert. We've talked about that a lot. Two, after the court decides to hear a case, then what happens? Do clerks start researching? Do justices split their clerks up so they research different things? Or do they all do their own thing and duplicate ground covered? From Amy. There is another round of briefing on the merits because the first round of briefing was largely aimed at convincing the justice to hear the case in the first place. So, right, there's like the briefs that you send on the cert petition of like,

please take this case. Sometimes those don't touch on the merits really at all. And it's really just on the circuit split and what all the courts decided. And so you have this whole other round that's now like, okay, now that you've taken it, here's why I'm right. Maybe we should do that on our legal TV show. After that, it varies from one chamber to another. As I understand the process in Justice Thomas's chambers, for example, the clerks prepare an extensive memo for the judge ahead of the oral argument, and then the clerks and the justice sit together for quite a while to discuss all of the

issues in each case. I don't have a good sense of how much outside research they do in advance of the oral argument, but I know they may do some, but probably that is a decision made within the individual justices' chambers. Certainly correct. And the ground covered issue often comes into play with these cert pool memos of whether to take the case in the first place. Some justices pool their clerks together to look at all of these cert petitions that come in, thousands.

And some of the justices have their clerks look at every one. And so when there's a new justice, a sort of inside baseball question is, is that justice going to have their clerks join the cert pool or are they going to do their own thing? So that's actually a pretty insightful, fun question. Number three, after arguments, how do the justice come to a decision? Do they sit in a room and duke it out? Do they sit in their own chambers, write their own opinions, and then someone compiles their quote votes and someone is assigned to write the majority minority opinions? Do they have a call and vote?

I don't mean pandemic related, but how does it happen in normal times uh will we ever see such a thing again from amy shortly after the oral argument the justices meet in non-pandemic times in person to vote they go around the table and each justice starting with the chief and going in order of seniority gets to cast a vote. Then the senior most justice in the majority assigns the opinion to an author and same happens in the dissent. They try pretty hard to distribute the workload evenly, not only over the course of the term, but also from sitting to sitting. So David, this is where we get Supreme Court bingo from. I love our bingo card and look forward to doing it again in the fall. But since each justice usually gets about one opinion per sitting, so like for the May sitting, if, for instance, Justice Alito already has written an opinion that's been out there,

you can guess that Alito then is not going to have the next opinion. So then you all of a sudden get to narrow it down and you now see who's left on your bingo card. That's how we were able to accurately guess that Roberts was writing the finance cases and Gorsuch was writing McGirt. Number four, why are there sometimes concurring opinions or similar? Seems like sometimes there is a judge assigned to write for the side, but then another justice jumps in with their input too. Can this happen at any time? Do they need the chief justice to approve their publishing their own additional opinions? Amy, this can happen at any time. A concurring opinion usually tries to emphasize or point out something additional or different. For example, in the case involving the birth control mandate

last term, Justice Kagan agreed with the majority's result, the exemptions from the mandate are valid, but not the reasoning. And she stressed in her concurring opinion that when the case went back to the lower courts, the challengers could raise another issue. And she thought they had a strong case on that grounds. That is actually probably the best, I mean, way to go, Amy, like off the top of her head, the best example of a concurring opinion where there were two concurring opinions and one was like, hey, lower court, you need to say yes. And the other concurring opinion said, hey, lower court, you need to say no. Even though they both agreed with the Supreme Court's opinion, they disagreed wildly on how you would apply that at the lower court,

which is not that usual, actually, in concurring opinions. Okay, number five, last one. Sometimes someone who writes a dissenting opinion has very sharp or spicy words for the majority opinion. Does this sort of thing come out as the justices deliberate? I.e., does one justice tell the majority they are all wackos and get all pissed off? How do those deliberations go? Do they speak afterwards when one obviously is upset with the thinking of the others? Amy, I don't know for sure, but I think it mostly comes out in the writing. As I understand it, the justices see the dissents as they are drafted because they are circulated to the rest of the court so the other justices who are writing in the case

can respond if they so desire. But I imagine it still isn't much fun. And at least in a normal term, you have the sense that they are all ready to take a break from each other over the summer. Just like all of us, David. Just like all of us. Yes.

All right, that was Supreme Court 101. And now we take our recess until... A long time. Red Mass in October. Yes. Well, thanks, Amy, for responding. I mean, my goodness. If I got those kinds of questions,

and I don't know that I'd have the patience and generosity with my time to sit down and answer them so comprehensively, that's fantastic. Do you know what's crazy is how fast she responded. It was like nuts. It was within just a few minutes. That's unreal. I was like, oh, okay. Thank you so much, Amy. Much appreciated.

All right, let's move on to the breaking news literally of today, which left both you and I, as we dove into the details, what's the right word? Surprised, perhaps with a dash of gobsmacked sprinkled on top. So here's the bottom line up front, is that a federal judge in the Southern District of New York has ordered Michael Cohen, the president's former lawyer, released from prison. Cohen had already been out of prison. And if all you knew about this dispute was from sort of like the casual conversation about it on Twitter, you would have been under the impression that Michael Cohen was out, was caught red-handed

eating at a restaurant when he wasn't supposed to eat at a restaurant, and then arrested and brought back to prison because he violated some of his conditions of his release. And Michael Cohen, if you remember, he's Trump's former lawyer. He lied to Congress about the length and intensity of the negotiations around a potential Trump Tower in Moscow. He was involved in the scheme to pay off Stormy Daniels, pay Stormy Daniels hush money, and had his own financial crimes. crimes um so this is a guy who's uh checkered past uh checkered very recent past is a proper way to describe him but um when i heard that he was alleging that he had been put back into prison uh in retaliation for him writing a book critical of the trump of of donald, I got to admit, Sarah, I kind of dismissed it. Like, I didn't know anything about it. Oh, I definitely did. You definitely did.

Like, dismissed out of hand. Yeah. Like, no. No. No. So, we found out that the judge released him today. We were frantically looking for some of the court documents. We found them.

And Sarah, your thoughts? Yeah. So turns out it's definitely not because he went to a restaurant. That's for sure. So here's what happens. He is sent to jail and applies for release because of COVID and because of health issues. And there's some sketchy stuff that maybe happens around there, but it mostly sounds like bureaucratic nonsense, rather than intentionally holding him in jail longer. So then he's let out on furlough. Furlough means there's no requirements on him. And then he and his lawyer went in. So he went to dinner,

by the way, while on furlough, not on home confinement. Right. So he and his lawyer on July 9th go in to the United States Probation Office in downtown Manhattan to transition from furlough to home confinement. And they are given an eight pay, eight numbered paragraphs for his federal location monitoring program participation agreement, FLM agreement. And the first paragraph says no engagement of any kind with the media, including print TV, film books, or any other form of media news prohibition from all social media platforms, no posting on social media and a requirement that you communicate with friends and family to exercise discretion not posting on your behalf or posting any information about you. The purpose is to avoid glamorizing or bringing publicity to your status as a sentenced

inmate serving a custodial term in the community. Cohen had just previously said that he was writing a book. And look, he's been very critical of the president, and he's the president's lawyer. I think this book is going to sell some copies. You know, think the Bolton book, but from the outside, if you will. Okay, so the lawyer says this appears to have been a custom-made FLM agreement for Cohen.

No problem there. And so Mr. Cohen says in this meeting with the probation officer that it looks like it would prevent him from completing and publishing the book he was working on. And he and the lawyer said they didn't understand the conditions necessarily. So they started asking just some questions. The lawyer asked the probation officer if it would be possible to adjust the language of the condition. And the probation officer basically says, maybe let me send your inquiry, quote, up the chain of command for a decision. Mr. Cohen then said he just wanted to be certain that he understood all the terms so he would not inadvertently violate any of the rules. And the lawyer asked some other clarifying questions, you know, like how much advance notice was required for medical appointments, things like this.

Okay, so the probation officer asked them to sit outside in the waiting area so that he can discuss the FLM agreement, quote, up the chain of command. An hour and a half later, the lawyer knocks on the door and asks if everything's okay. And the probation officer says, yep, just waiting for a response from the chain of command. So they continue to sit there. Mr. Cohen, this is important, was never presented with the FLM agreement to sign. Instead, shortly thereafter, three United States marshals arrive with handcuffs and shackles and place him, Mr. Cohen, under arrest and bring him back to prison. What? That was a real turn of events there. You show up with your lawyer to your probation officer

to work on the home confinement agreement, and you're taken out in handcuffs. They claimed that he had failed to agree to the terms of the FLM agreement. But as we just said, he didn't agree, failed to agree to sign it. He actually wasn't even really ever presented the opportunity to sign it. He asked some questions and then they handcuffed him. The probation officer, like, you know, you can imagine how this is going down in the office. I like have this picture of my head of the lawyer being like, whoa, whoa, whoa. He didn't fail to sign it. Wait, my client, don't take him. And the probation officer does not deny that he didn't fail to sign it, but instead told the lawyer, quote, it's out of my hands. I want to quote the greatest journalist of all time, Ron Burgundy, reflecting San Diego's own Ron Burgundy, reflecting on the now infamous Battle of San Diego between the various news teams. That escalated quickly. Yeah. So you have some of the quotes from the hearing today. Yeah, so in the argument, so all of this is happening in real time. So after, just before midnight last night, Cohen's lawyers responded

to the DOJ's legal arguments trying to keep Cohen in prison. And this is the summary, this is the summary of their, this is the Cohen's lawyers' characterizations of the DOJ's legal arguments, which apparently the judge ratified or agreed with. So listen to this first respondents. That's the governor. Do not contest Mr. Cohen's legal claim that the prior restraint provision violates the First Amendment of the Constitution.

They offer not one word in defense of the provision. Second, respondents do not contest that Mr. Cohen has a First Amendment right to write his book, nor that such writing and publication would be foreclosed by the prior restraint provision. Third, they concede that they took adverse action against Mr. Cohen for questioning the prior restraint provision and its infringement on his First Amendment rights. They acknowledge that the Bureau of Prisons remanded Mr. Cohen when he raised questions about the FLM agreement and including its prior restraint provision. This is pretty remarkable. And it's the judge in the hearing today said, I've never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge. Have you ever seen such a clause? So this is fascinating. And we also have to put this in context because we just had a situation where, uh, the DOJ had sued to block publication of John Bolton's book. I almost said Michael Bolton's book. That would be awesome, too.

That would be amazing. John Bolton's book. Trump sued to block publication of his, it's his niece, right? Is it Mary Trump? Sued to block publication of her book i detect a trend sarah and it appears that the judge was not having it now look i mean michael cohen he was furloughed in part because of covid concerns there is not necessarily a constitutional right for him to be out of prison, but he does have a constitutional right to if I've been denied or if the government has taken action against me for an illegitimate reason. a written opinion is still not seem seems to be forthcoming yet the judges found that they denied him furlough and arrested him because he attempted to exercise first amendment rights specifically being critical of the trump administration and trump in a book um it's easy to see why the court

would reach this decision and that fact pattern is so over the top that it's pretty remarkable. And it's a good reason why you always read the court documents when you're trying to figure out why is it that a judge just reached a ruling that seems surprising. Yeah. And I mean, looking back, perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to assume that it was the out-to-dinner photo because he was sitting outside in a chair. Like, that would be extra stupid. But frankly, some of the characters in this season of Trump reality show have been extra stupid. So, you know, shame on me for assuming. There's nothing about the stupidity or foolishness of a criminal that surprises me.

the stupidity or foolishness of a criminal that surprises me. I mean, in fact, if you spend much time talking to law enforcement, you'll hear story after story after story about how incredible mistakes made by quote-unquote criminal masterminds have made their jobs easier. Right. What's the line? Nothing replaces... I'm going to get it slightly wrong, but basically, no amount of genius on behalf of the prosecution can replace total stupidity on behalf of criminals. Yeah. Well, and I like those drug traffickers. Did you see this recently? They got caught because they had addressed their box of drugs. They had put cocaine in coffee beans and they had addressed their box of drugs to a character name that was a drug dealer. I saw that.

In an American television show. So like, did you not think that the customs people would see that? Like they watch TV too, dude. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that. Also the amount of work to put cocaine in coffee beans, that is time consuming. That's incredibly inefficient use of time. Yeah. Yeah. So not only were they foolish, they were inefficient. I mean, it's like a double. Be better drug dealers. Be better. So that, I mean, you know, what larger, what, look, you know, you start to put some of these

things together and you're, you really see, look, the DOJ is full of hyper-competent, high-ethics professionals. It is. I've had a lot of exposure to the DOJ in the course of my life. And I would say my general consistent impression is I'm impressed. The JAG Corps, the Reserve JAG Corps, for example, is, I'd say, disproportionately populated by assistant U.S. attorneys. And extremely smart, extremely competent, extremely ethical people. But this was not the finest moment of the DOJ. And I think, you know, we'll wait for a final verdict on this

until we see the judge's opinion and get a fuller sense of the arguments. But let me just say, the facts as we understand them now are pretty darn surprising. And to be clear, just because he is now released, according to the judge, that does not mean that he can, you know, this is what the judge said. In fact, if you can't have a press conference from your jail cell, you can't have a press

conference from your home confinement cell, quote unquote, either. But that's just so different than being able to write a book. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, let's move. That's one hot button controversy. Let's move on to, let's just, just dive into everything that's making everybody mad right now and move on to Portland. Hey, David. Yes. As a transition, do you ever, like, so we have our emails up and stuff as we do this and we have tabs open and things like that. And in the era of coronavirus, obviously everything gets delivered to the house. I really don't leave the house ever. And I just got the most wonderful email.

Some items have been delivered, colon, chocolate, choco love, salted almond butter, dark chocolate. Man, now I just want this podcast to be over. Sarah, can I just say, don't put salt on chocolate. Don't. How dare you, sir? How dare you? That's an atrocity.

You're an atrocity. Okay, listeners, help me out here. Don't put, do you put salt on chocolate? Have you had the Choco Love Salted Almond Butter in Dark Chocolate Chocolate Bar, David? I have had. put you do you put salt on have you had the choco love salted almond butter in dark chocolate chocolate bar david i have had i have seen and i have tasted i have had people these fringe extremists out there who have come to me with this salted chocolate and i put it in my mouth i have been looking for this chocolate bar for six weeks i have sent my husband to the grocery store with this item number one on his list every time.

And it has been gone from every grocery store. I have looked on Amazon. It was not available. But Walmart, thank you, good people at Walmart. You had it. And it has now been delivered

to my door. Do not disparage my chocolate, David. Do not do it. I have always looked at these salted chocolate lovers as like the Montana militia of chocolate lovers. Like these just whacked fringe extremists out there. And you're my co-host. What? All right. Next up. about violence in Portland. Okay. So, yeah, this is a tangled web.

And I thought, I wrote a newsletter on it, but I focused in my newsletter, I didn't focus on the legality of what was all happening in my newsletter. I sort of focused on the operational aspect, whether the Trump administration was accomplishing its mission that it was seeking to accomplish by deploying additional federal, not troops, this is really

important, not troops, but federal law enforcement officials to Portland. What was their mission? Were they accomplishing their mission? That's what I focused on. But we're going to talk more about the law and what are some misconceptions, I think, that are out there. So let's just briefly say what's happening. The president has signed an executive order. This executive order, and I'm looking at it right now, is entitled Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues, and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.

So the and there is going to be, the and part of this is going to be, I think, more interesting. Essentially what it does is it says it's going to be the policy of the U.S. to defend monuments, to defend federal property. to defend monuments, to defend federal property. And this is completely within the jurisdiction of the United States government. It is completely within the jurisdiction of the United States government to defend federal property. There is a courthouse in Portland that is under siege from violent protesters. It has been under siege for a while. And when you see federal officers out there defending that courthouse, what you are seeing is federal officers who are engaged in a core federal law enforcement function. Now, that's separate in part from how they do it, okay? What tactics they use can be up

to debate, but there's nothing legally improper about seeing federal officers engaged in defense of federal property. There is also, interestingly, nothing legally improper about seeing them not wearing name tags, identifying themselves, that there is no requirement under federal law that they do it. And there are often reasons why they don't want to wear name tags because their protesters have been known to try to find out who these officers are and harass their families or harass them and dox them, find out where they live. So there are reasons why you wouldn't want to do that. But the federal officers on federal property, defending federal property, was one thing. What caught a lot of people's eyes was the sight of federal officers in unmarked vans. I don't know if they were Honda Odysseys or not, but it was...

Sarah, it was like watching soldiers pile out of a soccer mom vehicle um they were not again they were not soldiers they were dressed like soldiers going around portland and arresting people putting them in these unmarked vans and taking them away that's what took everything to that's what escalated um public Now, is that unlawful? In theory, no, because if a person damages federal property, they've committed a crime that can be prosecuted by federal law enforcement, and federal law enforcement can go arrest them. Now, whether it's wise is a whole different thing,

but whether it's lawful, there's a lot of freedom given to federal law enforcement officers to enforce federal law. Yes, but you still have to have the same Fourth Amendment levels, which, by the way, we've gotten a request for this, and maybe in a future podcast,

we'll do standards of evidence, let's call it. But, you know, you have to have a warrant, for instance. If you had a warrant, that'd obviously be fine. But if you don't have a warrant, police are still able to arrest people, obviously, when they don't have a warrant. It happens all the time. But you have to have reasonable suspicion.

Yes. You can't just pull people off the sidewalk because they're on the sidewalk, because they look like they're under 30 to you, for instance. You have toh Amendments have often been gutted in the course of pursuing the war on drugs. You'll often hear a question that goes along the lines of this. Can law enforcement officials really? And then the answer is distressingly often, yes. In theory, law enforcement officials often have a wider degree of discretion than you might think to carry out their law enforcement objectives, but there are some basic things that they always

have to have. There is no excuse for excessive force, for example. There is no excuse for arresting somebody without probable cause. And so I think that what has ended up happening, Sarah, is that some things have gotten conflated. On the one hand, technically, yes, federal officials can exercise their authority to defend a federal building and to arrest people for the commission of federal crimes. That is standard black letter law. What we've laid on top of it is what is seems to be very unorthodox tactics and maybe excessive tactics. So federal officials are, have been quite free in the use of chemical irritants, for example, on the protesters. A federal official shot a protester in the face with a non-lethal munition and cracked his skull open. Appeared to be no justification for that. They've been caught on tape clubbing a Navy veteran who is standing among them with his hands in the air. There's a now famous story of somebody

who was pulled off the street for apparent no probable cause, brought to an undisclosed location, held and released. And then we have laying over top of this the strong objection of state and local officials to the presence of federal officials off of federal land attempting to quell violence and riots. So it's a mess of a situation. That was...

It's a mess. It's a mess. Yeah, correct. I'm sorry, go ahead. I had a different reaction to this than I think... My initial reaction to it, I think, was different than your initial reaction to it. Uh-huh. Because I think you went straight to this than I think my initial reaction to it, I think was different than your initial reaction to it. Because I think you went straight to this like,

uh, quasi military, like how do you deal with urban unrest and, you know, and your experience. And I talked to some women who also saw this video and our reaction was in our own experience, oh my God, I would have assumed that those people were going to rape and kill me, which sounds extreme. But in the 90s, there were rapists who posed as police officers, so much so that it became really standard to tell young women that if you get pulled over by the police late at night or something seems off to you, you're in a secluded place, for instance, where they have you pull off, call 911 to verify that that police officer is a police officer before you get out of your vehicle. And it's a thing that mothers have to tell their daughters. And I don't know a lot of women who didn't have

this conversation with their mother at some point, and I certainly did with mine. If someone puts a gun to your head in the parking lot and tells you to get in their car, let them shoot you. You're better off. Never get in the car. And so when I watched that video, it's late at night. Two guys in camo come out of an unmarked car. I wouldn't have seen the, you know, necessarily the stick on police Velcro thing, but also I can get that at Quantico if I drive down there right now. So that's not a huge indication to me of, um, authority. Uh, and if those two guys started grabbing me, I would assume that my life was then in danger and start truly like fighting for my life at that point. And the terror of that is a problem to me. Well, and I'm glad you brought that up because that was, that's the next logical thing to discuss here.

One is these tactics are unnecessarily inflammatory and alarming. What you just said about that police tab, Sarah, I could go, I could spend 40 minutes online right now. Oh, yeah. And in two days from Amazon Prime, I could receive a delivery where I would look exactly like one of those guys. The exact same camo pattern, the tabs. Now, I might not be able to get the police tab on Amazon, but I can go online to different places. I can find all of that stuff. I can kit myself out to look like that easily. And one reason we know that is, guess what? We've seen a

lot of right-wing militias out there that dress a lot like that. Now, the funny thing about those right-wing militias is that a lot of these guys are not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And so they don't exactly get it all right, sort of the kit. It always looks off and so you know one of the things i i have this constant text group with my friends from iraq and sometimes we'll take a look at like the way they've kitted themselves out and it's just hilarious so they have all the stuff they just don't put it together um it's imagine like if you went to a cosplay, like a fantasy convention,

and you saw like an orc, someone in a perfect orc outfit, wielding Glamdring, Gandalf's sword, which would never happen like in Middle Earth. And it's... Sarah, stop looking at me like this. This is a perfect analogy. It's amazing to me that you're married

to like a beautiful, normal woman. It's like, does Nancy know this? Do you save this? I don't know. Nancy doesn't just know it. She bought me a replica of Anduril Aragorn's sword for Christmas. We do not need that sort of level

of information into your marriage. What do you do in the privacy of your own home, David? She had it hand forged by a Montreal sword maker, including the elvish runes running down the length of the blade. Okay. But anyway, it's always a little off. That's all I'm saying with the militia. But yeah, like pulling up in a Honda Odyssey or whatever, bouncing out in kit that you can buy from Amazon or from an Army-Navy surplus store and hustling someone off the street strikes me as, number one, not the calculated to inflame an already volatile situation. It's almost like they got in a room and they said, how can we make Portland more upset? I've got an idea. Let's run around in unmarked cars in full camo and yank people off the street while everyone's filming it on camera.

Perfect. Now, on the flip side, crime is increasing in a lot of these cities. The murder rate and shootings are going up in a really concerning way. Crime had been at sort of an all-time low for 10-plus years. It started to tick up in 2015, 2016. It kind of leveled off in 2017, and we were seeing a decline in 2018. Not so anymore. And, you know, D.C. is at its highest. Chicago had all those shootings over the weekend. So these cities do have a problem. It's just that maybe this is not the solution. Yeah. And to be clear, one of the things that I think is a bit confusing, and let's go back to the title of the executive order. The executive order, again, the title of it is

Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues, and Combating Recent Criminal Violence. A lot of people are confusing what the federal government can do or are mixed up about what it can do. It can enforce federal law. It can prosecute federal crimes. It can protect federal buildings. It cannot, it does not have a background ability to bring order to an unruly city. It has specific federal jurisdiction. The only time really it begins to have sort of this background ability to impose order is if you go ahead and go all the way to invoking the Insurrection Act.

Now, that doesn't mean that the federal government doesn't have ability to ramp up its efforts at federal law enforcement. A lot of the crime that you're seeing in some of these cities involves additional violations of federal law, in particular gun crimes, for example. It doesn't mean that you can't ramp up participation in an existing public, state and local, and federal cooperative law enforcement efforts. All of those things are in the mix of what you can do. But what you cannot do as a federal police force is use these existing federal authorities to engage in general pacification of a city. And that's pushing these authorities way too far. And also the existence of unrest isn't an excuse for poor tactics, inflammatory tactics, or for violations of the constitutional rights of protesters. And so I think all of this is in this really toxic mix.

Sarah, can I have one last super short rant? Is it about orcs? No orcs shall be mentioned in this rant. Okay. Permission granted. Okay. Stop wearing military style uniforms, please. I mean, really. This is sort of orc adjacent,

so I'll allow it. You know, what you see are all these ranks of federal officials who look like infantry soldiers who are not infantry soldiers, okay? It's creating a military-style presence when it's not a military presence. And spare me the idea that, I mean, the multicam or the camflage patterns used by these federal officials, they don't blend in with the Hatfield courthouse. This is not courthouse pattern camouflage. It's like they're, you know, it looks more like they're, you know, creeping through Kandahar than standing in front of a courthouse. Why? Use a police-style uniform. Engage in

conventional police tactics. I mean, this is something that if you have an incredibly volatile situation, these kinds of escalations, and there's alarm on the part of military officials because it's not obvious these guys aren't soldiers when you just look at them. Unless you kind of know what you're looking for, they look a lot like military police, for example. So why use these uniforms? Use a police uniform. Engage in standard police tactics. And it won't de-escalate everything, but I guarantee you what we've been, what this, you know, the escalation that we've experienced in the temperature of the body politics and some of those videos of dragging someone off the street and putting them in an unmarked van were not worth it. And rant. Next topic.

Yes. Joy Reid, Sarah. Fascinating case. I'm really into it, and it's very likely to go to the Supreme Court. Yeah. For the reasons that we talked about in a circuit split. Yes. So do you want to sort of break down what's happening here? Sure. Okay. So there's this woman, Rosalind LaLiberté. She is against sanctuary city policies. California

had just passed their law. She goes to a city council meeting in 2018 to oppose California sanctuary city law. She's gone to some other city council meetings in the past. She's on social media. No question. During the city council meeting meeting she is photographed interacting with a 14 year old teenager who according to the case appears to be and is hispanic the photograph that's taken is you know like it looks very uh aggressive angry it looks like things are maybe physical like it's a bad photograph david no question. The photograph shows her with her mouth open and her hand at her throat in a gagging gesture. I mean, it's a weird photo.

I've seen it. Another person who's there, Alan Vargas, tweets that photograph with the following caption. You are going to be the first deported and, separate quote, dirty Mexican, where some of the things they yelled, they yelled at this 14 year old boy. He was defending immigrants at a

rally and was shouted down, spread this far and wide. This woman needs to be put on blast. Joy Reid retweets to her 1.24 million followers that tweet. That retweet, though, is not an issue here, but it's worth noting because that's where the information comes from. But later that day, Reid posts the photograph on her Instagram with the following caption. He showed up to a rally to defend immigrants. She showed up, too, in her MAGA hat and screamed, quote, you are going to be the first deported dirty Mexican he is 14 years old she is an adult make the picture black and white and it could be the 1950s and the desegregation of a school hate is real y'all it hasn't even really

gone away now David we can look at the difference between what Vargas posted and what she just posted right he just just put some quotes out there. You are going to be the first deported, quote, end quote, dirty Mexican, quote, end quote, were some of the things they yelled at this 14-year-old boy. He was shouted down. And now he does include this picture, but you'll notice he doesn't say you are going to be the first deported dirty Mexican, and he doesn't put those words in La Liberté's mouth. Okay. After Joy Reid's first Instagram post, the teenager in the photograph does an interview with the local Fox channel in LA. And he says that Rosalind La Liberté did not yell any racial slurs and that their discussion was

civil. So basically that the photograph, while it doesn't look great, is pretty misleading actually, because it doesn't look like a civil photograph. But at this point, the tweet has gone viral, the Instagram post has gone viral, and La Liberté is receiving mutilation, death threats, hate mail, recommendations that she commit suicide. Okay, two days later, after the boy does the interview, Reed publishes another post on Facebook and Instagram. This time, she puts the picture of La Liberté and the boy next to the picture of the Little Rock Nine walking past a screaming white woman with this caption. It was inevitable that this juxtaposition would be made.

It's also easy to look at old black and white photos and think, I can't believe that person screaming at a child with their face twisted in rage is real. By every one of them were. History sometimes repeats and it is full of rage. Hat tip to Hosea's writing, regram history, choose love. Well, Liberté then hires a lawyer, contacts Reed, demands she takes down the post and apologize. She does remove the account and says, quote, it appears I got this wrong.

My apologies to Mrs. La Liberté and the boy in question. Okay, then this lawsuit starts. Right, right. Yeah. And so what was interesting about this this so there's a couple of things that are interesting about this um one is well and before we get into that i have to very briefly tell my own joy reed story um this might here's a fox news uh dot com headline from january 18th 2018 msnbc's joy re Reid walks back comments on conservative David French after bipartisan Twitter beatdown.

So what happened is Joy Reid. Do you remember when there was this fake nuclear alert in Hawaii? I do. I definitely do. Yeah. Hawaii. I do. I definitely do. Yeah. So right after that fake nuclear alert in Hawaii, I'm sort of like what you would call a non... I stand by this characterization, Sarah. I'm a non-weird prepper. Okay. So I... But see earlier orc conversation and I'm just not sure that non-weird is going to apply. But sure.

I'm not going to defend any of the Ork comments, although I still think it's a great analogy. But I'm a non-weird prepper. I'm interested in the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Like Jonah and I have talked about what we do in the event of the inevitable zombie apocalypse many times. I've kind of...

This is just something that's sort of... I'm interested in it. I'm interested in like what happens if there's a nuclear attack? What happens if there's a pandemic? What happened? These things I've been long been interested in. So I wrote a very brief post after that fake Miami attack that basically said, here's what you would actually do if the nuclear attack was real. And that there are actually a few steps you can take that would dramatically increase your chances of living

because contrary to sort of like the television version of what nuclear war is, it doesn't blow up everything. You know, this is something that's awful, it's terrible, but if you do these things, and I refer to government guides. For instance, if you have Elfin ruins on your sword, you are protected in a radius. So you read the post.

It's fantastic. Please continue. So anyway, very simple. And so, Joy Reid tweeted, we have truly entered the age of insanity when the conservative argument in favor of risking nuclear war is, don't worry, it will only kill Democrats and minorities. Shame on you, David French. What? Wow. What? Fortunately, there are a whole bunch of people

left and right who are like, did you even read this thing, Joy? Like, there was nothing like that. You know, Yashara Ali came to my aid. My National Review colleagues came to my aid. I mean, across the political spectrum. And she wrote, took it all back. She deleted her tweet and said, David and I disagree on almost everything, but my take on his, this was off track. So Joy has a demonstrated ability to just go ahead and throw some pretty inflammatory stuff out there, regardless of its veracity.

And I have firsthand, I have firsthand experience with that. I have firsthand experience with that. So this is an interesting one because she just got a primetime MSNBC show. She's a major public figure. But there are legal quirks here that are also interesting. Why don't you say what is interesting to you? And if it doesn't cover my two,

I'll supplement. You know, there's the anti-SLAPP thing. I mean, that's what's really going to go to the Supreme Court is that sort of limited question. But, you know, what happens here is that Reid tries to have this whole thing thrown out

and says that it's not defamation because she was simply reposting after Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which you and I have discussed. Yes. But this is like such a weird application of Section 230. If you remember, listeners, Section 230 is what sort of protects Facebook or Twitter

from defamation suits when David or I post something on Facebook or Twitter. It means you can't, you can go after us for posting defamatory stuff, but you can't go after Facebook or Twitter, even though they do have some control. They can kick people off their account. They can prohibit pornography, human trafficking, things like that. It does not make them responsible for all content. So Reid's initial claim was that because she borrowed the photo from Twitter, from a person on Twitter, she should have the same protections as Instagram itself. It was always a very weird argument, David. I never quite followed legally what they were even really going for, but the judge made also the same side eye that I'm making. It was like, yeah, no, not even close. Not even in the ballpark.

Retweeting may not be endorsements in your profile, but nevertheless, you changed the post. You took the picture. You moved it to a different platform. You wrote your own text with it. You didn't actually even use the same, like you made huge logical leaps from that text when you made your own text up. So definitely no. And we've also talked about anti-SLAPP stuff. And we even, I believe, said during that podcast

that it's unclear yet to be decided what happens federally with state anti-SLAPP statutes. That continues. This judge said that California's anti-SLAPP statute is in conflict with federal rules of civil procedure and therefore doesn't count. And that's what's probably going to go to the Supreme Court because different circuits have held different things on whether the federal rules of civil procedure are in conflict for their standards of evidence and burden shifting and all of that. Okay. What were your two things? Okay. SLAP is one and then limited purpose public figure was the second. Oh, that was a good one too.

Yeah. So much. This is rich. This case is rich with interest. So the SLAP thing, I'm going to assume that some vanishingly small percentage of you did not listen to our original discussion of anti-slap laws many months ago slap is short for strategic lawsuit against public participation um there are people who are quite litigious who will sue individuals for their constitutionally protected speech and try to essentially shut them up by wearing them down. And so a lot of states have passed these laws, they're called anti-slap laws, that allow you to engage in a summary proceeding at the very beginning of a suit challenging your

speech that if your speech is protected under the law, you can not only get the case dismissed quickly, but you can get attorney's fees. So it is a deterrent against people trying to sort of sue you into silence. It's a great law, but they're state laws. They're not federal laws. And so do these state anti-slap laws trump or do they trump sort of the standard procedures outlined in the federal rules of civil procedure. And here in this case, this court said that no, the federal rules of civil procedure preclude, which contain their own set of provisions for how you can dismiss a case and the way in which you dismiss a case and the legal standard for dismissing a case, they trump the anti-SLAPP laws. There's a circuit split there. That's going to be likely resolved by the Supreme

Court. Going to be very interesting. Now, the other part of this, the limited purpose public figure, is very interesting because this is something that's relevant to people's lives in an interesting way. So the question, if a person is a limited purpose public figure and they're making a defamation claim within the context of their public figuredness, within a context of their public role, they're treated kind of like just a regular public figure. And they have to plead and claim and prove that Joy Reid had actual malice when she published the post. And the theory behind that is that if you're a public figure for the purposes of this topic, which was immigration, sanctuary city laws, that you have access to the media, you can defend

yourself. And these arguments should be fought out with more speech. And so we let everyone sort of duke it out to some extent, as long as each side is somewhat equal in their ability to defend themselves publicly. Right, right. And what is a limited purpose public figure? It might be somebody who's like, let's say they're known as like, say, a Lord of the Rings blogger. a Lord of the Rings blogger. And in the context of my analysis of orc costumes, I'm fair game. If you're going to make up some sort of post about me that completely mischaracterizes me in the context of my Lord of the Rings blogging, I'm going to have to prove actual malice. me in the context of my Lord of the Rings blogging, I'm going to have to prove actual malice.

But if you say something about like my marriage and claim that Lord of the Rings blogging makes me a full spectrum public figure, that's going to be different. But in this case, what's really interesting about this, and I think very important about this case, is so La Liberté, which by the name, by the way, Sarah, La Liberté just belongs in the all-name team. Is that a real name? Do you think it's real? I don't know.

I'm not, I don't speak Spanish. Does that like literally mean Rosalind the Liberty? I actually don't think that's written in Spanish though. That looks more French. Could it be French? La Liberté. Well, I don't know. I was a French minor, Sarah. I don't know. I don't know any more French. So anyway, it's still a cool name, whatever it's, you know, Rosalind La Liberté. But anyway, so she goes up and she shows up at a meeting, which a citizen is allowed to do. She gets into a discussion at the meeting and she becomes involuntarily famous. Not really famous, but sort of involuntarily notorious. And what I think was really interesting was- And afterward, by the way. So after she becomes involuntarily famous, she then seeks to defend herself. Yes, exactly. So

she's- And so that's relevant. She does get media attention after. Yeah, exactly. And so does that make her a limited purpose public figure? And the court here, I think, very sensibly said no. Why does this matter? You know, in this age of sort of social media gang tackling and sort of the way in which people can be involuntarily thrust into the public eye, I think this is a valuable decision to say, you don't lose your protections of the sort of default protections of being a private citizen when some, you don't automatically lose those protections when somebody else makes you notorious. And I think that's an interesting aspect of this decision because when somebody else makes you notorious, it's not like you have this ability to defend yourself in the same way that a true limited purpose public figure would. And I thought that that was a very interesting and important aspect of the opinion.

Yeah, and that defending yourself afterwards doesn't turn you into a public figure. Exactly, exactly. Which, think about that. If the rule was the contrary, you know... Then you have to public figure. Exactly. Exactly. Which, think about that. If the rule was the contrary, you know, you would... Then you have to decide between the two.

You cannot defend yourself and be able to sue, or you can defend yourself and not sue and owe attorney's fees, probably. Right. That would be a weird, weird outcome. And yet, it was the outcome

that the district court found. It was the circuit court that overturned that. I don't necessarily think that the Supreme Court will take that question presented, but if they did, that would be lovely too. That would be very interesting.

All right, we have an action-packed podcast and we're running long, but we still have more stuff, Sarah. Yeah, we gotta get to this EO. Yes, we have gotten a lot of email at the dispatch talking about a Trump administration executive order regarding the census. And Sarah, you have been looking into this closer

than I've been looking into this. So I'm just going to hand you the baton. Well, I do want to make this relatively quick because the punchline of this whole thing is we don't know. So this EO is about apportionment. There's two parts of the census every year. And I mean, every 10 years, the diennial census, one is the one that we all think of, which is redistricting. This is not about redistricting, actually. This is about apportionment, which is how many congressmen each state gets. Because as you all, I'm sure, know, the House is limited to 435 people. We're not adding any more House seats. Therefore, we split those 435 between our states.

But if one state grows in population, it steals congressional seats basically from another state. Congressional districts can't go over state lines. And so, you know, sort of once that tips, one state loses one, one state gains one. It's a zero sum game. So this EO is, apportionment will not include illegal aliens in its base numbers. It will include lawful permanent residents, like anyone with a lawful presence here, citizens, green card holders, et cetera, but not illegal aliens. And people on both sides have, of course, lost their minds and are very upset slash think it's brilliant slash tell you that the Constitution clearly states exact opposite things depending on which side of the argument they're on. Right. And fascinatingly, the answer to this goes back to a 2000 Fifth Circuit opinion. And you know the Fifth Circuit is the best circuit because it's my circuit. This is a case called Chen v. City of Houston.

It was decided by the Fifth Circuit in 2000. It went to the Supreme Court, but the petition for writ of certiorari was denied, and Justice Thomas dissented from the denial of cert. We're going to include his dissent in the show notes because it's short, it's sweet, and it tells you everything you need to know, which is we don't know. city council districts. And basically, they had created majority-minority districts. Then Houston, quite famously, annexed the city above it, north of it. There's still bumper stickers, by the way, that you can see, free the woodlands,

free Kingwood, things like that. So this is about Kingwood and Kingwood gets annexed. So now they've got to redo these districts and they're kind of feeling lazy about it. So what happens is they don't want to redo all of the districts. That would be pretty annoying. is they don't want to redo all of the districts. That would be pretty annoying. So what they do is they connect Kingwood, a hugely white ex-Urbia district, to another white district, and they don't really touch the majority-minority districts. But this creates a problem, which is then the white district got real big. And there's this one person, one vote, that the sizes need to be relatively equal, yada, yada. And so if you only included citizen voting age population, well, sorry, if you include total population, the variation between the districts was less than 10% variance. But if you included

citizen voting age population, the deviation went anywhere from 20 to 30% deviation between the two districts. And basically, the Fifth Circuit said that which population figures you use is a choice left to the political process, as in it's up to the state. And the Fourth Circuit also said that. The Ninth Circuit, however, said that districting based on voting populations instead of total population was unconstitutional. And yet the Supreme Court did not take it. So that just sort of left this,

depends what state you live in. As Justice Thomas put, the one person, one vote principle may in the end be of little consequence if we decide that each jurisdiction can choose its own measure of population. But as long as we sustain the one person, one vote principle, we have an obligation to explain to states and localities what it actually means. So this isn't about apportionment. This is about redistricting the other side. But if we don't know what population means in that, we definitely don't know what it means for apportionment. And so there's some history in the Fifth Circuit opinion that is fascinating where Judge Garland, who wrote the opinion in two footnotes, footnote 19 and footnote 20, which I will also include in

the show notes. Again, that's 19 and 20, because you're going to have to read through the opinion and go find footnotes 19 and 20. Talks about the history of the 14th Amendment, as opposed from the 13th, which prohibited slavery, and the 15th, which was on voting. These were the three Civil War amendments. But if you remember, the original Constitution had the three-fifths clause. Where was the three-fifths clause, David? It was in this. It was in redistricting and apportionment. Under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the number of representatives which each state would have in the United States House of Representatives was determined on the basis of, quote, the whole number of free persons, was determined on the basis of, quote, the whole number of free persons plus three-fifths of all other persons. So 13 through 15 become really relevant because that's what gets rid of the

three-fifths clause. But, I mean, and Justice Thomas provides this punchline, right? We just don't know what population means now. Yeah. At one point it talks about inhabitants and it talks about persons. Are those distinct? And is an inhabitant someone who lives there, which an illegal alien certainly inhabits the state? Or do we consider that, you know, as opposed to transient, like a tourist doesn't count? All of these things kind of up for grabs. Again, highly recommend footnotes 19 and 20

if you're interested in this. But this will be an interesting legal case, and I'm sure we'll get more history on the 14th Amendment, Section 2, as we go. Yeah, yeah. This is probably going to have to be... The Supreme Court won't be able to duck this much longer because this apportionment issue,

especially with our nation so ridiculously polarized right now, if you're talking about taking an electoral vote or two away from a state and giving it to another state that would be more likely to vote for the opposing political party, that's explosive. That's politically explosive. So yeah, stay tuned. All the more reason, Sarah, to keep listening to advisory opinions because like a Sherpa, we will guide you through this process. Okay, let's conclude with the podcast with your wrongness.

And this is, of course, so we get a lot of questions about, what's your favorite legal movie? And we had some mild controversy around that when Sarah would not permit me to provide the accurate answer to that, which was My Cousin Vinny. Like I was not even allowed to tell. Can you think of anything more off-brand for the dispatch, Sarah, than prohibiting your co-host from telling the truth? Worse. It was prior restraint. It was prior restraint. I was not allowed to say my cousin, Benny.

But now we've had the question, what is the best legal television show? And you have a very definite, though flawed, opinion on that. It's not close, David. It's Law & order. It's always been law and order. It always will be law and order. Now, not any of the spinoffs, not SVU, not Criminal Minds, whatever that travesty was. I mean, original law and order, Ben Stone, Jack McCoy. I mean, this is the heartland of law. Also, A, they tend to be right on the law. Not 100% of the time, but I'd say 90% of the time they're right. Two, before they really did rip from the headlines, they did rip from your 1L criminal law textbook.

And I really enjoyed those. Now, I am not denigrating Law & Order. It's been solid for years and years and years. It's brought us memorable characters. It's brought us memorable cases. In the era before, it used to be one of the few shows that was on so much, it felt like you were binging it all the time. Oh, but I was. I mean, really, I probably studied as much from my textbook in criminal law as I did from watching Law and Order episodes. I mean, at one point, I was reading about Tarasov. That's the California case about

whether this therapist has a duty to protect and warn third parties. And Jack McCoy is talking about Tarasov. And I was like, yes, synergy. So I think, though, at its height um that the best at its height the best show was the practice um and and this is defend yourself okay so it was incredibly well acted it was incredibly dramatic and kind of at the height of the series, they brought in James Spader. Some people might know James Spader as Robert California in The Office. He's also in a primetime anti-terrorist show of some kind. But it was electric. It was very, very well done. It wasn't just courtroom drama. It was full-spectrum legal drama. It was outstanding. But honorable mention, and you're going to make fun of me for

this. This is, listeners, this is what I knew you would already have gotten. You know what he's about to say. I can't help it. Just say it. I like Dally McBeal. I can't help it. I can't help it. You've got to be kidding me. The very quirkiness of it was what was appealing. The weirdness of the cases. And maybe... Claire Kincaid, Paul Robinette. These are the characters that should live forever in legal television history.

I mean, Jamie Ross. I loved the biscuit the biscuit was a great character you know I have to say that Adam Schiff has there ever been a better Manhattan District Attorney than Adam Schiff the grumpy ornery boss

but so wise so again in my defense I belong to a firm at the time I was a young lawyer at a firm. And we had one of the quirkiest set of fun personalities, especially amongst the young lawyers. We had this weird string at the time of just like crazy events happening in court and strange judicial behavior and weird twists and turns of cases that was,

and so it's going to sound so strange that something about that show echoed in my real life in a very strange way. Not all of the personal drama and all of that, but just sort of this joie de vivre and the quirkiness sometimes in the practice of law. I don't know, Sarah. I think if you've been in trial court in Eastern Kentucky, you get experiences. You get stories. You just do. I mean, Sam Waterston was probably my number one crush through the 90s. He also, if you remember, did the voice of Lincoln for Ken Burns' Civil War documentary. I'm not sure there's a whole lot else. In terms of hours of things that I watched,

it was Ken Burns' Civil War documentary over and over again, and the soundtrack, which was played in the car as my dad drove me to school, which was roughly 45 minutes away. So much Sam Waterston. And then he becomes Jack McCoy. I mean, Sam Waterston was my childhood. He was my whole life. He was your whole life. Jack McCoy, you are everything to me. Well, one day, I'm going to just tell listeners some of the stories from my early practice of law that, let me put it this way. If your practice of law, if your legal experience is in federal court in the Southern District of New York or federal court in the Eastern District of Massachusetts or usually federal court almost anywhere, these experiences will not ring true to you.

these experiences will not ring true to you. But if your experiences in state trial courts, especially state trial courts in the rural South, not only will these experiences ring true to you, you'll probably be able to top my stories. So at some point, Sarah, at some point, Sarah, I'm going to have to uncork these.

In fact, they were so beloved by my students at Cornell Law School. I think I mentioned this already in a previous podcast. I was asked to tell the stories at a spoken word poetry slam in Ithaca, New York. There are so many moments in your life, David, that are head-scratching. That one doesn't even rate, to be honest, because there's so many weirder ones. But, but of course you did.

Yes. Of course you did. Yes. All right, well, anything else, Sarah? Oh, there is one piece of breaking news. And you may have seen it

in Slack already. The Washington Redskins have officially changed their name. Is it the Sentinels? Is it the Sentinels? No it the Sentinels? No. No. Oh, phew. Phew. It is an interim name,

Sarah, because they've not settled on a final name. Are you ready for what it is? How do you have an interim name? But okay. Well, I guess if you want to get rid of the traditional name and as soon as possible, before you've figured out the new one.

Okay, so this will be the first time I'm hearing it. I'm going to have my, just whatever my first reaction is, I'm going to say it. Okay, go. Caleb is smiling. It is the lamest thing you can possibly imagine. The Washington football team. Terry there? Yes.

David? Yes. They named their football team the football team? They did name the football team the football team. So when I was four, I went to Walmart with my mother and they had a big stuffed animal display in the front. And I grabbed the stuffed animal from that display. And my mother said, absolutely not. Put that back.

And I said, no, no, mom. It's just as we walk around the store. And she said, fine, but then you're going to put it back. And then of course we got to the checkout and the cart was full of stuff because Walmart was very far away, um, from where we lived. And I just snuck in the stuffed animal to all of the big stuff and got it through. And she realized it after it had already been scanned. But if you remembered back in the day, that was actually very hard to unscan something. And it was probably worth, you know, $4.99 to just be able to leave Walmart. It was a panda, David. I have that panda currently. His name is Mr. Panda. I was four. And you were more creative because you added Mr.

That's right. Mr. Football Team would be great. The Washington Football Team. That is fantastic. Well, there you have it, listeners. I, David French, am broadcasting, podcasting from the home of the Tennessee Titans, a real football team.

And I'm signing off. Actually, no, you stole it from Houston, but okay. And I'm signing off on behalf of Sarah Isker, podcasting from the home of the Washington football team. We will see you on Monday. Thank you.