Jack - DC Special Grand Jury (feat. Joyce Vance)

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) put out a new opinion expanding the definition of executive privilege to cover up the administration’s corruption. A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of white supremacist groups. Donald Trump has appealed to the 11th Circuit asking them to halt the sanctions imposed by Judge Williams in Miami over the president’s lawsuit against the IRS. Joyce Vance joins us to discuss the special grand jury empaneled by DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Plus listener questions. Do you have questions for the pod or something for HITMEINTHEHEADWITHABAT?https://formfacade.com/sm/PTk_BSogJ Check out other MSW Media podcastshttps://mswmedia.com/shows/ Follow AGMueller, She Wrote SubstackMueller She Wrote on Blueskyhttps://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrotehttps://twitter.com/dailybeanspodMore from Andrew McCabeThe Real McCabe on [e-mail] on BlueskyThe Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump This Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at https://patreon.com/thedailybeansOr when you Subscribe on Apple Podcastshttps://apple.co/3YNpW3P Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

MSW Media. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel put out a new opinion expanding the definition of executive privilege to cover up the administration's corruption. A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside white supremacist groups. Donald Trump has appealed to the 11th Circuit asking them to halt the sanctions imposed by Judge. Judge Williams in Miami over the president's lawsuit against the IRS. And DC U.S. Attorney Janine Piro has impaneled a special grand jury in D.C. This is unjustified. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to episode 82 of unjustified Sunday, August 16th, 2026. I'm Allison Gill. And I'm Andy McCabe. All right. We got lots to cover today. As usual. It's always. Am I ever going to go?

Okay, not a lot going on. What's happening where you are, Allison? Yeah, it's slow news weeks. Real slow news week, Andy. Lord. But no, here we are. Another maelstrom of disasters to cover, including reporting from the Washington Post

that the Justice Department has convened a special grand jury in Washington. This is a rare legal body that officials say could pave the way for federal prosecutors in the nation's capital to investigate some of its biggest and most controversial cases. And we're going to discuss this while joined by U.S. Attorney and author of New York Times Bestseller, Giving Up is Unforgivable, a manual for keeping a democracy, Joyce Vance. Yes, our good friend Joyce Vance. I was so kind of her to join us from Alabama where it's a million, billion degrees. It's a dry heat. No, it is not. No, it is not. It's the wettest of all wet heat.

but very much looking forward to that discussion. But first, Andy, I wanted to bring this up. Yet another way in which this administration is dismantling oversight. I had a conversation live over at Mullershe wrote.com with Heather Cox Richardson today about all the ways this administration is dismantled oversight, whether it's through firing inspectors general, dismantling the national security apparatus, shutting down the public corruption unit in the Department of Justice,

But now we have this story from Talking Points Memo. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the good old OLC, has put out a new slip opinion earlier this week arguing that Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with anyone, basically anyone ever, even if they do not work at the White House or within government at all. So anyone. Now, experts tell TPM that the legal opinion is likely an effort from the Trump administration and his DOJ to preemptively, interfere with congressional investigations that the Democrats are planning to launch when they retake one or both chambers after the 2026 midterms. Quote, the legal opinion has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese. And that's from Charles Tifer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

And that's what he told Talking Points memo. He said it's clearly a devious tactic to try to cover up the investigations into Trump's corruption before they even get started. Now, David Super, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law School, agreed when asked if he sees the OLC opinion as a preemptive measure to hinder congressional investigations into the Trump administration. Quote, I'm sure that's exactly what they're trying to do here, Super Sit. I can't see anyone disagreeing with that.

Especially since his name is Super. I mean, like, I super agree. I super agree. I super concur, David. Now, Tifer, who was previously the acting general counsel and deputy general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, described the opinion as a clear attempt to create defensive barriers in advance of congressional investigations. Now, experts told talking points memo that individuals that may be called to testify in front of Congress might end up trying to rely on this Office of Legal Counsel memo to get out of testifying or giving over documents.

They will say, quote, they can't speak because they have executive privilege. that's what Tifer told TPM. That's if they even show up at all, he added. Now, presumably, the administration would try to help those people avoid testifying by sending a letter from Trump saying, I'm invoking executive privilege over what Joe the oil executive has been subpoenaed to testify about. That's David Super. This memo helps them lay that foundation ahead of time for Trump to be able to make those claims. Because you got to remember, in the next coming two years, anybody that's brought before,

Congress, if they just don't show up at all, and we take the White House in 2028, it will be within the statute of limitations for, it will, for ditching a subpoena. So this is kind of lay in the groundwork for them to keep their mouth shut, even though they could do that anyway. Yeah, he'll be handing out executive privilege receipts more than pardons in the next two years. Claims of executive privilege usually concerned communications between the president and his subordinates. In contrast, Tifer said, this opinion has nothing to do with the normal situation of a president getting advice from his subordinates about his duties. The memo appears to have been written in response to a request from Trump's counsel to determine whether the president could assert

executive privilege, quote, to protect communications between himself and private advisors. Trump, of course, is known for seeking advice from allies outside the White House, including congressional lawmakers, as well as personal friends and business acquaintances. Quote, executive privilege can apply to presidential communications with private advisors so long as the communications relate to official presidential decision-making, involve or reflect communications with the president or his direct advisors, and are confidential, the OLC opinion argues. And I'll note there, what jumps out at me from this quote is this sentence that they involve or

reflect communications with the president or his direct advisor. So it doesn't even have to be a communication with the president. It can be with some flunky that works in the White House. And it doesn't even have to be what they actually said. It can just, you can just claim it. It reflects, it generally represents or summarizes or you think it was the gist of what might have been said with the guy who cleans the sit room bathroom. I mean, that's insane. Yeah, yeah, it's very broad. But I will say that no privilege can't be pierced by the crime fraud exception. That is true. That is true, yeah.

Now further on, the opinion notes, restricting executive privilege to purely intra-governmental communications would foreclose the president from relying on an array of important sources that he may find necessary to commit crimes with. No, that's not what it says. that he may find necessary to the effective discharge of his responsibilities of office. Such an outcome not only would impair the president's Article 2 functions, but ultimately would harm the public itself. And it's just more power here under Article 2 for the guy. Now, Tifer told TPM that the 21-page OLC opinion is extremely long on rhetoric and equally extremely short on specific examples in setting precedent

for the office's claims that executive privilege extends to presidential communications with private advisors. David Super said, the important parts of the OLC opinion rely overwhelmingly on their own prior opinions rather than actual cases. I will tell you that the strongest legal authority I know is what I said to you when we last spoke. But you're welcome to laugh at that, Super added. Because of course, we always agree with ourselves, or most of us mostly agree with ourselves, but that doesn't have to persuade anyone else. They're not a court. There is no law that gives them the authority to make binding opinions. So citing themselves is not very helpful. And what he's talking about there is OLC is just rather than

citing precedent, which is cases, decided cases, which serve as law in this country, the only thing they're actually citing and the opinion is their own prior opinions in different situations. My dad said this. So. Exactly. We said. We said. this last week, so therefore it must be law this week. In contrast, there are examples of congressional investigations that have relied on evidence obtained from private individuals' communications with presidents. The January 6th investigation is one of them, T.Fer told TPM. Quote, if you look at the ringleaders of the president's legal schemes in that case, those were Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. They were private individuals. They had to give evidence. No successful executive

privilege claims for them, Tifer said. But they were also crime. So, yeah. I mean, you know, they try to call, they try to say that they're lawyers. So then they, and they, I think they tried, didn't Eastman try a bunch of times to say deliberative process privilege and work product privilege and attorney client privilege like in his multiple privilege logs? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, where this gets even more. more confusing is if people claim this privilege, Congress doesn't have to observe it. They can disagree. But the enforcement of their disagreement doesn't come until two years later. Right. And if you make any criminal referral to Todd Blanche,

he can just staple this OLC member to his forehead and say, read this. Yeah. Anyway, back to talking point. memo, Giuliani and Eastman did try to assert executive privilege over the communications. The January 6th Select Committee asked them to turn over as part of their investigation. And by the time they made their claims, however, Trump was no longer in office and federal judges rejected many of their executive privilege and attorney-client privilege claims. Now, if Democrats take control of one or both of the chambers in the midterms and start their own congressional probes, Trump will still be in office.

Experts agree that Trump will almost certainly try to claim executive privilege aggressively over the testimony of individuals who Democrats may subpoena. What was interesting is he never went ahead and wrote that letter for Pete Navarro, though, did he? No, he sure didn't. He didn't. He just didn't. Then the question will come, is that privilege justified? David Super said. The OLC is trying to put their marker down saying, yes, it is justified. It's very broad. It's very sweeping. It's very protective. The congressional investigators in this case will surely try to make the opposite argument, as you said, Andy, and the court potentially will have to decide whether it finds the OLC opinion persuasive. The court is absolutely under no obligations to defer to it to give special weight to it or anything of the kind.

Yeah, that's really the bottom line here. Executive privilege is not just like a thing that you invented it so you can add on to it, like an extra room on your summer house. It's a legal thing. It's a construct of law. And therefore, courts will, you know, there's got to be a route to get it in front of a court. That seems pretty obvious here. Congress would probably sue, I imagine. Right.

And once they're there, courts are going to look at these claims of executive privilege against the long history of Supreme Court precedent on this issue. And they're going to say, like, no, they don't care. care about OLC's opinion. They're going to knock this down and say, you people, whoever are the subjects of the lawsuit, have to testify. You have to provide testimony. Then they won't.

Now we're back to referring them for criminal prosecution. And I think that has a lot to do with hit me in the head with a bat, like where we are at with a presumption of regularity. Because back in the day when, for example, Bill Barr and O'Callaghan, the pay dag, whipped up that OLC memo saying that Trump didn't obstruct justice. Right. Right. That OLC memo made it virtually impossible for any future attorney general to charge Donald Trump with obstruction of justice.

But like you said, somebody could have tried and said, we disagree with the memo. It's wrong on the law. Yeah. I mean, the torture memos, right? Same thing. You would have to get OLC to basically revoke them, which you could do any time you want. He's got an OLC memo from DOJ that says it's legal to murder people on the high. seas in boats. Yeah, exactly.

Perfect, perfect example. Honestly, my biggest surprise as we started this story was, I can't believe that they're actually going to this length because what they have done in the past has basically claimed this type of broad executive privilege, and they just haven't been challenged on it. I remember testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee

in December of 2017, I think. hopefully I don't have my years off. But in any case, DOJ sent a team of minders. Was it right after Manafort was indicted? No. Because that was November 2017. Maybe.

Maybe it was. I think it was the end of 2017. Word. In any case. Ask me how I know. I know how you know. They sent me with a team of minders. And when Adam Schiff would ask me questions,

they would step in and say, they'll look at me and say, you can't answer that. And then they would say to him, he can't answer that because it's covered by executive privilege. And Schiff would say, no, it's not.

He's not a part of the administration. He doesn't work in the White House. We're asking him a factual question, da, da, da, da, da, da. And they would just disagree. And I'm sitting there like an idiot in between them. And I can't now disregard the directive of DOJ and answer the question.

It's so frustrating. But no one challenged it. Witness after witness after witness and multiple hearings and oversight efforts said the same thing. And it just, they got away with it, essentially. They never provided, Trump never officially invoked. But he had his minions do it like, you know, in the act sort of thing.

There was a group of people who did not get away with it. We referred to them in the Jack podcast as El Ocho Nostra. Yes. The eight recalcitrant witnesses. It is now 14, by the way. It's grown to 14 witnesses. When Merrick Garland was investigating Donald Trump for the January 6th attack on the Capitol, called in these 14 people for testimony, and they all wouldn't speak.

They all said executive privilege. And Merrick Garland took him to court. It took a year, but he won. And he got to compel the testimony of those 14 people. Key witnesses, the case couldn't have been brought without them. One of the reasons that the thing was so greatly delayed because it took so long, because the courts were back. up because of COVID. And, you know, all of the January 6th prosecutions that were happening as well.

But he eventually won. And it was around that time he was able to get rid of the chief of staff at the FBI who was blocking him. And another guy named Dan Twono who was stonewalling him on his, you know, his search warrants and whatnot. Remember when we were like, why did they send the- The inspector general? Foot-dragging. Why didn't the FBI execute these warrants? Why? Why is he sending the post office cops? It was because the FBI wasn't playing ball. Because Dan Twono didn't want any of his people doing anything that would be disliked by the administration. Way to go, Steve.

By Trump, who was no longer in office, but he was one of the holdovers. But, yeah, that took a year to get past that executive privilege. So there was a fight, and Merrick Garland was successful on that, and then the case was able to go forward. But that's all I could think of, really. Yeah. You got to fight it. And somebody will because we are in very different days. And I don't think that if the Democrats take the majorities at the midterms,

I don't think they're going to sit around and just kind of be brushed off. I hope not. And their oversight efforts. Yeah. This is good like Adam shifts and Jamie Raskin's time to shine, right? Yeah, because to give up is unforgivable. To give up is unforgivable. And speaking of a manual on how to protect a democracy.

and keep a democracy. We have the New York Times bestselling author of that book. Giving Up is Unforgivable. And former U.S. attorney, all around amazing person, host a civil discourse over on Substack, and of course, one of the co-hosts of the Sisters in Law podcast, Joyce Vance. We're going to talk about the special grand jury that Box of Wine has impaneled.

Excuse me, Janine Piro has impaneled over in D.C. And we're going to do that after this break. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, welcome back. As we said in the intro, really excited today to be joined by former U.S. attorney, Sisters in Law podcast member, which, by the way, if you don't listen to Sisters in Law, you absolutely must. And the author of the bestselling book, Giving Up is Unforgivable.

And this is a manual for keeping a democracy. Please welcome our good friend Joyce Vance. Hi, Joyce. How are you? Hey, it's nice to be with y'all. Oh, it's so good to have you here. I think I left off dog mom. Everybody please put out the good vibes because Joyce is nursing a very fantastic post-2016 election loss, German Shepherd, who just needs all of our love and all of our support right now. Thank you for that. She's doing great. And she was, in fact, my husband brought her home after the election. So she's special.

She's very special. Bella, I think is her name, yeah? Bella. You might have seen her on MSM.M. NBC, sometimes in the background, a lot like Andy's dog, who will pop up every once in a while. He does. He's catatonic at the moment, completely passed out on the floor, which is what he does about 23 hours a day. I'm very jealous. I'm very jealous of that.

The reason we wanted to speak to you today, Joyce, you wrote in your substack civil discourse, which, by the way, if you don't follow, you should follow because I am smarter because of your substack. You talk about a special grand job. And I haven't heard of a special grand jury since a state grand jury special was impaneled by Fannie Willis back in the old 2020 election interference case. Now, that's been completely dismissed and it took an extra six months. But we're hoping you could tell us a little bit about a federal special grand jury and what that means. Right. So there was news earlier this week that Janine Piro, Trump's U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, was impaneling a special

grand jury. And many people interpreted that as meaning something major was afoot. And it's important to understand that there are federal statutes that set forth the procedures for special grand juries. So this is not the same process, for instance, that Fannie Willis would have used in Fulton County, Georgia. But special grand juries are really. routine in the largest federal districts in the country. If your district has more than four million people by population, you must have a special grand jury in operation for parts of the year. That's not the case in the District of Columbia, and they don't typically have these in place. So they're big questions, right, about why now and what is the U.S. attorney they're up to with it.

So, Joyce, I have to confess, in my 21 years in the Bureau serving, in two districts, Eastern District of New York and Southern District of New York, both of whom probably clear that 4 million person requirement pretty easily. I don't think I ever

dealt with it comes to the dogs. I don't think I... It's all right. It's totally fine. I don't think I ever dealt with a special grand jury. I remember hearing that Enron was a Enron seems to be the case that people usually

cite as an example of a special grand jury because it's a huge case, lots of defendants. So what could this look like in the D.C. district? So Enron is such a great example of the legitimate types of cases you would use a special grand jury for. They're generally used for these big, complicated, long-term cases because by statute, a special grand jury goes on for 18 months as opposed to six months for a regular grand jury. And of course, Andy, you know the whole issue, right? If you're on a six-month grand jury and your case takes longer to indict, you've got to repeat all of that evidence for the new grand jury to hear. And although you can do it using an agent to present hearsay testimony, it's still complicated and time-consuming. And it can be really boring

for the grand jury. So these long-term grand juries think major cartel-link drug trafficking cases, human trafficking. In my district, we used them a lot for public corruption cases. Sure. And so that's usually what's going on with these situations. You know, what are they up to in D.C.? We don't know. But there was a lot of speculation that this was about a provision of the law that permits special grand juries to issue reports at the end of their time. So how can, I'm curious, like, I feel like this, when you have a special grand jury, it feels like this, it feels like this.

this could really backfire on somebody who's trying to use it inappropriately. Yeah, I think that's dead on the money. For one thing, you know, if the speculation about Piro wanting to use it to issue a report is accurate, there are a lot of limitations on her ability to do that. For one thing, it doesn't happen until the grand jury is done. That's at least that 18-month period of time. So that gets us almost to the end of this administration, praise the Lord. But I don't think that matters so much to this administration, because I remember when he wanted Durham to release an interim special counsel report before the election, right?

That was different, though. You know, the special counsel operation is different than a special grand jury. And here, before you can get a report, a couple of things have to happen. One is the grand jurors have to decide that they want to issue it. It takes a formal, though, to majority of grand jury. you know, this is a grand jury in the District of Columbia and not the grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina that indicted Jim Comey. Second, the judge has to accept the report. Now, that's typically pretty pro forma. But because the statute has very specific requirements for what can be in that report, a judge could reject, for instance, any sort of a premature report or something that was out of the orbit of what they're supposed to be because in essence, these reports only happen when you've got

a scenario where you're looking at public officials or public employees. And there's somebody that you don't have evidence to indict, but a preponderance of the evidence suggests that they should either be disciplined or removed from office. And so then the grand jury, the special grand jury, I should clarify, writes a report. And the attorney general, after the judge accepts it, And by the way, there is, you know, 30 days, I think, for anybody who's named in the report to file their response, their response becomes an appendix to the grand jury's report. And then DOJ would deliver it to the employer for the employer to consider. I, you know, this is not something that happens very office often. We are really in the arcana here.

Yeah, and you're going to have to get it past Judge Bozberg. And you're going to have to get it past 18 to 23 residents. of the District of Columbia who, you know, still have the sandwich guy and the reflecting pool guy is fresh in their head, right? Yes. Yeah, for sure. So if that's the purpose, in other words, of the report, presumably they can indict whoever they want to, if they actually have enough evidence to indict someone for any sort of crime,

they can do that as well. But for the report, it's typically used for addressing alleged fractions by a public official. Yeah. So, like, who would those public officials be? I guess the very few remaining public officials who we know are kind of standard enemies of the or seen to be as enemies, political enemies of the president. So like, you know, Federal Reserve directors, people who typically bridge one one administration to the next, I guess, right? Yeah, I mean, we really don't know who the targets of this. investigation are, it's clear that Piro's under fire following her dismissal of the Davy Hearn case, the reflecting pool case, and needs to get back into Trump's good graces. And so whoever the targets are, we could be talking to one of the targets. I mean, it could be all three of us, she guys, you know.

Come on. But it seems to me that this is of a piece with a theme that we've heard from Donald Trump before. It reminds me of the first impeachment in his conversations with Zelant. It reminds me of Donald Trump's interactions with acting officials at DOJ after the 2020 election. Trump is very much of the view that as long as somebody has an investigation going, that he can then use that he can make hay with the fact that an investigation has been opened. And so although grand jury investigations are secret, prosecutors, agents, grand jurors can't reveal them, witnesses who receive subpoenas are free to speak. And at some point, we'll learn, we'll get some insight into what this is about. That's such a good point. He always just announces the investigation.

I mean, that's what the letters through Jeffrey Clark at the DOJ about the fraudulent electors in Georgia and seven other states were about. Right? Just announce that there is an election. And of course, the Supreme Court took a bow and said, anything that you do to conspire with the Department of Justice is immune my king. And so we, you know, we can't go after that. which, you know, Andy and I have covered ad nauseum. But yeah, you're right. It's always about announcing an investigation to give the, you know,

the feeling that something is wrong was just, that was enough. And that's what he did with Zelensky. And maybe that's what he's doing with this special grand jury. And if you think about it, he's had such a hard time, getting rid of people like Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook. He tried to investigate Jerome Powell and the subpoenas got struck down. So that didn't work. Lisa Cook, they tried to indict. I'll go after anyone. I don't care about a no true bill.

I don't care. These activist judges. Yeah, she threw a fit. But then you see her wheeling a box of evidence about the reflecting pool to the West Wing. But that was in defense of herself. To stick over herself. So we thought, right, we don't know what transpired in that conversation. Maybe she showed up with boxes of stuff to suggest to Trump. He shouldn't fire her because she was getting ready to start this grand jury investigation. I mean, there's. There is just no anticipating the level of corruption and misbehavior and abuse of the justice system that this administration is capable of. So it's all speculation, right? But I think it's worth thinking about it because typically it's our worst nightmare that comes true. I think, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. But I also think it seems, it feels like the sort of thing that someone in the White House cooked up to resolve these problems that they have with. Lisa Cook and Jerome Powell can't fire these people until you can reach that threshold of proof

justifying that they, you know, to kind of trigger the president's termination power. They tried to do it with investigations. They tried to do it in the indictments. Both of those efforts failed. It seems like the kind of thing that someone in the White House would have said, hey, let's just get a special grand jury to issue a report that said, oh, they did a bunch of bad things. And maybe that gets us over the threshold to terminate them. I think that's a really good analysis because they could try to terminate the special grand jury early.

There is a provision that says if the grand jury's work is done, you can terminate. And the special grand jury, let's just say that they were willing to get on board, could then issue a report saying, we're not going to indict anybody or maybe we've indicted these people. And by the way, we find as to these two, by a preponderance of the evidence, which is the standard, the statute says the special grand jury would have to use. So that's just more likely than not. That's not the criminal standard. You know, by a preponderance of the evidence, we think Mr. President, or as AG would have it, Mr. King, you know, you've got reason to fire these people. And Trump, who says he has an article to power to fire anybody, could go to town. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to someone having standing

to sue over this to get the grand jury materials. Because, I don't know if you know this, Joyce, but every week we have a segment in our show about the loss of presumption of regularity. It's called Hit Me on the Head with a Bat. And it's just been dwindling and dwindling. And I remember when you wrote a piece in Time magazine during the first Trump administration,

and you were on the 11th hour with Brian Williams and quoted something that I had tweeted in a piece that you said, that you wrote for time. And it was about if the Department of Justice isn't doing justice, you know, it was, I think it had something to do with Jeffrey Epstein's death. If the DOJ is either just turning a blind eye or had something to do with it, the point is nobody trusts the Department of Justice.

And you were like, this is a huge problem. And now if you look at it, it's a million times worse. Yeah, you know, Ryan Goodman, my good friend at Just Security, which is an instituted NYU Law School has been tracking all of the judges that have said that they no longer give DOJ the presumption of regularity. And of course, that came out of Minneapolis. It has spread. It's just institutionally, it's tragic. It means that the Justice Department, which is essential for protecting our communities and good prosecutors and agents across the country, are still trying to do that work in difficult circumstances. But the courts can't,

trust them and with good reason and the build back to restoring normalcy is going to be difficult to say the least 100% especially when they're down 4,000 attorneys right now it's just a lot more difficult than it's unbelievable back from the first term this this is a million times worse but I do hope that somebody is able and has standing to sue over whatever this special grand jury puts out you know I don't know any way to get grand jury transcripts, well, transcripts other than if you're a defendant and you allege misconduct occurred, the report itself, I would think that their whole goal, if they're going to write one, would be to make it public just to dirty people up. So it may not require a lawsuit

even. Yeah. Well, you know, and if it does, then you feel defamed. Like, show me the grand, show me the grand jury trance. Show me where 18 to 23 people in the district of Columbia agreed with you, Donald Trump. I would love to see that paperwork because of the loss of presumption of regularity, there are so many people right now who are asking for and getting grand jury transcripts. Yeah. I mean, what have we been quoting the DC district's failure rate with grand jury indictments right now is running like, I don't know, well, there's success rate. I guess if you want to call it that in the high 60s, low 70s. That was a lot of last ago. I mean, it's. I mean, it's. I Andy, were you ever involved in a case where the grand jury declined to indict? I can just tell you 25 years, zero times the grand jury declined to return a true bill in one of my cases.

Yeah, Joyce, to answer your question that no until I got fired and then I was in the case that they failed to indict. So other than my personal experience, no, none. You know, didn't that the grand jury failed twice to indict you. Yeah, I remember that. Maybe the, I'm thinking the first Menendez case. I think the first time they tried to indict Menendez and it was in, I think they tried to bring the indictment in New Jersey and it, and it no-billed. And then they represented it in Miami. That vaguely rings the bell. I mean, that first prosecution, it went off the rails later on to maybe the jury declined to convict.

Yes, that's correct. But yeah, yeah. And by the way, you know, in those rare situations that you hear about where there's a no bill or just where grand jurors express some concerns about the case before there's a vote, smart prosecutors go back and do the corrective work that the grand jury needs to see. I don't care. I don't care about a no true bill. I'll bring all the crimes.

I'll bring them all. No bill. Good. Fewer bills the better. That was when the subpoenas were quashed in the Jerome Powell case. That's when she came out for that. That's when I started impersonating Janine Piro for the first time. It's a good impersonation. Yeah, it's pretty good. Well done. Thank you. Thank you.

Maybe followed only by the Davey Hearn press conference. You are here in the evidence coming to their trial. Yeah. Oh, my God. What happened to that? It's so pitiful. Whatever happened to the rule at DOJ that at the time when a case is indicted, prosecutors and agents do not say anything beyond what's in the four corners of the indictment. Would I love to hear more about the January 6th, Trump's investigation? I mean, U.S. attorneys, the Attorney General of the United States who undoubtedly knows better routinely violate that rule. And it's there for good reason, by the way, because if I'm a smart

defense lawyer, and I'm not, I don't even play one on TV, but if I'm a smart defense lawyer, I'm going to argue on appeal if my client gets convicted that the jury was prejudiced by what DOJ did violating their own rules. What are these people thinking? They just do not hear about justice or the long term. And surprisingly, they're quite, they're, they're pretty quiet about the people they pardon and the cases that get dismissed. So, you know, whenever anyone's like, oh, you know, Merrick Garland didn't do anything.

I'm like, he did a bunch. He just didn't tell you about it. And I actually appreciate the fact that Jack Smith is coming out and kind of giving some interviews now, mostly to stand up for the prosecutors, line prosecutors and investigators at DOJ and FBI, the good men and women who have been, have been completely trashed in this investigation. He's like, feels like an obligation to stand up to them. But he's also saying, I would have probably communicated more. Now, I know I can't say that there's an investigation. I know there's certain things that you can't say because on appeal, like you said, Joyce, it could be taken and

and said that this was tried in the court of public opinion before it even went to trial and the jury was tainted. But it feels like there could have been more said and that wasn't. You know, I actually wrote, and this is sort of embarrassing, but in my day job, I'm a nerdy academic. I teach law at the University of Alabama.

And I wrote a piece for the Yale Law Journal about transparency at DOJ called Treat Every Defendant Fairly. arguing that because DOJ can't talk about the substance of its prosecutions, it has an obligation to educate the public about the process. About why it can't. Well, or even about just how the system works. And I really do think a lot of the dismantling Trump has been able to do at DOJ would have been so much more difficult if we had a well-educated public that understood why DOJ doesn't and doesn't do certain things with, you know, this sort of influence. information vacuum, it's just so easy to become disenchanted with DOJ because you don't understand the reasons things are or are not happening. So you know I'm a big advocate of improving civics

education as part of our way out of this mess. And I think DOJ has an obligation to engage with its communities in a much more sustained, intelligent way. I totally agree with that. But I think you can, and I think I think you would say this as well, you can do that. And instead, respect the rights of the defendants to not be convicted in the media when they've only been accused of something. And now you look at, so it's, you know, it's not. But then we have Donald Trump who's like, Comey is guilty as hell. Lisa Cook, she's guilty. Look at her.

And that should never happen, let alone from the president. I think Andy's point is we never should talk about substance or evidence of ongoing cases. But we can explain, you know, this case has been to a grand jury. Here's the standard of proof. now there will be pre-trial motions in a trial. And the FBI does a much better job with this than the prosecutor's side because, you know, the FBI has these citizens' academies where they invite members of the public in and they learn not just from FBI folks, but also from other agency heads, from prosecutors. I've always been such a huge fan of that process. Every time I was asked to show up and help out, I did because I thought that was a tremendous public.

service. It's one of the best programs in the bureau and it's like a total soft power sort of thing. It's like great community outreach. It's like bringing people in, bringing them behind the curtain a little bit to show them like not the specifics of an investigation, but how investigations get done. The techniques, the tools we have, plus fun stuff like taking them out to the range like on the last day and stuff like that. So yeah, great program. It's been around for years. I hope it's still there. You never You never know these days, but I think we can all agree. Transparency about process is just foundational for democracy. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Well, wow, I feel a little bit out of my element right here. Former acting director of the FBI, former U.S. attorney, we got DOJ, we got FBI in the house, and we got, I don't know, somebody who used to tell jokes for a living. Thank God. We all need someone who tells jokes, man. I worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs for a minute. But anyway, it's so great to talk to you, Joyce. Thank you for joining us.

Everyone, please check out Civil Discourse on Substack. It's free to subscribe. It's an incredible source of information. I am smarter for reading it. You, like you, Steve Vladick, like there's some substacks out there that just, I feel like I'm getting a free top-tier law school education. So I really appreciate that. And please pick up, giving up is unforgivable.

It's such a good book. I know I've talked to you about that on the Daily Beans before. But New York Times bestseller, Joyce Vance, it's been really, really great to talk to you. Thanks, y'all, for having me. It's really nice to spend a little time with you. Thank you so much, Joyce, and tell that puppy we hope she feels better. Thanks.

Yes. All the love to Bella and the sisters-in-law. Please tell them we all said hi as well. I'll do it. All right, everybody. Stick around. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay, our next story comes from The Little Channel you know as CNN. What?

Do you know anything about CNN? What were? I'm just trying to stay on good terms. You know what I'm saying? Okay. A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of white supremacist groups, one of whom she was allegedly living with and had a romantic relationship with at the time. That all sounds very controversial, but I'm waiting to hear about the crime part. The woman Heidi Beatrich previously ran the SPLC's project tracking hate groups in the U.S. The Justice Department has alleged that the program, which is no longer running, defrauded donors who did not realize they were helping to pay individuals inside the same groups

that the SPLC aimed to root out. Berich allegedly oversaw payments of donors' money to people inside of these hate groups, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday. She also allegedly shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC's payments. Quote, I believe she was part of the effort

to open bank accounts in completely fictitious company's names and make payments to individuals for reasons that were not, accurate as described. Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference on Wednesday, quote, this is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the U.S. attorneys and the agents working the case can keep on working it even after the initial indictment. Beyrich has been charged as a part of a superseding indictment with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy

to conceal money laundering. A lawyer for Beirich denied wrongdoing on her part. This is so fascinating to me, because my understanding of how these things operated is that they had moles that they joined these white supremacist groups to infiltrate them, to get information and extract information from these hate groups. And they were paid to do so by the Southern Poverty Law Center

who studies hate groups and extremism. And it's also my understanding that the FBI worked pretty closely with Southern Poverty Law Center on some cases and getting information about certain groups. Because generally, the government itself can't classify a domestic group as a terrorist organization because of the First Amendment. We don't do that here. We do now. We've now classified Antifa as a domestic terror group and all that. But, I mean, did you ever work with Southern Poverty Law Center or use any of their information?

Yeah, I don't want to speak specifically about what sort of intelligence collection the Bureau may have been doing with any specific group because that's like a little bit still a little bit sensitive for me. But what I will say is this. The FBI is limited. You have to have, it's kind of like opening a case, right? You have to have information that establishes a predicate, like, you know, predicates the potential existence of criminal activity. before you can do this kind of thing. And it is even more sensitive when you're investigating groups

that are involved in some degree of political speech, even if it is in circumstances that most people would consider terrorism. Domestic terrorism is the rules under the First Amendment are applied to domestic terrorism in a way that they do not apply to international terrorism like ISIS and stuff like that. So it is very careful.

But what the Bureau can do is it can collect information from members of the community, citizens, professional entities, companies, whatever. And the SPLC has long been a source of very interesting and accurate information on domestic white supremacist groups and other terrorist groups operating here, or extremist groups operating here in the United States. So, you know, the Bureau is always, in the position of wanting to collect more intelligence. Now, we might not be able to task them to do something that we can't do legally, but if groups come to us with information that we have no basis to believe was collected illegally,

we're certainly going to take that information. So it's kind of a one-way relationship. I wonder if this lady can claim executive privilege. I don't know who can't by the new rules. So, yeah, I think what kills me about these, about the original SPLC indictment and now this one, is the fundamental core of it, I think is false. I think is baseless.

There's no actual, the first one was built around this idea that it's a fraud because the SPLC collected money from donors, but the donors didn't know that some of that money would end up in the hands of white supremacists. Well, that's not a fraud. That's just, you know, an organization running its business. You might not like the way they do business. If you found out about it, you might not give to them, give them money anymore.

That's your prerogative, whatever. But there's no crime there. So this is like a desperate Hail Mary pass to try to actually tie something criminal to this whole allegation. And what they might have here, if this defendant, Ms. Beirich, actually made false statements in opening the bank account, that could be. potentially be a crime? It's not a particularly big one. It's not a fraud on the donors. It doesn't have anything to do with really the core of what they're trying to get at here, which is basically scaring groups that do this kind of work. Of course. And CNN continues that the SPLC has fought the case, arguing that the government is mischaracterizing a longstanding informant program designed

to gather intelligence on hate groups and accuse the Justice Department of charging them for political reasons. That's attorneys for the SPLC, and they have also said that law enforcement officials have used information gathered by the organization's informants in the past. Okay. The charges are part of the Justice Department's case against the SPLC over the alleged payments, which prosecutors say were done through shell companies. In earlier court documents, the department gave details on nine unnamed informants. It says received payments through the program, which began in the late 80s. Now, despite her role in overseeing the payments, some of which were directed to an Imperial Wizard in the KKK, Beirich allegedly had a romantic relationship with one source who infiltrated a white supremacy group and stole documents for the SPLC, according to the indictment.

What does that have to do with anything? It doesn't, not in the way that they're suggesting. But here's how it could be relevant. if she was personally profiting or receiving some of these donor funds that went through these accounts into a joint account that she held with the informant who was receiving the funds, they could try to make up the claim that she was stealing donor money. Wouldn't that be a case that the SPLC would bring? It's an individual. It's like an individual act.

of embezzlement they could try to make it look like. I'm not saying that that's what it was. I'm just saying like this trying to figure out where they're going. Right. When this, when the first case came down the pike, many people said like, what is this about? There's no crime here. And that's when Blanche made these comments like, well, we're not done yet. We're still investigating.

We're still working on it. So that's this recent comment by him. He's like, see, we found a crime. Well, I don't know. I still don't see any anyway. So that person, this is the informant, who Beirich allegedly was in a relationship with, prosecutors say was paid over a million dollars by the SPLC since 2007, 140,000 of which was put into a bank account that Beirich and the person shared.

Beirich allegedly used that money to pay for their personal living expenses. You see, like, that's the direction they're going. Okay, but that's part of doing business again. Like that's part of doing business? Yeah, but like if you, like, if I'm an FBI agent and I open you as a source and I pay you for the information that you're gathering and then you take me out to dinner on that money, that's like not right. Because now I'm benefiting from the government's money that I gave you. Do you know what I'm saying? So you could claim.

That's not, that's a government thing. Yeah, it is. It's different. I get that. that. You know, maybe SPLC pays that lodging for these folks. Maybe they don't care. Maybe there's, maybe there's no, I don't know. Like I said, if SPLC had a problem, they would sue this woman. Like, that's what I'm saying. Like, the victim here is actually the SPLC. I don't, I don't want to, I'm trying to give them another theory. Right, right. All right. Here's the quote.

Dr. Beirich is innocent. In this case is without merit, her attorney, Michael J. Proctor, said in a statement, quote, we believe the charges against her and the SPLC are politically motivated. and Dr. Peerich has been targeted in this case because of the important work she's done to combat hate groups and extremists. Proctor said Beirich left the SPLC over six years ago. Dr. Beirich won't be silenced or intimidated by the government's false and politicized allegations now. Proctor continued. She welcomes the opportunity to present the truth in court. I bet she does and she should.

Yeah, I would 100%. That was like, Comey was like, let's go, let's go to trial today. Like, bring it on. Oh, sorry. Lindsay Halligan's not a legitimate prosecutor. Okay. Well, now you've got another chance with the seashells, sir. Yeah. The SPLC told CNN the indictment has not changed their commitment to the cause. Quote, taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is. And we believe it's also among the most important work we do. The actions taken by the DOJ will not shake our resolve. The group said in the statement, we remain steadfast in our fight for justice and in our commitment to ensuring the promise of the civil rights movement, that it becomes a reality for all. We are confident in our position and we look forward to presenting the evidence and making our case in court.

That's the end of the quote. So it's still very bizarre to me. I've read both this superseding indictment and the original indictment, Andy, like you said, and I just can't make any sense of it. I'm like, what is the crime? And if I were her and them, I would be file motions for failing to state a claim. I'm sure she will. Or not state a claim, but point to an actual crime. It's a motion to dismiss.

So yeah, I agree with you. I've had that feeling since the beginning. This one does not certainly does not make, it doesn't build a case of guilt on the part of the SPLC at all. If anything, it's trying to say, oh, well, this person who worked for them during this time six years ago or more. Defrauded the SPLC somehow. Made a false statement to a bank and maybe, you know, funneled some of this money. Some of this money that she was paying the informant ended up in her own pocket in one way or another.

Again, I'm not alleging that that's what actually happened. I think that's their logic here. It's flawed. But we'll see. Like, the court's going to have to sort this thing out. And I'm sure she'll have a very vigorous defense. Yeah, I agree. As well, the SPLC.

All right, everybody, we've got one more story and listener questions, but we have to take one last quick break. So stick around. We'll be right back. All right, everybody, welcome back. One more quick story before we go to listener questions. This is from Bloomberg tax. President Donald Trump has asked a federal appeals court at the 11th Circuit to pause a judge's order imposing sanctions on him and his lawyers for how they handled his $10 billion, quote-unquote, lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service while he appeals that ruling. Now, Trump is challenging a Miami judge's findings that he brought the IRS case in bad faith and reached a deal with the Justice Department to end the litigation that had no basis in law.

She barred Trump and federal agencies from referring to the terms, including immunity from tax audits for past filings in any official proceedings and referred his personal attorneys, Epstein and Brito, I believe, for potential disciplinary action to the Bar Association. In the request for an immediate pause filed Wednesday morning, Trump argued that allowing U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams' order to remain in effect for now, quote, would wrongly leave an unconstitutional speech restraint. and career-altering professional sanctions in force while this court considers an appeal that is overwhelmingly likely to succeed. Oh, it's overwhelmingly likely to. That's classic Trumpian court filing language. Okay, it goes on to say the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will decide next whether to grant his request to halt Williams from enforcing her order until the court rules on the merits of the dispute. Yep, Trump had sued the IRS earlier in the year. as we know, seeking to hold the agency liable for a leak of his tax information several years ago.

In May, the Justice Department announced it reached a settlement, and I put that in air quotes too, with Donald Trump to end the case that included the creation of the $1.8 billion slush fund for victims of alleged government weaponization, but apparently only that happened during the Biden or Obama administrations. Separate from that formal settlement, Attorney General Todd Blanche also signed an order granting Trump, his sons, Donald and Eric, and the Trump Organization immunity from tax audits or other investigations or claims by the IRS or the Treasury Department related to their past tax-related filings. And that's illegal. You can't, that's against the law.

But he's the attorney general. So what are you going to do? It's the old Dick Nixon. If the president does it, it can't be illegal. Right. Okay. Blanche quickly walked back the billion dollar fund plan in response to opposition from several senior Republicans in Congress.

although Trump has continued to express support for the idea. The audit immunity order remains in effect. Blanche at one point shared a memo making it clear that it wouldn't apply beyond the parties in the case after facing skepticism from top Senate Republicans poised to complicate his recent confirmation to the Justice Department's top job. And here's the thing. Everyone's like, oh, he rewrote it or he narrowed it. He didn't.

It's exactly the same as it was. Yeah. Trump, his sons in the Trump organization, immune from. It's just bizarre that someone like Cassidy or who were the other two that were Tillus and Corny and Cornyn. It's beyond bizarre that they were like, not until you get rid of that. And they're like, okay, well, it's the same. So that's fine. Like I don't understand.

They were so desperate. They were so desperate to get to that point. They wanted to stand up and pound their fists a little, but then they wanted to go along, you know, long run. And all through the quote unquote negotiations for days, they would say like, we're close. We're so close. We're really close. So we're going to get this done. Close. You knew they were just like begging for it. Just give us something. And he gave him nothing except the one sentence thing that rescinded the fund but didn't rescind the underlying settlement. Yeah. That it was based on. It's worthless. It's absolutely nothing, which is why I haven't dropped my lawsuit yet.

No. So, as we know, last month, Judge Williams found that the lawsuit was not legitimate because Trump had authority over both defendants as president, violating a constitutional requirement that parties in federal litigation be adverse to each other. In addition to barring Trump from referring to the terms for the deal with the Justice Department, she ordered Trump to pay his opponent's legal fees and referred his attorneys for discipline from bar associations and Todd Blanche as well. So how do you pay the legal fees of the government? This whole thing is so ass backwards. I mean, I just, it's crazy. Well, they wanted to do the legal fees for like the 35 judges that filed an amicus brief. And they actually came up and said, you can give us a dollar.

And then there was another friend of the court who I think asked the judge because the judge like, file them. Let me see your filings for your legal fees. Bring them in. I think another amici asked for, I think, $34,000 or something like that. But those judges, they're like, give us a dollar. Nice. Love them. Love them. Nice.

All right, time for listener questions, everybody. If you have a question, we have a link in the show notes for you. You can click on that link and submit your questions directly to Andy and me. What do we have for questions this week? Okay, so the first one, it's not really a question. It's more of like an update, a very interesting thing that I'm going to say, say a super fan sent in to us. A super fan who goes by the name

Kel. And it's super rel- disclosure. Kel's one of my lawyers. Okay. Okay. Super fan and also super smart lawyer. It's interesting to me

because we always get lots of questions about like can't so-and-so sue the government agency that did them wrong. And we're always say, you know, you can, but it's hard. There's certain avenues you can take. Certain things that you have,

remedies you have to exhaust. And then at the end of the day, if you actually win something, it comes out of the general budget. It doesn't really come out of that agency's pocket. But Kell is pointing out maybe an opportunity here. So he says, hey, fun fact. Some statutes actually specify that payments due to lawsuits

have to come out of agency budgets. For instance, FOIA has a fee shifting provision. where the government has to pay the reasonable attorney's fees of successful FOIA litigants. And Congress got fed up with agencies, just making people sue over everything because they never paid any price for it. So they amended FOIA to explicitly say that attorney's fees came out of the agency's budget. So if Dems take Congress next year, they could very quietly slip a similar provision into some massive must-pass bill like the NDAA, saying that payments made as a result of tort claims, against ICE or CBP come out of the agency's budget.

And if they play their cards right and don't draw attention to it, it would probably become law before anyone figured it out. Snaky attorneys. The best part of this plan is that even if you say this today, there would be so much time passing between now and then that nobody would remember it. And nobody would be scouring the thousand page bill looking for the section number that such an amendment would have to go into.

Worst case scenario, you send a lot of Republican congressional staffers on a snipe hunt and waste their time. Best case scenario, you get a Democratic staffer to realize the prospect, put it into motion when it comes time. It's really interesting idea. I like it. I like it. Let's see. You know, we got to see a different response this time than we had in 2021, right? Right. We need to stay the course of standing up and forcing the law and enforcing our congressional provisions and principles, and that means oversight, and it's going to be filing more lawsuits and doing what's necessary to start turning this ship right side up. Or President Ocasio-Cortez could put Elizabeth Warren in charge of ICE and then sue ICE,

and then they could reach a colluded settlement where there's a $1.8 billion slush fund for people who are harmed by ice. I mean, that's another scenario. That is definitely another. If you want to do it the Trump way. Anyway, thanks, Cal. Thanks for pointing that out. Because this is over a discussion I think we had in July.

Yeah. The final show in July. All right, what's next? All right. So we did get a real, I'm not going to read this, but I will say KPM sent in a note pointing out maybe our analysis of the box wine was not entirely accurate and that there is actually some good box wine out there. So I'm just throwing this out there.

No prejudice to the box wine. People box it up, enjoy it, whatever you like. And if we do kick out the box wine tour, you guys would be the first to know. For sure. Okay. So final question comes to us from a person who did not want to be identified. So I will call them Phanu Linu, and that's a famous old-timey FBI way of referring to people whose names we don't know. First name unknown, last name unknown.

Correct. Fennu Lenu says, love the show, keep up the good work. It is so beyond the pale. The thing that I think is most galling about all this corruption stuff is a total lack of accountability. They are going to take taxpayers' dollars and pay folks that beat cops, WTF. Trump is robbing us blind and now he's getting an even bigger tax scam. I am wondering who, if anyone would have standing to challenge the slush fund for J-Sixers and the IRS Immunity Fund for the Trump.

regime. I have an answer. Hit me. Well, I have standing to challenge the slush fund. But more importantly, a judge has found that Andrew Floyd has standing. And now the Treasury Union, the Treasury Employee Union, has joined that lawsuit and argue that they have standing over the IRS immunity. Because if anyone at the IRS is forced to carry this out, it being illegal, they could be in legal jeopardy for simply doing their jobs. So I think that's their standing argument for the slush fund part of it. Now, my standing argument for the, or excuse me, for the tax immunity part of it. My standing for the slush fund that I argue is that I have been weaponized against by the government, see my federal lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs for improperly terminating my job.

And as such, I am an interested party in the slush fund because it's for anti-weaponization payouts. But there was no comment period on the Federal Register. And so I was unable to comment and point out some of the legal deficiencies of the fund that concerned me as someone who is a potential recipient. Eligible to be a recipient. And since you violated the APA by not issuing a rule for comment on that. the Federal Register, you violated the APA and therefore, as an interested party, you harmed me. That's how I have standing. Yeah, for sure.

And I think, you know, you or anyone else could also gain standing by filing a claim and getting denied. That you could challenge the administration of it. So I think there's plenty of people who could have standing on that one. On the IRS immunity one, I'm going to sketch out a different theory for you. You're not saying that the one you talked about it wouldn't work. But another way to- And I'm just guessing.

I haven't read their theory on standing. that was just a guess. So another way to kind of legally obliterate the immunity agreement, the immunity agreement is just that. It's simply DOJ wrote on a piece of paper, we will hereby not ever investigate you or prosecute you for tax stuff. Now, you can best think of it as like a contract. This is the way DOJ would defend it.

Well, it's a contract. We agreed to do that to force to not investigate. in return for Trump's dropping the lawsuit. Because any contract has to have three things. An offer and acceptance. And it has to have a, oh, I'm forgetting the word. Offer acceptance and. Oh, it's killing me.

This is from first year law school. You get something in exchange? Yeah, there has to be something exchanged. Consideration. Offer acceptance and consideration. Barely passed. that one. There's no consideration here because what they would say was the consideration is Trump's dropping the lawsuit. But the lawsuit was never actually a lawsuit. In fact, it was brought

in bad faith, according to the judge in Miami, and there was no case or controversy at all. And the entire thing was a fraud on the court. So you could have, in the next administration, the OLC issue an opinion as to whether that agreement that Todd Blanche personally signed actually binds the department to anything. And my strong suspicion would be a good lawyer would say it does not. It does not. There's no consideration. There's no consideration.

Because there was not a lawsuit to give an exchange. It's not a binding agreement. So, sorry. Let the investigations begin. Yeah, that's why we really, really, really, really, really have to elect a Democrat in 28. Do you know, I mean, how, what's our next podcast going to be on how long it takes to unwrite all the LLC memos and put the district.

DOJ back together again. Part of me hopes we're out of business. Yeah. At a point where we're like, that's all good now, we're good. We just go back to being happy. Well, thank you, listeners. If you have questions again,

please send them to us by clicking on the link in the show notes. We really appreciate getting them, and I know we love reading them. So thank you very much for sending them in. And I hope everyone has a safe and wonderful rest of your weekend, what's left of it. Please check out the breakdown today at millershe wrote.com. I'm going to talk to Katie Fang about

the hearing that went down in the Epstein Files case this past Thursday. The DOJ sent a lawyer who didn't have any of the answers and it didn't go well for the Justice Department. Judge Emmett Sullivan told a 30-minute story about the one time he's held DOJ lawyers in contempt. Oh, geez. A 30-minute story about how the time, the one time in his 41 years on the bench that he's held DOJ lawyers in contempt. And he's like, I'm not saying, I'm not holding anybody in contempt today. he's like but I just thought we'd start a conversation and then he goes I love that guy

and then he goes I'm not this isn't a threat it's a promise I'll do whatever I need to administer justice it's not a threat if it's a fact so everybody's just like 30 minute lecture on contempt and told the story of Senator Stevens in 2011 I remember there were 34 35 doc 33 or 34

documents of Brady material, exculpatory material that the Department of Justice didn't turn over. Whistleblower came to court and blew the whistle right there. I mean, there was like, I think there was an FBI agent having an affair with the chief informant and witness in the case. It was a disaster. In fact, prior to these days, I used to think of that as maybe one of the biggest messes of the department, but it seems quaint. But the DOJ wouldn't hand over the case.

33 documents. So Judge Sullivan held him in contempt until they did. And that cured the contempt. Yeah. And everybody could move on from there. That's what contempt is for. I know a lot of people are like, throw them in jail and into, you know. It's a motivator.

It's just to get justice. And in this case, it could be if they failed to hand over documents because now Katie Fang has been asked to write an order for the judge to sign. that says you have to hand over the FBI handwritten notes. Todd Blanche is withholding them saying they're substantially similar enough to be considered duplicative. And Judge Sullivan's like, I'll take a look for myself. So they have to hand those over now. And then he's like, and don't you forget in 2011.

Don't make me tell the story again. Yeah. Anyway, thank you all so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Do you have any final thoughts? No, I'm good. Let's hope for a slow week next week, but I'm sure we won't get one. Yeah. First full week of Attorney General Todd Blanche. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. I'm Allison Gill.

And I'm Andy McCabe. Unjustified is written and executive produced by Allison Gill with additional research and analysis by Andrew McCabe. Sound design and editing is by Molly Hawkey with art and web design by Joelle Reader at Moxie Design Studios. The theme music for Unjustified is written and performed by Ben Folds. show is a proud member of the MSW Media Network, a collection of creator-owned independent podcast dedicated to news, politics, and justice. For more information, please visit MSWMedia.com.