Jack - The Murder End of the Stick

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

Tulsi Gabbard declassifies new documents in the latest attempt to cast doubt on the 2016 Russia investigation.A former January 6th prosecutor and former DOJ employees are suing the Trump Administration for wrongful termination.The Department of Justice circumvented the Vacancies Act to install Alina Habba as the interim US Attorney in New Jersey after the NJ District court judges rejected her.One of the people Trump freed in the prisoner swap with Venezuela using the CECOT detainees is a convicted murderer.Plus listener questions…Do you have questions for the pod? Questions from ListenersThank you CB Distillery! Use promo code UNJUST at CBDistillery.com for 25% off your purchase. Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations. Follow AG Substack|MuellershewroteBlueSky|@muellershewroteAndrew McCabe isn’t on social media, but you can buy his book The ThreatThe Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and TrumpWe would like to know more about our listeners. Please participate in this brief surveyListener Survey and CommentsThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at the Justice Enforcers level and above:https://dailybeans.supercast.techOrhttps://patreon.com/thedailybeansOr when you subscribe on Apple Podcastshttps://apple.co/3YNpW3P

MSW Media. Tulsi Gabbard declassifies new documents in a latest attempt to cast doubt on the 2016 Russia investigation. A former January 6th prosecutor and ex-Department of Justice employees are suing the Trump administration for wrongful termination. of justice employees are suing the Trump administration for wrongful termination. The department of justice circumvented the vacancies act to install Alina Haba as the interim U S attorney in New Jersey, after the New Jersey district court judges rejected her and one of the people Trump freed in the prisoner swap with Venezuela using sea coat detainees is a convicted murderer. This is Unjustified.

Hey everybody, welcome to episode 27 of the Unjustified podcast. It is Sunday, July 27th, 2025. I'm Alison Gill. And I'm Andy McCabe. As usual, we have a lot to discuss this week. Another week of bringing the criminals back from overseas. I feel like that's we're in backwards land now, but apparently not. But before we get into the headlines we mentioned in the introduction, let's talk about a couple of other things that are happening. So Tulsi Gabbard is accusing Barack Obama of a treasonous coup. Yeah, let's talk about that. Because, boy, my phone started lighting up. As you know,

I think it's fair to say both you and I know a lot about the Russia investigation. Just a little, right? Just a little. Lived through it, wrote about it, talked about it. It never goes away. Started it. Yeah. Started it. That part too. Really, really never goes away. But this thing is amazing because before we get to trying to figure out exactly what she's talking about, which is not easy because you kind of have to climb into the mind of Tulsi Gabbard. The background I think is also relevant.

Like this is a person who is supposed to be the president's go-to on national security intelligence matters. And what do we know for a fact? Well, we know that in the biggest foreign policy decision of his presidency so far, that being how to handle Iran and whether or not to drop bombs on it, he completely ignored her sideline. Like she wasn't even invited to half of the meetings they had to discuss it. Yeah, unlike Pete Hegg's wife. Yeah, exactly. Right.

And when, you know, when confronted on Air Force One by reporters who said that like Gabbard recommended against it, you know, he just immediately dismissed her as she's wrong. I think he said, I don't care what she says. Yeah. Which is generally a bad thing. And then she released that somewhat bizarre video of herself just kind of free-form spoken word poetry addressing the badness of nuclear war. I don't know if you saw that. I did. That did not go over well in the White House from the reporting that I've seen. He was

really stunned by it and couldn't understand why she had done something like that. So she's on the outs, right? And what better way to get back in than to like, you know, blow some air on the dying embers of the Russia, Russia, Russia obsession. And so that seems to be what she's doing here with this report and the crazy graphics and all the stuff that's up online. But fundamentally, it's my interpretation that her problem is she has conflated a couple of very different things, right? So it's 2016, the election, leading up to the election, and then through election day

and the immediate aftermath, we were realizing because of our investigation, all these different things that the Russians were doing. They did a bunch of stuff. They sent, as you all know from having read the Mueller report, they sent undercovers here. They engaged in a hack and dump campaign where they stole information from political institutions like the DNC and then released it in an effort to harm Hillary Clinton. They started the Internet Research Agency and bought tons of ads and airtime on social media in an effort to influence Americans' perceptions of different issues and influence how they thought about who they

would vote for. One of the other things they did was they tried to hack their way into the voting infrastructure. We know this because they probed the networks of many different states. Some of them they got into. Some of those penetrations included getting into things like voter registration roles, and also some of the networks of the county level voter administrators, things like that.

But what they didn't get into was actually voting machines. We knew that at the time because even then the voting machines are pretty well protected. They're not online for that reason, so they're not vulnerable to those sorts of attacks. And so our assessment about that part of what they were doing was that the Russians were not successful in altering the vote tally. So they didn't change the numbers of votes, you know, take votes away from Clinton and give them to Trump, that sort of thing.

All the other stuff they absolutely did, deeply, meddled deeply into the election. And then Robert Mueller, of course, laid out all the details of that in his special counsel report. Gabbard has conflated our assessment about their cyber activity targeting the voting infrastructure with our overall assessment that the Russians meddled in the election. And you know, there's only two possibilities here.

I can't say what's in her head, but there are only two possibilities. One, she knows that she's conflating two different things. It is deliberately doing it to mislead people. Or two, the director of national intelligence does not understand intelligence. She can't read. Yeah. She can't read, doesn't process things well, doesn't understand the things that she's reading. I'm not sure which of those two possibilities is more terrifying, but it's got to be one or the other. It doesn't always boil down to it's either incompetence or evil. I mean, it's always

one of the two things with this administration. But what's interesting is now, of course, people are calling, even Lindsey Graham. Like John McCain just must be like rolling over in his grave. Is is saying we should we should appoint a special counsel to look into this. Y'all did. His name was Durham. He's a full on investigation. There's a report. You can read it. He charged three people, two were acquitted because it was so ridiculous. And in fact, the whole reason he was made

a special counsel in the first place is because Trump broke a law. And that's why Barr elevated him. So this whole thing has been investigated a million times. They've investigated the oranges of the investigation. We had the Comers and Jordans of the world investigating this. It's been thoroughly and totally debunked what Tulsi Gabbard is claiming here. I don't even understand how Obama, I guess she's accusing him of changing the assessment, the intelligence community assessment in December of 2019. 16, 2016. 2016, excuse me.

And saying that him changing the assessment shows that he was trying to steal the 2016 election for Hillary. I guess it's really hard to follow. Very hard to follow. Very hard to follow. Very hard to follow. What she's trying to say. But I think at the core here is she's saying that Obama changed the assessment, had the assessment changed after a December 2016 meeting.

I think she's saying he received our assessment that they did not change the vote outcome. And then he said, I want a new assessment of everything they did. And then we came back and said they meddled in the election. Like those two things are, you know, mutually exclusive. It's just, it's insane. It's insane. And you're right. It was, first of all, our concerns, we opened the case, turns over to Mueller. Mueller investigates it two years and basically confirmed exactly what we were concerned about and proved how it happened. Then the IG comes in looking for some scalps, finds some problems with the FISA for sure, but ultimately concludes the investigation was valid, should have been open, was open correctly. How does he phrase it? He says, no decisions were

not made for improper purposes. I'm sure it killed him to have to write that. Well, that conclusion didn't cut it for, this wasn't what Trump was looking for. So hence Barr brings in Durham to redo that investigation and to come up with a different conclusion. That was a disappointment because Durham concluded basically the same thing. He brought two cases against people who had nothing to do with opening or conducting the investigation and he lost both of them. The only case he got a conviction on was Kevin Kleinsmith, which basically he took over from Horowitz. That was not even something that he found.

Right. And that guy pled guilty. So- Right. Right. Right. And then on top of all that, you got the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating it for years, multiple lines of work. Rubio wrote the whole thing, wrote the letter at the executive summary after Burr was kicked

out, right, for insider trading. Burr championed the whole thing until he had to leave. And then Rubio took it over and finished it. So it's a Republican and Democratic production. Then you had the, even if you want to mention this, the Devin Nunez house intelligence version, authored by none other than Cash Patel, which basically includes the same thing. Yeah, they rip all over the Steele dossier and whatever, whatever, but the origins or the oranges of the investigation remain unscathed. So now we're going to do it again. There's going to be a strike force. I understand. So it's, they're going to call it something new. So

it'll be different and more fun, maybe more meme worthy. But wasn't strike force the Sidney Powell Kraken name? Like, can't you come up with something new? Yeah. I mean, like that would seem to be a failure of creativity, but I mean, not a, not a surprising one. Call it crossfire churro cane. It's a bunch of churros. I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know. Who knows? But it'll be interesting to see how this goes. I read today that making the public referral and request on DOJ to open a criminal investigation on a former president of the United States was done without ever speaking to the Department of Justice ahead of time. Pam Bondi learned about that referral when Gabbard was speaking from behind the podium at the White House. She probably should have consulted with them first because they probably

would have mentioned to her that, oh yeah Thanks to Donald Trump Barack Obama is absolutely and completely immune from anything He did while he was in office that was related to his official duties. So maybe Should can the referral because that one's not going anywhere. Yeah, and yeah, that's just that's just well, you know, not surprising, but the timing is interesting, right? Because I have to assume they've been planning this all along. This isn't just something that Donald Trump has decided to do, to discredit Mueller's work, the 2016 Russian investigation, the IC assessment, etc cetera. He's been long planned to try to debunk this going all the way back to Bill Barr and Durham and even before that and Nunes

and all that other stuff. But the timing is interesting, right? Right? Is this the whirlwind going around with the Epstein files? I feel like they just have all this stuff in the hopper, ready to go when they need to distract from something. Totally. It's the Epstein dumpster fires raging out of control now and singeing everyone close to it. So they needed something to... When the Epstein conspiracy theory is falling apart and the base that loves it is now pissed, you need to just switch tunes to a different conspiracy theory that you know they like. And this is right up there on the best hits, greatest hits of all time. So it was inevitable.

Reopening Hillary's email, the investigation, all that stuff. Now, speaking about not being able to get indictments, like they're trying to go after Obama, trying to go after Brennan and Comey and all that. There's another story that grabbed my attention this week too, this about federal prosecutor, the federal prosecutor in LA, the US attorney. Apparently he's having a really hard time getting grand juries to return indictments against Los Angeles protesters, right? Because they're trying to keep bringing these charges that people were violent and assaulted ICE officers and assaulted National Guard or whatever the charges are, right? And this is US attorney Bill S. Salie. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

I think that that's close. But he has filed felony charges against 38 ICE protesters, but he's only got seven indictments back and some in his office question whether his approach is based on the evidence. And we'll talk about this in a second because seven out of 38. That's not good. And, and we'll talk about this in a second because seven out of 38, um, like he's broke, he's blown the record of no bill, no true bill out of the water. Right. Yeah. I mean, it typically would be like, it would be like 37.9 out of 38. Right. Because a reporter from lawfare linked back to an old article about how rare it is.

They wrote this back in 2019. They say it's hard to express what an incredibly rare occurrence of grand jury refusal to return a true bill would be, if that is indeed what took place. It may not be quite accurate that, as the saying goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but the sentiment gets something real. The Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that between October 2013 and September 2014, the last year these data were publicly available, the department investigated almost 200,000 cases, declined to prosecute about 31,500. And of that latter category, just five of those cases, five were declined because the grand jury returned no true bill. And here this guy's got 31 turned down in a week. And

the people are questioning the veracity. Megan Blanco, former federal prosecutor, current defense attorney representing one of the anti-ICE protesters that's currently facing charges, told the LA Times that there's a simple reason grand juries aren't pulling the trigger on indictments. Prosecutors' cases are full of holes. Matthew 14 Yeah. I mean, and let's remember two things I think were worth reminding us about the grand jury process. First, it's of course massively stacked in favor of the prosecution, right? It's controlled by the prosecutors. The defendant or the target of the investigation has no right to appear. If they do appear, they can't bring an attorney.

The prosecutor is allowed to put hearsay in. They can put in whatever part of the case they choose. It is for the most part secret. There's all kinds of built in kind of structural preferences for the prosecution. So that's, that accounts for the massive kind of numbers on one side of that equation. But another thing to remember is like, part of the reason we have a grand jury is because this is how our criminal justice system incorporates essentially the will of the people, the norms and the perspectives of your fellow citizens. It's kind of like jury nullification, right? So if you're in a case that does get indicted and you go to trial, the jury can sit there, listen to all the evidence, hear all the witnesses. Even if the evidence is strong and solid, the jury can go back

into the jury room and say, you know what? We just don't want to send this person to jail. We're going to acquit. They're allowed to acquit in contravention of all of the evidence and testimony they've heard. And that's part of the system. Like if the citizens, if the mind and the kind of morals of the citizenry are so strongly against the case that's been put forward, then they can say, no, no conviction here. Now you can't do the opposite. You can't convict someone if there's no evidence. Jury nullification only works one way towards acquittal. In the favor of the, yeah. Right, but it's the same in the grand, this is basically the grand jury equivalent of

that. And I would suspect, I don't know, and we won't have data on this, but there's probably a lot of citizens of Los Angeles who are serving on grand juries who are not supportive of what they're seeing in terms of what the government is doing about these protests. And they may just be saying like, you know, unless you can show us that somebody really like went crazy and committed some act of violence on someone else, then no, we're not doing it. Right. Angelina is, yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what result you thought you were going

to get, but also I'm reminded of, this is exactly the opposite of the arguments that Donald Trump and his lawyers use in the immunity case saying that if you don't give me immunity, we'll have rogue prosecutors because you can indict a ham sandwich. Even Alito said the phrase, right? And everyone was like, did he just say you could have died a ham sandwich? Like, oh my God, he's just the Supreme Court. Like you leave that to podcasters, sir. Exactly. Do better. Be more smarter, Mr. Judge. But just, you know, I just wanted to kind of throw that out there that that was his argument. You got to get rid of these rogue prosecutors. And here he is, rogue prosecuting.

And I think you're right. I think it's a combination of either there's just giant holes in these cases and there aren't a lot of laws being broken by these protesters or Angelina's are like, I'm not going to send somebody to jail or even put them into trial for this. Right. There's a first amendment. First Amendment is important to people and it's possible these jurors are seeing these things like, you know what, I'm sorry, these people are engaged in First Amendment protected activity and I'm not on board with this. Anyway. All right, last thing I wanted to touch on before we get into the main news is, we talked

briefly a minute ago about the Epstein files, but Todd Blanch meeting two days now with Gillian Maxwell and Maxwell's lawyer telling Fox News, we're hoping for a pardon. And Todd Blanch saying our meeting went really well. It was really productive. This is, that's not something that you say about a convicted sex trafficker. If you're the deputy attorney general. So I don't know. But the whole thing stinks to me. It reeks to me. It seems like a quid pro quo. I mean, how many times did we see in the Mueller report, Donald Trump dangle pardons to get people to lie? Roger Stone, Flynn, Manafort, Papadopoulos, I mean, the list, Cohen, the list goes on and on. So I don't know, I just was wondering, you know, with your experience with these kinds of meetings at the department, what is he doing?

That is a great question. That's the one that I keep coming back to like what is the goal here for the government? So typically this happens when You convict something. Let's say you must say you have a terrorist who's involved in planning an attack here in the United States This is a big target, right? This is maybe the top of the food chain for this crime and they don't cooperate They never testify they claim their, you go to trial, they get convicted, you get a huge sentence. It might be that that terrorist at some point says, okay, now that I've been convicted,

now I'm ready to talk about the guys back in Pakistan who sent me, whatever. There's a thing in the federal rules of criminal procedure called rule 35, where you can actually cooperate after you've been convicted. And rule 35 gives the prosecutors the ability to after you've been convicted. And rule 35 gives the prosecutors the ability to, after you've cooperated productively, they can come in before the judge who sentenced you and request like a downward departure in your sentence. So I think nominally, that's probably what they're looking for here. Let's put the pardon issue aside, just because that's so crazy. But again, Maxwell

doesn't even- Let's put the likely scenario aside because it's just mind boggling and talk about legally what they could be trying to do. How it normally would happen is the prosecutors who convicted her would go and meet with her in jail and evaluate whether or not she could actually substantially assist the government. That's the standard in Rule 35. That would mean she'd have to be- So the prosecutors that convicted her, not the Deputy Attorney General. Not the Deputy Attorney General, not his assistant, not that person's assistant, not the assistant

of the assistant of the assistant, but like 16 levels below. The actual line attorney who had the case would be the person to go in. Who fired her. Yeah, can't do that here because you fired that person, Maureen Comey last week. But I'm just trying to analogize to normal world. And you would go in and you'd listen to them and if they had- Without promising anything. Without promising anything.

And they'd have to have unbelievable information that led you to other cases in which you could convict even more important people. And still you'd have to be able to use that person as a witness, which means they can't really, you know, you have to somehow be able to rehabilitate them in front of a jury. Now here, Maxwell has never cooperated. She maintains her innocence to this day, right? And she was also charged with perjury. So you tell me, how is she ever going to be a witness? They use that to keep her in jail. I don't know that they charged her with the 1000 one, but yeah, she's perjured herself.

Yeah. I think she was originally charged with it, but she wasn't convicted of it or something. But in any case, you have someone who has a terrible record as a liar. So this is all just, it doesn't fit the normal rules and processes of a criminal procedure, but it's super important to Todd Blanche's boss. And so there's probably nobody else in the Department of Justice who Trump trusts as much as he trusts Todd Blanch, maybe Emil Bovi, but beyond those two, no one. So he sent his guy, his former personal attorney down to Florida to do the interview himself. Unprecedented. 21 years, I've never ever seen a deputy attorney general conduct an interview.

And I have seen and worked with many, many of them. So the question becomes, what are they trying to do down there? What are they trying to accomplish? Well, they're trying to make the Jeffrey Epstein problem go away. Wait, how? They're not producing a transcript that they're going to release here. You're never going to hear the production here. No, but they could get Gillian Maxwell to testify to Congress that, yeah, Trump's in the files, but he never did anything wrong. But these Democrats and these billionaires and Bill Clinton's in there and da-da-da-da. That's the only thing you can even dream up. The purpose of this trip is to find out how

they can best run interference for and protect Donald Trump. It's all about the coverup. And all those processes that you mentioned and all those rules, they're in place that way to prevent a terrible witness from lying to get a... To get a benefit. Of course. Of course. So they're going to what? Pardon her? You're going to pardon the one person who's serving jail time for having sex trafficked all these young women? I mean, how to make a bad problem worse. This is like a masterclass in screwing up a crisis. Yeah. But if they can get their MAGA base to be like, I knew it. I knew Trump didn't

do anything wrong and move on from this. I think that's probably their goal. I think so. I think so. But if that's true, then they're grossly misjudging their base. Their base is not going to be satisfied until they have some like people who they can identify as rich or politically influential Democrats that they can then vilify on social media. That's it. That's what they want. They might be able to get that out of this. Maybe maybe. But then, you know, you still have the wall street journal, Rupert Murdoch and JD Vance and Peter Thiel to contend with.

Who I don't think want Trump to be president anymore. That's just my tinfoil hat. Um, 20,000 foot view of all this. Uh, but, uh, we will see this will unfold. The dam is breaking. Mike Johnson sent everybody home early because he didn't want to vote on it. So we'll see what ends up happening with that. But thanks for that insight into what's normally supposed to happen after you've been convicted and somebody wants to cooperate because we know it happens.

It does. Yeah. And there's a right way to do it. There's a right way also to get a corroborating witness to testify against somebody. And it's not somebody who's lower down on the food chain and it's not somebody that you're going to, who's a triple felon that you're going to give asylum to and release into the community. Like what happened with the co-conspirators in the Abrego case, which I'll talk about a bit later, but that's also not the way to do it. So anyway, I think we're beyond the right way to do stuff with this particular administration.

And we'll get more into that with a couple of other stories, but we have to take a break. So everybody stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody. Let's be honest. Some days you're running on caffeine and fumes and sleep feels like a second job. That sounds familiar. You might want to check out CBD Distillery. Their CBD products have helped millions find relief, including me. Over 90% of their customers

report better sleep, but they're not just for rest. CBD Distillery has options for stress, mood, focus, and even pain after exercise. And yes, they have CBD cookies for pets too. I want to thank CB Distillery for sponsoring this episode and you can get 25% off your entire purchase at cbdistillery.com. Use promo code unjust. I just started using CB Distillery's sleep gummies a little while back. They've become a staple part of my routine. I take one in the evening and instead of scrolling, doom scrolling on my phone late into the night, I'm winding down and falling asleep within 30 minutes. That was never possible before.

And I sleep through the night. I wake up feeling clear headed. I also picked up their pain stick and I loved it so much that I have one in my gym bag and one in my suitcase for when I travel and I have one in my nightstand. So it's a lifesaver. You just rub it on sore spots after a workout or after long travel, maybe your neck hurts. It's no mess, no smell. It's just relief.

It's awesome. And CBDistillery has over 2 million happy customers, a full 100% money back guarantee so there's no risk. And if sleep or stress is wrecking your rhythm, maybe it's time to try something. A lot of people are finding CBD is the missing piece and CBDistillery is the place to go for it. For a limited time, you can save 25% on your entire purchase. Just visit CBDistillery.com. Use promo code unjust. That's CBDistillery.com. Promo code unjust. One more time. CBDistillery.com.

Use promo code unjust. Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations. All right, everybody, welcome back. The prisoner swap with the men that Trump disappeared to Seacoat in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. The men, by the way, that Trump claimed they have no control over in the United States, no custody. That prisoner swap with Venezuela is complete. The men released from Seacoat now are telling their stories of the torture they faced in the prison. And it lines up with what Mr. Abrego said in his court filing and his amended complaint, what he went through when he was there. And now that they are free in Venezuela, the question remains as to whether they'll be brought back to the United States for due process, right? And Politico writes, more than 250 Venezuelan men deported by the United States to a notorious

prison in El Salvador could be headed back to the United States for immigration proceedings under a three-country diplomatic agreement revealed Friday, that's a week ago, by the Trump administration. Under a prisoner swap between El Salvador and Venezuela, brokered in ago by the Trump administration under a prisoner swap between El Salvador and Venezuela brokered in part by the United States. Venezuela has agreed to permit the 252 men to return to the United States if ordered by a court. It's according to a senior Homeland Security official in illegal filing with a federal judge. Melissa Harper, the acting assistant director of enforcement and removal operations for

immigration and customs enforcement, said the Trump administration obtained assurances from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government that it would permit its citizens to return to the United States for legal proceedings if required by a court. Quote, the Maduro regime will not impose obstacles to the individual's travel, Harper said in a sworn declaration Friday to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Maryland-based Trump appointee. That arrangement for the Venezuelan men, many of whom were deported under President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, will also allow the return of 10 Americans detained in Venezuela.

But we're going to get to those 10 Americans in just a few minutes. Yes. Now, if the agreement is carried out, it appears poised to end a legal standoff in which judges have weighed ordering the return of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador in March with little to no due process. That includes proceedings pending before Washington, D.C.'s chief U.S. District Judge, James Boesberg, which we've covered extensively here, who had pushed the Trump administration to find ways to return the deportees in order to provide them a chance to challenge the claim that

they were gang members. Since that story was written, by the way, the one that we just finished reading, the swap has been carried out, Andy. And the New York Times is now reporting, quote, he killed three people in Spain and fled to Venezuela where he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, according to court documents. Then last week, the Trump administration negotiated his release as part of a larger prisoner swap and he has arrived on American soil. Now that convict, Dahoud Hanid Ortiz, who is 54, he's a US Army veteran.

He's free in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of the case. One said he's in Orlando. Hmm. When the Americans put Mr. Hanid Ortiz on a plane on Friday, again, this is last Friday, back to the United States, at least some people in the Trump administration knew of his criminal past according to a third person. Mr. Henid Ortiz was among 10 Americans and US legal permanent residents extracted by

the United States from detention in Venezuela on Friday. In exchange, the United States agreed to allow the release of 252 Venezuelan men it had sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. That's the swap we were just talking about in the previous article. Mr. Henid Ortiz's crimes and conviction had been documented in the news media and in public court records for years before his release. In 2023, officials in the Biden administration, who had learned of his detention in Venezuela, decided not to take him as part of a different prisoner swap, according to a former US official. The official said that the Spanish authorities had asked the United States to send him to

Spain, but that Spanish officials ultimately decided against this, and the Department of Justice decided it did not want him in the United States. The decision by the Trump administration to facilitate Ortiz's release from the Venezuelan prison has elicited anger and fear among relatives of his victims and a man court records say he had intended to kill, but who ultimately survived. Mr. Ortiz's crimes took place in 2016 in Madrid, according to Venezuelan court documents, when he visited the office of a lawyer, Victor Salas, who he believed was having an affair with his wife. He killed two women there, as well as a man that he

mistook for Mr. Salas. He fled then to Germany and then on to Venezuela. Spain sought the extradition of Mr. Ortiz, but the Venezuelan constitution does not allow the extradition of its citizens, and he was tried instead in Venezuela. Mr. Henid Ortiz, a dual Venezuelan-American citizen, served 19 years in the army and was awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq. He suffered multiple physical and mental injuries as a result of his military service, according to an army court document, and then was forced out of the

military after pleading guilty to fraud and larceny. Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, an autocrat, began detaining foreigners on a large scale last year in an attempt to try to extract favorable treatment from other leaders, including Mr. Trump. Eight of the 10 U S citizens and permanent residents released on Friday have been declared wrongfully detained by the state department. This is an official designation that paves the way for access to a

rehabilitation program. Mr. Hanid Ortiz has not been declared wrongfully detained according to one of the people familiar with the case, though Mr. Rubio used the phrase in a statement about the men on Friday. Quote, every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland, Mr. Rubio said. Well, how long before you think he commits another crime and gets arrested? Well, you know, fraud and larceny in the military and then triple murder in Spain. I don't know.

I'm not betting on this guy. I don't see like real goodness in his future. That's just my jaundice view. And the Biden administration was like, no. Yeah, no. We don't want him as part of a swap. Normally when we do a prisoner swap at somebody like, like let's say we've got a Brittany Greiner in Russia who had a little bit of hash on her and she's in prison for 800 years. That's who we try to get home. Not a guy convicted, spending 30 years in prison for a triple murder after being tried

in Venezuela. Did Venezuela not say, oh, you sure you want this guy? We we convicted him of triple murder Venezuela's like yeah. Yeah, sure. You can take him. You can have him. He's both of ours, but you can have now And he's just he's free in Orlando everyone look out yeah, so Hmm and of course this is buried so far under the radar. Nobody's going to ask Donald Trump about this in a press spray. No. Right. Okay. Well, I'm glad that we could get that New York Times story and in more people's ears. We do have more news that we need to get to. We do need to take another quick break. So everybody stick around. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. Okay. You'll recall last week when we reported that the Department of Justice appointed the embattled US attorney in the Northern District of New York, John Sarkone, to be his own assistant so he could then become the acting US attorney. I mean, yes, I just said that. They did that as a workaround to the vacancies act after judges had refused to allow his appointment to continue. Well, something similar seems to be happening with Alina Habba in New Jersey. Yes. The Justice Department on Thursday cleared the way for Alina Habba to remain in her role as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. Habba's tenure as interim US attorney was set to expire this past Friday, but she announced on social media that she's going to be the

new acting US attorney in New Jersey. Then this decision will allow Ms. Habba to lead the New Jersey office for at least the next 210 days. Now, President Trump had previously nominated Haba to be U.S. attorney in a permanent capacity, which under the law would have precluded her from serving as U.S. attorney. But a spokesman for the Justice Department said, wrongly by the way, that the White House had withdrawn her nomination and that allows her to serve as acting U.S US attorney. No, it doesn't. Anyone who had been nominated is disqualified, but I guess they don't care about that. Yeah. I mean, why would you? It's just the law. So Steve Vladeck writes for One First,

to make a long story short, although the details matter, the bottom line is that there's a meaningful difference between what happened in Albany and what's happening in New Jersey. Not in the entirely appropriate behavior of the district courts in both cases, but in both the Attorney General's inappropriate effort to fire the court appointed prosecutor in New Jersey and the transparent attempt in the New Jersey case to end run the already weak limits of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to install unconfirmable individuals as lead local federal prosecutors. Take Albany first. At the end of Attorney General Bondi's 120-day interim appointment of John

Sarkoan III, the district court declined to appoint Sarkoan under section 546 D basically by putting out a statement saying that they hadn't done so after Sarkoan publicly claimed that they had. Leaving aside the awkwardness of claiming that the entire district court had done something that it hadn't and the many other warning signs about Sarkoan, what happened next seems to be a stretch of the existing authorities, but a defensible one. Specifically, Bondi appointed Sarkone as a, quote, special attorney to the attorney general, which 28 USC 543 specifically allows her to do. And then she designated him the first assistant to the U.S.

attorney for the Northern District of New York, a position not otherwise specified in any statute and so one that she had the power to designate. Now, under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the president then had the power to name him the acting U.S. Attorney because he was serving as first assistant. And critically, and more on this when we get to New Jersey, he had not been formally nominated to the position. It's a

stretch, but it's one that I do believe the law allows. Nicole So that's what Steve says. He goes on to say a few more things, but I just want to really just quickly point out all of this acrobatics to appoint a US attorney, yet the appointment of Jack Smith was somehow unconstitutional. It just blows my mind. Steve Yeah, Good point. All right. In New Jersey, Steve Vladeck continues, things have been even worse. Alina Habba, who has made plenty of bad and ethics challenged headlines in her prior personal representations

of President Trump, was appointed by Attorney General Bondi in March as interim US attorney for the district of New Jersey and was formally nominated by President Trump to the position on July 1st. This latter point is going to matter in a minute. Haba's interim appointment expired on Tuesday, at which point the District Court appointed her handpicked deputy, who was already serving as her first assistant, Desiree Lee Grace, under 28 US Code 540-60. Now later in the day, Pam Bondi tweeted that the Department of Justice doesn't tolerate rogue judges and that the first assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey has been removed. Matthew 20 hold on a second. Can you actually refer to the judges who make a decision that

the law empowers them to make? How is that rogue? Lauren Well, that's what they always say. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But once grace was appointed US attorney by the district court, Bondi actually lost the power to fire her. It's possible that Trump removed her from her position as the court appointed US attorney for the district of New Jersey, but there's at least publicly no clarification on that front. Unlike in Albany though, Bondi cannot reinstall Habba the way that she reinstalled Sarkone for the technical but important reason that Habba can't be appointed acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey while her permanent nomination to that post is pending. The FVRA specifically prohibits such a maneuver. So

whereas the Albany situation has resolved itself, however dubious, the New Jersey situation is up in the air. Presumably, Bondi can name someone else the first assistant to the U.S. attorney for the district in New Jersey, and then Trump can then appoint that person as acting U.S. attorney. But the relevant point for present purposes is that whoever it is, it almost certainly cannot be Alina Haba. So by the way, if you don't yet subscribe to the one first newsletter by Steve Lattic, I learn like most things that I talk about on this show, I learned from that newsletter. So you need to subscribe for that. So this isn't new for Trump though. I mean, he's circumvented the vacancies reform act back in his, you know, in his first term. I remember that whole kerfuffle with Liu and

Sherwin in the DC US attorney's office. I remember the Berman situation in New York. The Berman situation, yeah, in New York. That was a big one. So this isn't new for him. And he's long said, I mean, there's a Guardian article in 2019 that I keep referring to where he's like, I like acting. I prefer acting. I like acting. It's more flexible. And I think you learned that from Putin because his entire cabinet is acting. But you know, I think maybe he thinks it's actually acting. Right. Like he thinks asylum seekers come from insane asylums and that people on visas are being given credit cards, Visa credit cards.

He's constantly referring to as appointees as right out of central casting, which is good because the role is an acting one. Oh my God. We got to stop doing the impressions, I guess. That's what people are saying in the questions, but I just couldn't resist that one. They don't like the impressions. Okay. And also I think Steve brings up a good point

like later on the article he says broader looking don't lose the legal force for the trees. These are people who couldn't even get confirmed by this Congress and they're about to confirm Emil Bovi. Yeah. Right. And that's why he's circumventing these things. The whole thing is confusing I think for people to try to keep up with because of this huge difference between Interim US attorney and acting US attorney. So if you're put in as an interim you have I think 120 days and at the end of that time The judges can decide to make you the permanent or to throw you out as they did with Habba

decide to make you the permanent or to throw you out as they did with Habba. If you're the acting, I think you cannot be the permanent, but you can be in the temporary position longer, the 210 days. Nicole Soule-Northrop You can be there for 210 days and then reassigned to the same job for another 210 days. That's how Mike Sherwin was there for so long. Matthew Feeney Oh, I see. I see. Nicole Soule-Northrop Yeah. So that's, yeah, that he's just circumventing the stuff and he hasn't found another Jeanine Pirro to take Hobbes place like he found to get rid of Ed Martin, but then made him the whack-a-dag-pa over at Maine Justice. So we'll keep following this. And by the way, just

real quick, speaking of Emily Albowie, something's just come across my feed. There's now a new whistleblower working with whistleblower aid, Mark Zaid, and that group confirming that Emil Bovi lied during his confirmation hearing. And this whistleblower has been trying to get this information to the Republicans in Congress for the last couple of weeks, and they just keep ignoring, like Chuck Grassley and everybody at Senate, I should say, keep ignoring him. So we'll probably start to hear more about this whistleblower and maybe even additional whistleblowers to back up Arez-Riveni's whistleblower letter, which we read in its entirety. There's an audio version here on the Unjustified Podcast feed. But I'm afraid that, I mean, there was

another procedural vote that advanced 50 to 48. I'm afraid he, I mean, his, his, there was another procedural vote that advanced 50 to 48. I'm afraid he's going to be confirmed to the third circuit court of appeals, which is just absolutely horrifying. Completely, completely. Totally agree. All right. We got one more story and then some listener questions. If you have a question, by the way, or you want to tell us to stop doing Trump impersonations. Just drop it right in the question bucket. Or if you support our Trump impersonations, just let us know by clicking on the link in the show notes

and submitting your question. We'll see if we can read it on the air. All right, everybody, we're going to get to that and that one final story right after this last quick break. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey everybody. Welcome back. Just like I said, we have one more story before we get to listener questions. This reporting comes from NBC. It was late at this is Ryan Riley, by the way, I love the way he writes. You need to get his book if you don't have it. It was late afternoon on the last Friday in June, and Assistant US Attorney Mike Gordon was in his office in Tampa, Florida, interviewing a victim for an upcoming trial via Zoom. Alongside a special agent, Gordon was preparing the victim to be a witness in

a Justice Department case against a lawyer who the Justice Department alleged had been scamming clients. There was a knock at the door. Gordon later told NBC News, and he did not answer. At the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida, there was a culture of not just popping in when the door is closed, but the door popped open and there stood the office manager, Ashen-faced. The office manager is in charge of security. Gordon thought for a moment that something might have happened to his family. Gordon muted the zoom call and the office manager handed him a piece of paper. It was a one page letter signed by attorney general, Pam Bondi.

He'd been terminated from federal service. Quote, no explanation, no advanced warning, no description of what the cause was, Gordon said in an interview. Now I knew why. I knew it had to be my January 6th work. Now Gordon had been a senior trial counsel in the Capitol siege section of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which prosecuted alleged rioters involved in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. His title reflected some of the high profile cases he'd taken on during the January 6th investigation and the role that he played

in helping other federal prosecutors. At the time of his firing, Gordon had long been working on other cases back home in Florida. He had recently been assigned to co-lead a case against two people accused of stealing more than $100 million from a medical trust for people with disabilities, as well as injured workers and retirees. Just two days before he was fired, he'd received an outstanding rating on his performance review. That sounds so familiar. Where have I heard this before? Oh, yes, my case.

Now, along with two other recently fired Justice Department employees, Gordon is pushing back, suing the Trump administration late Thursday over their dismissals. The suit argues that the normal procedures federal employees are expected to go through to address their grievances, the Merit Systems Protection Board, are fundamentally broken because of the Trump administration's actions. The Merit Systems Protection Board, or the MSPB as it's usually referred to, is a quasi-judicial body that is meant to settle disputes between employees and their agencies. But the suit argues it cannot function as intended because of President Donald Trump's firing of MSPB member Kathy Harris.

The federal court issued a permanent injunction reinstating Harris, but the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, of course, allowing Harris' removal. Now the MSPB lacks a quorum to vote on any petitions for review, while MSPB administrative judges are overwhelmed because of the government's termination of thousands of federal employees. This is really fascinating. Um, normally, you know, when you're fired, you go to the MSPB and then your case is heard by an administrative law judge.

And then if that is denied, if you lose that case, then you have a 90 day window in which to file a federal lawsuit. The reason that there's been six years between my termination and my lawsuit for me personally is because the MSPB didn't have a quorum for several years. Yeah. And oddly enough, Kathy Harris was my attorney until Biden appointed her to the MSPB and then I had to get a new lawyer. So this is very personal to me specifically, but also to the countless federal employees who now have a broken MSPB to deal with. And you cannot file a federal lawsuit until you go through the MSPB, which is, I think this is why this is so genius.

lawsuit until you go through the MSPB, which is I think this is why this is so genius. Their part of their lawsuit is that the MSPB is broken and the normal way that we go about this isn't available. Yeah, that's absolutely right. This is their way of basically handicapping or crippling an element of civil service protections. Like we can't get rid of the MSPB, but let's just not fund it or let's not staff it and that it won't be able to process these claims and therefore people will not be able to advance claims for having been fired wrongfully. It's just awful. It's awful what these people are doing to government civil servants across the board, not just the Bureau or DOJ, but really all across the government. I'll tell

you, I also believe that this is sowing the seeds of massive litigation problems that the federal government is going to have to deal with for years and years and years because these chickens are going to come home to roost at some point. The plaintiffs who are sturdy enough and committed enough to really ride these things through for the years it's going to take to resolve their cases, someday many of these cases are going to get settled for lots of money. Nicole Sade Right. And I think that this lawsuit might pave the way for that. Yeah, very well could. By saying, hey, federal employees don't have the MSPB, then they can go ahead and sue in

federal court, you know, without having to exhaust that process first. There's a lot of stuff that goes into that, and a lot of things that have to, like, if you don't bring certain things up in your MSPB, you cannot bring them up in federal court. There's a lot behind that, but I know that these lawyers can handle this. So Gordon filed this lawsuit alongside Patricia Hartman, who was the top spokesperson for the US Attorney's Office for DC, and Joseph Terrell, who was the Director of Departmental Ethics. That was before the Trump administration dismissed them this year. Terrell, an FBI and Navy veteran, had 19 years of federal service along with six years of military service

when he was fired. Now Hartman, who had worked for various Justice Department components for almost two decades, oversaw news releases and media responses related to the January 6th prosecutions, which was the largest investigation in FBI history involving more than 1,500 defendants. I was never given an explanation for my termination, Hartman told NBC News. Based on my performance reviews, which have always been outstanding, I have to believe that something else was driving this. The bottom line is this, in my mind, amounts to psychological terrorism. You are removing people who were good or excellent at their jobs with no explanation. The lawyers on the lawsuit are Abby Lowell, Norm Eisen, Heidi Barakowicz, and Mark Zaid,

a whistleblower attorney who has been targeted by the Trump administration, which stripped his security clearance after Trump named him in an executive order. Zaid has since sued. The new administration has fired roughly 200 Justice Department employees, according to Justice Connection, an organization that was set up to support Justice Department employees. Quote, the way in which these employees have been terminated seems like a pretty clear violation of the Civil Service

Protection Act and general constitutional due process protections. And it's been destabilizing for the workforce because nobody knows when they're going to be next," said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department employee. I hear from employees all the time who tell me that they wake up in the morning terrified that today will be their day. It feels to a lot of them like psychological warfare.

Well, that's what Russ Vaught has said, right? We want to cause them trauma. Yeah, that's his goal. Cause them trauma. Get rid of them. Yeah. And I remember Mick Mulvaney standing up in a room full of donors saying, oh, we've got this great new way to fire pesky, non-loyal government employees because it's really hard to fire them. We just move their jobs across the country and get them to quit. And there's a lot of that going on too. Dragging people back in who are in remote work contracts, trying to get rid of bargaining rights with federal employee unions. I mean, and then this dismantling of the merit systems protection board is one of those ways. If there's never a quorum, your case goes nowhere ever, never.

Right. In the Bureau right now, that move across the country thing is Huntsville, Alabama, because the Bureau has a big growing facility down there and they've had to move staff down there. So if you're a senior leader, like maybe you're running a field office or something like that, all of a sudden one day you find out that you're out of your leadership position and you've been moved into some sort of like administrative role in Huntsville. And the fear is compounded by the fact that people feel like, okay, I'm on the slate to get fired.

So if I stay and take the transfer, then I'm running the risk that like, if I come in, if I show up late for work one morning, I get fired for cause. And then I'm out of the organization having been fired, you know, so it's, which is worse than, than resigning, of course. So I think they're right. And the way they're characterizing this as like a psychological warfare. Yeah, I agree. And we'll see. We'll see where it goes. Yeah. All right. Listener questions.

Again, there's a link in the show notes if you want to submit a question. We've got time for one or two. What do we have today? All right. I'm going to jump to this second one that I have here. And it comes to us from Owen. Owen says, Hi Andy and AG avid listener here. Thanks for reading my question. If you do, I so appreciate how Andy manages to preserve a certain decorum or tact about the insanity you always tell us about. As far as I could tell, he's never issued a full throated insult despite them being so deserved. Thank you, Owen. I appreciate it. I don't know. Maybe I'm just boring. That's possible too. Okay. My question is a logistical one about DOJ staffing. Now, full disclosure, I picked this one because literally like three

or four people sent in a very similar question. So it's obviously something that's on people's mind. So he says, with the numbers you recently reported about the public issues unit, I think that's what it's called. I started to wonder what happens when DOJ staffing gets so skeletal that it can't even cover its own hearings anymore. Will the judiciary take pity and grant continuances until DOJ scrapes together enough willing ethics-free attorneys to argue its indefensible positions, or do you think the government will be held to the same standards as other litigants and giving consequences for failing to appear? Maybe naive to hope this administration's approach to law is too lawless to keep it

staffed, but I'm hoping you both thought about this more thoroughly and with more expertise than I have. Thanks always for your genius and dedication. Well, thank you, Owen. That's very nice the way you phrased it. So I feel like there's a couple of things to think about here. One, if you think about DOJ reaching some sort of critical staffing level, first of all, if they get to that point, and there's lots

of lawyers, so it's going to take more than 100 or so or 200 to really be felt broadly across the entire organization. But if they get to that point, what's going to happen is DOJ is going to do less. There are going to be fewer prosecutions. Agents who investigate cases run to the U S attorney's office and they pitch their cases to line assistants and attorneys and say, Hey, this is what the evidence we have, here's who we'd like to indict. And the US attorneys, they have the authority to say yay or nay. And they can say, nope,

sorry. And part of their calculation is obviously the case, the significance of it, how good the evidence is, la la la. But part of it is a resource allocation issue, right? If they say, just don't have the manpower to staff this right now, bring it back to me six months, something like that. So that's how they do less. They'll make decisions to like turn down more cases, which means that victims and family members get less justice and it means more criminals get less justice than don't go to jail. And so yeah, it's a failure. It's a slow rolling failure. The other thing to keep in mind is even though DOJ may be losing a lot of good people, it's still a prestigious place to work if you're a lawyer. So they will always attract some

candidates, right? But what they'll start hiring is people who are not the same quality and experience as the people they normally hire or used to hire. They'll start hiring is people who are not the same quality and experience as the people they normally hire or used to hire. They'll start hiring people right out of law school. Just very hard to get into DOJ like that right now. They'll start hiring people with less experience. They'll start hiring people who are more overtly political. And that will degrade the quality of the work that they do and their effectiveness.

So I don't think you're going to see it very, you know, in terms of are there more continuances requested that sort of thing. But what you'll see over time is a gradual degradation of their performance and of their ability to do their job. Gradual? Yeah, quick. I don't know. It's pretty degraded. Screaming downhill already.

Already. They're never going to stop defending their policies like they are now. They're going to stop doing prosecutions. They're going to do less of them. Right. Just the ones that this particular administration wants to see. They've already done that, right? By saying we're not going to do FCPA cases. We're

going to do less white collar. We're going to, you know, we need more immigration, less white collar investigations of corporate fraud. Yeah, less foreign counterterrorism and more mass deportation. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, we'll definitely be keeping an eye on that. That's a really good point, Andy. We're going to see maybe the same amount of people, but fewer people, but just less quality, lower quality folks. I know that that's probably going to be true for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement too, with their newly injected $170 billion budget. They want to hire thousands and thousands of ICE agents. We saw this on the first Trump term when Trump hired 5,000 additional border

patrol agents and completely sort of threw the standards book out for hiring those folks. I think we'll probably see the same thing here. They saw skyrocketing corruption within the force within the border patrol. They saw through some period of time, we talked about this a few weeks ago, there was like one border patrol agent arrested per week every week for seven years or something. It's like, yeah, really bad results from trying to hire too quickly, which invariably you have to lower standards to do that. Exactly. Thank you for that question. and thanks for sending in all of your questions. Please

send them to us. Again, that link is in the show notes. And we'll be back next week. And like we always say, who knows what's going to happen between now and then, but things are happening fast and furious and we'll cover it here on Unjustified over at the Justice Department. So any final thoughts today, Andy? No, I just, I mean, I think on your invitation to send in questions, yes, the question bucket is a place where democracy lives. Yes. If you don't like our impressions, or if you like them, either side, all are welcome here. And we always have a quorum. Either side, all are welcome here. And we always have a quorum.

That's right. You always... The leader of the question board is happy to have your remarks, whatever they are. Yes. Thank you. Yes. All right, everybody. We will see you next week on Unjustified.

Thank you so much for listening. Just your listenership makes a huge difference. If you joined us, if you're a patron, and you joined us on, because you're listening to this on Sunday, if you joined us for the happy hour, thank you for joining us on our happy hour Q&A. We have these calls once a month, Zoom calls where we all just sort of hang out and very excited. We're recording this before that hangout, but you're listening to it after. So thanks for joining us. The magic of time travel and podcasts and we'll see you next week. I've been Alison Gill.

Andy McCabe And I'm Andy McCabe. Unjustified is written and executive produced by Alison Gill with additional research and analysis by Andrew McCabe. Sound design and editing is by Molly Hawkey with art and web design by Joel Reeder at Moxie Design Studios. The theme music for Unjustified is written and performed by Ben Folds, and the show is a proud member of the MSW Media Network, a collection of creator-owned independent podcasts dedicated to news, politics, and justice.

For more information, please visit MSWMedia.com. © 2012 The MSWF, All Rights Reserved. No part of this recording may be reproduced without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.