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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 27th, 2022.
It's 11 o'clock in the morning here in West Texas, where I find myself today.
I'm giving a speech to about 400 or 500 students mainly, but townsfolk and faculty and staff as well,
at San Angelo State University tonight, due to the courtesy of my friend and former student, Professor Benjamin Powell. Ben is a professor at Texas A&M and runs
the Free Market Institute which is popping up at various universities here in West Texas and I'm
their guest speaker at their annual function tonight.
So from West Texas to wherever you are watching Judging Freedom, good day, my friends and viewers.
I come to the camera, and I'm using my iPhone this morning so you don't see the usual library background from my home in New Jersey, to discuss this secret litigation going on in Washington,
D.C. Now, you may say,
Judge, what do you mean secret? I thought litigation was available for the public.
Well, yes, it is, except when it involves a grand jury. Remember, the theory behind grand juries,
the reason they operate in secret is if they don't indict someone, then theoretically,
there's no damage to that person's reputation because
everything was done in secret. So if Donald Trump were not former President Trump, but just Mr.
Trump, even if he weren't the media and construction company mogul that he had been
before he was president, stated differently. If the average
Joe is being investigated by a grand jury and they decide not to indict him, nobody knows about it.
There's no damage to his reputation. That is at least the theory behind keeping grand jury
material secret. But Trump is the former president of the United States. He is the subject of six criminal investigations that we know of, and one of them
is being conducted by, or two of them are being conducted by grand juries in Washington, D.C.
One of the grand juries is investigating his removal of national defense information documents from the White House to his home in Florida.
The other is investigating whether or not he was involved as a conspirator in any efforts to
disrupt the government of the United States from transferring power from himself to Joe Biden on
January 6th. It is presumably two different grand juries, but we don't know that. It might be one.
But whatever it is, they meet in the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., and one or the
other or both has served subpoenas on former members of the former president's inner circle
when he was in the White House. And the former president does not want them to testify. So even though they received
the subpoena, Pat Cipollone, for example, you may know the name, he was President Trump's chief
legal counsel for the second half of the president's term in office, has been subpoenaed.
And he basically said to the grand jury, I'm going to testify. And then Trump's lawyers entered the
case and filed a lawsuit seeking to have the subpoena quashed, a fancy word for squashed,
meaning that the subpoena wouldn't be valid. That motion was heard in secret for the reasons I just
articulated before Judge Beryl Howell. She is the chief judge of the United States District
Court for the District of Columbia Circuit, and she hears matters involving the grand jury. She
ordered, or she dismissed the complaints against the grand jury and ordered the witnesses to
testify. Trump's people appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit. That's a three-judge panel that sits in the same courthouse, same courthouse as Judge Howell,
same courthouse as the grand juries. We don't know how those appellate judges ruled, but we know
that the testimony is going on before the grand jury. So either the testimony went on before the appellate court ruled or the appellate court ruled against former President Trump. I guess it's the latter
because everybody here is a lawyer. The people getting the subpoenas, the people representing
the DOJ, the people representing Trump and the witnesses and lawyers generally know if an
appellate court is about to hear something,
you don't jump the gun, you wait until they hear it. So my guess is, and again, this is all secret,
and it may soon be made known because Judge Howell has indicated that there's a public
interest in this. And everybody from the New York Times to Fox News and the media has filed
Freedom of Information Act requests to see these documents,
and she's hinted she is likely to reveal them. But until she does, I have to read tea leaves for you.
The tea leaves tell me that Trump's motions were denied by Judge Howell, and those denials were
upheld by the Federal Appeals Court. That means there is no attorney-client privilege, there is no executive privilege, and these witnesses must testify.
Whatever this is, it's not good news for the former president.
And it shows how aggressive the DOJ has become in these two litigations, Mar-a-Lago and January 6th, as they zero in on the former
president. More as we get from West Texas, from San Angelo, Texas. Judge Napolitano for judging
freedom.