Legal AF by MeidasTouch - GA Judge Issues MAJOR BLOW to Trump’s Election SCHEME

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

In breaking news, Georgia Judge McBurney has put a stop to the Trump-dominated state election board’s efforts to require at the last minute for this election an impossible “hand count” of every single vote in Georgia before certification. In his second of two orders in the last 48 hours slapping back the Trump-dominated state and county election boards and their attempt to implement new rules to favor Trump in the vote count and certification, Judge McBurney is single-handedly protecting democracy in Georgia. Michael Popok explains how in his latest hot take. Lomi: Visit https://Lomi.com/LEGALAF and use code LEGALAF and checkout to save $50! Join the LegalAF Patreon: https://Patreon.com/legalAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's ultimate appliance event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now in-store or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Growth is essential for every entrepreneur. At BDC, we get that. And the businesses we support grow at double the average rate, accelerating the pace. We're on it.

BDC, financing, advising, know-how. This is Michael Popak, Legal AF. Sometimes I think Judge McBurney in Fulton County, Georgia is the only one fighting for democracy in Georgia. And he's now issued his second of two opinions in the last 48 hours to push back and shove back against the Trump dominated state election board, who tried to pass a rule in the last month and to apply it two weeks before the election to benefit Donald Trump, particularly the hand count rule, which would listen to this, sit down for this one, grab a cup of coffee,

would require that in the state of Georgia, in every precinct, in every county throughout the state, and that's a pretty big state, that every election precinct manager take out the ballots from every voting machine in every precinct and do a hand count against the electronic count in two days. And Judge McBurney was like, how are they ever possibly going to do that? It's almost impossible to do that with no training, with no memos, with no advice, and against the actual advice and recommendations of the Attorney General of Georgia who said, you can't implement this rule. And I'm not going to

give any, I have no time to develop any guidance or advice to the election poll workers and precinct managers about how to apply it. And Judge McBurney's like, I don't know, you might've had good intentions. I mean, I don't think he really thought that with his quotes later on about Jan 6 and what happened there, but your timing is terrible. Your timing is wrong, and I'm not gonna let you implement the hand count rule. Now this case has gotten a lot of attention.

It originally started as one county's board of elections and registration. Every county in Georgia has a BER, a board of elections and registration that are responsible for that county's vote. And then they flow up to their bosses at the state election board, or what I call the TEB, the Trump election board, now dominated by Trumpers. So Cobb County, which is a county adjacent to Atlanta, ran in and sued the state election board, their bosses, but others intervened in the case allowed by Judge McBurney. So the Democratic National Committee intervened, the local Democratic Party intervened, the Republicans intervened, some friends of the court briefs got filed. And the judge took it all in.

He said, sure, everybody come in. This is important. Everybody come in. Now listen to my order. And my order is I am granting an interlocutory stay, an injunction, to stop this rule from going into effect for this election until you get training around it, memos around it.

The attorney general has time to help with the training of it. It's not happening this election, in other words. And he goes through the reasons why. I thought, I'll read to you from parts of it, but page five in particular is one of the reasons why he's not letting this go into effect, or actually, sorry, page seven. And this is where I think he's really coming from,

including a site to a case by Justice Kavanaugh, one of the MAGA Supreme Court Justice US, which he uses to bolster his argument. He says on page seven, finally, the public interest is not deserved by pressing pause here. In other words, it's in the public interest for me to grant the stay and to stop the rule, the hand count rule from going into effect. This election season is fraught. Memories of Jan 6th have not faded away,

regardless of one's view of that dates fame or infamy, regardless of which side you are. We still think about Jan 6th on a regular basis. Anything that adds to uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process deserves the public. On paper, the hand count rule, passed by MAGA, if properly promulgated, appears consistent with the state election board's mission of ensuring fair, legal, and orderly elections. It is, at base, simply a check of ballot counts,

a human eyeball confirmation that the machine counts match reality. But that is not what confronts Georgians today, giving the timing of the rules passage. A rule that introduces a new and substantive role on the eve of an election for more than 7,500 poll workers who will not have received any formal, cohesive, or consistent training, and that allows for our paper ballots,

the only tangible proof of who voted for whom, to be handled multiple times by multiple people following an exhausting election day all before they are securely transported to the official tabulation center does not contribute to lessening the tension or boosting confidence of the public for this election. Perhaps for a subsequent election, the judge continues, after the Secretary of State's office and the 150-plus election boards have time to prepare, budget, and train, but not for this one. Then he quotes Kavanaugh from a Merrill v. Milliken case from just 2022, where Judge Kavanaugh,

in a concurrence, in other words, he voted with the majority but he wrote his own opinion, said that state and local election officials need substantial time to plan for elections. Running elections statewide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. Those elections require enormous advanced preparations by state and local officials and pose significant logistical challenges. This is Kavanaugh cited by Judge McBurney. Implementing the hand count rule, the judge inserts, would require heroic efforts by those state and local authorities in the next few weeks, and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion. Therefore, as the judge concludes on page eight,

Judge McBurney, because the hand count rule is too much, too late, its enforcement is required, is hereby enjoined while the court considers the merits of the petition. That means I'll get around to whether these rules make sense at all at any time with proper training or whether they are completely violative of the Administrative Procedure Law, APL, which is a statute, a scheme in Georgia, and every state has one, on how you pass new laws. In other words, the fundamental underlying substantive argument here is that the Georgia state election board dominated by Trumpers violated the procedures that are required

to be followed in order to pass last minute or any new rules. What's better than a clean kitchen? A kitchen that doesn't smell. With Lomi, that gross trash smell is gone and my kitchen feels fresh all the time. Lomi lets me turn my food scraps into dirt with the push of a button. It's a countertop electric composter that takes my waste and transforms it into nutrient rich dirt

in less than four hours. I run it while I sleep just like my dishwasher. No more smelly trash bins and it's so quiet you barely notice it. Since I got my Lomi, I'm taking out way less garbage. I used to struggle with three or four full bags of trash every week. Now I'm down to just one.

Just last night after dinner, I tossed all the leftovers into Lomi, hit the button, and by morning it was dirt instead of a smelly garbage bag. What I love most is how much waste I'm keeping out of landfills. Less trash means less methane. And with Lomi, I'm turning that waste

into nutrient rich dirt that my plants absolutely love. Getting and using my Lomi makes me feel like I am making my household's contribution to saving our planet and helping the environment with just a push of a button. That turns my garbage into well, Lomi Earth that I can easily recycle and use with my plants and in my garden.

Lomi is part of a lifestyle for my family and me, as we are focused on leaving as little footprints on the earth, so to speak, as we can in everything we do. And now Lomi lets us get the kitchen and garbage in on the act too. If you're ready to start making a positive environmental impact and make cleanup a breeze, Lomi is exactly what you need.

Head over to lomi.com slash Legal AF and use promo code Legal AF to get $50 off your Lomi. That's $50 off when you go to lomi.com slash Legal AF and use promo code Legal AF at checkout. Say goodbye to food waste and hello to a cleaner, greener kitchen with Lomi. And with the holidays coming up, Lomi makes the perfect gift for someone on your shopping list. That issue, the judge says, I'll get

to that. We'll fully brief it. We'll have a hearing. Everybody will be heard and I'll issue a ruling. But in the meantime, I'm giving a temporary emergency stay of the hand count rule. It's not happening. The status quo, which is before the hand count rule was implemented in September, is going to apply. No hand count rule in Georgia. That is a win for democracy. That is a win for voters and making sure their vote counts. Because all we've been watching in battleground states is a concerted, coordinated conspiracy effort by Republicans since 2020 to try to tip the election

in favor of Donald Trump. To, if you will, steal the election for Donald Trump. So they've set up barriers to voter registration and have harassed groups trying to properly register voters. They've harassed election workers. They've harassed election workers. They've harassed precinct managers. They've harassed secretaries of state.

They've harassed others involved in the election process. They've tried to take control of election boards at the county level and at the state level. They've already started to file lawsuits in the early voting period to claim fraud. They've set up rules at the last minute to give their MAGA time to throw sand in the early voting period to claim fraud. They've set up rules at the last minute to give their MAGA time to throw sand in the gears of a proper vote cap. Oh, we'll have a rule of reasonable inquiry and we'll be able to spend an unlimited amount of time staring at all the ballots and delaying the ultimate certification to give what? To give

Donald Trump's lawyers more time to go into court before the votes are certified instead of what they did in 2020, which is they had to wait until after the votes were certified. They have been working to get ready for 2024, having learned their lesson in 2020 that they got to work harder at voter suppression. They got to work harder at voter suppression. They gotta work harder at voter registration suppression and rip away your right to vote. And we gotta call it out and we gotta count on judges like Judge McBurney, who is just a little side note, profile and courage for Judge McBurney.

Not only did he preside over in Fulton County, the special purpose grand jury, that ultimately led to the recommendation to indict Donald Trump and supervise Fonny Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney at the time. But he just recently, in the last 10 days, issued a breathtaking decision taking on his own Georgia Supreme Court that had sent the case back to him, finding that a woman in Georgia has a right to choose and has a right over her reproductive choose and has a right over her reproductive bodily autonomy and has a right to an abortion under Georgia's privacy and liberty provisions of their Georgia Constitution.

Two days later, rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court. But he's on notice, and he's put everybody on notice, that he believes that the Georgia Constitution protects a woman's right to choose up to 22 weeks, not the six-week ban in Georgia. So this is a jurist I've been impressed with for the last two and a half to three years. I mean, he should be one day considered by Kamala Harris, hopefully, to be on the US Supreme Court. He's that thoughtful, he's that smart, and he's that willing to take on hard decisions and make decisions that are a pro-democracy. And that's my shout out, if you will, to Judge Roberts, CI, McBurney, Fulton County, Georgia.

We're not done. The loser here, which is the state election board controlled by MAGA, is going to take an appeal. We'll report on the appeal. We'll report all the way up to the Georgia Supreme Court. I don't think, ultimately, any of these courts are going to move fast enough in order to impact this election and the hand count rule in particular. But we shall see and we shall report on it right here on the Midas Touch Network. And on a new channel, we're overflowing and bursting with legal and political analysis

and commentary. We had to create our own channel with the Midas Touch Network, spread our wings a little bit. There's part of my wing spreading over on legal AFMTN for Midas Touch Network, free subscribe right now. We're one of the fastest growing YouTube channels. I'm the chief curator, if you will, over there. We're doing five, six videos a day.

We've got court accountability over there with us. You're gonna love what we're're doing on Legal AF MTN. I ask you to come over and subscribe. So until my next hot take, my next podcast, Legal AF, or my next exclusive content, where? Legal AF MTN. This is Michael Popak and I'm reporting. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN.