Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Judge FINALLY DROPS Evidence BOMB on Trump

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Special Counsel Jack Smith's 2000 page, 4 volumes of evidence to keep his criminal indictment against Trump in the DC Election Interference case is out, and Legal AF's Michael Popok and Karen Friedman Agnifilo give you an overview of what the categories of evidence against Trump are, and what is missing from the data dump that we can expect to see at trial, like witness statements. To boost YOUR NAD+ levels up to 50%, Go to https://qualialife.com/TRUTH for up to 50% off and use code TRUTH at checkout for an additional 15% off. Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! 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

Welcome to a special edition of Legal AF with Karen Friedman-Ignifilo and Michael Popak because we've gotten our hands, our hot little hands on over 2,000 pages of evidence against Donald Trump that was required to be filed by the, by Judge Chuck in the DC election interference case as part of her process in the public to review the superseding indictment against the immunity decision by the United States Supreme Court and make her ultimate ruling. There's no other way to do it but that in the public because the public has access and has a right to access to all this information subject

to some redaction and some blackouts and some tape that we're going to talk about but finally after rejecting Donald Trump's last minute Hail Mary, he's no other way to frame it, he was given seven days to evaluate his litigation options, and the best he could come up with was to file a ridiculous bit of gibberish at the last minute yesterday asking the judge, pretty please, can you just not publish this until after the election? I mean basically what he was asking for. And the judge took one look at it, did a little Heisman move with the special counsel.

I got this and said, no. And I am immediately, or at least when the clerk shows up tomorrow morning today for her cup of coffee, I'm gonna give her a couple of minutes. She's gonna publish the entirety. We now know, and having now gotten into it, there's four volumes. It's pushing over between, I think it's like 1,500 to 2,000 total pages. The volumes are broken down into sort of groups of information, categories of information. And to be clear, we're going to give a high-level

review, Karen and me, right here of what we were able to pick out in just about an hour of going through thousands and thousands of pages, many of them redacted, but others not. We're gonna be doing deep dive hot takes, both here on the Midas Touch Network, including with Ben and others and Karen and me, and on Legal AF MTN, the new channel that we created

almost for this moment, in order to capture all of this law and politics stuff and do it over there. So between the two, by the weekend is over, you will know every bit of detail and morsel that we pick up. But we picked up some fun things in the last hour, so we wanted to come on really quickly as breaking news and not keep you in suspense any longer. Karen, let me turn it over to you. You got it first. You had a chance to kind of go through the first pass of one through four volumes. Why don't you kind of give an overview, high level overview of what you find interesting already about it and then I'll do my part in that. And then we'll, like I said, this is a series. We're going to be doing a series of episodic hot takes that by the end of them, by the time you've watched all seven or eight

of them, you will know exactly what level and amounts of evidence against Donald Trump there really is. I think he's dead to rights. So this was a huge, huge data dump that Jack Smith has done in support of his memorandum that he filed, describing all of the evidence and all of the reasons why the evidence is not subject to this new legal doctrine created by the United States Supreme Court in July of this year called presidential immunity. This is exactly what the United States Supreme Court told them to do.

They ordered this judge to review every possible piece of evidence and say, is this something that is part of President Trump's core presidential duties, and therefore he would be immune from prosecution for that conduct, and Jack Smith cannot use any evidence that would be subject to this immunity. And so he instructed this analysis. And so Jack Smith filed this huge memo that was 180-something pages long.

And it was very substantive. And it talked about in detail all of the evidence, everything that's going to come in. It was like an opening statement almost. This is what I anticipate the evidence, everything that's going to come in, it was like an opening statement almost. This is what I anticipate the evidence to show. But like an opening statement at trial, it has to be backed up by the evidence, right? It's not enough to just say this is what the evidence is. You have to back it up. And so that's what an appendix is. And the appendix was very much, this is the evidence backing up the words in the memo that was

Jack Smith's opening statement of what his trial is going to be, what he expects the evidence to show. And so we've been waiting for this evidence because again, it's one thing to say this is what happened, right? You've got Jack Smith saying one thing, you've got Trump claiming something else. So show me the evidence. Let's see what it is. Back it up, back it up with proof. That's what a trial is for. And that's what's going to happen. And so we've been anticipating and waiting for this for a while. And as you said, Popak, there's four volumes, thousands of pages, and they group them in types of documents. And a lot of it, first of all, when, when, when sometimes things are redacted, you see lots of words on pages, then you'll see like a sentence blacked out.

This is very different. This is page after page after page. That's just blank. It says redacted, you know, that the pages are sealed. And so they're just white pieces of paper throughout, a couple pure black pieces of paper, and then some blacked out of names and any personal identifying information.

Now, we're not surprised that this was heavily redacted because Jack Smith said in this memo that a lot's gonna be redacted. And so, you know, it's interesting because Donald Trump, as you said, did this last ditch, don't put this out into the world. We don't want this out there until ours comes out. It'll be very one-sided.

You know, it's just very interesting because prosecutors don't really wanna do this either. Jack Smith doesn't want to show all his evidence to everybody and let everyone pick it apart. Prosecutors don't love to give over all their evidence in advance. You want to save it for trial. This is going to give Trump a huge opportunity to prep, to know what witnesses are saying, to tailor his testimony potentially. I mean, you just never know. So it's just funny to me that somehow Trump thinks this is something Jack Smith wants to do. I didn't get that impression.

And the reason I say this is because I think he over-redacted. I think he redacted more than he probably needed to. And I think he was acting like a cautious prosecutor who's like, I don't need everything out in the open. I can describe what it is, but I don't need everyone picking apart every last word and having this tried in the court of public opinion, much to our chagrin,

right? We would all love that. So there's a lot of redactions and then some stuff that we saw was, were things that have already been part of the public record, newspaper articles, tweets that we've seen, press releases, Mike Pence's book, they've highlighted portions of his book and there's lots of pages of that and you ask yourself so why would they put that in here? Why did that need to go in here? What they're really doing is they need to identify for the court what is the evidence that they anticipate they're going to potentially introduce? So they

might introduce, because what you don't want is this has the judge hasn't ruled on this one piece of evidence in advance. And so all of a sudden the trial has to stop because they're putting something into evidence. They're like, wait a minute, judge, you didn't rule on whether this one piece of evidence is subject to presidential immunity or not. So Jacksman is being overly cautious in every piece of evidence that he wants to put in, including things that are matters of public record, like newspaper articles and press releases and transcripts from from certain court proceedings, etc. It's all in here. And so that is what's highly unusual.

But the judge has to make this determination of what's immune, what's not. So in addition to a lot of redacted stuff and a lot of public stuff, there's a lot of transcripts from the select committee on Jan 6. Again, things we've seen before. But seeing it again was sort of interesting. There's also some stuff on January 4 and 5, these lunch at the Willard Hotel, phone calls that are made, records related

to various packs, et cetera. And so there was a lot in there that just you kind of are reminded of how much was going on in those days leading up to January 6th and then January 6th. And so one of the things I thought was sort of interesting is you've got Donald Trump on January 6th talking And, you know, part of, so one of the things I thought was sort of interesting is you've got the, you've got Donald Trump on January 6th talking to various people. We don't know who because the names are redacted. Someone's bringing him a Diet Coke. They're joking around. But they're literally, he's watching TV and watching all this happen. And he's just

talking about it like he's watching it like a spectator and enjoying it and drinking his diet coke and so it just gives you a flavor of kind of what what it was like on that day to be around him all the people coming in to Try to talk to him and what he was doing But there was one piece of evidence or one one thing that came in here that that really Struck me and I'm gonna salty I'm gonna ask you to to put up the the thing that I showed you as a transcript. And it was a conversation, I don't know with who, but it's transcripts from a conversation. So the Q is question, the A is the answer. And it says, How did you learn of that answer? The Speaker of the

House told me that I might be getting a call from the President of the United States and advised me that my display on my phone would say, spam risk Egypt. That was my notification for the fact that it might be him. And question was the Speaker of the House at the time, whoever it was, answer correct. And did he tell you that you already spoken to the President about coming to the White House? Answer, I believe so. So spam risk Egypt. So if you continue on, and I don't have it up here, but if you continue on the transcript, he got a phone call from the President of the United States, this gentleman who is testifying here in this transcript. He got a phone call, and it showed up. Egypt. Okay? What does that tell me? It tells me this is this is the kind of stuff we used to do when I was a prosecutor

Okay, we used to see people in the mafia and drug dealers, etc Or cyber criminals, you know These sophisticated criminals would spoof calls and make it come out and look at like something else So that people don't really know who's calling and so spam risk Egypt I don't know who thought of that but that's how the call from the president of the United States is gonna come up so that if anyone ever seizes the phone

or looks at the phone or if there's a reporter nearby and they can see the phone, it's gonna come up Egypt. It's not gonna come up president of the United States. I guess, you know, maybe that's why they do things like that, but it seemed really fishy and sketchy to me. What about you Popov? Have you heard about NED plus? It's a molecule in every cell of your body and it's critical to aging well. NAD plus helps keep us feeling youthful by promoting cellular energy, maintaining healthy

DNA, using nutrients efficiently and supporting detoxification. But did you know NAD plus levels plummet with age? So by age 50, most people's NAD plus levels are only half of what they were at age 20. Falling NAD plus levels is a major reason that signs of aging start to accelerate. Luckily, science has discovered a way to boost your NAD plus levels up to 50%. It's called Qualia NAD+, a groundbreaking supplement from Qualia. Many doctors and health experts over age 30 use Qualia NAD+. And I'm proud to have them sponsor this podcast

because their pioneering research and life-changing nutritional formulas are transforming how well people can age. Look, I wanna feel decades younger than my actual age, especially with my four month old daughter in the house. That's why I'm staying at the cutting edge of aging research and boosting my NAD plus levels with Qualia NAD plus.

Qualia NAD plus is a huge part of how well I age and putting it in my control. NAD Plus is a huge part of how well I age. And putting it in my control, NAD Plus is a large molecule that struggles to be bioavailable if you just supplement it directly. That's why Qualia NAD Plus supports NAD Plus the right way by including ingredients called NAD Plus precursors that your body can convert into NAD Plus to boost your body's own NAD Plus production up to 50%. And boosting your body's NAD-plus production takes a full understanding of how it is created. That's why Qualia NAD-plus has many other holistic ingredients that support every key aspect of

NAD-plus production in your body. And get this, Qualia NAD Plus is clinically tested and naturopathic doctor formulated. I've been using Qualia NAD Plus for about six months now and I'm experiencing energy levels and vitality that I thought I'd never feel again. I had zero idea how much NAD Plus levels played in making me feel tired and run down and well, feel my age. Nutritional science is reaching the point where someone 50 or 60 can feel 30 or 40, but only if they take advantage of these scientific breakthroughs. To boost your NAD Plus levels up to 50%, go to qualialife.com slash truth for up to 50% off and use code truth at checkout for an additional 15% off. That's qualia.com slash t-r-u-t-h for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks to qualia for sponsoring this podcast. Yeah, listen, I anytime you're using covert operations, covert means to hide your trails,

your tracks, you probably know you're doing something wrong. And as the prosecutors have to prove mens rea and criminal intent, this is another indicia of it. But the 2000 pages or so that we've gotten our hands on, just to make it clear to our audience here, this is supporting evidence that supports every line in the 165 page brief that was already filed by Jack Smith. I assure you that there was not a line in there, not a

reference to one of the 77 numbered witnesses against Donald Trump, not a line in there that didn't go through a vetting process with Jack Smith to make sure there was a corroborating supporting piece of evidence and now we have the corroborating supporting piece of evidence. A little bit of Swiss cheese, a little bit of pages and pages and pages of redacted, sealed, redacted, sealed, redacted, sealed. We will get them one day. Let me have a little, let me do a little tutorial on that for a second then I'll turn to things that were, I found interesting in the four volumes. Big picture, 5,000 foot level.

First of all, these things remain sealed for now to the public. Donald Trump, of course, has the unredacted, unsealed versions, as does the government, as does the court, and all of its personnel. The media has been clamoring for this, not just Midas Touch and Legal AF, but the corporate media. 22 of them joined together to

file a lawsuit, which is in front of Judge Chutkin, to get as much of this black tape off as possible, because they are the ones, and it's good that they have a seat at the table, because in our First Amendment public access to the criminal justice system, where you get investigated, generally, accused, indicted, tried, and either acquitted or convicted all in public along with everything that's filed against you in public is on purpose. It's not by accident. It's part of our criminal justice system. You're presumed innocent, but it's in the public.

And so this public's right to know and public access is always a tension in our court system, in our criminal justice system, as you can see. And we have the media out there telling the judge, more, more, more, not less, less, less. And she's trying to strike a balance based on some factors that she has to apply as a federal judge to get it right, you know, make sure the oil and gas mix is right. Now, over the course of time, what was once redacted may be unredacted in the future. In fact, the judge will be consistently reevaluating what is currently redacted to see if it still

needs to be redacted because she always leans in favor of, as a federal judge, ripping the tape off. So she'll put the prosecutors to their, you know, a month or two from now and say, do we really have to redact all this or why? She agreed with it for now, but as time goes on and more information gets into the public domain and more people start piecing together, oh, that was that wasn't redacted in the Jan 6 committee version. It's in the public domain, so the press will say we should have the full version. It's in the Jan 6 committee report and then the judge will have a hearing about it. So tape gets ripped off as time goes on. Things that are now protected like grand jury

secrecy and that type of thing in the future, although I didn't see much grand jury material in there, that's one of my observations. And then when the trial happens and after the trial we'll get it all. So a year from now versions of Michael and Karen and Ben will be able to talk about everything. That is that tension that we're talking about. The four volumes, volume one was almost entirely comprised, is entirely comprised of Jan six committee interviews.

And if you give me enough time with reference to my Jan six library, I might be able to figure out who a lot of these people are. I mean, some I can already tell. There's staffers and aides and house members. There's one in particular that you just know based on the testimony is Mike Pence's general counsel in conversation with John Eastman because I know that story.

I know the story where the lawyer for Mike Pence called up John Eastman because I know that story. I know the story where the lawyer for Mike Pence called up John Eastman and said, this is a crackpot idea you have to try to pressure Mike Pence, my client, into overthrowing democracy. What's your basis for that? And he said, and this is him repeating to the committee, Gen 6 committee, but now with evidence in this case, John Eastman told this guy, oh, we'll go down nine-zero. We might only have one or two votes on the Supreme Court for that. That's John Eastman. I've heard that story before. So give me time. Give us time. We'll be able to piece it through. Volume one, Jan six committee interviews. Then you go into, there's like 16 or 17 interview transcripts just in volume one alone. Volume two, or volume three, skipping around a little bit, you got excerpts from Mike Pence's book,

So Help Me God, in which he talks about his conversations with Trump. But remember, Pence has testified. What's missing from this evidence dump is the transcript of his testimony to the special counsel. See, I'm as interested as what's out that hasn't been produced in the four volumes as what's in. I thought I'd see more grant, and maybe this is the pages and pages and pages of redaction, grand jury transcripts and summary,

transcripts of Mike Pence's testimony, of Mark Meadow's testimony. I thought I'd see more text messages of Mark Meadow's than ended up being in there. But again, it's hard for me to tell exactly because of that. Then you have a whole section of the fake elector certificates, I get to see those in person, we'll show those in future hot

takes, and the real elector certificates and the various positions that the different battleground states took about fake electors and real electors and things that would have gotten into Donald Trump's hands and reports that his fraud theory was BS, that's in there. The full transcript prepared by the FBI of the now infamous phone call to Brad Raffensperger trying to find 11,789 votes in Georgia in order to, or a threat of him being criminally prosecuted unless he did, that's in there. Then you got a lot of FBI transcripts of speeches that Donald Trump has given after Jan 6th. See this is what we've always said, Donald Trump has a knack for creating new evidence that the prosecutors are going to use against him in real time in his

case. So there's speeches that Donald Trump gave to the Georgia House with Ivanka at his side. And every one of these speeches is transcribed from C-SPAN by the FBI stenographer, you know, for authenticity. And it's Donald Trump dumping on himself showing a lack of, it's proving his mens rea and that he doesn't even believe the things and he's not consistent with the things that he said over time so they're using a whole section where they're using Donald Trump's words against him there's another whole volume that just is comprised primarily of Donald Trump's tweets and drafts of tweets and that goes to

mens rea and when they line it up at a timeline which you don't get, and I agree with you, the prosecutors or defense lawyers, nobody wants to put their entire playbook on the table. But this isn't the playbook. This is like, I like to think of it like you're baking a cake or you're baking something. You come into the kitchen and all these ingredients are laid out on out there. And you know, like 50 ingredients in different proportions and you're asked to look at it and say what the recipe is. What are you making? You can come up with some broad generalities. Oh you're making a chicken dish. Oh you're making a cake. But you can't get into like

the nitty-gritty details. So we know these little disparate pieces of evidence but we don't know how they're going to be stitched together, what they're exactly going to be used for, and what other evidence that he didn't have to reveal here is going to be saved for the courtroom. And so we're getting a trailer, we're getting a preview of the movie to come, but I wouldn't even think necessarily the best of. We also finally got our hands, and I'll be doing hot takes on this, on the Ken Chesbro memos. Four of them in number, in which this is the basis for the fake elector scheme for Donald Trump trying to storm the Capitol on Jan 6th. It all emanates from Ken Chesbro's legal memos. And now we have them.

And they're not really redacted because there's nothing in there to redact. So when you look at these broad categories, I'm very, very excited about what's in there. And we'll dive in deeper and start quoting from them soon. But it's also interesting to me what's missing or under the cover and also an acknowledgment to our audience that this is not the complete

trial in a box of evidence that's going to be used against Donald Trump. That we need a tractor trailer. It wouldn't be a thousand pages. It would be a hundred thousand pages of material going to come in against him. But it is what Jack Smith thought he needed in order to have his superseding indictment survive this immunity determination at this level with Judge Chuckin and up to the United States Supreme Court. No more and no less.

Yeah, I mean, you're right. The evidence that's missing is the witness testimony that are going to testify at trial. That's going to be what's really killer, right? Real life people, like it was clear in here that there's transcripts before the Jam 6 Committee of Seamus and Ruby Freeman. And what they said there, we've seen that before. But they when they testify, and they come in and talk about what it was like to have Donald Trump upend their life, and they give the details of that. And they talk about all they're going to have evidence themselves that have nothing to do with presidential immunity, right? They're going to have things like videos, phone calls, harassing phone calls, death

threats. They're going to have things that relate to them that if this is just the evidence, as you said, Pope, this is just a small amount of evidence that has to do with Trump. These are things that might be subject to presidential immunity, because this is the presidential immunity motion. This is the I'm immune from prosecution. This is the evidence that cannot be used against me. But as you said, there's a whole other category of evidence

that have nothing to do with presidential immunity. It's other people's evidence and other people's transcripts and other people's words, et cetera. And so it'll be, that's what's going to also just be tremendous at the ultimate trial, if we can hopefully get to a trial. And how do we get to a trial? We get to a trial if the case survives

and how does the case survive? The case survives if Kamala Harris is president because Donald Trump obviously will pardon himself and dismiss the case otherwise So this is going to be a huge trial with a mountain of evidence This is just a small part of of it in order to make that determination And we're only seeing a small part of the small part of it Yeah, and come on over to legal af mtn. We're going to hit 250,000 subscribers well before Halloween, which was my target date because of you, not because of us.

And it's really where we're spreading our wings at the intersection of law and politics over there. Karen's over there doing work with us, which is great. Yeah. Court accountability and everybody else. And we're going to be doing hit after hit after hit. As soon as I or Karen or Ben, as soon as we digest a piece of the 2000 pages, we're going to be doing hit after hit after hit. As soon as I, or Karen, or Ben, as soon as we digest a piece of the 2,000 pages, we're going to be doing a hot take on it. It's either going to be here on the Midas Touch Network

or over on Legal AF MTN, but you'll find it there. So until our next hot take, I mean, just set your dial. About every hour, you're going to start seeing lots of things. This is that momentous of an occasion, and so an unusual moment in our history. And we just got to spend the time with you going through it and bringing it to you. The only way that we know how here on Legal AF. So until our next our next hot take, Michael Popak, Karen Friedman,

at Nifilo, and we're 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.