Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Legal AF Full Episode 3/26/2025
Episode Date: March 27, 2025Michael Popok and Karen Friedman Agnifilo join forces again on the Legal AF podcast, and debate the success of a new federal lawsuit to accuse the Trump Administration of violating, what else, the Fed...eral Records Act by having a "signal group chat" about war plans, a case assigned to Trump's least favorite judge Chief Judge Boasberg(!); an update on the Alien Enemies Act case in which a trial judge and now a federal appeals court have stopped Trump dead in his tracks from using a phony "war proclamation" to invoke war powers and deport people in the middle of night without due process; how soon Attorneys General will sue this week the Trump Administration to stop their assault on voting rights and the creation of new barriers to people voting through phony "ID" laws through Executive Orders; and so much more at the intersection of law and politics. Support Our Sponsors: Zbiotics: Head to https://zbiotics.com/LegalAF to get 15% off your first order when you use LEGALAF at checkout. Qualia: Head to https://qualialife.com/LEGALAF and use promo code: LEGALAF at checkout for 15% off your purchase! Soul: Go to https://GetSoul.com and use code LEGALAF to get 30% OFF your order! Three Day Blinds: For their buy 1 get 1 50% off deal, head to https://3DayBlinds.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 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
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It's Legal AF. It's the midweek edition. That's why Karen Freeman, Nick Niflo and Michael
Popock are together once again, a dynamic duo. We got three fat topics, all of which
matter. And at least two of them are major setbacks or will be major setbacks for the
Trump administration, which is circling the drain of history before our very eyes.
Teapot dome scandal leading to cabinet members' departure.
Forget that. We're going to talk about Signal Gate,
or the Breach Brigade, as I like to call it,
or HuffPost called it.
That's where every major member of the national defense
and national security part of the Trump administration
all got together
and violated the Federal Records Act and also violated national security
by communicating on an app you can get in the app store called Signal,
which even its own owner, its own CEO said, it's it's gold standard
for private communications, except this is Pentagon-level discussions about war plans
against a Yemeni-focused terrorist group called the Houthis,
that including target packages.
And then, to add insult to injury,
the national security advisor, the director
of national intelligence, the CIA Director,
the Department of Defense had all basically lied during their testimony. And the Atlantic,
which was involved because it was their editor-in-chief who got added to the signal
chain for four or five days, they decided, well, we're going to release the texts, right split screen at the moment of their testimony, which showed they were liars.
And it got very heated in the hearings. Midas has done a great job following all that.
But hearings are so yesterday, Karen. Federal court filings are so today,
because a public interest group who frequently uses FOIA, Freedom
of Information Act requests to get to the bottom of what's going on in our
government with their transparency was scratching their head for a while saying
how come we're not getting any documents now we know why because they were using
Signal with its magical disappearing deletion component to communicate about high profile the business
of the public, which you're exactly not supposed to do.
So they filed a new emergency temporary injunction case,
which has been assigned to, wait for it,
Jeb Boesberg, Donald Trump's favorite judge,
the one that he calls a lunatic and corrupt and a lefty and all
bashes him left and right in the in the Alien Enemies Act case which we're gonna
talk about. He's back because he just got the case assigned to him. So we're gonna
talk about the hearings, what happened to bring everybody up to speed, the new
filing, the new federal filing. Then we'll move to another Jeb Boesberg case
as the chief judge of the district court in DC,
which is, God, it's hard to believe it's only been 10 days
since this started, but 10 days ago,
Jeb Boesberg entered an emergency temporary restraining order,
really two of them, against the Trump administration's use
of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
to deport undocumented Venezuelans,
not even to Venezuela, to El Salvador.
We'll talk to you about why they're putting them
in the deep dark hole of killer El Salvadorian prisons
in a moment, but the judge took a look at the fake,
phony proclamation of Donald Trump declaring war
against Venezuela and this terrorist,
narco-terrorist gang and said, yeah,
I don't see the enemy invasion, incursion,
or the war declaration by Congress,
which we, 10 days later, we still don't have.
And no, I'm going to block you from doing that,
at least while we're litigating.
They didn't like that.
They attacked him.
Justice Roberts had to step in up to the appellate court.
We just got a new ruling for the appellate court.
We'll cover all of that today.
And then Donald Trump made good on his promise
right out of the playbook for Project 2025
to try to change how we vote.
There are certain things that the federal government can do
about voting rules,
and there are certain things they can't do
because it is delegated to the states.
And one of them is how states run
and operate their absentee balloting,
their provisional balloting, their mail-in balloting.
But Donald Trump hated all of that because we all know
that Democrats ate his lunch when it came to one thing,
mail-in ballots, special ballots, veterans ballots,
you know, military ballots and all of that. So he tried to, he's trying to pass some new rules about when ballots can be, arrive and be counted.
Here we go, to try to undermine the Democratic advantage, and as well as having some sort of voter ID,
maybe even a passport, maybe at the voting,
at the polling places, I mean, it's just getting ridiculous.
We got a lot to talk about in all of those places.
We might even touch if we have time
on some United States Supreme Court decisions
that have come down or some oral arguments
that have come down.
But let's bring in Karen, who's in our,
one of her favorite happy places,
which is the law and order set,
where she is a legal advisor for those that didn't know.
Right, Karen?
Yeah, no.
Whose office is that again?
This is Lieutenant Brady.
She is the lieutenant in charge of the detectives
who are at the law and order.
They're in the order part of law and order.
So I, for some reason, I've always liked her office the best
and I always use this whenever I need a place
to do things like podcast or do work when I'm on set.
Early in our podcast relationship history,
you do it from there and people would tune in,
I remember the comments, we still get them sometimes.
Which is, Karen has a terrible office,
what's going on in New York?
Look at the grill on her window.
I know.
It's a set.
She's a lady.
Oh, show off.
Well, but they do such a good job.
I know, it looks like a real crappy office
in a police precinct.
Yeah, they haven't spent much of my career
in police precincts,
they really do an excellent job
at making it look legitimate and real.
So.
Yeah, absolutely.
They have that half-drunk Grecian blue cup
of coffee nearby that's only, it's a New York thing,
along with the, my favorite part of learning
about New York production is that I didn't realize
that that steam pipe that's in the streets of New York to relieve the steam heat of our that that all the
TV producers and movie places movie production houses they all want in their photos or their
movies they want that steam stack and they don't get it unless it they actually are needed But that that's another new a little new inside New York thing very classically
That you know speaking of the New York coffee
My husband makes fun of me all the time because my favorite coffee is police precinct coffee from a bun-o-matic
Coffee. Yeah, I have the least apparently have the least sophisticated least fancy coffee pal.
Burnt dirty water.
There's nothing like it.
Yeah, let's blow off some steam ourselves. Why don't we turn to
signal gate, breach brigade? And what happened? You want to lay
out what happened? I'll turn to the hearing in the in the
lawsuit.
Yeah, well, this is just a scandal
of epic proportions, right?
So what is Signal?
Signal is one of these chat groups,
what like WhatsApp or other places
that people get together and have text messages.
Text message chain.
Signal is considered one of the leading encrypted end-to-end encryption secure text
chat groups that you can use.
That being said, it's not infallible.
And so it is not approved, for example, for things like national security or classified
information or even when you are in foreign countries, places that might be hostile to the United States,
there are certain countries you wouldn't use that in because they can read that information as well.
So, although it is more secure than using, for example, a regular text message chat,
it is certainly not up to the standard of national secrets, national state
secrets. So what happened? You had literally every single person who was in charge of national
security, whether it's the head of the CIA or it was Treasury Secretary Pete Hegseth,
Tulsi Gabbard, you name it. They were the who's who on there and they were texting
about the war plans essentially and the date, time, location,
the setup, the plans of who, what, when, where,
they are going to drop a bomb.
And if that's not classified, if that's not secrets,
if that's not endangering military people
who could be flying the planes, et cetera, in our military,
I don't know what is.
And they accidentally added the editor-in-chief
of the Atlantic, which is a extremely reputable,
well-read article, or I'm sorry, magazine publication.
And he happened to find himself on there.
I don't know how he got at it.
And he had a bird's eye view into what was happening
and where they were gonna drop the bombs
and when and on who.
And talk about a huge breach.
When I saw that, I saw that the editor,
first of all, they said what happened,
they didn't publish the details in an effort
to not jeopardize national security.
But when I saw that, I thought to myself,
these are the same people who complained
about Hillary Clinton's emails and her server
that she had at home, right?
With allegedly classified information,
bought her emails.
And these people are doing this, and they're so fast and loose
with national security.
I mean, we already know that Donald Trump is fast and loose
with classified documents and national security
when we saw how he kept all those classified documents
at Mar-a-Lago.
But his current administration, that they would do something
like this is just outrageous.
And then of course there were hearings about it
and everybody lied about it.
And so now he had to come out
and actually publish what was said
and show that it's absolutely highly classified.
And this is stuff shared by Pete Hegseth.
These were operational plans
because the operation hadn't even been started yet.
So pretty big deal.
You know, of course, Trump and everybody's downplaying
the sensitivity of the information,
denying that it's a war plan.
I mean, the fact that we're parsing words here,
but, you know, it was extremely detailed strike information,
including, again, the airplanes, the drones, all of that.
And if this had been anyone else in the military
who'd done something like this, you bet,
I'll bet you anything, they would have been court-martialed.
So to say this isn't classified is outrageous.
First of all, I had top secret clearance.
I've had access to classified information.
Certainly nothing at this level.
I mean, this is beyond.
And so, you know, I think this is a huge, huge mistake,
a huge misstep, and rather than owning it,
they're lying about it.
And speaking of lies, we got new reporting
as we're on the air that Mike Walz,
who's our allegedly, what time is it?
Six o'clock or eight o'clock, whatever it is,
Eastern time, he's currently our national security advisor.
They try to whisk him off to Greenland.
He left his Venmo account open.
And on, you know, when you use Venmo,
you can see Billy paid for a haircut for Molly,
$12 or whatever it is.
Yeah, he left his open with all his transactions.
And there's a lot of reporters listed there.
I don't know why he's paying reporters,
but for those people that jumped to his defense yesterday
and said, he doesn't even know Jeffrey Goldberg,
I'm not so sure about that.
By the way, I saw a picture of them together.
I saw someone posted a picture of them together.
Yeah, and how do you like your national security advisor
keeping his Venmo open?
This is the guy, and I ran it on a hot take,
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State,
and we'll talk in a minute about him being
the acting archivist for America, that's hard to believe.
Mike Waltz and Hegseth when he was on Fox and Friends,
attacking, not only attacking Hillary Clinton,
calling for her to be prosecuted,
calling for her to be jailed,
calling for her to be jailed, calling for
her to be hanged from the highest tree. Okay, let's just turn it around. I agree with all
that then. But so that was about email servers and a couple of emails, just like every other
Secretary of State had ever done on her personal, you know, Hillary email account. How about
discussing war, war plans? You know, you got Hegsef who's barking out
as if he's had a couple, let's be frank.
No, no war plans, they're not war plans.
And the Atlantic said, you remember I was
on the actual chat, right?
I saw all of it before some auto deletion.
And take a look.
And so they were forced, they were basically goaded
into releasing the information as part of the First Amendment
and freedom of the press to show
that they basically lied to Congress.
Congress is trying to get to the bottom, mainly the Democrats,
only the Democrats, of what happened here
and why it happened.
And instead you've got, Sean, they're all disqualified.
They all should resign.
I have a friend that's the best man in my wedding.
He's not a Trumper, but he's Republican.
He wrote me, he had been in the military,
every one of them should resign.
Every one of them should resign.
And I was like, okay.
They had the exact times that aircraft was taking off
from Yemen two hours before it was supposed to happen.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
The vice, what's his name?
The John Radcliffe, who's our chief spook,
who's our head of the CIA, he said,
well, it was Biden's fault,
which is exactly what came out of the text chain,
which is we got to come up with messaging
about attacking the Houthis,
which is effectively Hamas's Air Force and Navy.
They were attacking the Suez Canal shipping lanes, really impacted the Europeans more than us.
But Trump decided, I'm going to be a tough guy, bomb somebody. Well, the Houthis are good.
Biden had done it. So he said, well, I was told that it was okay at the CIA.
You're now the director of the CIA, may I remind you, to use Signal for a non-classified, right,
but this is not non-classified. This is, and then when they were pushed about it, both Tulsi Gabbard,
who is disqualified as being the head of anything, including intelligence, she said, well, it's really
not up to me. It would be really up to Hegseth at defense. It was really, it's really Hegseth. It's
really, you know, hospital path to Hegseth.
Questioning today in the hearing was
over whether Hegseth was drunk.
I'll just say it out loud because it would happen
in the hearing, whether he was drunk while he was using signal.
And they said, and when Ratcliffe came to his defense,
I said, that's really out of line.
And the Democrat on the committee said, really? Because he held up a drink while he was in Europe in February.
So, and he has a long and he's admitted to a long history
of being a public drunk.
So, how do we know that that wasn't part of that
in the impaired judgment of using effectively an open app
that the Chinese can peer into,
why isn't that an appropriate question to be asked?
Donald Trump's used, you see Donald Trump's kind of silent lately.
You know, it was a glitch. It was just a glitch.
But according to internal reports by the media, his first reaction,
Trump's first reaction was, they did what?
Which is the only fair reaction you can have to that particular thing.
Now heads should roll.
In any other administration,
somebody would fall on the sword and take responsibility.
We know it's not gonna be JD Vance
because the egg got placed on JD Vance's face
because in the signal chat,
which has been confirmed as legitimate by the White House, not by the Atlantic,
he says, I'm not sure if the boss at POTUS really understands
the ramifications of taking out the Houthis
to benefit the Europeans, and it seems to be inconsistent
with our attack on the Europeans.
And they really hate the Europeans right now.
So I think we should pump the brakes on this.
So he got sideways and offsides with the president.
So now all of a sudden, he's got to go,
suddenly he's going to Greenland to get away,
talking about it's Siberia, to get away.
So is he going with his wife?
Yes, he wasn't originally, but ever since,
he's got to find a way to get back in Trump's good graces.
You know, he already had a fight with Musk.
Now, now he's, he's publicly outed as being opposite the Donald Trump.
And I'm not even talking about the fake deep fake audio from earlier in the week where
somebody cribbed likely likely that he was attacking Elon Musk.
This is real.
And so he's like, I better, I'm sure,
I am sure that the West Wing called the East Wing
or whatever, wherever the vice president sits.
And the two staff said, we gotta get JD Vance out of here.
Let him go to the dog race in Greenland with his wife.
Did you hear it?
Huh?
Yeah, go ahead.
And start making amends with Donald Trump
and get him out of this media cycle and get him off to Greenland.
And that's exactly what's happened.
Did you see the people in Greenland are selling MAGA hats that say, make America go away?
That's a perfect MAGA acronym. I love that.
So the hearing has gone terrible for them.
And as shown what you and I and Ben and others
on the Midas Touch Network have said from the very beginning, which is this is not ready
for prime time players.
They are incompetent.
They are unprofessional.
They are sloppy with our secrets and with our public documents.
And they should be disqualified from serving in office.
Now, Trump's not going anywhere until we get the House and the Senate.
JD Vance isn't going anywhere unless Trump fires him
as vice president.
Question is, is Rubio, who already screwed up
and should have resigned over the treatment of Zelensky
in the White House, is he going anywhere?
The natural sacrificial lamb here is Pete Hegseth
does a press conference that says he's got a drinking problem,
he needs to spend more time with his family.
You know, the old sports coach that needs to leave.
We'll see.
But you know Trump, he circles that wagon tight,
as you've said before, around Republicans.
And he'll go down, because he's not going anywhere.
Trump knows, I got nothing to lose.
It just makes his administration look like a bunch of jokers that they are. When we come back from a quick break, Karen, let's dive into the
lawsuit that's been filed. We knew one was coming. I think this lawsuit is genius because it doesn't
even have to get involved with was it classified, was it top secret, was it military, was it
intelligence, was it anything? It doesn't matter. It's all public records that needed to be preserved,
and that's the focus of the new lawsuit we'll talk
about when we come back, along with the,
I thought the biggest news of the week was the declaration,
the phony declaration of war last week,
and Boasberg being supported by Chief Justice Roberts,
who had to step out of character and protect him.
No, we've got new reporting about what's going on in the Boasberg case
on the Alien Enemies Act right up to the minute with a new decision
against the Trump administration by the appellate court for DC.
And then you and I will talk about the Voting Rights Act,
maybe some other things if we have time related to the United States Supreme Court, but
we've got our sponsors and thank God that we do. For those that are like, oh
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I got a big announcement here.
We got a whole group coming over
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Dave Arenberg is coming over.
The rest of the people you love on Court Authorities
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Welcome back.
Yesterday's news or today's news was the hearings
about Signalgate, and now we've got the lawsuit.
We've got a group called American Democracy Forward
or Democracy Forward, who's a public interest group
who just really spends their morning, noon, and night
bipartisan, in a bipartisan fashion, making public records requests,
known as a Freedom of Information Act request,
to the federal government,
to in order to promote transparency in the government.
And they base their existence
on getting from the document information.
They've suspected from the very beginning
that the Trump administration was hiding the ball
and hiding documents and not preserving them.
Of course, Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago, need I say more?
He's not going to be respectful
of the National Archives requirement,
the Federal Records Act requirement to preserve things.
This is the guy that notoriously ripped up in eight pieces
of paper and stuffed them in toilets as his staff tried
to piece them back together again.
Because these are the people's documents
about the people's transactions,
as the Federal Records Act refers to it.
And you're not allowed to use Signal, a disappearing ink app
with an auto deletion function
for official government conversation,
really any conversation.
It's not, as somebody said, I think it was HuffPost,
it's not like they were getting a group together
to decide what to order from Sweet Greens.
They were talking, we're talking about bombing packages
and military targets and timing of military targets
for an attack on an enemy by using signal.
So the focus on the hearing side
is that that's a breach
of national security for obvious reasons.
Believe me, and if Mike Waltz hasn't changed
his Venmo settings, I only half choked,
but now I'm worried, have they,
I mean, I'm not the IT director for the administration,
but have you changed your passwords?
Are you still using Signal?
I mean, why, I choked, why don't you just cut out
the middleman and use WeChat, the Chinese WhatsApp version.
Just give the Chinese everything.
They lived inside of the Verizon servers
and peered into Donald Trump and JD Vance's traffic
during the campaign.
So of course, you know, of course, so whose idea was this?
Mike Waltz decides to fat finger it
and he adds Jonathan Goldberg of all people,
and then tries to say, well, Goldberg,
I don't know Goldberg, but he does know Goldberg,
just like Donald Trump didn't know E. Gene Carroll,
and he has a whole venmo of reporters.
I don't know if he's paying them off,
but there's money passed, change in hands apparently,
according to reporting anyway.
So the lawsuit gets filed.
What I love about the lawsuit, Karen, is that it's focused not
on classification, the nitty gritty of classified
versus top secret versus compartmented, who cares?
It has to do with public records
and Federal Records Act violation.
And they nail Marco Rubio, who I had forgotten
or I didn't know is the acting archivist.
Because they fired the archivist.
Of course, they didn't like the fact
that she was considering making the Equal Rights Amendment
an amendment, even though she didn't at the end.
And they rewarded her by firing her.
And Marco Rubio is now in charge of everything, USAID
and the National Archives,
but he's violated the Federal Records Act
by participating in Signal.
This ought, and Goldberg has the goods because he saw the deletions.
And that means that our documents are being deleted.
And it got assigned to Jeff Boesberg.
Karen, what do you think is gonna happen next?
I mean, the law is fairly clear here.
There's a couple of statutes that talk about
the preservation of federal records.
You've got 44 USC, United States Code 3101,
and five United States Code 701,
which prevents the unlawful destruction of federal records
and compels people to fulfill their legal obligations
to recover them if they've been deleted
or to preserve them for a period of time.
And it's any recorded information regardless of
the form or characteristic it's made. It's pretty clear it's Black Letter Law and there's no doubt
in my mind that by using signal from March 11th through 15th, at least we know for sure,
was the dates because that's when Jeffrey Goldberg was added to it regarding these
coordinated strikes on Yemen, that that was in violation because at least one person,
I think it was Marco Rubio, set it to disappearing.
And when it disappears, it's gone forever.
And so you're just not allowed to do it, right?
Signal is not approved as a way to maintain the records
and the business of the United States government.
This is how everything is done.
You remember how during Trump number one, people would run
and when Trump, when he would tear up his Post-it notes,
they'd run into the trash and tape them back together
because you're just not allowed to do that, right?
Why do you think they're releasing the Kennedy files
and all of that, right?
It's, these things are preserved. They belong to the Kennedy files and all of that, right? These things are preserved.
They belong to the American people, and it's part of history,
and it's part of the official record of the United States.
And these people work for us, right?
They're elected officials, and they work for us.
So you have to keep it.
It's black letter law.
The only question I have is will the court find
that the plaintiffs here have standing to challenge it here
in this particular case?
That's just an open question I have because although that is.
I thought they did a good job of establishing standing with all of their FOIA requests.
Yeah, I thought so too.
So, to catch people up.
Treasury secretary had a FOIA request to him,
the Freedom of Information Act public.
When I say FOIA, I mean public records request.
So did secretary of state, so did the other ones.
They all said none on documents and communication.
And their argument is, now we know why.
Because they were using Signal.
How many other times did they use Signal?
Where did they use Signal?
This is fact finding that the judge would do, Judge Boesberg.
So I think-
But it's unclear that they are,
that as opposed to the archives, for example,
could easily have standing to challenge their use of Signal.
It's just unclear whether they're going to have it,
but I hope you're right.
And I think it's a great lawsuit, easy to read,
very thorough, and we'll see where it goes.
Well, the archivist isn't going to do it,
because it's under the control of the executive branch,
and it's Marco Rubio.
So that's not happening.
I think they'll find, especially in DC,
they'll find the injuries that's required for standing.
And then the question is for Boesberg,
that's gonna go fast.
We're gonna have another fast set of hearings.
I wanna see what lawyer shows up
for the Department of Justice this time
in front of Boesberg because
they've asked for the temporary injunction.
By the time we came on the air,
he hadn't yet pulled everybody together on the docket.
I'm sure he'll do that in the next 48 hours because it is a temporary restraining order request on an emergency basis. I
think this could be another Saturday hearing. He loves Saturday hearings. Did
you see, I read the transcript for the recent Saturday hearing. He was away
and did not have his, he apologized. He says, I didn't have a suit, I don't have my
black robe. So he was like in soft clothes, as we like to say, as a civilian.
But he said, I do appreciate all the rest of you dressing up.
I love Boesberg.
But I think he's going to do some fact finding.
He's going to do some ordering.
We're going to have some assertions of executive privilege.
They've already, when we get to the next segment,
the Trump administration
is very free with their assertion of privileges. Oh, the state secrets privilege. Can't tell
you, I think we're going to see the state secrets privilege. We're going to see the
executive privilege. You can't review us. You can't get to the bottom of this, but it's
the records act. You either violated it or you didn't in real time, and a judge has to be able to review that.
And, you know, it's not the case Jeb Boesberg wants right now,
but it's randomly assigned to him.
Here's what I think the Trump administration is going
to try to do again.
They're going to try to get rid of him.
They already sent a letter to the last appellate court.
Get rid of Jeb Boesberg.
It's not going to work.
You're not getting rid of federal judges
because you write a nasty letter.
Yeah? Hello?
Oh, hi. Sorry.
You write a nasty letter.
Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, it's just it's not, it's not, it's, you're not allowed
to pick and choose your judges.
These are lifetime appointed judges.
Every president gets to fill vacant spots of federal judges.
They have to be nominated and confirmed by the Senate.
And then it's a lifetime appointment.
And so you don't get to, just because you don't like them,
unless there's some kind of cause, you don't get to just say,
oh, gee, I don't like this judge.
I'd like a new one, please.
It just doesn't happen that way
It's not the law and and by the way Trump that this is there. This is there
This is their MO how many times do you have to hear?
Every time they get a ruling that they don't like it's the judge is a lunatic
The judge is should be impeached the judge is
You know, like just they go after the attack, the judges, I can't even imagine, you know, we've been practicing law together, you know, you and I collectively for what 75 years between the two of us, at least. And, and have you ever
Can you imagine attacking judges the way they all do?
I mean, I don't see anybody doing it. It's just absolutely not how you're supposed to practice.
No, and the judge is getting pissed off
and the Supreme Court got pissed off
and stepped in to protect Boasberg.
That was unusual.
That was highly unusual.
There's not a history.
A Supreme Court justice issued a statement.
Yeah, exactly.
And I just think that's worth underscoring how unusual that is, that when people were
calling for his impeachment, literally, I didn't know it was the first time in history,
but I take your word for it.
Okay, the first time in history, the Chief Justice John Roberts had to come out and issue
a statement, an uncharacteristic statement,
basically saying.
In real time.
Yeah, in real time, exactly.
This is not how we do it.
This is what appeals are for.
You don't call for the impeachment of judges.
It's dangerous what you are doing and what is happening.
And inconsistent.
Roberts had to do it.
He was almost goaded into it.
You and I covered the state of the court address
that he did on the January 1st every year.
And this year, the topic was the judiciary is under attack.
So it's very hard to watch the judiciary under attack,
law firms under attack, lawyers under attack,
and sit idly by if you're the head of the other branch.
You know, the Trumpers like to constantly harangue
about it's the executive branch, there's one occupant,
he's got all the power, it's the unitary branch,
it all resides in one person.
Okay, well the other branches have heads too.
And the head of the Article III branch is the Chief Justice
of the United States Supreme Court.
And let's just say he opened a dialogue with Trump.
Now let's move to, and there's going to be a lot
of intersection of the United States Supreme Court
and Donald Trump's actions.
The next one we're going to talk about is Donald Trump's,
a Friday ago, declaring or Saturday publishing,
effectively a proclamation of war against Venezuela by way of an narco terrorist drug gang,
saying that that's the equivalent of being at war with Venezuela
and then invoking wartime powers in peacetime to try
to turbocharge the deportation, not even back to where they live,
to another country into the waiting arms
of a dictator wanting to abuse Venezuelans instead of giving them due process.
Or as Judge Millett put it in her concurrence today, inciting against the Trump administration
and denying their attempt to block the temporary restraining order of Boasberg, this is the
intersection of due process, the Fifth Amendment due process and the Alien Enemies Act.
And you want to bring everybody kind of up to speed
about what happened with Boasberg
and this temporary restraining order
and sort of the niceties of what's going on there
that will move to the appellate ruling?
In other Judge Boasberg news,
he's certainly busy on legal AF and the Midas Touch lately,
right? And these are just random assignments, by the way, how cases get assigned to people.
And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of them because a lot of this stuff is going to be
happening in Washington, DC, for obvious reasons, because that's where the federal government is.
So essentially what's been happening and what's going
on is there's something called the Alien Enemies Act.
And, you know, there's all these history lessons that you learn
when you read some of these court decisions,
especially involving Trump and these laws from hundreds
of years ago that they like to dig up dust off and try
to apply to modern day standards.
And so you learn a lot.
So what happened, the brief history
of this is apparently back in 17, back in the 1700s,
there was something first called the Alien Friends Act.
And there was serious law, series of laws called the Alien
Friends Act, the Alien and Sedition Act, and it granted President Adams
with sweeping authority to expel immigrants,
gag the free press, and purge the country
of Jacobian sympathizers.
So the Alien Friends Act was something
that gave the president sweeping powers to detain
and expel any aliens deemed dangerous to the peace
and safety of the US.
Well, and the Alien Sedition Act said it was a crime to write,
print, or utter or publish any false scandalous
and malicious writing or writings against the government,
against Congress, and against the president with the intent
to defame or bring them into contempt or disrepute.
Obviously, anyone, not even a non-lawyer, could hear just
from me reading these laws that these would be held unconstitutional
or be, you know, derided as unconstitutional.
And they were allowed to lapse in 1800.
But a new law in 1798 was passed, the Alien Enemies Act,
that granted the president the power
to detain and expel enemy aliens during times of war, invasion, predatory,
or predatory incursion.
And so there are two clauses, one called a conditional clause
and one called an operative clause.
The conditional clause limits the Alien Enemies Act's authority
to conflicts between the United States and foreign power.
So in other words, you have to have declared war,
or you have to say there's an invasion, something like that.
And then once the conditions are met, there's an operative clause.
And so anyone who's part of this hostile nation or government,
get to be 14 or older, can be apprehended and removed
as an alien enemy.
So it basically vests the president
with incredible authority to detain and deport
any non-citizen whose affiliation traces back
to an enemy state.
So it's widely been thought to believe
that it only applies when we're at war or under invasion
or some kind of real predatory incursion.
It's very rarely used.
And I don't think it's ever been used in the way
that Trump is using it, declaring that this narco gang
that is affiliated with the Venezuelan government is
designated a foreign terrorist organization conducting invasion
or predatory incursion into the United States.
And so, you know, he calls it a narco-terrorism enterprise
that is under the control of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela
and a cartel, et cetera.
So, you know, this essentially he, this was the whole scuttlebutt
that you and I talked about where they tried to turn the plane around.
There was lies about whether or not the plane had already taken
off, and Judge Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order,
and that was appealed to the DC Circuit.
And so what's happening now is a decision,
a three-judge decision, two out of the three,
found in favor of not lifting the temporary restraining order.
And it was an interesting decision because they said,
look, normally temporary restraining orders
aren't something that's reviewable on appeal
because they are so quick, they don't last very long.
However occasionally they are when it's really important
and we're going to find that an injunction against the President of the United States is something
that's important enough to trigger appellate review, notwithstanding that,
we're going to not lift the temporary restraining order
because there was no literally zero due process
that was given to these individuals.
They were just declared part of this group.
They were swiftly flown out of the country
and they weren't even allowed
or given any opportunity to appeal it.
And so now they're just being held in an El Salvador jail
and that's where we are.
So obviously it's gonna go to the Supreme Court next,
but that's where we are.
Well, we've got, you know,
so there's like three different things going on, right?
You got the temporary restraining order being challenged
at the appellate level and a new decision there.
You got Boesberg who's trying to determine
through fact-finding whether there's been a contempt
violation of his order, willful,
by the Trump administration who for an hour or so
after an injunction was already in place orally,
continued to fly planes in
violation of that order. The whole thing, he thinks, was concocted in order to
deny the court jurisdiction because the filing of the lawsuit happened in the
early morning of Saturday morning. Obviously the Trump administration got
wind of it, proclamation gets published, it was secret on Friday, plans were already in place, wheels were already up,
people, 200 people already off to this terrible prison,
a prison so bad that more than 300 people have died
in the last year at an El Salvadorian,
in this particular El Salvadorian prison,
from natural causes according to the government.
If being beaten to death is a version of natural causes,
then you will agree with the El Salvadorian government.
So why the planes were continuing to go while they were
bullshitting with the judge in the hearing room is what the
judge is trying to get to the bottom of.
The Trump administration has said, A, we're not going
to tell you because we're going to assert state secrets.
And the judge is not really sure that state secrets privilege
applies when he's trying to get to the bottom of whether
his order has been violated.
And so they've said, roadblock, we're not telling you.
And the judge has briefing going on about that
and will rule this week on state secrets.
I think he will deny the use of state secrets
and that will have to go up on appeal.
He will find them, I think, in contempt.
And that will be later in this week.
Temporary restraining order,
which again is temporary restraining order.
That's what Judge Millett and Judge Henderson,
who ruled against Donald Trump today
in the appellate court said, what is the rush?
We're not telling you to release these people
into the general population of the public.
We're not telling you to stop picking them up,
pursue it to the Alien Enemies Act,
or detaining them, or putting them in concentration camps.
You wanna put them in Guantanamo, you can do that too.
But why are we deporting them out of the country
when you're not even using the immigration statute
to do it. Use the
immigration statute. Get before a judge. Give them due process. We won't have a problem. And we're
only talking about the short interval of time during a restraining order, which is 14 days,
20 days tops until the judge goes to preliminary injunction, which maybe is another five days from
now. What is the effing rush?
And you're compromising due process.
Do we want to wake up in a world where people get called enemy combatants and whisked away
in the middle of the night chained together?
Or do we want to have them have due process?
Because that's the world we want to live in.
And that was the Millett-Henderson position today when they ruled against overturning
the temporary restraining order, not on the merits yet,
just on the measures of when you can overturn a temporary restraining order.
So for now, two of the three judges, the Trumper didn't agree, no surprise, Judge Walker.
Two of the three said, yeah, we're keeping the temporary restraining order in place,
which means Boasberg can still find that there was contempt
of that temporary restraining order.
If Donald Trump doesn't like it,
he can try to take an emergency,
which he may do by the morning,
an emergency application to the United States Supreme Court.
We're in a weird area though, Karen,
because this is temporary restraining order
and appellate courts don't generally have jurisdiction
over temporary restraining orders.
It doesn't get triggered until preliminary injunctions,
which is the next step in the food chain.
So we got all of that going on at the exact same time
while Boasberg presides over the new case
about Signalgate.
It's a lot of fun, right?
But we do.
It is, it is.
It's like a fire hose of information though.
It's hard to keep track and as happened earlier.
We do.
We say it's hard to keep track, but we do.
Yeah, well, you do very well, I will say.
I find it hard to keep track of it all.
You do too.
And things are breaking news as we are on the air
constantly as well.
Yeah, the Venmo thing while we were doing it.
So we're gonna talk finally about a couple of things here.
I know, Karen, you're tight for time.
We're going to definitely cover the voting, the impact on voting
by Donald Trump's executive order and what that impact would be
and how the states are going to challenge that,
led by the attorneys general that we all love in New Jersey
and in New York and in New York
and in other places.
And then if we have time, I'll touch on some things
that happened at the United States Supreme Court,
including a request by Donald Trump
to have the Supreme Court intervene
in an area related to hiring 16,000 probationary workers back
and a oral argument about whether two black districts
in Louisiana voting districts is too, too many
and whether the Voting Rights Act is really on life support.
We're gonna cover all that, but first we got another word
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Welcome back, you're on LegalAF,
the midweek edition of course, Karen,
but tell our audience about what Trump just tried to do, was trying to do by executive order on voting.
And then we'll talk about what I'm sure the states are going to do in response.
Yeah, so another executive order. Trump really loves these executive orders.
This one's called Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.
And boy, is this one a doozy.
This one rolls back, what, 20 years of voting rights
and everything that people have been fighting for for so long.
This is a Republican's wet dream.
Excuse my, you know, grossness,
but it's absolutely unbelievable what they put in here.
And it's quite well written in the sense
that clearly they must have some good lawyers working
on their team because they're trying to make it
as bulletproof as possible.
Now, let me explain why I say that.
What's the difference between an executive order and a law
and when can a president issue an executive order?
And it's really pretty fairly simple, okay?
The only place or the only people who are empowered
to make laws are Congress, right?
They pass statutes and either the president signs it
or if they veto it, Congress has to override that statute.
But what an executive order can do is a president
can essentially interpret a law through an executive order,
but they can't make new law unless, except for a few very,
very small, narrow circumstances.
But they essentially can't make new law.
So what they did here is they cited to all the laws
that they claim they are interpreting.
And it comes from the president's article
to constitutional power that vests in the president,
the executive power to take its quote,
take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
And that is how it's justified
that they can make these executive orders.
And they essentially shoehorn it
within that part of the constitution.
So that's what an executive order is.
And so I say that because that's how this was written.
This is literally a, it's saying, okay, there's this law,
this is how we're going to interpret it.
This law, this is how we're going to interpret it.
And, you know, he starts by citing India and Brazil
who rely on biometric data saying, you know, we rely,
however, on self-attestation
for citizenship, and Germany
and Canada require paper ballots counted in public
by local officials, remember, that's what they tried to do
in certain states where they thought that there was going
to be close calls.
They wanted to slow the process and make them count by, you know,
by and large, who are the people in the states
who are doing election-related things.
It's mostly, mostly Republicans
because the vast majority of states legislatures
are controlled by Republicans in this country.
They also cite to, they cited to Denmark and Sweden
that limits mail-in voting
to those unable to vote in person.
And they, you don't count late arriving votes
regardless of the post-market.
So all the things they complained about in the election
until of course Trump won.
And then suddenly this was the fairest,
most secure, best election ever.
But they were setting up all these issues,
basically saying we wanna require identification,
citizenship in person, they don't like mail-in,
all these things to restrict people's access to vote voting. I mean look nobody wants
anyone who cannot vote and should not vote to vote. That's not, I don't think anyone, any legitimate person is advocating for that.
Nobody should be able to vote who isn't a
legally
legitimate voter. But really what what happens here is this is voter suppression.
This is voter intimidation.
This is requiring people to go over and above
to get certain documents that they might not have.
It's to disenfranchise people
who might be on the margins of society, right?
So it's basically you need an identification, you know,
and you need a certain type of identification,
like a passport or a real ID,
the ones that you have.
You know, they're very, very prescriptive
about what kind of identification you have to have.
What if you don't have an ID?
What if you lost your ID?
What if you're somebody who can't drive
and like somebody who might have special needs
and can't drive, why shouldn't they be able to?
I'll give you a real life example.
My mother, my mother is in a wheelchair,
for those that don't know.
It has been for about nine years.
And she hasn't driven in all that amount of time
because it's so difficult mobility wise
to get my mother to get a picture taken.
I've never gotten her a non-expired photo ID.
Now that makes it very difficult
because I wanted to fly my mother
to live closer to me recently.
And I'm literally going to have to do it by transport by car because I don't have
a photo ID for her and she can't get one.
Does that mean my mother doesn't have the right to vote?
She's 90 years old.
She, you know, she's voted every year since she was 18 or
whatever the period was.
And, and this, this, this, um, callousness about the Trump administration,
social security recipients are gonna have to check in
with like their probation officers
on a weekly basis to social security.
A social security phone line that they've cut funding for
and field offices for, they gotta check in
because we gotta get to the bottom of the 1% of fraud
that's going on in social security.
It all falls into the same boat.
We don't care what barriers to entry that we create, as long as it screws the Democrats
and those that aren't MAGA.
That's it.
Let's just call it out.
Sorry, Karen.
What's my mother got in my head?
I got very fired.
No, no, I get it.
Look, I have a child on an adult child
on the autism spectrum.
She's never gonna drive.
And it's a challenge to get an identification for her.
I mean, and it's just, it's,
everybody has, I'm sure an example,
a real life example of somebody who isn't in necessarily
this is easy for, right?
Or it's just, if you read the executive order
and you look at it, it's issue after issue
that they tried to impose in the last election
to create these barriers for people
to come and be able to vote.
I mean, I was thinking of military officials
who are overseas and who are
fighting for our country and they might not have been, you know, they might be in a war zone and
couldn't put, couldn't get their mail and ballot in time in the mail. Thank you for your service,
but you're disenfranchised. Exactly. I mean, they're so, or look at college students, you know,
college students don't always have, you know,
don't always have a passport
or don't always have their ID with them.
Or, you know, it's just, you just, it's just really,
we've come so far over the last 20 years
of allowing more access to voting and allowing people
to vote in lots of different ways.
And this is just fake news to say
that there's all these illegal immigrants
and dead people voting.
Nobody has ever found that despite what they are saying.
And it is a 0.000, I'm almost done,
1% voter fraud problem,
which means there's no voter fraud problem.
And then, so I'll just, this part of it I'll mention.
The states are ready if they haven't already drafted it,
because it all comes out of the,
we got the playbook before he got elected.
It's like the opposing team in the football,
and you know, in the NFL,
left the playbook in the bathroom right before the game.
We got the playbook.
We got the 900 pages of the Project 2025.
We knew they were gonna do this.
So a lot of these suits are drafted already,
that's how they get filed so quickly.
And so I'm sure tomorrow, tonight, before the week is up,
there's gonna be a filing by 18 to 22
of your favorite attorneys general, we can name them,
led by Letitia James, or the Attorney General for New Jersey,
or the one for California, or Illinois, or or fill in the blank and they're all gonna come
Together and they're gonna say you are in this is an incursion on our rights as states given to us under federalism
To control the time means matter and method of voting and it's up to our
Legislatures to do that and the feds can't impose this on us and it undermines people's and it disenfranchises people.
And then we're gonna have to see what court they file it in.
We know it'll be in DC or it'll be up in New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, California or the like.
And it's coming and it's gonna again be,
as I've only half joked,
I've said to the Supreme Court justices
who watch this show, cancel your summer vacations.
I know you have these elaborate on the right side.
You got these elaborate summer vacations.
Got it.
And, but cancel it because you're gonna be doing
a lot of emergency hearings over the summer and the like.
So, Karen, as we know, as I said earlier,
had something that kind of crunched her there at the end. So let me just wrap up the show while we're here altogether.
Again, we're indebted and humbled by our audience.
The Midas Touch audience, the Legal AF audience,
some of that overlaps, a lot of it overlaps, some of it's not.
Some people are just Legal AF people, some of them are just Midas people, so to speak.
But you all come together here and support in such,
I mean, I would not swap our audience
and level of commitment and enthusiasm
for any other YouTube channels audience out there.
And I wouldn't, and I can name five or six
that people think are our peers or our competitors,
and I wouldn't trade anybody for it. Because we know it within the fiber of our competitors, I wouldn't trade anybody for it.
Because we know it within the fiber of our being,
how supportive our group is,
how important they find our content.
And we take it seriously.
And it's a responsibility that we won't let you down.
We really won't.
We get up every morning,
all of us from the back of the house,
the production team led by Salty and Sid and other people
and Jeremy and the rest and the brothers
and their shining guiding light of where we need to end up.
And I kind of took that with me over to Legal AF,
the YouTube channel.
Lastly, I'll just touch two quick things in a two minute
kind of speed chess, okay?
Speed dating. Here we
go. United States Supreme Court still sitting on an application by the Trump administration
to intervene and not make them rehire 16,000 young or inexperienced probationary workers
back to the federal workforce. The administration doesn't want to comply with Judge Alsop's
order up in San Francisco coming out of the Ninth Circuit,
and we're still sitting around.
It's not a good sign of the Trump administration,
and yet they have not intervened yet.
Nor have they set a briefing schedule, which is really weird.
So it may just die by lack of interest
at the Supreme Court level. That's one.
So again, another opportunity for the Supreme Court to bail out Donald Trump. And, you know, he's losing votes at the Supreme Court level. That's one. So again, another opportunity for the Supreme Court
to bail out Donald Trump.
And you know, he's losing votes on the Supreme Court,
bashing judges who are well-respected like Boesberg,
who is the roommate of Kavanaugh in Yale Law School,
and friends with Chief Justice Roberts.
That's not winning him any friends at a moment
where he needs every vote at the United States Supreme Court.
And we just covered on unprecedented,
Dina Dahl and me, on the Legal AF YouTube channel,
the oral argument about Louisiana's voting map
and whether the two districts which are predominantly black
in a state that is more than, at a six total,
which is more than that as a percentage of the population,
whether that's good enough, not good enough, just right, at a six total, which is more than that as a percentage of the population.
Whether that's good enough, not good enough, just right,
violates the Voting Rights Act, and here's the scary part.
Kavanaugh came up with,
why do we even have the Voting Rights Act anymore?
Isn't there a time limit on it?
We're colorblind as a nation, aren't we?
Said the white guy to the almost other white people
that were on the Supreme Court.
No, we're not colorblind.
We're not gender neutral.
We're not color neutral in this country.
What country do you live in?
So it does concern me,
even though I don't think the map is gonna be overturned
because they're gonna find,
I think that it was created for political purposes
to save the hide of Mike Johnson from Louisiana,
the Speaker of the House, and Steve Scalise.
That's why it looks so weird.
It's shaped like a snake, appropriately.
But it also, it's not done for racial purposes.
I think it survives, but I don't like Kavanaugh
trying to lift up under the hood
of the Voting Rights Act again
and trying to get rid of it,
which came out of our civil rights movement signed by President Johnson. So we've reached the end of Midas Touch
and our Legal AF midweek edition. Join us on Saturday. I do that show. We had our four-year
birthday. Midas had its five-year birthday. We had our four-year birthday, although we're really
four and a half because we were doing, Ben and I were doing a legal show that was the precursor to Legal AF earlier, we just called it something else.
Five-year anniversary for Midas, hit the subscribe button for their drive for five,
drive for five million, come over to Legal AF, we just hit, we just tossed over, rolled over 500,000,
we're trying to get to a million in under a year,
and we're getting there with our new court authority,
true crime contributors led by Dave Arenberg,
who starts on Monday with us exclusively,
joining our other contributors, Shan Wu,
former Attorney General, Deputy General Counsel
for the Attorney General under Janet Reno,
and a great defense lawyer in his own right
under a brand he calls Under Color.
Court Accountability Action, Mike Sacks, Lisa Graves,
Alex Aronson looking at corruption and money
in the federal court system.
Mike Sacks is going to be coming on with Ellie Mistel
to do some work with us as well.
And he's an amazing legal commentator as well.
Dina Dahl does that show unprecedented with me
and other hot takes.
Karen Friedman-Cnifilo, which is not busy
being a practicing lawyer and a law and order commentator
or a legal advisor.
Come over to Legal AF, the YouTube channel.
And of course, support us on Patreon.
We've got patreon.com slash legal AF
where you can get some exclusive
content, you can't get it anywhere else.
So until my next reporting and my Saturday edition with Ben Misalas, the legal AF, the
YouTube channel, the legal AF, the hot digs, over on Midas, I'm Michael Popak.
Shout out to the Midas Mighty and the legal AFers.