Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Legal AF Full Episode - 9/6/2025

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Summer is over and the anti-Trump resistance has its groove back, winning 6 major cases against the Trump Administration, as Trump’s Epstein scandal and illegal Tariff scheme send his Administration... into a self-inflicted tailspin. Ben and Popok are back on the top rated Legal AF podcast to debate this week’s developments from the resistance’s front line—the courts. Support Our Sponsors: Miracle Made: Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made! Go to https://TryMiracle.com/LEGALAF and use the code LEGALAF to claim your FREE 3 PIECE TOWEL SET and SAVE over 40% OFF. Tushy: Over 2 million butts love TUSHY. Get 10% off Tushy with the code LEGALAF at https://hellotushy.com/LEGALAF! #tushypod Everyday Dose: Go to https://EverydayDose.com/LEGALAF for 45% OFF your first order Done With Debt: Visit https://DoneWithDebt.com and talk to a strategist for FREE. Check Out The Popok Firm: ⁠https://thepopokfirm.com/⁠ Subscribe to the NEW Legal AF Substack: ⁠https://substack.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 Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum with Dr. Steve Hassan: ⁠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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:32 And there's a bunch of other losses out there. I'm talking about real big, humiliating losses. And then you had a federal magistrate judge in Washington, D.C., just rip into the Trump DOJ and say, do you think this is cops and robbers? We're past a constitutional crisis. Like, do you think you're cosplaying as lawyers? Do you think this is just some fun exercise? You're destroying people's lives.
Starting point is 00:01:59 You've had to dismiss multiple cases before there even can be prosecuted because you have no evidence. And the stain of what you will do will remain on these people's lives. How dare you? And like literally yelling at the Trump lawyers at the Trump DOJ. I want to talk about all of that. I want to talk about the case with Harvard, Pasicombatatus, AEA, due process, tariffs, FTC, there's so much, Popock's going to break it all down, rapid fire,
Starting point is 00:02:30 so you are up to date and all of that. I want to talk about the Epstein survivors courageously going to Capitol Hill. It was an honor here on the Midas Touch Network to be able to stream that entire press conference live about a million views, and we made sure that other networks covered it because they knew we were going to get the views, so they had to cover it. But what was important was that the survivors got. their word out. And then Donald Trump was saying, oh, they're all a hoax. It's a, it's one big hoax while he did a jet flyover to intimidate the Epstein survivors and said, oh, the reason I did
Starting point is 00:03:05 the flyover was to impress the new president of Poland. You want me to believe that? You've had a lot of other presidents and prime ministers at the White House, but that's the one time you do a flyover of fighter jets while the Epstein survivors are speaking. It's just Bush League stuff, Michael Popak that makes us look weaker in the broader context of the parade that took place in Tiananmen Square in China, the big meeting at Tianjin between Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Modi, who's no longer allied with the United States because Trump demanded that Modi nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize and Modi's like, you didn't stop the India-Pakistan war. I'm not going to do that. So Trump imposes 50% tariffs, destroys an American relationship.
Starting point is 00:03:51 And then we have Modi, we have Xi Jinping, we have Kim Jong-un, we have Putin there in China laughing at us while all of this is taking, while Donald Trump's doing freaking flyovers over the Epstein survivors and sending four ships and one nuclear submarine off the coast of Venezuela to murder people on a fishing boat, who he claims were Tren Deiragua with cocaine on it. And the story gets more suspicious each day. First, they said this boat was going to train. Trinidad, and they said, nope, it's going to the United States. None of that, none of it. It doesn't look like there's 11 people. It looks like a 16 to 24 foot boat. It doesn't even have the fuel to get to the United States. What are we doing there? So we'll talk about all of that and more in legal life.
Starting point is 00:04:36 Michael Popak, how are you? That's a good. I like that wrap up. That was good. Yeah, what are we watching? But we are watching and we'll piece it together as you and I go through today's podcast, is that Donald Trump is a, promoter of the wag the dog theory where he creates a war, kills 11 people without due
Starting point is 00:05:00 process, drops the Maxwell or Epstein files at politically timed moments in order to steal the thunder and step on the news story. He's willing to start a war with Venezuela in order to cover up for a loss in court over his use of the Alien Enemies Act, which at its core is about whether Trend de Aragua is a proxy for a war predatory invasion or not, the day he gets the bad order in the Alien Enemies Act, or any of the other six things we're going to talk about, you can do it on a graph, and we will do it on Midas Touch and Legal AF. I will do it. When I have time to doodle, I will do this, where every time there is a bad news story, sometimes two and three a day, either related to Epstein, his failing health, the failing health of America,
Starting point is 00:05:57 RFK Jr. being grilled maybe out of existence during a Senate hearing, or any of the, any of the things you've talked about or touched on, like magistrate judges having had enough along with federal judges, appellate court judges, specialty appellate court judges, every time one of those things happen, he does something, he pushes a button and something bad happens. but to distract. And you and I and the Midas Touch Network and Legal A.F., we spent a considerable amount of time holding him accountable and calling that out. And we can almost track minute by minute.
Starting point is 00:06:36 Bad ruling comes out in the morning and in the afternoon in courts. Donald Trump by the evening does something. But what we're watching is the reveal, the ripping the mask off of all of this, which we've done so beautifully and your brothers and you have done. on so beautifully on the Midas Dutch Network, where now our audience is like, oh, we know why he did that. He did that because, right, it has nothing to do with, he politicizes everything, including child sex trafficking, in order to prove some sort of ultimate political point. But at the bottom line, let's just take the plane up 5,000 feet for one second before we kick this off.
Starting point is 00:07:15 America is not buying what he's selling, not the economy, not the big, beautiful bill. Not anything. 30% of America approves of the big, beautiful bill, and its attack on their social safety net, mainly in red states. 30%, which means he's lost 20% of MAGA in order for that to happen. 38% is his approval rating. I believe it'll crash below 30% in the next round or two. Okay?
Starting point is 00:07:41 That's the two things. Three, we've got, he's finally woken up, I guess, to figure out that chasing human beings through farms, factories, churches, and fields is not, and deporting a million people is not great for the economy, neither on the consumer side, where consumer spending has ground to a halt and gone into the negative region since Donald Trump took over the economy and from the manufacturing agriculture goods and services side, where they're not building, they're not creating, they're not crops are rotting in the field, construction, to have a shortage of labor. We're down one million people in the amount of people necessary to run this economy.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Social Security Administration estimates that we are down 35 million people, Ben, for the 2030s to run the American economy. Because the reality is, Native-born Americans and people who are naturalized here are not enough to run the American economy. We've always relied on immigration to help fill those jobs. and now we're seeing what's happening with the economy when his only one trick pony was tariffs and that's now been taken away from him and that was the foundation of his national security policy his economic policy
Starting point is 00:08:59 his world security policy all tariffs and now that's been challenged and threatened to be taken away there's nothing else left you pull the screen away and there's nothing else left I'll leave it on this he inherited he inherited from Joe Biden the strongest economy in the world and in eight months has reversed it to one of the worst performing, if not worst performing economies of a major economy in the world in eight
Starting point is 00:09:28 months. Michael Popak, if Donald Trump just went out and golfed all day, he did nothing, he could have taken credit for it all, he could have golfed, he could have literally done nothing. And the thing is, is that almost. anybody in the United States would have done a better job than him because he's just affirmatively inflicting the most damage everywhere. You know, we're going to talk about the court losses, the fights, but whether it's in the education sector, attacking education institutions, at all levels from the best universities to school lunches, right, to children's
Starting point is 00:10:13 health at schools to attacking our overall health and well-being and gutting vaccination advisory boards and preventing others from being safe if kids can now contract polio and measles and mumps based on the new anti-guidance i think i call it from the cdc what happens when a pandemic strikes from fema what happens when there's a massive emergency like we've seen before you have FEMA that's going to be unable to act energy. Donald Trump's weird views about windmills and solar because Donald Trump didn't like the windmills that were outside of his golf course in Scotland at Aberdeen. So he's brought in this view of his hatred of windmills to Trump's personal ego fueling the end of decade-long relationships that we've been trying to cultivate
Starting point is 00:11:08 with countries like India, even when Donald Trump brings, oh, as I said at the outset, because India wouldn't nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize the way Pakistan did. And then when Pakistan invested in Trump's crypto fund and then said he can go to Nobel Peace Prize, the chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, Munir got a direct visit to the White House, which further pissed Prime Minister Modi off. The Trump family is getting rich. They made $5 billion this week or added $5 billion to their net worth this week off of a pretty failed launch, in my opinion, of something called World Liberty Financial, which
Starting point is 00:11:44 I think a lot of people were left holding the bag, but I think it was lots of people who wanted to hold the bag because they were under SEC investigations or had other personal reasons to want quid pro quoes with Donald Trump to try to prop it up a little so the Trump family could make their money. I mean, you look around at just all of these areas and all of these sectors, and it's just one thing after the other. And then even where he invites someone over, like the new president of South Korea who shows up at the White House, Trump, then says certain things that would piss off Japan. He's got the head of South Korea there. He starts bragging about his relationship with Kim Jong-un.
Starting point is 00:12:24 And then in a factory that Hyundai is building here in the United States and other South Korean companies are building these factories, Donald Trump's ICE is doing immigration raids of South Koreans and arrest. them and putting them in detention centers when they were here to work at the factories that Trump said he wants in the United States, which, by the way, he didn't bring those factories. It was Biden and his Biden's policies. But now they're being attacked. So right now in South Korea, the news, I follow the news on purpose and all other countries. South Korea right now is livid at Donald Trump for attacking its people and throwing them into detention centers when they try to invest money into the United States.
Starting point is 00:13:07 So just think about every aspect is not helpful. So when you see, you know, then our state regime media here in the United States like Fox and others, which, by the way, most won't even cover what was happening with the Epstein survivors. We're strong. We're powerful. It's like we're not. We're getting crushed right now. We're getting laughed at internationally.
Starting point is 00:13:26 We're weaker than ever. That jobs report that came out on Friday was one of the worst jobs reports in generations. And guess what? It's not a fluke. It's the start. It's going to get worse and worse and worse. And while we were here on Midas Touch Network, legal a.F, all of our programming for months now saying, actually the tariffs are hurting.
Starting point is 00:13:47 Look at what's happening with the ships. Look at what's happening with cargo. Look at what's starting to happen with price. Look at the fact that bankruptcies are surging as companies were doing all they could not to pass on costs to consumers and they would have to go BK, go bankrupt. And now the other companies are like, we can't go bankrupt. We've got to pass it on to consumers. So in July, they were gas.
Starting point is 00:14:06 lighting us, right? All the economists are wrong. There's no inflation. By the way, there was inflation in July and June and it was rising. But they were saying, oh, everyone's got it wrong. We're the only ones. No, it's very basic because tariffs are attacks. And when we talked about the case from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the first reasoning that they ruled against the Trump regime in imposing emergency tariffs against the world is that they wrote tariffs are taxes. Taxation is the power of Congress. Article 1, not Article 2. So when you have people like Treasury Secretary Scott Lutnik and Treasury's like Scott Bessent and Congress Secretary Howard Lutnik and all these people, they go up and they go, it's not a tax. It's not a tax at all. It's not
Starting point is 00:14:54 getting passed. It does. It is. That's what it is. Now, if you acknowledge what it is, we can then have educated conversations about, should we use it here, strategically, structurally. That's not what they're doing. They're lying about what it is. Donald Trump wakes up one day and he's pissed at the president of Brazil because the insurrectionist former presidents getting prosecuted and Trump gets, you know, he watches something on TV, 50% tariffs on Brazil, 50% tariffs on India. You're just going about it, even if you wanted to do tariffs, which would not be
Starting point is 00:15:27 helpful in a certain way. You're going about it in the wrong way. Anyway, long intro. Let's get into it very quickly, though, Popak, because I want to show two things. One, I want to show Donald Trump in the Oval Office saying two things. I got two clips of him this week. Then I want to show what Maga Mike Johnson was saying. So Donald Trump says it's a Democratic hoax, everything relating to Epstein.
Starting point is 00:15:47 As the Epstein survivors are there in Capitol Hill, Trump saying it's all a hoax, one big democratic hoax. Let's play that clip first. Nobody's going to talk about because they're going to talk about the Epstein, whatever. I understand that we were subpoenaed to give files, and I understand we've given thousands of pages of files. And I know that no matter what you do, it's going to keep going. And I think it's, I think, really, I think it's enough because I think we should talk about the greatness of our country and the success that we're having. I think we're probably having, according to what I read, even from two people in this room, we're having the most successful eight months of any president ever.
Starting point is 00:16:26 And that's what I want to talk about. That's what we should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax. Again, the 33,000 files that were turned over were all. old files that had previously been released. 97% of them were old files. The 3% of new files essentially all redacted where you couldn't read anything that was even in what was released. There are three gigabytes of other files that are out there. You and I... Terabytes. Sorry, three terabytes of data that's out there that needs to be, you know,
Starting point is 00:17:00 release. It'd be easy for it to be released. But then you have Trump saying, It's a hoax. But then Maga Mike Johnson, Michael Popock, says that actually Donald Trump was the informant and the good guy. Here, play this clip. He's not saying that what Epstein did as a hoax. It's a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Marilago. Who's an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down? The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harm. It's detestable to him. He and I have spoken about this as recently as 24 hours ago. He's the informant. He hung out. He was hanging out at all the Epstein events. and best friends with that because he was the informant Michael Popach that he didn't say
Starting point is 00:17:41 it was a hoax play the clip right before where he says it was a hoax. What do you make of it before? Yeah, well, all right. First of all, if he's the informant, then we have him to blame for Epstein getting a sweetheart deal through Alex Acosta, who Donald Trump eventually elevated once he took the White House to be his labor secretary, Alex Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for Miami, Southern District of Florida. So Trump, as the informant, which suggests that he had criminal liability, was giving a loud, paved away for a non-prosecution agreement to keep Epstein on the street, to continue to abuse girls and rape them.
Starting point is 00:18:19 That's what, in the hallway of Congress, that's what our Speaker of the House, that's his new position. All right, let's back up a little bit. All the things that the Trump administration is trying to kill. the Epstein story is backfiring and not working because the American people and MAGA in particular are understandably interested to find out who is in the files and the more that Donald Trump tries to make it go away, the worse it is for him. He called it a hoax. The fact that Mike Johnson says, no, that's not what he meant was the hoax. It's the other thing is the, no, stop. Johnson
Starting point is 00:18:58 meets with the victims, the survivors, for two and a half hours allegedly in his office before the press conference. But you know who didn't meet with them and has not only not embraced them the way they've requested, but has actually trolled them and attack them moments after the press conference is Donald Trump. And during the press conference with the flyover, as you said, he's disrespectful of the survivors. He doesn't believe them. He can't acknowledge what is in the files. What is in the files, this three terabytes we've talked about, we know from reporting includes references to Donald Trump. That Donald Trump has told people, including those on Fox News, that he's very concerned about how things could, quote, unquote, be misconstrued in the Epstein files.
Starting point is 00:19:44 This is the only, we don't have to look for it an exotic reason. This is the reason that Trump has not allowed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release the files as she promised back in February. he will not allow it. So what he's been trying to do is trying to spoon-feed the American people shit, hoping that they'll accept it and they'll move on from this story. So he had Mike Johnson take a recess for the summer, hoping the story, you know, the oxygen would be taken away from the story. Well, it hasn't been, mainly because news organizations like Midas Touch and LegalAF
Starting point is 00:20:17 are so trained on it and so are the American people. MAGA also won't let it go. So that didn't work. Then they said, well, we'll blame Joe Biden. Let's run. J.D. Vance is becoming, for me, it reminds me of what Ann Richard said about Bush. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. J.D. Vancey, they trot him out all the time to try to tamp down stories like Donald Trump's not dying, but if he is dying, I'm ready for the job. That's not what you say out loud if you're trying to distract from a, is Donald Trump alive or dead story. You also don't try to him out to try to kill the Epstein story by trying to blame Biden. So that blew up in their face. So then they decided it's obvious to use the oversight committee. I'm talking about the White House to use the oversight committee to spoon feed cook the books and see if, well, will 30,000 pages satisfy the American people? No. Will the grand jury transcripts from the judges satisfy the American people? No. The only thing,
Starting point is 00:21:20 and he has the power in his, he's got the keys to the door in his pocket, Trump. But he refuses to do it, hoping that everything else will make this story go away. And that allows, in that vacuum, like undercover reporting by what used to be Project Veritas to go undercover on a dating app with somebody who identified themselves and it is identified as the acting director of enforcement for the Department of Justice to go on a date and say,
Starting point is 00:21:52 oh yeah, you know what we're doing with the Epstein files to the woman he thought was a date? We're redacting the names of the Republicans so it only harms the Democrats. And we moved, and we moved Maxwell, a convicted sex predator against BOP guidelines to a Fed spa environment, effectively, to reward her for not talking, not for talking, but to shut her up so that she doesn't point the finger in Donald Trump. And so that came out with a hot mic undercover just in the last couple of days. The way to crush the story, if you're Donald Trump politically, is that you release the files. but you know why he's not releasing the files.
Starting point is 00:22:35 So nothing is helping him in this regard. And it won't. And it will hang around his neck like an albatross through the midterms and beyond. Because I don't ever see him growing a brain and releasing those files. He'll never meet with the victims. He'll never allow, he'll bury his head in the sand when all these people are deposed. Hillary Clinton needs to be deposed. Get the victims there.
Starting point is 00:22:59 Get the details of what happened and how Donald Trump was best friends. friends with convicted child sex traffickers and indicted ones. Get that out into the open, do the public service there, and then let the chips fall where they may. Well, look, if he's the hero in this narrative, as Maga Mike Johnson suggests, you would absolutely want to release that right away. You redact the victims, you show that you were a hero, and you saved the day. My gosh, if you were really the person who helped expose all of this, and because of you,
Starting point is 00:23:28 you know, Epstein was going to be brought to justice, but that's not what happened. There was a sweetheart non-prosecution agreement deal that was entered into as a result of whatever took place during that time period in 2006, 2007, when the local police first and then FBI agents were tipped off about what Epstein was doing in Palm Beach. And this also ties in with the reporting that we got on Michael, from Michael Wolf, where Epstein, though, did think that it was possible that Trump informed on Epstein after a real estate deal, wrong. You know, Epstein and Donald Trump were involved in a lot of things together. They knew each other very well. And oftentimes informants are not good guys. There's a difference between
Starting point is 00:24:12 an undercover cop and a confidential informant. Often confidential informants are involved in the underlying act. I can tell you that because I did a lot of civil cases in Bakersfield that dealt with CIs and confidential informants and how they were utilized. Epstein always thought that when Epstein was threatening to potentially bring litigation against Donald Trump, when they had a falling out of their friendship in that 2004 to 2006 period, that Donald Trump may have told on Epstein secretly in order to get Epstein to not go after Donald Trump. Epstein told Donald Trump about a real estate deal that Epstein was involved in $36 million purchase of a beachfront property on Palm Beach.
Starting point is 00:24:57 Epstein wanted Donald Trump's advice about how to maybe move the pool or what to do with it. And so Epstein asked Donald to come take a look. Then a few days or weeks later, Epstein finds out that the seller sold it to Donald Trump and not Epstein. And Epstein's like, what the hell? I was just asking you for advice. A few years later, Donald Trump resells the same property. All Trump does is paint it. Really, no additions, nothing.
Starting point is 00:25:23 Resells it to a Russian fertilizer oligarch for about two. to X the value. A $40 million, $41 million property sells for about $90 million. And then the Russian oligarch swiftly destroys the property and claims there was mold all over the property. Doesn't take action against Trump. Epstein thought that one of the things that could have been going on there was that there was shady Russian money entering into the United States. He didn't know one way or another, but I think he suspected that. That put him and Trump in a conflict. That's why their relationship. ended and Epstein thought because they knew each other because they were hanging out and being
Starting point is 00:26:01 in all these places together maybe that's what happened and how you know and and how the police were tipped off to know when to show up where to go and and where to look but if Trump is the hero in that story then really then you would want to release the files it would be it would show it would be great but in the Epstein version Trump's not the hero he's potentially an accomplice who then ratted in order to get buy on this real estate deal, which when you think about it fundamentally has some logic to me that something like that could have happened. In any event, release the freaking files. Let's get done with it.
Starting point is 00:26:42 The victims want the files release. Stop using the victims as the reason why you're saying you're not releasing the files. And the American people deserve it. It's not a democratic hoax. I can't think of anything more offensive to say what the Epstein sex trafficking ring than calling it a democratic hoax. What the hell is even going on here? Anyway, when we come back, I want to talk about more.
Starting point is 00:27:05 I want to talk about Trump's massive court losses, Popok. You'll be able to tick them all down. I want to remind everybody, Michael Popock's new law firm, it's absolutely crushing it. The Popok firm. Go to the Popak firm.com or call 877 Popok A.F. One more time, go to thepopocfirm.com or call 877 Popak AF for a free case review today. If you've been injured in a car accident, a trucking accident, you're the victim of sexual harassment, sexual assault. You know people who were the victims of the negligence of others, wrongful death cases, medical malpractice cases, negligent cases.
Starting point is 00:27:44 Call the Popok firm trusted. You know Michael Popok for a very long time. you know the work that he does and he started this firm because you all wanted him to start this firm we're representing right now so many of the uh viewers of this show so give him a call if you have a case we'd love to hear from you and also subscribe to the legal a f substack and the legal af youtube channel we will be right back after our first quick break of the show when you're buried in credit card and loan debt it's human nature to put it off and say i'll deal with it later if that's you Here's a hidden fact that debt strategy experts had done with debt shared with me.
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Starting point is 00:30:19 Your mornings will thank you. Welcome back to LegalAF. Thank you to our sponsors right there that keep this show and this network rolling on. We appreciate them greatly. And thanks for everybody who reached out to the Popak firm.com. Appreciate it. You're in great hands. And we will keep following up about the numbers.
Starting point is 00:30:40 There's so many cases that the Popak firm is representing. All right, let's get into it, Popak. Speaking of cases, it's been loss after loss after loss for the Trump regime. Big losses on big issues in the realm of immigration, alien enemies. Why don't you break down in the Harvard case? You know, there was a, it's always interesting because every what now, every few weeks a rumor percolates that Harvard's about to settle. and they're about to do the deal and sell out the and then sell out there's definitely something
Starting point is 00:31:15 going on behind the scenes there's definitely a divided board of trustees there at Harvard right now and it's probably incredibly tense behind the scenes of people who want to tap out a la Colombia and people who want to fight but the thing is if you can't even for the people who want to tap out you can't do deals with a maniac and a sociopath like Trump. Just like the big law firms have discovered, if you think you're doing pro bono, nope, he now makes you his tariff lawyers. And you say you don't want to do it.
Starting point is 00:31:48 He comes after you again. The only way you can address it, like even out of your own self-interest, assume you don't want to do good. The only way you can deal with him is to stand up to him. I mean, just even take Canada, though, for an example right now. Canada did not do any fake trade deal, unlike other countries that did some fake trade deals with
Starting point is 00:32:11 them. Canada didn't do any trade deal at all. They didn't give them a fake one. There's only like four or five fake ones out there where there's no binding. And then there's that which really aren't deals. But what happened? Nothing. He huffs and he puffs. Nothing different than would have happened with the fake trade deal. And then once he has you in the trade deal, like an abuser, he just abuses you more. You're now in his orbit. And so you got to get the hell out of his orbit and you've got to fight, even out of your self-interest, even out of your survival. If I was their legal advisor on any of these cases, I would say, look, I understand, you know, that you may be being advised by people that your research dollars are important. And maybe you even have bad intent.
Starting point is 00:32:54 Maybe you don't care about standing up for principles of law, which I disagree with, but maybe you don't want to stand up for principles of law. then stand up just for yourself because you do a deal he's coming back for you a third a fourth the fifth the sixth time that's why you got to fight people are fight popa a lot of momentum this week man i mean this sincerely i feel like we came back from summer and right away whether it was the epstein survivors whether it was democrats punching back on the hill in these committee hearings RFK Jr. getting excoriated on the, like, it just felt like Donald Trump and Maga thought they were going to roll into this thing and be like, we're back. Democrats got their groove out of here.
Starting point is 00:33:38 Democrats got their groove back. And what's leading the way are the lawsuits. I just did an interview with one of our contributors, one of our partners on Legal AF, Democracy Forward, who the Atlantic magazine said is the single most troublesome opponent of the Trump administration. I'm not talking about media now because of the lawsuits that they brought, 100 lawsuits. They're winning at a 93% clip. There are almost 400 lawsuits, 400 lawsuits in eight months against the Trump administration. And whether it's the attorneys general, 23 Democratic attorneys general, like the one in California,
Starting point is 00:34:21 Rob Banta, the ACLU, Democracy Forward, groups led by Norm Eisen, you name it, new groups you never heard of that weren't here in the first administration, NAACP, which of course you have heard of. They are filing cases at a rapid rate because we're watching an administration that is devolving before our very eyes tracking the de-evolution of Donald Trump's physical and mental health. I mean, the fact that we even have to speculate, is he dead or alive? If he's alive, why does he look dead? You know, what's with the makeup? Is that the cover-up? I mean, the fact that we have to even do that as Donald Trump single-handedly destroys our public health system, which is going to be, and is going to be a major issue to run the bastards out at the midterms.
Starting point is 00:35:10 You know, but you always have to come back to the lawsuits and to the litigation. And we just had, I keep, I'm coming, I'm losing adjectives for a lot of. like the worst round of the worst week in Donald Trump's life in court. But I've said that before. But look, we've got on major issues across six different courts. And there's been other rulings as well. These are the, if you had to rank them, like the biggest ones of the week going back eight days or so.
Starting point is 00:35:40 This is in six different courts from San Francisco to Massachusetts to D.C., appellate courts and trial courts on fundamental constitutional issues, which meant. of them are on fast track to the United States Supreme Court, but we'll have to see. You let off with Harvard, so let's lead off with Harvard. You're right about what's going on in the back room. Donald Trump pounding the table and saying, I'm not going to reinstate the $2.3 billion worth of, now let's remember what this is, because I don't want these numbers just to lead to glossy eyes here. $2.3 billion in medical, scientific, and technological research.
Starting point is 00:36:17 research in America, R&D, is done fundamentally at the major university level. Sure, there are major companies that do their own R&D, but if you're looking for things that don't necessarily, can't be commercialized immediately, but may impact and help people from dying from cancer, from the next pandemic, from all of that, it's at the university level and Harvard first among them as our leading university and leading research university.
Starting point is 00:36:46 the $2.3 billion or so of grants that were canceled by Donald Trump that have been reinstated by Judge Burroughs in Massachusetts. The bulk of it was from the National Institute of Health, from the Centers for Disease Control. These were research grants to make people well and healthy and stop them from dying. And I've said this on a hot take, and it is true. It's unfortunate but true. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die just as they did because, of his COVID policies are going to die because of Donald Trump's depraved, unscientific quackery in public health than any other time.
Starting point is 00:37:29 I mean, direct correlation to his public health policies, led by RFK Jr., the vaccine denier, science denier, medicine denier at the helm. And that's a fact, just as you can put the bodies of Americans who died from COVID, because of Donald Trump's failed policies related to that in containment and the rest. And just to stay on public health for a minute, because it links back to Harvard. Donald Trump, who bragged to everybody about Operation Warp Speed making vaccines, just had his head of public health cancel a $500 billion vaccine program led by some of those same entities that created the vaccine for COVID.
Starting point is 00:38:11 We are not ready for the next pandemic. We are not ready for the next epidemic, which doesn't come from America. It comes from overseas. We just withdrew from global public health in research, in funding. That's where it comes from. It comes from China.
Starting point is 00:38:31 I'm not about blaming the country, but it comes from Africa. It comes from China. It's not coming from Idaho. It's not coming from Baltimore or Boston or Chicago. So all of that comes to a head in Harvard. the judge reinstates the $2.3 billion grants, finding that Donald Trump's administration
Starting point is 00:38:48 violated the First Amendment rights, among other things, of Harvard University, that the sole reason that they were attacked and their grants were terminated had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, which is with a false flag that Donald Trump flew under. It had to do with woke. Donald Trump loves that word.
Starting point is 00:39:08 The Department of Defense needs to be changed the Department of War because it became the Department of Defense. defense during a woke, a woke period, what, in the 1940s, so he says, well, we got to go after anti-Semitism. The research wasn't anti-Semitic. The judge was like, there's no link between anti-Semitism and the research. Instead, look at what Donald Trump said out of its own mouth and his own fingertips, which is liberal, leftist, woke ideology, we need to get rid of the teachers and the students and this, that, that is the reason, the retaliatory First Amendment viewpoint-based
Starting point is 00:39:43 First Amendment violation, and she has reinstated it. The Harvard fight that you're so rightly pointing out is that behind the scenes, including with a new trustee that is a right-wing respected Republican who joined that board of trustees about five months ago, who I thought when he joined was going to try to find a way to settle. Donald Trump is demanding a $500 million tithe or tribute to be paid to his administration in order to reinstate it. Now the tables have turned because they're winning in court. They're going to likely win at the First Circuit.
Starting point is 00:40:22 Well, I'll have to see what happens to the United States Supreme Court about whether they're going to allow the defunding of America's higher education institutions because Donald Trump says so. And it's hard to tell with this court. You know, you and I have always, you know, it's hard to tell where maggot on the Supreme Court is in any given moment on any given issue like this and whether they're going to allow it to happen, even though many on the court went to Harvard. But you're right about the fight back. The easiest contrast is Canada versus Mexico. Canada doing an amazing job, elbows up with a
Starting point is 00:40:56 central banker as its prime minister, fighting back and winning to protect the Canadian economy and punish, rightly so, the Trump administration, in ways that they can do. Tourism, for instance, there are loss of 10% in tourism is Canada's game and the dollars behind it. Hundreds of billions of dollars of tourism has been lost in the last nine months and the jobs behind all of that. Much of it back to Canada. Mexico, on the other hand, has been trying to, and I like Shinebaum a lot, and she's been successful
Starting point is 00:41:27 in getting many postponements of her tariffs, but because she is bargaining with him constantly, he is, Trump is constantly coming back to her for more and more and more and more. So she finds herself in a deadly cycle of having to constantly compromise in order to get Donald Trump off her back, whereas Canada is in the fighting mode. And I think we've seen that contrast. And the world is watching that contrast of what's happening. So we have the win at Harvard.
Starting point is 00:41:54 But that's not the only win. That was Massachusetts. Then you've got the Alien Enemies Act, which because of his failures in the lawsuits, and because of the attention we brought to it on Midas and on Legal A.F., He has not used the Alien Enemies Act to deport anybody since March. And that's not by coincidence. It's not like he forgot about it. It's because he's losing badly between the Ibrago-Garcia case and the losses now at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals,
Starting point is 00:42:22 which leans to the right, two to one ruled that after a remand from the United States Supreme Court, ruled that Donald Trump could not use the Alien Enemies Act and improperly used it, unconstitutionally used it, in violation of the statute, by deporting hundreds of people from Texas or trying to
Starting point is 00:42:42 by claiming that there was an enemy invasion, a war, no declared war with Congress, predatory invasion or incursion. They said there were none of those things. You cannot use the Alien Enemies Act. The only thing they said was okay with a decision within the decision
Starting point is 00:43:03 was a two-to-one that his seven-day notice was proper due process. Another one of the judges said 21 days is the, but so they had a little internal fight about that. But as the Alien Enemies Act, which was the framework by which Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:43:18 started deporting 200 people to the torture prisons of El Salvador and then in other places, that is now the first court, up now back to the Supreme Court as to whether Donald Trump can call the Alien Enemies Act, he could just declare a national crisis.
Starting point is 00:43:32 Now, that day, when that judgment came out, is the day that he bombed out of existence, 11 people without due process, without a court of law, without a conviction, where he claimed to be Venezuelan drug lords working for Trendaaragua. That's not a coincidence.
Starting point is 00:43:51 He's got to create a war. It's not the first time in American history. We ever bombed a ship as a pretext to a war. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin. So he bombed a fishing boat and then claimed, well, they couldn't get their story straight. Marco Rubio, who's leading the charge here, It's like, see, we did drug interdiction.
Starting point is 00:44:08 When you see the interview with Marco Rubio and they caught him coming off the plane in other places, he never talked about we're at war with the Maduro regime in Venezuela. He said, drugs, drug interdiction. We're stopping drugs from spreading through the Caribbean. I'm like, that's our new job to stop drug interdiction in the Caribbean by bombing ships with our military? No, that's so Donald Trump can say,
Starting point is 00:44:29 look, we're at war with Venezuela. So we had that, we had that bad ruling. Again, as I said at the top, look for the wag the dog moments when Donald Trump tries to start a war or dump some files on us or sues a city or federalizes National Guard and creates a federal police force to have an occupying standing army. That's off of a bad news cycle from that particular day. The posse combatatus, that was Tuesday coming off a Labor Day. We get the decision by Judge Breyer in San Francisco. Now we're in our third court.
Starting point is 00:45:04 Again, this is all the same week in which he rules, he made a chilling observation and finding on the way to finding that the Posse Comitatis Act had been violated by Donald Trump. And the easiest way to explain the PCA, for those that are joining late to the story, is that you are not allowed under our system of constitutional Republican federalism if you're a president to create a standing army and use the might of the U.S. military on domestic soil for civilian law enforcement purposes. That's the POSICOMMENTATIS Act in a nutshell. Whether you federalize the State National Guard,
Starting point is 00:45:44 or you create your own boot-jacked group of shock troops, which Donald Trump is doing through ICE and Border Patrol, and through the U.S. Marshal Service, whatever you're doing and you're creating a standing army, which is the very reason we left England with a Declaration of Independence, that violates the Posse Comitatis Act. But Breyer went further in the first page or so of his decision. He said, what we are watching is a president creating a federal police force with him as the chief,
Starting point is 00:46:16 all in violation of the Possi Combatatus Act. So when you hear that Trump is attacking the Boston mayor or the city of Boston or the city of Chicago, we'll put up a beam related to that, or going after Cleveland, or going after other blue cities or states, taking his shock forces on the road. All of that is a violation of our system of federalism about the power of the states and their sovereignty, the role of the militia in those places,
Starting point is 00:46:45 and is unconstitutional. Now we have our first decision. It'll go up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I just interviewed Rob Banta, the Attorney General, about this. You can find it on Legal AF Substack as well. And ultimately to the Supreme Court, which is sat on the sidelines because they haven't been asked to do anything yet.
Starting point is 00:47:02 related to the Posse Comitatis Act. And fresh on the heels of that ruling, the District of Columbia filed a new lawsuit in order to get the militia, federalized militia, and the Marines and others off the streets of D.C. once and for all. And that is a direct consequence of Judge Breyer's ruling in San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:47:22 So these things have consequences. You've got, you want to put up his attack on Chicago, a sovereign state? Yeah, let's put up the meme right here. that Donald Trump posted this morning, a photo of him saying, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War.
Starting point is 00:47:48 And it's a reference to, I guess, the movie Apocalypse now, Vietnam movie, but he's calling it Chiapocalypse now. And the implication is that he's going to send in our military to, what, put Agent Orange all over Chicago and to kill the people of Chicago and invade it? I want to talk about that, Popak, but I want to take another quick break, but I want to say one thing before doing that,
Starting point is 00:48:15 which is all of this also hinges on the Supreme Court, having given Donald Trump absolute immunity last year or two years ago at this point in that horrific ruling. Because the absolute immunity ruling, if it didn't exist and he didn't have immunity, these are willful violations of the law, meaning he should be criminally prosecuted for this behavior.
Starting point is 00:48:43 If you go and just start killing people and murdering people and causing people to die and there are willful violations of the law, that's prison stuff, that's felony stuff, that's treason stuff, that's traitorous stuff. But the Supreme Court's absolute immunity, well, if you say you were doing it in the course and scope of what your executive functions are, just tether it to a war power, which is why Donald Trump always says it's a war power, it's a war power, it's a war power. Then you don't get, then you don't even have the fear of being criminally prosecuted, which every other president in the history of the United States would think I could be criminally prosecuted for this. Their behavior was such as the president of the United States other than Nixon. you know, and a few, and a bunch of others in the 19th century and act like everything. They're all great. But their behavior was such that
Starting point is 00:49:37 modern day presidents wouldn't be like, oh my God, am I going to be criminally prosecuted? But like literally everything that Donald Trump does in a day, forget it being an impeachable offense. You know, in my opinion, a lot of this stuff is just absolutely criminal. And he hides behind immunity. So let's talk about some of more of the Trump court losses, but let's take our last quick break of the day. A reminder, go to the Popockfirm.com website if you haven't already or call 877 Popok AF, 877 Popok AF or go to the Popok firm.com. Get a free case review today. If you've been in a car accident, a trucking
Starting point is 00:50:12 accident, if you've been the victim of somebody else's negligence in some other way, if you know somebody who's been the victim of wrongful death, or if you know people who may have a case, just tell them to reach out to Popok. Sexual harassment cases, sexual. Sexual assault cases, employment-related cases involving sexual assault and sexual harassment, medical malpractice, reach out to the Popok firm, get a free case evaluation, and especially it's not some people like, well, I was in a car accident or a trucking accident and I was hit, but I don't want to bother the Popak firm. You're not bothering the Popat firm. Reach out to them. That's what they're here for. They're here to help you. There's no, it's not like, oh, we're not
Starting point is 00:50:52 going to do it as a car. That's exactly the type of cases they do. So reach out. Also, check out Popock's YouTube channel, the LegalAF YouTube channel surging on its way to one million subscribers and also check out the LegalAF substack, legal AF substack surging as well. Check it out, everybody. We will be right back after our last quick break of the show. If you've ever experienced discomfort from heat and sweat, especially during the summer months, it's time to rethink how you care for your personal hygiene. I recently installed a tushy bidet. And the difference has been remarkable. Instillation was simple and took about 10 minutes. The bidet fits seamlessly into my bathroom, adding a modern touch. Using warm water to cleanse instead of toilet paper
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Starting point is 00:53:57 Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to all of our sponsors there. Thank you, everybody, for reaching out to the Popak firm.com. We're calling 877 Popak AF. And he has a special shout out to those sponsors. Jordi negotiates those discount codes. And we try to make sure we're only finding sponsors who align with the brand and the mission. and that would be and stuff that you would like. So please check them out if you can.
Starting point is 00:54:22 It helps us out as well. All right, Popak, let's chat about the other court losses. I mean, you have what, at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., right, a memorial Labor Day weekend. You had Trump trying to deport 600 Guatemalan orphans in the middle of the night where they could go back and potentially get killed, and then the court sets an emergency hearing there. You've got Trump rushed into the Supreme Court. Where do you want to start? Yeah, well, let me back up one second. This is so bad that you've got 10 different federal judges who gave an interview to NBC in the last couple of days anonymously in which they said back to the Supreme Court for a minute that they don't feel properly supported by the United States Supreme Court that they're doing their job. They're applying the law to the facts. They're applying precedent. They're doing the analysis. They're issuing injunctions. And the Supreme Court is sitting up on high and criticizing them and critiquing them and telling them that
Starting point is 00:55:16 they did it wrong or they got it wrong and they're sort of fed up i mean i rarely have heard i mean i've been doing this for 35 years i've never heard of federal judges even anonymously especially in this administration taking to the airwaves to complain about their bosses we saw it however um i'm going to do the uh since we we let off with the 600 kids i'll go there nothing says i am doing something depraved underhanded and in violation of the in violation of the Constitution, like loading 78 children onto a plane at one o'clock in the morning who were part of a refugee resettlement program without adults on board, without due process, and hoping to get away with it.
Starting point is 00:56:02 See, that's the opposite of doing things in the sunshine. That literally is doing things in the middle of the night, hoping that a federal judge won't find out about it. Well, they did, because the children, some of them I assume had cell phones. Immigration rights advocates sprung into action and been in under an hour, because they have these suits ready to go in draft, they filed an emergency lawsuit in federal court in D.C. to stop those planes. It got assigned to the emergency duty judge who happened to be that day, Judge Sparkle Sukhannan, who is an immigrant herself, came from Trinidad and Tobago, our honors all the way
Starting point is 00:56:39 through her career, top leader at the Department of Justice, including the Civil Rights Division under Joe Biden, clerk for Justice Sotomayor, I mean, just the right judge for this. She gets the, she gets it, it files at 2 o'clock, a.m. Sunday morning, Labor Day weekend. She's, it gets assigned to her randomly. Within 45 minutes, she's on the phone trying to find somebody at 3.30 in the morning at the Department of Justice. And nobody's home on purpose, I'm sure. To pick up the phone for a federal judge who's trying to find them to set the hearing. She enters two temporary restraining orders almost immediately. She schedules a hearing.
Starting point is 00:57:16 She moves the date of the hearing, the time of the hearing up, and then has because of knowing that the planes are about to leave. And then she issues no less than 15 orders in less than 24 hours, what we call these minute order entries, to require not only that they get those kids off the plane, She then certifies a class of another 530 Guatemalans who are part of the refugee resettlement program. I'll talk about that in a minute. And who are now part of this putative class, this potential class, she then, with a temporary restraining order on top of it,
Starting point is 00:57:55 and then makes the government every two hours or every hour report in about getting those kids off the plane and getting them back into the office of refugee resettlement. she then sets and that finally happens after like 18 hours they get them all back and accounted for allegedly she then sets a briefing schedule for that has already begun on the preliminary injunction and the class action to be certified but the case gets kicked over because she's the emergency judge to a a permanent judge which happens to be tim kelly who is her trump appointee i wouldn't call him maga but he is conservative he is right wing he was the protege of of the grassley chuck grassley who's the 80 year old head of the senate judiciary committee so he and he worked on the judiciary committee along with
Starting point is 00:58:49 the department of justice i've seen a rule against the trump administration i've seen a rule for it we'll have to see what he's going to do next i only back check is 91 years old chuck grassley i'm so sorry it's not even the octogenarians it's the whatever that's a nautogenarian whatever they Yeah. The interesting thing about it, or the deprave thing about it, is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services. I just interviewed, it's going up tomorrow, a senior lawyer for the International Refugee Assistance Project, IRA, who just argued at the Ninth Circuit, she was in the room for this on Wednesday, to try to get 120,000 approved refugees who have been blocked by Donald Trump. from resettlement, back into resettlement, some of them waiting three to four years. She told me something that I didn't know. I'm not sure you knew either.
Starting point is 00:59:42 Refugees who are approved by the Department of Homeland Security are the most vigorously vetted and given due diligence about their application than any other group of migrants who try to come to America. And they passed. And Donald Trump still doesn't want those. And this is refugees. This is the foundation of America. This is literally the base of the Statue of Liberty
Starting point is 01:00:07 is Emma Lazarus' poem about refugees. My grandfather was a refugee. I'm sort of sensitive to this issue, who came to this country on a boat but came through Ellis Island and got naturalized. So this is who we're talking. We're talking about refugees. There's some people who are worried about being persecuted
Starting point is 01:00:25 and murdered in their home countries and have done everything right to come here with dignity to America to start a new life. and to be a contributing member of our society. And Donald Trump blocks them and stops them, including children, and then has the balls to have his lawyers stand up in court in that hearing, truancent of all people,
Starting point is 01:00:45 who has been accused of lying to federal judges by whistleblowers in this about planes and immigrants to say to the judge, Judge, you got it all wrong. This is a family reunification program, a pilot. This is the Orwellian language they use. We're reuniting families in Guatemala. These are the same families that sent them to America alone because of the life that they were leading in Guatemala.
Starting point is 01:01:13 So you've got that that happened. This is all the same week, just to remind people. Then you've got the Federal Trade Commission case where Rebecca Slaughter got herself reinstated, subject to a Supreme Court appeal that Donald Trump has taken, when Donald Trump just decided to fire the only Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission. And there's a problem with that.
Starting point is 01:01:33 There's a case that you and I have talked about at length called Humphreys Executor from 1935. Humphreys was a Federal Trade Commission commissioner, just like he was Rebecca Slaughter. And he successfully sued creating the precedent that's still on the books that says, at least for the Federal Trade Commission, that they are not allowed to be fired without cause. My problem that the Supreme Court has been doing, when they've been allowing these commission, and other agents, board members, to be fired is that my belief, I have a working theory that when Congress, whatever Congress it was, created these agencies and commissions, that part of the material part of them doing that was that they would have a bipartisan, non-political, nonpartisan board
Starting point is 01:02:22 with long terms that overlapped and no one president being able, through political whim to change its membership. And that was a fundamental foundational requirement to set up the executive agency then turned over to the president. But all the Supreme Court looks at is they just take a blue pencil and go, well, we'll keep the agency, but we'll get rid of the foundational governance component of it. And I'm like, how do you get to do that? Maybe Congress would not have created that agency that way or that commission. Had they known that you were going to say it was illegal or unconstitutional for us to require four cause before somebody gets fired. Now, on the FTC, this is the pushback of the appellate courts and the trial courts against
Starting point is 01:03:09 the Supreme Court. Millette, Pallard, it was a two to one decision, wrote in their opinion, effectively challenging the Supreme Court, they said, we're not going to do your job for you. You told us, as appellate judges, that we need to apply. the extant precedent, the precedent on the books. This precedent is on all fours. It's exactly the case. We're applying the case you told us to apply that only you can change a precedent. So we're not going to do your job for you. Literally, they wrote this. You do your job. And we're going to apply the precedent as written. And these other cases that you've done, where you've let people be
Starting point is 01:03:49 fired with just procedural emergency shadow dockets without getting to the substance, we're going to look at the law you've left on the books. Now, let me just explain it quickly this way. The argument is for the Supreme Court, on a sliding scale, the more executive power that an agency or commission exercises, the more the Supreme Court wants the president to be able to fire them without cause. If you're on the other end, the least amount of executive power being exercised, then the for-cause requirement is okay. So that's the scale. And that's the fight. So Trump's arguing, oh, the FTC of today is nothing like the FTC of 1935. It exercises tremendous amount of executive power, and we can fire without cause as a result. So that's going to be
Starting point is 01:04:37 the push poll we're going to see at the United States Supreme Court. Is there, are there five votes to destroy Humphrey's executor and put it out of its misery or Trump's misery once and for all? That is the question. But it has been teed up with another loss for the Trump administration related to his ability to fire people at will, while we watch him continue to go after Lisa Cook and others. One note on that, because we just did great reporting on this on Midas Dutch Network and off of ProPublica's reporting. He's using as his four cause when he needs four cause or going after people, he's using mortgage fraud, claiming that people that have two primary home mortgages, meaning they got a little bit of a rate cut, but they have two properties. They claim to be
Starting point is 01:05:25 their primary when you can only have one. That is mortgage fraud to get rid of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, to get rid of Adam Schiff as a senator from California, to get rid of the New York Attorney General, Lettisha Jains. The only problem with that is 20, according to ProPublica, 20% of his cabinet has the exact same problem. So it's either mortgage fraud and Bill Pulte and Donald Trump and the Department of Justice need to go after the Labor Secretary, the Transportation Secretary, and the EPA administrator, or it's not mortgage fraud. And the reality, is, according to reporting that's gone out there, including from the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia, this is not really mortgage fraud, that banks encourage people to check the box
Starting point is 01:06:04 for primary residents more than once to make the loan. They don't really care. Sometimes it's the same bank giving the loan, the two loans to the same person. And then what is a borrower supposed to do? They get a raft of documents electronically, sometimes on an iPad. It's check, check, check, check. You know, they're not real estate law experts. And so they have two mortgages that have maybe they maybe they would have got a slightly different rate. It's just ironic that a president who has still been a judge to be a fraudster when it comes to mortgages, loans, and real estate property is the one that's going after people for mortgage fraud. And it wasn't in Trump's case, which is primary residence versus not primary residence,
Starting point is 01:06:50 which the fact that Donald Trump lives in a club which he is not supposed to live in as a residence in order to avoid paying state income tax as well and other things is its own area. Trump's mortgage-related issues dealt with him claiming a certain value on a property when it came to taking out loans on the property and very different values of the property.
Starting point is 01:07:22 This was when it came to insurance and when it came to property taxes and when it came to other things. And so in the case of Trump, he had to, it's an issue of intent. Like the issue with Trump was never, oh, you know, you click this box versus that box, gotcha. It was, there was a plan over debt,
Starting point is 01:07:48 decades of increasing and decreasing valuations on a property in order to extract unlawful benefits for yourself. That's what the case was about. Not, you know, did you go through a form and did you accidentally check one wrong box or whatever? In any event, if indeed there was a criminal prosecution of somebody like Elisa Cook, if there was a criminal prosecution or a civil case that went through the process and there was an adjudication after the evidence came out and there was a finding of liability of fraud when the evidence comes out,
Starting point is 01:08:35 then, you know, Popak, I would think in that case, you know, okay, maybe it was more than just to check the box. Donald Trump's case, when it came to business records, he's a felon. He's a felon. when it comes to valuations he's found civilly liable when it comes to sexual assault he's found civilly liable there there are actual findings and so here we've now learned to your point that you know it's 20% of trump's cabinet does the same thing bill pulty the fair housing administrator his family members you know we're we're doing the same thing if you were to prosecute
Starting point is 01:09:13 alisa cook for doing this you'd basically have to prosecute a lot of the country and in that case and it would harm the banking industry it would while already home sales are tanking right now and and the housing industry suffering so they're not prosecuted they are you know i i had on the show last night um um um la monica mcguiver congresswoman who was arrested um and they're prosecuting her um out of new jersey so much of what the trump regime is trying to do is huff and puff and intimidate and get you to submit based on using the full force of the federal government. But there's no there's no there there there at all. And so I think it's important that shows like this continue to shed light on what's really
Starting point is 01:10:05 happening, break down the facts. And the court system is still functioning. It's completely under assault by the regime, but it is still functioning. And you have all these federal judges, Bush appointees to, Reagan appointees to Clinton Obama appointees and a few Trump appointees as well who are like, what the hell is going on here? This is not law and order under the Trump regime. It's not law and order. And I like to approach this show Legal A.F from a very nonpartisan lens. I don't think that this should be a Democrat or a Republican or an independent issue.
Starting point is 01:10:40 I think that an evidence-based fact-based system is something that we should all want. We could form our opinions there. after, but let's go through the evidence, the facts, the documents, the tape, and let's see it. You know, I'll close with this, unless Popak you wanted it and anything else before we go. Again, this is Governor Pritzker posted in response to Donald Trump's post. I mean, why would you want, if you're a Republican, if you're just any American, why would you want the president of the United States to post a meme of himself invading an American city and calling it chipocalypse now, like apocalypse now, and send imagery of your
Starting point is 01:11:25 United States military destroying a major American city and say, I love the smell of deportations. Chicago's about to find out why it's called the Department of War, to which the governor of Illinois has to respond. The president of the United States is threatening to go to war within American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Trump isn't a strong man. Here, pull that up one more time.
Starting point is 01:11:50 Trump isn't a strong man. He is a scared man. Illinois won't be intimidated by a wannabe dictator. And it just makes us look weak. If you think that that makes us look strong abroad, you are a very weak person because I can assure you that everyone from allies to enemies or former allies at this point, watch that and go, oh, they're crazy. these are crazy weak weird people over there like the laughing stock of the world as trump used to say
Starting point is 01:12:21 they're laughing on us they weren't trust me they were not laughing at us right now there's a combination of laughing at us and horror at what the united states of america has become but we'll keep on fighting i feel momentum you got governors like pritzker and newsome and others fighting back you've got incredible candidates that we're seeing whether it's it is, you know, in Maine, whether it is in New York, across the country, and you've got those great Bernie rallies that are taking place also that we're covering here. But that's all for me. Popak, anything else do you want to say before we go?
Starting point is 01:12:59 No, I think we've got our groove back. I mean, people were wondering what phase we're in after waiting nine months. And I think there was a very short honeymoon phase for Donald Trump, but the crashing economy and public health crisis and Epstein scandal. personal health scandal, has dashed any hopes that Donald Trump will have a successful administration. We don't pray, we didn't pray for that, as you said, if he had just gulfed and left the Biden economy alone and didn't try to destroy the relationship between the federal government and the states and its people, he would be doing a lot better in every measure of a presidency.
Starting point is 01:13:37 But if you wanted to know what a failed presidency look like, because you've only read about it in history books, you are watching a failed presidency right now. I almost laughed out loud, I think, where I had myself on mute when you showed the clip of him in the White House talking about, I think by every measure, including by a couple of people in this room, this is the most successful eight months in history. I mean, that just shows you the dementia and the delusional aspect of what he's peddling to the American people. And it's just not working. He can go on and have all of his people go on and they keep floating these. I'll just end it this way. They keep floating these things like Scott Beset, the Treasury Secretary,
Starting point is 01:14:17 who I thought was reasonably normal coming in, saying we got Federal Reserve, we got to get them out of banking regulation. We don't need the independent Federal Reserve any longer. Howard Lutnik going on television, constantly talking about how great the economy is, while people are suff... These are the words from the Federal Reserve-Bage Book survey and from other surveys that came out this week. The operative words, the dominant words,
Starting point is 01:14:42 vocabulary being used by Americans right now is struggling and suffering. Those are the two adjectives that are being assigned to the Trump administration. And he thinks it's funny. And we could spend an entire show just doing the memes he's using at the Department of Homeland Security to hire people,
Starting point is 01:14:59 which look like Nazi and white supremacist propaganda. What you just saw there, which is the smell of napal in the morning with Robert Duval from Apocalypse Now. This is a war that he's threatening sitting from his pulpit as the commander-in-chief of the United States against other sovereign states
Starting point is 01:15:18 which is part of our federalism. And if it's not Chicago, then it's Boston, then it's Philadelphia, then it's Cleveland, then it's California, and they're all fighting back. You had a great interview with Larry Krasner, the DA for Philadelphia, where he set a version of, I don't know, we might have to start arresting federal officers
Starting point is 01:15:35 who come here to try to violate our sovereignty. These are the things that are not just tabletop, exercises anymore. This is what the Democrats in the major states, we got 23 states and hundreds of cities that we control, are having to sit around and talk about the break the glass moment. What if Donald Trump does the opposite of what, or he thinks he's the new Lincoln who's going to go after renegade democratic cities and states? What do we do in response? Exactly. We fight back. We get out the information. We organize. We bring people together. We talk about the No King's protests happening in October.
Starting point is 01:16:15 We highlight the survivors of Epstein. We interview people like Congresswoman McGiver. We give people platforms here in Chicago, Lieutenant Governor Stratton, coming on the Midas Touch Network, telling us what she's doing there. Governor Pritzker coming on, Governor Newsom coming on Bernie Sanders, coming on Mondami, getting you a wide view of perspectives and getting the information out there in terms of what you can do as well. Look, I would love if Donald Trump really did bring in $17 trillion. We wouldn't have needed to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. It would be great if inflation was zero right now, as he claims. But that's a lie.
Starting point is 01:16:51 He'd be great if gas was $1.99 and everything was so affordable. But that's not true. It'd be great if there was peace in Ukraine in 24 hours and the atrocities in Gaza stopped and the hostages were returned and everything was great. Would be fantastic if all of those things happened, which he said he would do. Not happening at all. Instead, he says, I brought in $17 trillion. I stopped 7 to 10 wars.
Starting point is 01:17:13 The Epstein files are a hoax. And then he posts memes of himself invading Chicago when he finds it funny. It's not funny. It's deeply serious, but this community is deeply serious and it's ready to fight back. Thank you all for watching a reminder. Check out Michael Popak's law firm. Please give him a call. Don't be shy.
Starting point is 01:17:29 If you were in a car accident, a trucking accident, if you need legal representation, please give a call to the Popak firm by calling 877 Popok A.F. 877 Popak AF or go to the Popak firm.com if you've been injured in a car accident, trucking accident, if you know someone who's been injured in that type of accident, any type of catastrophic injury, if you know people who are the victims in a wrongful death case, sexual harassment, sexual assault, medical malpractice, please don't be shy, give a call. Don't be like, I don't know, was Popok one here? Yes, he's got lawyers across the country who want to be helpful. So please give a call if you can or go to the website and fill out the form.
Starting point is 01:18:07 A reminder, Michael Popock's YouTube channel on its way to 1 million subscribers. That's the LegalAF YouTube channel. Subscribe there and subscribe to Michael Popock's substack as well. The LegalAF substack is absolutely crushing it. Hey, thanks everybody for watching. We appreciate you. We are grateful for you all. And we'll see you next time on LegalAF.

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