Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Palin’s Runaway Jury and Trump is Up S#%@$’s creek without a Mazars

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Welcome—Legal AF Midweek edition with your hosts Michael Popok and Karen Friedman Agnifilo. On today’s :40 minute pod, and in rapid-fire, edge of your seat, fashion will take on: (1) Sarah Palin���s 2-Time Loser Libel case against the New York Times, and what it means for the First Amendment now and in the future; and (2) the Trump Organization is now officially up sh@#$#@ ‘s creek without a Mazars, as its long-time accountant now says in a NYAG filing that 10 year’s worth of financials are “unreliable.” And finally, a new segment –Mailbag—where KFA and Popok answer our listeners/viewers’ legal/political questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to LegalA F Midweek Edition. I am ringing an imaginary triangle. Come and get it. A hearty, happy helping of legal and political analysis with your co-hosts, Michael Popakans. Karen Friedman Agnipola, nice to see you. Karen Friedman Agnipola. We're doing midweek. We got lots to talk about. Two big things and a new segment on midweek edition, which is mailbag. We're taking things out of the Twitter feed. People that have asked us questions

that they want KFA and Popok to address. And we're gonna do it. I love that new edition to the show. Credit out, shout out to a high school friend of mine, Danny Berg, who watches a lot of podcasts and wrote me separately. It said, you got to do mail back. And I wrote what's mail back. And so from there, the rest of this history and you know what, we got a lot of great ideas. And we're going to pick a couple of them to talk about tonight. Two things in our main segment that we're

going to do in the in this 30 or 40 minute midweek is going to be talking about the Jan 6th first trial, February 28th, that's going to happen in DC against one guy. We, I love this guy, Guy Wesley refit, who is a Texas oil executive or oil worker. And we're going to talk about the whole trove of information that the prosecutor's office is going to bring out against him, including his own children, and testifying it against him when this trial. This is going to be grabbed the popcorn. You're going to see the DOJ main justice and the US attorney's office for DC on full display and to give you a roadmap at how they're going to do the other 500 prosecutions that are left in the tank. And then we're going to talk about

Sarah Palin, which we've been following on the weekend edition. And we have a result. We have a conclusion just the way that Ben and I had predicted it. We've got a two time libel loser in Sarah Palin. We're going to talk about that. And in the mail back, two concepts for today in legal AF law school. One is spousal immunity and all the people that are married and what about their wives and vice versa at KFA. I'll take that one. And I'm going to talk about the development this week where Mazar's the accounting firm for 15 years with the Trump organization, wrote a letter to the lawyer for the Trump organization and said, we are walking away from all of our financial reporting, auditing and certification, and telling the world that all prior financial

reports to the Trump organization are not reliable. So that's what we got a lot to talk about. Karen, I don't even know how we're going to cram it all in, but we are going to don't you think? I think so. Like I said, I love this new addition to the mailbag. I was reading all the questions thinking how are we going to pick which one because it's so interesting. Yeah, and it will keep doing this. This will be a nice new, a nice new version of what we're doing today. So let's, let's kick it off with Guy Wesley refit, a member of the three percenters out of Texas. They are a right wing militia organization in the mold of the proud boys. And why this moron decided out of 700 people that have been indicted that he's going to take it to trial. Now, obviously, I'm going to give my opinion.

He knows he's going to lose when, when, especially he must have crap the bed when he saw the witness and exhibit list that the government had a file on seventh February, and we'll go over that in detail. But the only reason this guy against this much evidence, video evidence, tape recordings, cell tower evidence, his own children testifying against him. Another three percent who got immunity testifying against him has decided against all odds to have his

day in court. Why do you think that is, KFA? I think reading, it's hard to understand and sort of understand what they're saying, but I think it's his intent. He's going with the, I didn't mean to cause any of the things that they're accusing me of. And he wants to draw a distinction between a protest and an insurrection or a crime, you know, sort of what's a, what's a lawful protest and what's a crime? That was my guy.

What about you? Well, I, I would have went with that except the guy was caught with a pistol in his waistband. And when they executed the search warrant, they pulled out not one, but 240 caliber weapons, 28 rounds of ammunition, a vest, a zip lock ties that you use for handcuffs and the like. I leaned a little bit differently. I leaned towards this guy wants to be a martyr. He knows he's a dead bang loser. He knows that the full weight and power of the US government is going to come down on him. I mean, literally everything they've been assembling for the last year. Since almost hours after the end of the insurrection or the put down the insurrection, they are going to be trotting out against this

guy, which I want to ask you that that I think is good and bad. Is it overkill because do they have to put on this much of a case, especially when they've got four or 500 other people who are now going to be taking copious notes with their lawyers about what the case looks like. What do you think about that? Do they need to bring this heavy, that's to come this heavy against this particular guy? Well, first of all, they have to prove every element of every crime, right? That's charged against him. And in mass arrest cases, they're hard because if you're going to have people testify about what happened, they weren't looking at any one particular person. They were looking at the whole scene and the whole situation. So this is largely going to be prosecuted based on video.

And it's going to be sort of looking at the video and picking out who he was and what he was doing because there can't possibly be tons of witnesses who can say exactly what this guy was doing just because there were so many people and it was such a chaotic scene. So, well, let me, let me interject on that because I did read to me the guy with the horns and, you know, the, the, for co, I think, I love him too. And I think everybody knows who he was, right? He stood out. But this guy looked like just anybody else in the crowd. And with that many people, go ahead. Yeah, except, except in the 11 page filing by the federal government, which I you'll tell you'll tell our legal a after is why the prosecution has to

do that in advance. They laid out their witnesses, their civilian witnesses, and they laid out that the evidence that they're going to be putting on and present. It's only about 13 witnesses, right? Right. But three of them are capital police that had direct interaction with him. So that's one, two, he videotaped himself. I don't know if he was using GoPro. GoPro must be the best invention for prosecutors ever because he's idiot, strap it to their whatever's and they, and they like you and I used to make home movies

when we went to like Niagara Falls. These people do it during violent overthrow's insurrections and then send it through social media and dark web or to their families. So that looks like the sun intercepted video that he sent back to his family, like, hey, look at me. I'm over throwing the government. And the kid was like, hmm, I might have to report my dad to the FBI. And I was the one who turned him in, right? Yeah. And the daughter and the daughter and listen to this one, KFA, the guy, the, the testimony because it's in the filing by the government. The daughter is going to testify

that basically the father told her, if you turn him in, snitches end up in ditches. Traders get shot and she's going to testify that her father threatened to kill her. And the son and the son is going to say the same thing. The son has video evidence and text messages and the other interesting thing on this list. Then I want to talk about why the prosecutors have to file this list because our legal A efforts are probably going by the government even tell them in advance, you know, just do it a trial, which is what I would sort of do it at a civilian case.

But the other interesting piece of evidence is it looks like the cryptographers and others for the FBI for the federal government have been able to crack the encrypted telegram platform, which is an encrypted platform like WhatsApp that a lot of these three percenters, you know, two two smart by halfers. smart by halfers used to communicate on that day and other days. And they're encrypted, but it looks like the code has been cracked because they've got the cyphered and translated messages that are part of the evidence trove that's going to be used against this guy. Why does the prosecution have to a week or two before trial? File such a thing. So in federal court, it obviously differs state by state, but in federal court, you have to file your witness list and your evidence list.

And in this particular instance, they didn't just provide a list of witnesses and a list of evidence. They also sort of talked about the evidence that was gonna come in through each witness and what count it was related to, what charge was related to. It was almost like they were providing a road map for us and people who are watching the trial so that we could see what was happening. I thought

it was a very thorough and good road map for people to understand. And I think people do that in high profile cases so that so that people who are following it can can get such a road map and not just get a list. But I want to say I don't think that 13 witnesses is overkill for a case of this size. I mean, you still have to prove certain things like, for example, in the gun in the gun charge. He's being charged with carrying a gun over state lines on that date of the crime, which was January 6th, obviously. And you have to prove that it was a loaded gun, that it was an operable gun.

And it's hard to do that when he didn't, all you see is him in video with what looks like a gun, right, it could be a fake gun for all you know. So they're gonna still have to prove what the gun, that the gun was loaded and operable and that it was an actual firearm. And so they're gonna probably, I would guess, do that through the cooperator who you alluded to,

who's the cooperating witness who they gave immunity to and to the holster and the guns that they recovered at the search warrant. And they're going to argue circumstantially that this was the gun on that date. But so let me ask you a question. I want to go to the immunity person. So you've got a three percenter who turned on

is, you know, who was facing prosecution and turned on his fellow three percenter and is going to be testifying and have to testify to the jury that he's be given immunity. Talk about it, not particularly to any case you worked on. Talk about it in general about when you have a cooperating witness who's given immunity, how you handle that in the courtroom, so that he has credibility with the jury and that

he doesn't lose that credibility with the jury. But that the immunity issue, of course, comes out. Do you bring it out in your direct to, so that it's not used against you in cross-examination? The jury here is at first. Do you talk about it in the opening so that the jury understands it and you're building up credibility with the jury? Talk about how that works.

Yeah, I mean, you go even so far as talking about it in boardier and to make sure that people don't harbor, you know, that's the jury selection process where you just wanna make sure that people don't have negative feelings about having to make deals with the devil, if you will, in order to prosecute and prove cases.

And some people have opinions about that and can't be fair and they won't be on the jury. But you obviously, you talk about it in your opening. And when they testify and direct, you bring out everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then you embrace it in summation and you say, look, as bad as the cooperator is, as bad as the defendant is, he picked

him. I mean, I didn't pick him, you know, I'd pick all nuns and priests, you know, to be, to be eyewitnesses, but, but criminals hang out with other criminals. And, and that's just how it is. And so, I mean, it's, it's what everybody, all the prosecutors know how to do that. And, and that's how they will do it with, with this individual. Yeah, I like that. In a civil setting, I'd often tell, you know, when I was training my team or talking about facts, bad facts, or facts that needed to be dealt with, I would tell them, don't run away from them. Don't feel embarrassed by them and certainly don't feel gun shy about them. No pun intended. Embrace your bad facts. You got to live your bad facts

and you got to find a way to maintain your credibility with the jury and with other court officials. And don't act like the bad facts are that bad. Make them your friends. And I'll take it one step further. As a trial lawyer on both sides, as now I'm on the other side, I always say, what's my worst fact?

And then I embrace it and make it my best fact. I figure out how to do that. And it's hard sometimes, but that's what you got to do. That's all my people. Take it to dinner, buy it a drink, make it your best friend. And that's the way it works. All right. I'll just say, I think we're going to follow this.

You and I are going to follow this trial. It's going to kick off. I believe on the 28th of February in DC. I'm not sure it's televised. I don't think it is. The judges are Trump appointee, right? Yeah, but I mean, listen, as you know, it's really out of his hands at this point. It's up to the jury that they're going to select. And that's going to take a while. No, but the judge, for example, she's not letting the defendant out on bail, for example,

which I thought was interesting. Oh, yeah. She's, I mean, you got gun, toe, got a gun towing insurrectionist. I mean, even the Trump's, Trump appointees have got to go, hmm, you know, but, so you and I are going to follow it. But let's move on because we try to do a rapid speed chest type thing on this, on this addition. Let's move on to what I refer to at the top of the show as two-time libel loser Sarah Palin. We talked about it on Saturday, Ben, Missalis and I in our show on the other show. And we said we're going to follow this and that it was very unlikely she was going to be able to prevail on actual malice in front of the jury. What we hadn't anticipated is and maybe we should have is that the defense the New York Times was going to bring

what's called under under the federal rules of civil procedure a rule 5050 motion and ask the judge as a matter of law to rule in their favor even and take it away from the jury. Yes, a jury has a process, but if there is a element of a, of a, of a, of a, a, a cause of action, in this case, libel and defamation, that has not been proven by the plaintiff, then the judge as a matter of law can find on that defense or on that claim in favor of the other party. Now he's done an interesting thing here. Two days ago, and all the reporting was Judge Raycoff, who's the judge of the Southern District of New York federal, that's handling the pale in case. He, he granted the rule 50 motion, Bob Rapa, The New York Times, and

I guess by Stephen Bennett, who's the editor, who is also implicated, but that he was going to allow the jury to continue to deliberate because in his words, I know this case is going up on appeal. And the second circuit, which already reversed Raycoff once at the top of the case when he dismissed the case on a motion to dismiss against Sarah Palin, it's a second circuit reversed and said judge Raycoff, you shouldn't have done an emotion to dismiss, let the discovery happen, let the handle it on summary judgment later on in the case or let it go to trial. So he did, but a trial, he did not hear evidence to support that one element that a public

a figure or a public official has to make out in a defamation case or a libel case if it's in writing. And that is actual malice. So he lets the jury deliberate because he said, well, let me see what the jury's going to do because it's a jury sort of sides with me and finds that there's no actual malice. My job is done here. And that's exactly what happened because yesterday or actually today, the jury, yeah, today, the jury came back unanimous decision, unanimous decision that there was no actual malice proved by the lawyers for Sarah, Sarah, Sarah Palyn. Let's dive into actual malice.

Before you do, just to ask you one quick question. Why did, so Judge Raycoff is one of the more brilliant federal judges. I mean, just a real smart, interesting judge. Why would he have signaled what he was going to do, uh, while the jury was deliberating? Cause I mean, judges always have that power to do that. And it happens occasionally. Why would he signal and risk the jury reading about it? Or, you know, there being some other issue, like, why would he do that instead of just wait and see what happens? And if they come back and find actual malice, then he can move, then he can dismiss. So why do you think you do that? I think I agree with you that he's brilliant.

I actually early in my career when I first started at a, at a large firm, when he was a white collar guy, a white collar defense lawyer, he was involved with a case I was on when I was a very junior lawyer. So he's a brilliant, he is a brilliant guy. I think this was cover for Judge Raycoff. I think he, he had to grant the rule 50 motion because after listening to two weeks of testimony, including by Bennett who testified about what happened. And let me just bring everybody up to speak because, you know, I don't want to make the assumption that he listened to Ben and I over the week, the Ben and me over the weekend.

So Sarah Pallon brought the defamation case against the New York Times. She argued that in a 2017 editorial, which was on the day after the shooting at the the Congressional baseball, the Congressional baseball game. Right, the bipartisan baseball game where Scalice got terribly injured or shot and injured by a gunman. He made the Steve Bennett who wrote the piece, made a link between the, that shooting, the Gabby Giffurch shooting in 2011, in which she, of course, was terribly brain-ingered by a

shooting, and six people died. The editorial made the link between that and some propaganda that Sarah Palin's pack put out, which I remember, which was a target, a mailer that had gun sites, what that had gun sites what looked like gun sites, is no other way to call it. It was red circles with crosses in the middle of it over certain districts. You know, basically encouraging her supporters and donors to take out, you know,

democratic representatives in these districts. And around the same time, she was also quoted as saying, you know, don't retreat when you're facing something, reload another stupid gun violence type motif that she adopted. So listen, they wrote an editorial linking the shooting to rhetoric like that. She didn't like it. There was no real reports or evidence that the shooter at the softball game, the baseball game was influenced by Sarah Palin. But that doesn't mean her office didn't put out those pieces. Yeah, but the New York Times retracted it pretty quickly after they put it out.

And that's what Judge Raycoff said. He said, you know, you had an error. It was an error. It was a bad error, but it was an error. It was an error. It was a bad error, but it was an error and it was corrected. And that's what the New York Times said in their press release today, which was this stands for the proposition that the fundamental first amendment right, uh, you know, editorial privilege of a of a newspaper to make a mistake, but then correct it when there's no harm. You know, that should, that should be dismissed. There should not be, you know, a public official should not be able to chill and attack the media by filing these lawsuits.

And the preeminent case in this area, and this is, we'll tie it together with where the Supreme Court could go if they ever got their hands and a monkey wrench under the under the hood of the first amendment the way they have with abortion and religion and all the other things this last term. is Sullivan or Sullivan versus New York Times, which was written by Justice Brennan and was a 9-0 decision. And it stands for the proposition that if you're a public figure that you have to clear another hurdle that citizen John or Jane Doe, like you and I, don't have to clear if somebody defames us. If somebody, you know, I'm not yet a public figure. Maybe this show will make you not yet a public figure. Maybe, maybe

the show will make you an eye public figure. But for right now, if my next door neighbor yells out something at me and accuses me of like a loaf some disease or accuses me of money laundering of doing something untoward, that's probably defamation. And it may be defamation where I don't have to prove damage or injury or maybe defamation where I do. But I'm because I'm not a public figure. If I'm a public figure, that same person yelling that at me. Also, I have to satisfy that they had actual malice, which is sort of what it sounds like, that they intended to lie about me, even in the face of counter facts that would have led them to believe that what they were saying was untrue. And so you've got, that is the bedrock principle, at least since 1964, of First Amendment media

law. And that's the rules of the road for whether you're social media or you're media, big media, whatever you want to call it. And that's why mostly, mainly, people like Sarah Palin don't win lawsuits like this. They don't even get this far because. Yeah. No, just really quick, I was going to say when you was reading about about this article, it was interesting. A different people interchangeably use the words defamation and libel and slander. And so I had to Google it myself and just sort of remind

myself what's the difference. And so for everybody out there who's like me, defamation is the umbrella term that refers to either libel or slander. So to defame someone is to say something bad about them as Popoq was just saying. But libel is to do that in writing and slander is to do that orally. And I just thought, put it out there. I sort of look at it like pastas, the umbrella term, but you have spaghetti and you have pinae pasta, right? They're all pasta, but they're the different types. Yeah, yeah, with that, it's out and just to round out this segment on Sarah Palin and where it's going to go next, for our legal a-appers who are scribbling to keep up here with our episode. The case is reported at 376 US 254, that's probably 254, and it's a very interesting

the way it arose. The Southern states in the 1960s had a strategy of going after mainstream media and liberal media like the New York Times because they hated the reporting about Jim Crow laws, civil rights movement, you know, fire hoses being used against protesters and black population and all that. And so their strategy was let's sue the bastards for defamation and libel in this case as you just pointed out. And this was the culmination of that Southern strategy because you had Alabama and the police department or the police commission of Alabama didn't like the fact that the New York Times think about how long ago this was the New York Times ran a full page ad by supporters of Martin Luther King, Jr. in which in the in the ad wasn't even something the New York Times wrote. In the ad, there were a couple of facts that were like off. Like how many times he was arrested,

not that he wasn't ever arrested, but they Alabama took umbrage that it said like he was arrested six times in Alabama and it was only like four. And they had other really small, inconsequential details wrong in the ad. And they sued because they wanted to have a chilling effect on the New York Times and other media outlets. What I didn't understand, no go ahead. Finish. No, no. So anyway, Sullivan, who I kind of forgot from law school, was the police commissioner for Alabama. But anyway, it's a case that the Supreme Court at that time in that era used to create this new element of actual malice. The problem is you've got at least two judges on the justices on the US Supreme Court, Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, who have signaled in other recent cases that if they ever get

their hands on New York Times versus Sullivan, that they may make major changes to a corsage saying that was written at another time in 19, I don't know why I'm using a Southern accent for corsage. That was written in 1964, and now with social media and the rapidity of the way media moves, that is an outdated standard for what should be actual malice, which of course made my heart stop because now with the numbers that they have in their favor on the Supreme Court, the right wing of the Supreme Court could now destroy the fundamental bedrock of the First Amendment.

Go ahead, Karen, I'm sorry. No, no, I just, I found it interesting that the right wing is that there's people are surmising that the reason Sarah Palin's bringing this is to do exactly what you just said and get this issue in front of the Supreme Court because they wanna change the actual Malice standard. I just found it interesting that that's a right wing position because it's gonna apply to both sides, right?

To both perspectives. And I hate to say it, the Alex Jones is of the world and other sort of far right wing Fox News, et cetera. They're going to have to do a lot more careful with their reporting if the, if the standard of actual malice changes. I mean, the New York Times can make a mistake here in there, but they're pretty good at being factual and not and not sort of, I mean, I just don't think it's going to apply to the left as much. It's going to apply to the right

and and the carelessness of the reporting. So I don't quite understand why they're fighting for this so much. I agree with you. I think you live by the sword you died by the sword. I agree with that completely. Let's go to mailbag. We're doing the new segment on legal AF midweek, Mailbag. We've got Mailbag and we're going to kick it off with Spouse Soul immunity, which comes up all the time, KFA, because a lot of these bad guys, primarily Republicans, have wives, or they're about to marry their girlfriend. And everybody's wondering, hmm, I wonder what happens when the girlfriend becomes a wife or there's a spousal immunity in play. What happens if she was the girlfriend when the bad thing happened?

And now she's the wife when the testimony happens. Then what? So I said, you know, who's perfect to explain this? A former prosecutor at your level, KFA, hit it. Let's talk about spousal immunity. It's actually a spousal privilege, which is slightly different than an immunity. So sometimes it's known as the marital privilege, sometimes it's the spousal privilege, and it's, there are different privileges in the law. Everyone knows about the attorney client privilege, which means communications between an attorney and client are secret, and they can't

reveal them, et cetera. Well, there's this marital privilege or spousal privilege. And there's federal privileges, which are different than state privileges. So I'm not going to go into every single one because it's slightly different. But there are two basic concepts and two basic marital privileges. One is the confidential marital communication privilege. It looks just called the communication privilege. And the other one is the adverse spousal witness privilege

or also known as the testimonial privilege. So one is for communications, one is for testimony. And the more common one that everyone sort of assert of is I think the Marital Communications privilege. And that just was recognized in a Supreme Court case known as Tramble versus the United States, that just it's all about marriage and the sanctity of marriage

and trying to encourage spouses to talk to one another and talk freely and it requires four things, a communication of some sort. So it could be spoken communication, it could be written communication, it could be sign language, as long as it's communication of some sort, that you're actually married and it's a written communication, it could be sign language, as long as it's communication of some sort, that you're actually married, and it's a valid marriage,

that it was made in confidence, so not in front of others. Normally, if there's a third party there that won't be considered made in confidence and fourth, it must not be waived in some way like by having another person there. And it survives death, it survives, it survives everything. It just it literally it exists always in both civil and

criminal matters, and it gets held by either party. So, so I can force my husband not to testify, he can say, I can't testify, he can choose that I I can choose it. It's, it's very much a sort of umbrella, umbrella privilege that is not, doesn't go away with divorce or death, but the other one, the one that prosecutors use, which is slightly different, in a slightly different scenario, is for criminal cases only. And that is the one where it only belongs to the witness, not the defendant, not the person who's accused of the crime. So in a criminal case, if the person who's accused of a crime,

if your spouse wants to testify against you, they can, and you can't stop them if you're the accused. And the thought behind that is that if your marriage was so great, we want to protect the sanctity of marriage, but if your marriage was so great, we wanna protect the sanctity of marriage, but if your marriage was so great, you wouldn't wanna testify against them. So clearly, clearly there's some issue there.

It's also to encourage victims of domestic violence. I mean, otherwise imagine a scenario where you're a victim of domestic violence and you can't testify about it because, what your spouse your husband said about you. So, you know, and if once you're divorced by the way, you no longer, there's no longer any privilege there whatsoever. So, so that this one is slightly different, but that's basically the spouse will slash marital privilege in a nutshell.

So let me go back, so let me go back just to sum it up. I am with somebody and we're dating and that guy or woman commits crime. And then he marries me or she, can I testify against that person or not in a civil setting? If it happened before you were married, yeah, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Then it doesn't apply. And then we got married. And then we got married right before the trial. Like this is this is this is this is where you're doing you're doing such great service to the L.A. efforts because every movie ever made about this issue. They get married to prevent the person to testify. The plot twist is exactly that. It's like, come on, honey. I love you. Let's get married. Don't worry. My trial is on Friday,

but let's get married today. But that's not the real world. The real world is they had to be married at the time of the transaction, crime, or whatever, right? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, look, there's some exceptions. Like if you're committing a crime together, for example, and yeah, exactly things like that, but but this essentially what what it is. So yeah, all right, great. And I'm going to thank might as the pug might as the pug who also goes by Pope pocket might as on her Twitter feed for that that question that we pulled for the mailbag. And now let's we're going to go to

maizeers the everybody knows them because the Supreme Court, a few years ago, ordered they turn over there, all of their workpapers and financial records and certified accounting records for the Trump Organization, having been the accountant and auditors and certifiers of financial things for the Trump Organization for a long time, at least from 2011 to 2020. Now, I'm going to be doing most of the talking on this one.

When I get to some big picture items that don't really relate to the Trump organization, if I get something wrong, Karen's going to hold up giant Yeti water mug, and then I'm gonna try to backtrack. That's all. We gotta get Yeti to sponsor us because they really are the best. They are the best water mugs. So here's how it works, ladies and gentlemen, and I'll announce it for those that follow the pod audio. If she holds up the giant red Yeti, I've probably done something wrong.

Otherwise, I'm gonna be taking the segment. So, and I, let me thank two people, two followers and listeners for this idea. One of them is Cheryl Ann Murphy, and I'm not outing her. That's her Twitter handle. And the second person that we're going to compliment for the idea today to do this one is K,

is J.K. sister or J resistor. Okay, so the New York Attorney General's office made a filing the day before yesterday in which they disclosed that measures a general counsel had written a letter to the Trump organization basically, describing 11 years of certified financial records for which they were responsible. So let's just break it down. Every time the Trump organization needed to show financials, their financial health to a lender, to an investor, to a sub sort of counter party, stakeholder, the market in general, whatever the SEC, if they had an SEC issues, they had, they can't just do it on the back of a piece of paper and

have like a Weiselberg, their financial guy, CFO certify it. They got to get like an independent, what's supposed to be an independent company. Now normally companies of this size use what's called the big four or the big six. I think it's down to big three now accounting firms, but there's a tier right below that. A good, competent, auditing and accounting firms. I'm not sure. Mays are fit that bill at the time, but they did the job for the Trump organization. They, my speculation here is that they have been leaned on by the New York Attorney General's office to cooperate and having been

pointed out to them a number of places in their certified filings that may not be correct based on the NY AG investigation, including a giant filing of 125 pages that the NY AG just recently made in which they went through all of the fraud and false statements that Mazeers has sucked themselves into. By certifying, Mazeers has now thought better of continuing A to do Trump's work any longer. So they're like, we're out, we're not gonna do your work anymore.

But in a look back that is breathtaking in scope that I've never seen in 32 years of practice. The auditing firm said everything that we just said for 11 years can't be relied on. We didn't find any material misstatements in there, but it's completely unreliable. So if you're a third party that's relying on these financial papers for any purpose whatsoever. Don't. Popo, let me ask you a question. Is there an accountant client privilege? That's a very good question.

Can you answer that? I think the answer's no. There is not, which is why this can happen. That's right. Thank you very much. Because there aren't just, it's just something for people to know that there are certain privileges in the law and that there aren't certain privileges.

So there's Dr. Patient Privilege, there's Attorney Client Privilege, but there is not Accountant Client Privilege. And so if you think your conversations with your accountant are privileged and your accountant in general can't be subpoenaed against you, that's to testify against you, that's that is false. Despite a valiant effort by measures all along the way until they got into the crosshairs of the NY AG, they were they were fighting back themselves.

They did not will, you know, willingly turn over boxes and electronic boxes of their materials to the NY AG. They, you know, they were or to even a euro old office. They were forced to do it by the U. S Supreme Court. So, but now, I mean, talk about this, think about the ramifications of this.

Every loan document, every loan document, every place where the Trump organization or its principles are guarantors of debt and loans. And it reaches into the billions and hundreds of billions of dollars for which they have personally guaranteed the loans. It's what's called a recourse loan where the bank, if they can't get it out of the asset, if they can go against the person who signed it for it personally, all of these have default provisions. All, I don't even have to look at the document. I just know it exists. But then every document, there's a default provision

that says, if anything about your financial situation, if you get indicted, if you get investigated, if your auditors or CPAs walk away, then you're gonna be, we're gonna put you into fault. And we're gonna call the loan, we're gonna charge the fault to interest rate. So this may be the single worst thing civilly that has happened to Trump so far because of

the domino effect throughout his the house of cards of his finances, whether it's Deutsche Bank or any capital one or any of the banks, can't even believe he was using capital one for his lending, but in any event, this will be a cascading effect just ripping its way. It's going to be like a fire going through, you know, a paper house when it's all said and done and implicating ultimately and just I haven't seen the yeti yet. Uh, implicating ultimately the children that many of the children were involved in these representations, you know, the size of Trump tower apartment, Eric Trump, you know, this, you know, something over here, Ivanka, I mean, they're all, you know, this, you know, this again, you want to put your family in key executive positions and you don't want to have independent business managers play that role.

Okay. Then when the whole thing comes down, comes crashing down, it's going to come crashing down on the heads of your children and you. So I don't want people to minimize how, how devastating this particular turn of events could be in the, in the ultimate default default and downfall of Trump and his empire. And we're going to follow it. It was a three-page filing, but it, you know, I think it may have lit a fuse that you and I are going to be following or at least I'll be following and you'll be watching me follow it for some time. So, mailbag, what you think about mailbag, did you like it? I loved it. I really hope we get a lot more questions. I think that's really fun to, it's fun to also brush up on areas that you don't always think about, but it's, I love the mail-back idea. So I hope we get a lot of questions for next week. We will, and now the people know about it, and we're going to ask for it earlier in the week, then I think we'll have a really nice segment

on there. So KFA, Karen Friedman, Agnipolo, we reached the end. I want to say tonight was hard to pick a topic because there's so many things that happened today between Sarah Palin, between Prince Andrew settling his case. I mean, I couldn't believe there's just so many different things we could talk about in the news. You know, you know what, you know what that means? That means Ben, my Salis and I are gonna have to cover it all on Saturday edition of Legal AF, where we covered 10 or 11. It's like, again, speed chess,

but we go one, two hours at all. But our show here with you and I, with you and me, Wednesdays and with the audio pod dropping right after it and all the places that you pull your pods from. And then Saturday's Ben, my Salis and me, with the audio pod dropping right after it on all the places that you pull your pods from. And then Saturday's Ben Micellis and me, we do legal AF, a two hour version, both audio and video.

And it was my pleasure again today. I think we're on episode five or six. Couldn't ask for a better time and a better person to be with on a Wednesday night with you. And it's Michael Popak and KFA signing out. Shout out to the Midas Mighty. Shout out to the Legal A-Averse. We'll see you next week.