Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump PANICS Over Prosecution as Election GETS REAL

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

In breaking news, Trump just filed his latest brief attempting to avoid criminal prosecution in the Mar a Lago obstruction and espionage case, arguing that Judge Aileen Cannon — who he just publicly offered a job to be his likely Attorney General—was right to dismiss the case, based on: (1) the reasoning of justice Clarence Thomas, (2) an indicted former attorney general, and (3) a stray comment made by President Biden in the last 2 days. Popok explains the “Cannon” defect and why Trump should lose the appeal. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% OFF your @MUDWTR by going to https://mudwtr.com/LEGALAF #mudwtrpod Join the LegalAF Patreon: https://Patreon.com/legalAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Michael Popak, Legal AF. Well, when Donald Trump's not offering a job to the criminal court judge that dismissed the indictment against him in Mar-a-Lago, he's trying to bolster and support her decision to dismiss that indictment with a new filing before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal. It's been quite a week for all things Judge Cannon

down in Mar-a-Lago, or the federal court in Southern District about the Mar-a-Lago case. First, she gets offered a job to effectively be the attorney general of the United States in a Trump administration because of a quote unquote secretly not so secretly leaked document by the presidential transition team for Donald Trump where she was at the very tippy top as an attorney general candidate. But that's not the only thing that happened this week.

We got two different filings in which Donald Trump's lawyers, same lawyers, are arguing to two different courts that Aileen Cannon was right to dismiss the indictment because Jack Smith was not constitutionally appointed by the special counsel, by the attorney general as special counsel. He wasn't funded properly under the constitution. There's a separation of powers problem. Ignore the long line of precedent going back 200 years that allows special counsels to be appointed by the Attorney General.

Ignore the Nixon decision from 1974 in which the very bosses at the U.S. Supreme Court said, yes, you can have a special counsel appointed by an Attorney General. Ignore all of that and just focus on a comment that was made a week ago by President Biden, Joe Biden during a campaign stop when he said, we got to lock him up. We got to lock up Donald Trump. And then he realized what he said. He said, politically, you got to lock him up politically. Oh, there it is. We finally have Joe Biden, according to the Trump team, admitting, admitting that this

has all been politically motivated. What does that have to do with the constitutional argument? Let me now analyze for you on the fly here on this hot take, this 60 pages, okay? The entirety of their argument is premised on three things and a straight comment by Joe Biden during a recent campaign stop in which he made that slight slip of the tongue

about how he was gonna want Donald Trump locked up. That's all they got. So they say, well, we are supported by a district court judge, that's Judge Cannon, who they just offered a job to, at least one or two attorney generals. Right. One of them is Ed Meese, who's 96 years old and had been indicted himself and almost sent to jail when he worked in the Reagan administration. So that Ed Meese, who will say anything as a member of the Federalist Society that's put in front of him at this point, as a quote-unquote expert person. And three, legal scholars. And they cite a whole bunch of MAGA, super right right fringe legal scholars in a footnote. That's their basis. And I guess they think they got a gift because in the last, I don't know,

two days, Joe Biden at a campaign stop in front of all other democratic officials who burst into applause said, uh, I would have been locked up for this about five years ago if I had said it, but we got to lock Donald Trump up. And then when he saw the reaction, he said, I mean, politically mean politically, not through the court system. But that ended up in the brief.

In fact, it's the leading, it's one of the leading quotes in the brief that Joe Biden said, lock him up. All right. In fact, it's footnote two on page one of the brief. Here's what they said leading into it. I mean, this just shows you the weakness of the argument that they had to get this stray comment from Joe Biden. And this is one of their leading arguments in paragraph one, footnote two of their motion. Here's what it says. More than 36 million has been

spent. This is a very long sentence, so have a seat. More than 36 million has been spent unjustly targeting the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election. I'm not sure the polls indicate that. President Trump threw unprecedented encroachments on executive power with President Biden wrongly and inappropriately urging to lock him up only days before the filing of this brief as part of the election interference strategy. Footnote 2 had an article by CNN or Fox News. Biden's lock him up remark about Trump was profoundly stupid thing to say. All right, well, it may have been a profoundly stupid thing to say, but it doesn't give you the basis to seek the

dismissal of the special counsel by finding that he was inappropriately appointed under the Constitution. Let me explain that argument to you. Because they have filed now two briefs a day apart, arguing the exact same thing. They filed the same brief effectively as this one a day or so ago in front of Judge Chutkin, arguing that the D.C. election interference case should be dismissed for the exact same reason. So let me give you the core reasons. Their argument is that notwithstanding the Appointments Clause of Article 2 of the Constitution, which gives the power to the Executive Branch, meaning the President, and by extension, his Attorney General as a department head to appoint inferior officers without having to run all the inferior officers by the Senate for confirmation, because that would make no sense. US attorneys, yes, US attorneys, other heads are confirmed, but US attorneys are not underneath

the attorney general because they are inferior officers. You don't confirm inferior officers as that term is used in the Constitution by the Senate. It would immobilize the ability of the Department of Justice or any department to operate if it had to bring before it the thousands of people that of Justice or any department to operate it, that had to bring before it the thousands of people that work for them or that they appoint or that they assign and drag them through the Senate. Does anybody think that's a good idea? They can't even fill the federal judicial positions, the judges, in a four-year term.

How are they ever going to fill the rest of the offices of the Department of Justice? Their argument is, oh, we've got a separation of powers problem. Congress needs to authorize, already stop, we already have a breach of the separation of powers, by the way, and a breach of the co-equal branches of government. Congress telling the executive branch how it can fill out its cabinet and how its inferior officers are going to be appointed is already a violation of separation of powers. It already undermines and scuttles their argument to make that argument. If these are really three co-equal branches of government, I mean, one has been supersized by

the Supreme Court, that's the presidency, but then one department can't tell the other how to manage its affairs. Congress can fund. I mean, they do hold the purse strings. They fund the Supreme Court. Another way to regulate the Supreme Court, by the way. They fund the operations of the executive branch and things like that. These departments don't separately tax and spend

on their own. Like, oh, we need to renovate the Rose Garden. Let's just tax people from the White House. That's not how that works. So Congress has that power. But Congress already had on the books an appropriation for the Department of Justice to use for things like special counsel back in the 80s when they passed the independent counsel law, which eventually got scrapped after Ken Starr went, ran amok going after the Clintons and ran into the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal when he was supposedly looking for public corruption.

Okay, but the funding stayed in place. As to, there is no doubt in anyone's mind except for Donald Trump's lawyers and some of his fringe advisors and commentators and Edwin Meese, this indicted attorney general that Jacksmith is an inferior officer as that term is used under constitutional analysis under the Department head of the Attorney General and he has the power to appoint these

independent or other special attorneys to do the work of the of the Attorney General Without going through Senate confirmation. Ever feel like your morning coffee is more like a roller coaster than a smooth ride? Today's sponsor is for the caffeine junkies who find themselves in an endless cycle of coffee highs and lows. Mudwater, M-U-D-W-T-R is a coffee alternative

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forward slash LegalAF. After you purchase, they ask you where you're heard about us. Please support our show and tell them LegalAF sent you. Start your new morning ritual today. After you purchase, they ask you where you're heard about us. Please support our show and tell them Legal AF sent you. Start your new morning ritual today. The Clarence Thomas is the other big argument here. They love Clarence Thomas because in a concurrence, not even the majority decision, he wrote a special section

which was targeted to Aileen Cannon, who he's the boss of because he sits over the 11th circuit as the Supreme Court judge responsible for that circuit and said to her, I don't even know why we're here. He's just a citizen. He's a stranger to this case. Why is there a special prosecutor? He wasn't properly appointed.

Dismiss the case. And she did exactly that about three months later after he blew her that love note, those love kisses. So we've got, you got Cannon first time in 250 years, a federal judge ever found that a special counsel was improperly appointed based on analysis by Edwin Meese, an indicted attorney general, fringe right-wing legal commentators,

and Clarence Thomas, whose comment about the special counsel is invalid was so outside even the norm of the right-wing MAGA on the Supreme Court that nobody joined him in his concurrence. And you got this comment made by Joe Biden a couple of days ago in which he said, lock him up, I mean politically. That's what they got for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. And then they go through the statutes that have been used and cited in the past, because this is not the first special counsel that we've ever had. We have some simultaneously. At the same time, we had the Hunter Biden special counsel, right? We had the special counsel Robert

Herr looking at Joe Biden's boxes in his garage, and we had special counsel Jack Smith. So right in our, not even our lifetime, in the last news cycle, we had three special councils operating at the same time. They're all invalid, right? Well, then I can, good, because then I can ignore that piece of POS that Robert Herr wrote about Joe Biden. I'll just do that. And we can, we should just get rid of the prosecution

that happened against Hunter Biden then, right? He should have been prosecuted because special counsel is invalid. Like, which is it, man? And what about the special councils that you appointed or that you kept on when you were the president Hunter Biden then, right? He should have been prosecuted because special counsel is invalid. Like, which is it, man? And what about the special counsels that you appointed or that you kept on when you were the president of the United States, Trump?

What about Mueller? So this whole argument, which of course they ignore, they ignore that while Donald Trump was president, he had a special counsel that he did not fire nor claim that he was improperly appointed. What about that? There's also another layer here in their argument that's been missed. Jack Smith

did not actually indict Donald Trump. A grand jury. No, two grand juries indicted Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago because there was a superseding indictment there as well. The grand jury indicts, not the special prosecutor. So even if they're right and they're not, about the separation of powers argument, or their analysis of 200 years of special councils that we have dating back to like the time of Aaron Burr,

even if they were right, I don't see how that undermines or invalidates the indictment. Just let another US attorney take it over. Then you'd have to cross out all of the Department of Justice manual, which is a self-policing guidance. It's not really, you can't really enforce it and just say, fine, the US attorney for the District of Columbia will take over the prosecution from the special

counsel and we will go forward with the indictment that was rendered by a D.C. grand jury. Again, just because the guy gets invalidated, I don't think it invalidates necessarily the indictment underneath it. They'll argue, oh, there shouldn't have ever been one. We've got to start all over again, toss the indictment. He. They'll argue, oh there shouldn't have ever been one. We got to start all over again. Toss the indictment. He didn't have the power. I don't see it that way. I see it as at worst an improper delegation of authority by the attorney general and then he should just take it back in-house and handle it himself, which is what we always thought he should do. Just let the main justice in DC handle the case without being special

counsels. They're getting paid by the Department of Justice anyway. Or turn it over to the US attorney for the District of Columbia and let him take it over. But the indictment's the indictment. There weren't like 22 Jack Smiths in the grand jury box indicting Trump. These were a fair to partial grand jury. So that's an argument that never gets raised. Maybe we'll see it in the next brief that we get from the Department of Justice, which should be coming in after the election. Now there hasn't been a panel selected, just a quick breakout session here on appeals process.

You got an 11th circuit sitting in Atlanta, there's about 20 judges there or so, give or take. Three judges get randomly selected. But I would not be surprised if Chief Judge Prior, William Prior, who takes on a lot of the Trump cases and usually rules against Donald Trump and Aileen Cannon, doesn't step in on this case and use his chief justice prerogative to be the presiding judge on this matter. He just handled the case in front of, with Mark Meadows, he handled a case involving Jeff Clark,

he was on at least one of the panels that ruled against Aileen Cannon about her interference with the prosecution of the case pre-indictment. I see Chief Justice prior there, that's a good thing. If not, we'll have to see. The 11th, that's a good thing. If not, we'll have to see. The 11th Circuit leans a little to the right, a little center right, and there's a number of Trump-appointed people in there. So we've got to see who the three-judge panel is, and then they'll make their decision after oral argument.

Since they're putting this on a normal track, I don't see oral argument on this until late November, early December at best, and then a ruling in the first quarter or so of 2025. By then, of course, we'll know if Kamala Harris is Madam President-elect or not, and we'll go from there. If Donald Trump loses and this Mar-a-Lago prosecution and indictment is reinstated, which I believe it will, and the entirety of the special counsel's office is reaffirmed by the 11th Circuit, which I believe it will be, primarily because we have a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving Richard Nixon, our last criminal president, that establishes that special prosecutors and special counsels can be appointed by the attorney general. Assuming that all goes according to Hoyle, like I think it will, then the loser will try to take a case

to the United States Supreme Court. So again, as I've said before, both here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF, the YouTube channel, on a new show we have called Unprecedented, talking weekly about the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is gonna be involved again, whether we like it or not, in voter issues,

voter registration issues, voting issues, voter registration issues, voting issues, voting certification issues, and all things about Donald Trump and his prosecutions in 2025. And we'll be reporting on them both here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. So until my next reporting, I'm Michael Popak, and I'm here on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network.