Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump THROWS US Military UNDER BUS in Criminal Filing

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Trump and his lawyers are at it again blaming everybody for the crime scene that was Jan 6 except for himself. In a new filing with Judge Chutkan in the DC election interference case, Trump blames Nancy Pelosi, and General Mark Millie for the crimes, trying to divert attention from his own role as the criminal mastermind. Michael Popok breaks it all down in his new hot take. Magic Spoon: Get this exclusive offer when you use promo code LEGALAF at https://MagicSpoon.com/LEGALAF Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Join the Legal AF 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

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now at BHP, a future resources company. To discover how, visit bhp.com slash better future. Michael Popock, Legal AF. Donald Trump's at it again. Blaming other people for Jan 6th. Blaming Nancy Pelosi, blaming General Mark Milley. Everybody's responsible for the crime scene that is Jan 6th, except for the person who actually did it, which is Donald Trump. Now Donald Trump has just filed a new brief. What else? In the D.C. election interference case, on time, that should be news, Donald Trump actually didn't miss a deadline, on time he filed his motion or supplemental motion concerning his request by Judge Chutkin that all four of the criminal counts be dismissed against them, especially the two for obstruction of an official proceeding.

And he leads off, I presume this is what you do when you write briefs, with your strongest argument. His strongest argument, Nancy Pelosi did it. Mark Milley did it. I didn't do it. And you might be thinking to yourself, that's all he's got? A random stray clip of Nancy Pelosi from like the back of a car with a mask on after Jan 6th, in which she made a stray comment, in which she acknowledged that there were policing and security plan problems on Capitol Hill on January 6th.

And Mark Milley making a comment that in one of his many testimonies, that there was a discussion about the National Guard use before Jan 6th and Mark Milley making a comment that in one of his many testimonies that there was a discussion about the National Guard use before Jan 6th. What about all the other things that these people have said? What about all the things that Mark Milley has said, particularly about Donald Trump being derelict in his duty as commander in chief? They ignore that. This is the cherry picking that goes on constantly in all of Donald Trump's filings. The original brief that he filed a year ago,

and then comparing it, laying it next to the one I'm gonna talk to you about now, it's about the same, but they have a new case that they need to discuss. They think, Donald Trump thinks they're the winner of a case in front of the United States Supreme Court that preceded the immunity decision, and we call it shorthand by its name, Fisher, the US versus Fisher case.

And in Fisher, the Supreme Court said that one of the counts for obstruction of an official proceeding, we call it the 1512 count, was improperly used and charged by the prosecutors. They overcharged the case against the Gen 6 insurrectionist because they found that that particular statute required that there be not only corrupt intent to obstruct, but there actually be a interference with evidence or

destruction of evidence or the use of false evidence. When Katanji Brown Jackson participated in that along with Sotomayor, they made clear that that could include in Judge Chukin's review things like the fake elector certificates. And that's how the superseding indictment, which Jack Smith got from a grand jury after the immunity decision to ensure that it would comply with the immunity decision by the Supreme Court, he made sure that they leaned into the fake elector certificates. If you look at the 165 page brief, for instance, just filed, and I've done about six passes through it here for Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network,

you'll see how they lean in, Department of Justice, with some of their 71 witnesses against Donald Trump to talk about the pressure campaign and the use of fake electors, the involvement of Eastman, of Bannon, of Giuliani, of Chesbrough, of Roman, to facilitate this use of fake electoral certificates, false evidence and that should still be able to survive under 1512. That's the argument. But Donald Trump, you know, he's got to be heard because since he wrote his original brief in October, this new brief that just got filed last night, you know, we had the Fisher decision in between.

So I get it. I get why they needed to supplement it. Let's start before I get to the clips of his blaming. Let's start with how they started it all off last October. Same motion, just been supplemented. I'll just read you the first two paragraphs because this will set your mind in the right direction for what to expect for the rest of this hot take.

Here's Donald Trump and his lawyers on this very motion last October. Targeting an audience other than this court, the prosecution's indictment in this matter rants endlessly about President Trump's politics and in a shockingly un-American display of authoritarianism accuses him of crimes for having and expressing the wrong opinions buried at the end of this diatribe or conclusory statements that Trump somehow violated criminal law. Oh, poor, poor Donald Trump. Talk about gaslighting and projecting.

It's the Department of Justice's politics that's driving this. It's their authoritarianism. Okay, now let's fast forward. Now, it's only a seven page supplement. Judge didn't say you only had seven pages, but that's all Donald Trump has. This is the reason again, Donald Trump asked pretty please, can I file my brief against the 185 pages of detailed evidence against me with 71 witnesses? Can I do that after the election, ma'am?

Like a seventh grader. Can I do the book report after Christmas holiday? I don't want the American people to understand that I don't have anything to respond to those 165 pages of detailed evidence of 71 witnesses, the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and recordings, and the fact that my phone was hacked, or the another 200 pages that's coming in another two weeks into the public. I got nothing. I got nothing. And so you got, when you got nothing, you say things in an aggressive way and then you get the hell out of there. That's why this is like seven page, oh, sorry, 14 pages. That's it. You know, his life and liberties hanging in the balance, the best they can come up with is like

10 or 11 pages. All right. So remember, when you when you and I've said this before, as a sort of a tutorial, being a practicing lawyer for 32 years, when you have when you're organizing your argument to make it persuasive in advocacy, in adversarial advocacy, you have to have some organizing principles. Usually it's a version of primacy and recency. You put your best argument first, primacy. You put your second best argument last, recency, and you kind of stick in the middle some filler

if you need it. You might have three great arguments, but that's sort of the organizing principles. You have to have thematics and you have to make it, you know, it's like journalism. You have to don't bury the lead and then you have to explain it and tie it together. Donald Trump doesn't really operate or his lawyers by those principles, but assuming they did. What is the first thing he says in the new filing? Let me read it to you. And then I'm going to go to a couple of clips. Of course we have, right? Investigative reporting on Legal AF. It says, the superseding indictment, which is the new indictment,

stretches generally applicable statutes beyond their breaking point, based on false claims that President Trump is somehow responsible for the events at the Capitol on Jan 6. He was just wandering by. He was just on a Capitol tour that went awry. I love this somehow.

It's so cavalier in rewriting history. The special counsel's office seeks to assign blame for events President Trump did not control and took action to protect against. Yes, he doesn't know how Gen 6 got out of control. I don't know, start with you had all the people on the ellipse during your speech, you knew were armed,

because the Secret Service told you they were, and you told them to get rid of the metal detectors, the magnetometers, and you knew they were armed, then you pointed them all whipped up, all whipped up in a frenzy, frothing at the mouth, and you pointed them at the Capitol, knowing or you should know or knowing or should know that there were no National Guard

there. It was just Met Police and Capitol Police. You are the commander in chief, maybe that. But then he had, this is on page one, they couldn't even get out of page one of this new filing without mentioning the dreaded Nancy Pelosi, the real scourge of American democracy, Nancy Pelosi. The real scourge of American democracy. Nancy Pelosi. Here you go. It is apparently of no consequence to the office, the Department of Justice, and those who support their efforts that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was caught on a previously undisclosed video accepting responsibility for the events at the Capitol. Let's start with that. Nancy Pelosi was in the back of a car

doing a documentary with her daughter. I think she was coming out of the carnage of Jan six when this happened. So she had a couple of things on her mind. Her husband hadn't yet been hammered by literally by a MAGA follower of Donald Trump yet and suffered brain damage, not yet, but it's coming. And so in and under her muffled

mask you hear her say, because she is the Speaker of the House and the Sergeant in Arms does ultimately report to her and they should have had some sort of plan assuming that MAGA would have overwhelmed the Capitol. But she's not the Commander in Chief and she has no power to call out the National Guard. You know who that is? You know who's the sole person in America who can call out the National Guard? Wait for it. The commander in chief, the president of the United States, not the speaker of the house.

She's busy hiding under her desk with Chuck Schumer and trying to call to the Virginia National Guard nearby to help them. SOS. Let's watch the clip first of Nancy Pelosi that they've, they've, talk about silly putty, they've stretched it out of all recognition or understanding or reality. This one simple statement she made in which as an adult she said, I take some responsibility. Sergeant of Arms had, should have had a better plan. You know, we should have had more coordinate. We should have expected that Donald Trump's crazies

would attack democracy. But to blame Nancy Pelosi is, as I've said before, it's like an arsonist that's fired to a house and you're blaming the family for not calling the fire department fast enough. Let's run the clip of Nancy Pelosi. I got two clips. Let's run the first clip of Nancy Pelosi in the documentary that he recites here, Donald Trump in the brief. Let's run the clip of Nancy Pelosi. I got two clips. Let's run the first clip of Nancy Pelosi in the documentary that he recites here, Donald

Trump in the brief. Let's run it. Why weren't the National Guard there to begin with? I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for war. The video shot by Pelosi's daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, for an HBO documentary. Pelosi telling MSNBC the video is Republicans' attempt to rewrite history. The former president and his toadies do not want to face the facts. They're trying to

do revisionist history on January 6th. Now let's put that in context because we don't cherry pick on Legal AF or on Midas Touch Network. There's also a clip in real time on January 6th of Nancy Pelosi making a phone call, a desperate phone call to the governor of Virginia, Jay Northam, asking him to roll out his National Guard under which he, because there the governor's control the state National Guard. And here's that clip. Let's roll that. Hi, Governor. this is Nancy.

Governor, I don't know if you have been approached about the Virginia National Guard. Mr. Hoyer was speaking to Governor Hogan, but I still think you probably need the okay of the federal government in order to come into another jurisdiction. Thank you. Oh my gosh.

They're just breaking windows. They're doing all kinds of things. It's really that somebody, they said somebody was shot. It's just, it's just horrendous and all at the instigation of the President of the United States. Okay, thank you governor I appreciate what you're doing. If you don't mind I'd like to stay in touch. Thank you. Virginia Guard has been called in. You know I'm just talking to Governor Northam and what he said is they sent 200 of state police and a unit of the National Guard.

So all it is, is Nancy taking responsibility as an adult. Not letting Donald Trump off the hook. The arsonist is still gonna be convicted of the crime just because the victim maybe should have made one more phone call, come on. So as a kid, I loved eating cereal. But as an adult, I don't want all that sugar and most cereals don't give me the protein I need.

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Hold on to the dream. Now Mark Milley, why am I mentioning him? Former head of the joint chiefs of staff, army general, I think he's four star, a lot of brass for Donald Trump because Mark Milley and Donald Trump are like Superman and Lex Luthor and Mark Milley is Superman. Mark Milley has gone out on the record and testified that Donald Trump was a coward, a coward in the dining room and let Washington burn because he was upset and sucking his thumb over losing the election.

Called him a coward. Said that Donald Trump was going to go to war with other countries, but that Mark Milley stepped in and made sure that didn't happen. That Mark Milley testified that he called his counterpart in China and basically said, you know that crazy president we have, don't worry, I'm not going to let us go to war. I'm not going to let us go to war because he woke up one morning in a bad mood. Donald Trump didn't like that and then Donald Trump attacked Mark Milley, said he should be hanged and shot. And then in addition to that, as part of Mar-a-Lago and that investigation, we know that the Mark Milley comments reported in the New Yorker magazine triggered Donald Trump to show off his top-secret classified maps and war plans and try to accuse Mark Milley of being the one that wanted to start a war,

and he was trying to stop him. It's always somebody else. He's like the four-year-old. Somebody else broke the vase or the window. It wasn't little Donnie Trump. Here's what he says about Mark Milley. He said, even one of the officer, officer star witnesses, see he knows who one of the 71 witnesses are. Good for him. General Mark Milley acknowledged long before charges were even brought in this case that President Trump had instructed the Defense Department on Jan 3 to make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or soldiers to make sure it's a safe event. That is a complete lie. I know it because the Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump testified that Donald Trump never gave an order for 10,000 or 20,000 people. I think it's

interesting. They're not saying that anymore. Donald Trump still says on the campaign trail that he ordered 10,000 or 20,000 National Guard people. They dropped that in this brief. Let's run the clip of Donald Trump with his bullshit 10,000 and 20,000 clip. The 25th Amendment, they said, Joe, you're going to get out. And Nancy Pelosi led the charge. And Nancy Pelosi has a little problem because her husband sold their visa stock. They had a lot of visa stock one day before visa was announced that visas being sued by the Department of Justice. Think of that.

Nancy Pelosi sold vast amounts of visa stock one day before the big lawsuit that we all read about a few days ago was brought against visa. You think it was luck? I don't think she should be prosecuted. Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted for that and she should also be prosecuted for J6 because she turned down 10,000 or any number she wanted, soldiers or National Guard. And I hope you all read John Solomon and what John Solomon wrote two days ago because if you read it, you'd see that Donald Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. It's a scam.

It's a scam. See, no mention of that. And they also don't mention what Mark Milley really said about the dereliction of duty that he observed and the cowardice he observed of Donald Trump because he sat for almost three hours in the dining room of the White House while the Capitol burned and didn't do a darn thing to stop the carnage. Five people died, hundreds of cops injured. Some people died after the facts of heart attacks, suicide, and the taking of a life, the unborn, the unliving of people.

So look, let's run the clip of Mark Milley. Yeah, Commander in Chief, you got an assault going on on the capital of the United States of America. And there's nothing. No call, nothing, zero. So at the end, what their argument should be, they finally get into it on page two, where they basically say that the evidence that is falsified in the false certificates are really not false certificate evidence, the way that term is used under 1512 with a statute. It's a complicated argument, but they're basically saying,

Fisher, you can't prosecute me for obstruction of an official proceeding, two of the four counts against Donald Trump, because I didn't have the corrupt intent to obstruct and this type of fake evidence isn't the type of fake evidence that Fisher allows to continue to be prosecuted. I disagree. I disagree. Kataji Brown Jackson disagrees. Justice Sotomayor, who used to be Judge Sotomayor in a Second Circuit case that was cited by this United States Supreme Court, even this Chief Justice Roberts, Sotomayor and Kataji Brown Jackson was able to get him to put on page 8 of

the Fisher briefs, so pretty early on, that if you're talking about false evidence or fake evidence or as used as part of the obstruction, then you can be charged. What they didn't like, what Fisher What they didn't like, what Fisher renounced, what Fisher ruled, is that the government can't use it as a catch-all for conspiracies of any kind of obstruction, because there's already statutes for that. There has to be specific crimes that are the object of this particular statute. That should be the argument. That should be the makeup of this 14 pages. But it's not. It's Mark Milley was mean to me and Nancy Pelosi was mean to me and this is my vendetta list I'm checking off and that's masquerading as a new filing with Judge Chutkin. Let me tell you what's going to happen next. There's one more brief

coming in this, just one more. It's going to be on the, let me get the dates right here. On the 17th of October, the Department of Justice gets to file their last brief, the last word here, and that's it. Judge doesn't want any more briefs. No more reply briefs. She gave two briefs. And then she's going to decide, and she's going to decide that the statutory grounds, including under Fisher, allow the four counts to go against Donald Trump that this false evidence and fake evidence survives. I'd be shocked if she dismisses two of the counts finding Fisher.

And this is exactly what the Supreme Court asked and commanded Judge Chutkin to do. They said, you got to do two things. You got to take all of this evidence and place it into immunity buckets and figure out if the superseding indictment or the indictment survives. And there's a way to do that with the analysis and they gave her guidance on how to do that and the 165 pages from the government will help and whatever Donald Trump wipes his backside with and files won't help and the judge will make the ultimate decision. She makes the ultimate decision. They also, the Supreme Court told her, you gotta figure out whether the two of the accounts

for obstruction of an official proceeding survive our Fisher decision. And she's gonna do that too. And that's the briefing we're watching now. We'll continue to watch it all. We have an audience that loves what we do and we love our audience on Legal AF. And we have so much to talk about

at the intersection of law and politics. That Legal AF and Midas Touch got together and said, we need another channel. We need another channel and an outlet to discuss law and politics. So we formed it. It's called Legal AF MTN for Midas Touch Network. And it's on YouTube.

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with the Midas Touch Network. You like our commentators there. You like our analysis. We don't blow smoke or sunshine at that intersection. We got a great new show, for instance, called Unprecedented, about the United States Supreme Court. I'm doing it once a week with a revolving group of great commentators kicking off with Dina Dahl.

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So until my next hot take, my next podcast Legal AF, my next exclusive content with Legal AF MTN, this is Michael Popak, and I'm reporting. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN.