Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump’s Own Judge Just Buried Him…

Starting point is 00:00:00 Donald Trump and his Attorney General Todd Blanche continue to fabricate and manufacture their own evidence against them. They do it all the time. Donald Trump's been doing it since he was a criminal defendant, since he was a fraud defendant, in civil cases, in sexual abuse cases before he was even president. And certainly he's doing it now. And based on the new reporting, the Judge Kelly new preliminary injunction extending indefinitely the ban against Donald Trump banning the press. from attending the White House and working in the White House is based in large part on things that Donald Trump said out loud in interviews, in social media posts, and little glib comments to the press, and Todd Blanche's Attorney General, too. Remember the days when we never heard from the Attorney General when there were rare press conferences only to announce indictments or convictions?

Starting point is 00:00:55 And nothing else? Merrick Garland barely was ever seen. And now that might have been a problem for the Department of Justice, but not like what Todd Blanche is doing. Because Todd Blanche has said out loud, he doesn't see that there's any importance to an independent Department of Justice. He's just another cabinet member. That's why he goes to political rallies. That's why he makes comments. That's why he gives interviews. And they end up being sort of manna from heaven for plaintiffs lawyers and defense lawyers against Trump and the Trump administration. Case in point, the new memorandum opinion out by Judge Kelly. I'm going to take it from kind of two angles.

Starting point is 00:01:32 One, why would Judge Kelly have to put in a self-serving one line in there to sort of throw a bone to Donald Trump to reinforce the argument that the press is doing something wrong by being critical of his policies? I mean, anybody with half a brain would be critical of his policies. The American people are critical of his policies. His favorability rating is now down to the 20s. Now, some people would say, well, that's because the press is so bad.

Starting point is 00:01:59 The press is just doing their job. The way we do our job here on LegalAF and the Midas Touch Network. That's where you're at, by the way. I'm Michael Popock. Take a minute. Hit that free subscribe button over on the LegalAF YouTube channel and over here on Midas Touch. So why did Judge Kelly do something? I don't think any other judge appointed by a Democrat would think to do.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Throw in a one-liner in the middle of a 26-page decision in which he's rebuked the Trump administration, and Donald Trump, based on their own evidence, for violating the First Amendment, trying to chill the speech and chill the conduct of reporters, and also the Fifth Amendment violations of taking away their due process rights, their property rights in the hard passes that get them access to the White House, finding violations of the Fifth Amendment of the First Amendment, and extending his ban all the way through to the end of the case indefinitely, why would he do that on one hand?

Starting point is 00:02:59 And on the other hand, say, don't hurt me, daddy. What's with this comment? So on page one over to two, after he just got through saying that he's going to grant the preliminary injunction on behalf of CNN, MS, now, and Politico, why does he have to include this line? You can put it in notes and comments. Still, no one should interpret the court's,

Starting point is 00:03:24 decision to suggest that President Trump's concerns about accuracy and fairness in the media's reporting are unfounded, or that the government is powerless when its true aim is to protect national security when classified information is unlawfully disclosed. That said, for the reasons explained below, the court will extend the relief it already ordered. I mean, there's no judge in D.C. I can think of, certainly not Judge Boseberg, not Judge. Anna Reyes, not Judge Chutkin, that would throw that bone and give it over to Stephen Chung and Stephen Miller and let them run with it. See, a federal judge has acknowledged the negativity of the press. You know that's how they're going to run with it.

Starting point is 00:04:13 Why put that in there? I think it degrades the position of being a judge. I think it's obvious that you're only ruling on First Amendment and Fifth them at grounds and you're using their own evidence against them. It's ironic that this opinion came out just hours after the 14 minute press conference, the disastrous first press conference, and maybe the last of not ready for primetime player Katie Zacharia. I mean, I personally am thrilled by the arrival of Katie Zacharia because she is a, what's the professional term? She's a nincompoop. She can barely read.

Starting point is 00:04:55 She got challenged on her resume by because she's been lying apparently to the American people that she's a practicing lawyer and listing it on her LinkedIn as a general counsel when she is not, she went to law school, sure, but she's not a practicing lawyer. It's like a doctor who graduates medical school, but doesn't get admitted, right? Doesn't take his boards, doesn't get licensed, practicing medicine. And then she thought better of it and said, oh, I was admitted in. China. She's like, oh, I got to cover up for the fact I've been lying for 11 years about my law degree. I better say I'm a Chinese admitted lawyer, which is false as well. So with that disastrous backdrop, just hours earlier, you've got Judge Kelly talking about the free press that would be on the other side of Katie Zacharia. But by way of context, let me just show you a clip of Katie Zacharia in

Starting point is 00:05:51 action during this 14-minute press conference, which is just about as long as this video. Play the clip. So my president, excuse me, my husband, that's a good one. My husband is out here. Good morning. Good morning. I am so honored to work for President Trump and the American people. And thanks to President Trump, we are once again bringing back.

Starting point is 00:06:21 American energy dominance because energy security is national security. He had a historic one-day war, and now we have a booming economy and a great relationship with Venezuela. In addition to that, we will be, we will be, he had, there is $54 billion tied to the Alaska LNG pipeline and terminal to service the Pacific Rim. and sell fuel to our allies. For Americans to understand how much has changed in this brief period of time, what he's been able to accomplish. My goal is to be able to communicate that

Starting point is 00:07:05 in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson, and will absolutely be leading the way with that. The idea of not spending evenings with my kids is completely unacceptable. So my president, or excuse me, my husband, That's a good one. My husband is out here to the question on the president will be back on Thursday. And that's what I will answer. I'll leave it there.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Yeah. So that's what the judge had as he was polishing up and entering this order at about 10 or 11 o'clock Eastern time last night. But he says, look, he finally got around the judge to saying that the First Amendment is a important. Every decision that he's made so far on the temporary restraining order was based on the Fifth Amendment. He ignored the First Amendment. Fifth Amendment due process because the hard passes to get access to the White House were being denied without proper due process. The reporters weren't given proper notice. They weren't given certainly notice before. Their passes were deactivated. They weren't told what the standards are they needed to meet. In other words, how do you get it back? right so the judge had been focused on that during the temporary restraining order and the preliminary injunction i said he's going to have to address the first amendment which is this viewpoint-based discrimination tied to things that they've done tying it to the ban to the retaliation and to having a chilling effect on the press and there he was able to use Donald trump's own words

Starting point is 00:08:49 including comments that he made to CNN and comments that he made about the ban and him wanting to change how CNN operated. Play the club. Mr. President, earlier today, you posted that you intend to ban CNN, Politico, and MS now from the White House. Every president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution,

Starting point is 00:09:12 which includes the First Amendment. I do too. Much more so than you. Because they're full. fake news. You get so tired of reading and seeing fake news. When you look at CNN, it's just fake. That's why their ratings are no good. When you look at MS now, which used to be MSNBC, which some people call MSDNC, Democratic National Committee, it's fake news, it's fake news. And excuse me, excuse me, and when you look at PIS political, I mean, they got a government, the government,

Starting point is 00:09:49 under Biden gave him like $8 million to keep them afloat. And the stories they wrote a fake. So there's a lot of news. And there may be others to join them. And maybe they can get better and would like to admit. But our country has to have honest news. You know, you don't have a country unless you have, as I say, borders, good voting.

Starting point is 00:10:09 We're straightening them out. Borders are unbelievable. Nobody's coming to our country in the last 17 months illegally. But you need borders and you need fair and free. voting and you know what you need? You need a free press. You need a fair press and an honest press. And CNN, and you know, and everybody knows it, you're intelligent. I've known you a long time. You know how fake their reporting is. Now, he frequently bashes CNN, you know, constantly says, what are you doing here? I'm not answering your questions. We've seen that before as well.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Play the clip. Mr. President, two-thirds of Americans, two-thirds of Americans don't think the U.S. is winning the war with Iran. When will live? What's an honor to be here? I'm surprised that CNN is here covering me. The United Nations allowed us in, sir. You should not be here covering me. You said you weren't going to cover me. You shouldn't be covering me.

Starting point is 00:10:58 Two-thirds of American... And then the problem for the judge is that nowhere in the record is Donald Trump on record as saying that he's doing it for national security purposes. He just talks about fake news and fiction and lies covering the president, fake news outlets. You know, fake news isn't national security. threat. That's news you don't like. And he points to social media posts like he reproduces on page three of his order. I'm proud to announce Trump said on September 18th that effective immediately I'm banning fake news, including the plaintiffs, directly for the United States government,

Starting point is 00:11:35 in order to keep them alive. Seems like corruption to me in the White House as a result of their content reporting fake news. Media outlets shouldn't be able to constantly write or report fiction and lies. Where's the national security implication? The judge even went so far as the site, even when there was a top secret security plan that got leaked to the press, like the coverage of underneath

Starting point is 00:11:56 the East Wing, the building of a military hospital complex, that reporter got their credentials back. There's been other leaks. And the press has its own defenses to when they are the recipient of leaked information,

Starting point is 00:12:14 It's not as simple as Judge Kelly said, well, there's national security concerns. I mean, the press gets leaks all the time. How do you think we found out about Watergate? How do you think we found out about what was really happening in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers? And the press enjoys a special set of protections, maybe not the leaker, but the leakee, the recipient in the media does. You know, WikiLeaks, for instance. And so I still don't understand Judge Kelly's comment there, but I did understand the video clip in which he says that Trump says he wants to try to reform the press.

Starting point is 00:12:55 Then they tried to morph that into a national security issue, and the judge isn't buying it. Here's a clip from Todd Blanche trying to do exactly that as the Attorney General play the clip. The judge decided this was not based on national security. So what do you think... The judge issued a temporary order. it's not final. The litigation's ongoing, and I'm not going to talk about the specifics of what the judge said. That wouldn't be right. What I'm talking about is the government's position and what the Department of Justice said in court, which is the same thing that President Trump has said repeatedly, which is at some point, at some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue, and it's not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it. Again, the judge says there is nothing in the record to suggest that Donald Trump is peeved

Starting point is 00:13:46 about a national security problem. I've been using laundry sauce, and I love how it makes my clothes smell. These premium-scented laundry pods don't just clean your clothes. They elevate them with fine fragrances made by the world's top perfumers. And they're not just about smelling incredible.

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Starting point is 00:14:31 legal AF20, L-E-G-A-F-0 at Laundrysauce.com. That's 20% off your order. at LaundrySauce.com with promo code LegalAF20. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. It's time to make Laundry Day the best day of the week. In fact, although it's not part of the record, here's Caitlin Collins from CNN making it her report

Starting point is 00:15:06 that it was Natalie Harp, Donald Trump's office wife, who triggered him at this moment to ban the press because she laid out a whole bunch of negative press analysis for him. And then he went nuts and banned the press. Play the clip of Caitlin Collins reporting. One of the biggest questions that we've gotten asked and that we've asked our sources ever since the president announced that he was banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from covering his administration on Friday was why now? The president has complained about negative coverage for decades, long before he was in political office. So why is he taking this step to block outlets whose coverage he doesn't like from covering him? Well, our sources tell my colleague Kevin Liptack and I that last week, the president's close aide, Natalie Harp, who is often seen with him in the Oval Office or on Air Force One, showed him graphics of negative coverage from Politico.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Between that and coverage TV clips that the president also saw, he was infuriated, which is what we are told led him to ban these outlets from covering him. him on Friday. It's a move that actually caught a lot of people in the West Wing off guard, and they were surprised themselves when the president announced that he was banning those outlets. Now, when it comes to CNN and the president banning CNN from coming into the White House, from accessing Air Force One, the TV pool, which are all the major outlets, Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN have all banded together, and they have suspended the TV pool, which means that for the time being, The president will not have a camera and reporters from a major outlet, a major television outlet, covering him. That comes as he is headed to New York on Monday for the United Nations General Assembly,

Starting point is 00:16:50 and also ahead of his big state visit in Washington with Xi Jinping, all events that we know the president values having broadcast on television. Now, the weird thing about national security is that Donald Trump picks and chooses who he's going to abuse. I'll give you an example. Maggie Haberman. Maggie Haberman has been covering Donald Trump for upwards of almost 20 years from her perch at the New York Times. Maggie Haberman wrote that now famous piece about three months ago, about a meltdown in the situation room, where the top people in Donald Trump's cabinet and administration, including Todd Blanche, right, including J.D. Vance, including Susie Wiles and others, met in the White House situation.

Starting point is 00:17:38 room. And she had like verbatim reporting. Like there was a leak about their discussions about the cover up for the Epstein files. She published that. Now, the difference is Katie, Maggie Haberman, also in her article said that her reporting was based on more than 200 interviews inside and outside the government. Other words, it was almost like one of those movies where somebody says, if something bad happens to me, I'm going to send these manila envelopes around the world with photographs in them. So make sure nothing bad happens to me. Otherwise, you know, almost like a little bit of an extortive comment. A little protective, a little prophylactic comment by Maggie Haberman. If anything happens to me, I've got people inside the government who are cooperating with me.

Starting point is 00:18:31 And Donald Trump left Maggie Haberman alone. There's no opening of an investigation or a criminal investigation against Maggie Haberman for obtaining what looks to be verbatim transcripts from inside the situation room? Just it goes to show you that he respects Maggie Haberman and ultimately the New York Times, begrudgingly maybe, but he wants to go after the easy targets of CNN Politico and MS now. To the comment of Donald Trump trying to reverse a court precedent for the Court of Appeal. appeals in D.C., two cases, one Cheryl or Sherell and one Karam, the judge says, well, that's above my pay grade. If you want to get those reverse, go ahead. Here's what the judge says about the first amendment on page 13. And we'll post this on legal AF substack for you to review.

Starting point is 00:19:27 It is likely that President Trump's revocation of plaintiff's heart passes is the sort of action that would deter a reasonable reporter or news organization from publishing stories to which he objects. The revocation of plaintiff's hard passes matters a lot as to how, whether, and to what extent, they can do their jobs. As plaintiffs attest, a hard pass is crucial to covering the White House because it allows reporters immediate, unescorted access to the areas of the White House complex designated for the press. Without hard passes, they would miss newsworthy events that often happen with little or no notice. Trump's own comments suggest that he intended the revocation of plaintiff's hard passes to alter their reporting on him,

Starting point is 00:20:09 bolstering the case that his actions here is sufficient to deter a reporter of ordinary firmness from reporting in the same way she had before, using his own words against him. And the judge says, you know, you supplied me this affidavit from this person at the Pentagon that says, well, it seems to be a lot less leaks about national security now that we've had these press bans over at the Pentagon. The judge says, that's sort of a relevant to what I'm trying to get to the bottom of here, which is did Donald Trump base his decision on legitimate national security concerns? Because I don't see anything in the record that he did. He says on page 19, viewed in light of the whole record, neither the September 22 letters

Starting point is 00:20:55 to the press nor the Wilson Declaration, that's the affidavit from the person who works in the Pentagon, suggests that President Trump would have revoked the hard passes and, ban them from the White House, even in the absence of the sort of reporting about him, that he criticized when he announced the ban. They do not suggest that a ban based on national security concerns was in the works before President Trump made his announcement. The reporting incidents described in the letters are a year and a half old. And to repeat, one of the reporters here had her hard pass renewed six months after publishing a story in January 2026, inside plans to build the top secret bunker beneath the White House East Wing.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Moreover, even accepting defendants' claims that these incidents damaged national security, a proposition that is discussed below, they have not really tried to support with evidence. Such reporting is commonplace for better or worse. Finally, it seems likely that if President Trump or another official would have banned plaintiffs from the White House, even in the absence of their protected speech, defendants would not have had to scramble to make their case with unsigned letters and a declarant who does not even work there. This is now extended for an extended period of time

Starting point is 00:22:10 until the end of the case. Donald Trump can now take his appeal to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Three Trump judges out of about 12 sit on the D.C. Court of Appeals. If they get two of them on the panel, they'll vote in favor of Donald Trump, I'm sure of it.

Starting point is 00:22:26 If they get one or less, it'll be against Donald Trump, then up to the United States Supreme Court on a shadow docket, emergency application, I am sure, if they want to make bad law. Or they'll just give in and stop trying to cut the press access for those media outlets. I'll tell you what this case doesn't involve as of right now, but other cases will. Donald Trump trying to ban these media agencies he doesn't like from the press pool, banning them from Air Force One, Marine War.

Starting point is 00:22:59 the Oval Office, the Rose Garden, and other places. Those cases are coming down the pike. They're just not the subject of this particular case, even though it's still a victory for the First Amendment, even with a slightly gun-shy Judge Kelly. I'm Michael Popock. Thanks for being here on Midas Dutch and Legal A.F. Take a minute and hit the free subscribe button until my next report.

Starting point is 00:23:20 If you love this episode, make sure you're subscribed to the Intersection Audio Podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts. It's my solo ride, and we release new episodes daily, all completely free.

Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump’s Own Judge Just Buried Him…

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