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It's All BS! Epstein is Why Trump Keeps Inventing “Emergencies” | George Conway Explains It All

It's All BS! Epstein is Why Trump Keeps Inventing “Emergencies” | George Conway Explains It All

The Bulwark

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0:00

As far as I'm concerned, part of deploying the National Guard to D.C. when there was absolutely not an emergency was to change the conversation away from Epstein. Hello, everyone, and welcome to George Conway Explains It All to Sarah. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, and we're back. We're back, George. It's great to see

0:27

you. I cannot believe how much illegal news we have to cover.

0:31

Did anything happen this morning or in the last 10 minutes?

0:34

Well, guys, I gotta tell you, I woke up to a thousand text messages from George. He's

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just been...

0:41

This happened at 1am, this happened at 2am, I, you know- Have you slept?

0:46

I was looking at the text messages the time they came in, it was like the middle of the night.

0:50

Uh, because I was, I, well, I got into, I'm in New York City, I got in late, and I had all this stuff, because I was traveling, that I wanted to read and catch up on like literally like six or seven judicial decisions that have come down in the past week and some couple of them two or three of the last three days.

1:09

I was staying up trying to read them all and I can't say that I met with a lot of success but I think I know enough to to spin to talk about this for a bit.

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I'm glad I'm going to try to move there really is a lot of content and so I want to try to move somewhat expeditiously through it because I think is going to be an action packed episode. And I guess I'll just say, this is the first time George and I have been together in a little while I took the summer off from this focus group pod I missed you too. I have a special project I've been

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working on. So it's don't get people acted like I took a big vacation somewhere I took one, took my kids to Disney, but otherwise I've been working on a lot of stuff. But we are back, original team.

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Here we go.

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Yesterday, the survivors of Epstein and Maxwell's abuse held a press conference telling their stories and calling on Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This comes a few weeks after DOJ released the transcript from an interview between Ghislaine Maxwell and Todd Blanche, formerly Trump's personal lawyer and now

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Deputy Attorney General. She did the interview in exchange for limited immunity. She also got transferred to a minimum security prison. Okay, so George, I know you read the transcript. I have not. Tell me if we learned anything interesting. And also, just as a note, is it normal for, like, the deputy AG to be interviewing a witness?

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No. It's so irregular. I mean, there's so many irregular aspects about this. I mean, first of all, you don't normally interview somebody who's already been sentenced to jail. Okay, unless they have something new and different to tell you when they're trying to get leniency. And she's kind of trying to do that here, but this isn't in the regular sense of getting leniency because I'm finally willing to tell you what the boss told me to do. The boss is dead here. Epstein's dead.

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There's nobody she can point the finger to that really matters at this point, although she could say unhelpful things to Trump. And the other irregular aspect is none of the people who were involved in prosecuting her, who actually know the record of the case, who investigated

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the case, who drafted the indictments, who presented the materials before the grand jury, who selected through the hundreds of victims to figure out what four witnesses they were gonna put this woman away with. None of those people were involved.

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In fact, the government not too long ago fired one of the lead attorneys on the case, the lead attorney on the case, a very talented lawyer named Maureen... what's it? Comey. Comey. Comey, yes. Comey. Yeah, so there may have been some other stuff going on there. But she would know best. I mean, she would be the one who would be able to extract information

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3:57

from her, particularly because one of the things you would do when you're interviewing a criminal, somebody who you, the government, have previously argued is a tergerer—they argued in sentencing and in other circumstances that she perjured herself, Elaine Maxwell perjured herself in connection with civil litigation against Jeffrey Epstein, which kind of got all of this rolling decades ago. You want somebody who knows the factual record, who knows what the investigation shows, because

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you need to test the witness's credibility. Of course, they did not do that here. Instead, they have Todd Blanch, the deputy attorney general. Deputy attorney generals don't do this. They're admini- They don't usually even argue in court. Sometimes they might get a, you know, get one case in the Supreme Court if they really want to do it for fun. But they don't really do day-to-day stuff. They manage.

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They make policy decisions. If a really, really important critical indictment comes down or is about to be offered by the, by a U.S. Attorney's Office to be presented to a grand jury. And it involved, I don't know, a United States senator or a foreign, some kind of a foreign person that has potential foreign policy issues. I mean, yeah, sometimes that stuff goes all the way up there. But to interview a witness is absolutely insane. And then who is Todd Blanche? How did Todd Blanche

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get to be Todd Blanche, Deputy Attorney General of the United States? He was a criminal defense lawyer, okay? He was also a prosecutor, but the most important credential he has, he was a criminal defense lawyer for?

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Donald Trump?

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Yes, good guess, excellent. And he was convicted of 34 counts in this city. So, I mean, it's just freaking bizarre. And then, other bizarre aspects of it, this woman is a convicted child molester and trafficker. Okay? She got, I don't know, what, 20 years? She got a stiff sentence, and, you know, they don't put child molesters in Club Fed. But she got transferred to Club Fed right

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after this interview. And there was nothing in the interview, of course, that suggested she didn't do the things she said she did, although she clearly isn't accepting responsibility for it. And then she said stuff about Epstein that didn't make any sense.

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I have to go back to see it. But there's stuff in there that that people who know the record Were I've been saying is just it's not true And so what happened with respect to Trump and I should have I should have selected some stuff to dramatically read but the upshot basically is she was

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you know, she said I never saw Donald Trump in any circumstance where he did something inappropriate or something like that very very vague and it's like okay is the standard for appropriateness of someone who has been convicted of physically molesting young girls and then of assisting a monster like Epstein and trafficking hundreds of, if not, I think over a thousand girls for his and other men's sexual pleasure and participating in it. I'm not sure she's a great judge of what is appropriate.

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Sure, yeah. Maybe not a reliable, moral arbiter of appropriateness.

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I'll just add one more thing and I'll stop blabbing. Lawyers know how to ask questions. Good lawyers know how to ask questions. Like good journalists, but lawyers are very, very precise. I mean, the way you ask questions is you start general and you go and then you drill down. Alright, have you ever eaten scrambled eggs? What did you have for breakfast today? Is it a fact that you had ketchup on your eggs today?

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You ask very specific questions because if the questions are specific enough and it turns out that the witness lies and then there's a photograph of them eating scrambled eggs, you've got them for perjury. And it's really important here to know what the facts are here because you can just generally say, oh, I didn't see anything untoward. Okay, but what did you see?

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I mean, he was there. Did you see any young girls there? Oh, well, I mean, what do you mean by young? You know, under the age of say 20 or under the age of 18 or something like that. Those are the kinds of specific questions you would ask if you were actually trying to determine whether somebody did anything inappropriate or was in a circumstance or a compromising circumstance where people were doing inappropriate things with minors by

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our standards and not the sex traffickers' standards. And none of those questions were asked. And lawyers know how to ask questions to get answers, and they also know how to ask questions not to get the answers they don't want to get. And sometimes you do that, you do that at your peril at a trial because the other side can show that you're, you know, if you don't bring it out on a direct examination

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or something, the other side can come and say, oh, Mr. Conway didn't ask you this. Isn't it a fact that, and you say something. So, you know, he was clearly trying to avoid Todd Blanche asking any question specific enough to bring something out.

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What would that something be?

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I don't know, but George, if you add it on top of the press conference yesterday with the victims and the stories that they're telling and the fact that Congress is trying to have a vote to release more of the DOJ files, and that it would be seen as a hostile act toward the administration for any Republican to vote for it. I like, sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I was talking, I was on Next Level with JBL and Tim

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yesterday, and we was talking, I was on Next Level with JBL and Tim yesterday and we were talking, and we were in the political implications of all this, but sometimes, and they were both kind of like, I don't know how big of a deal this is. And I don't know, I like lose my mind.

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10:17

It's like, am I taking crazy pills? The President of the United States is very clearly, they've taken the one person they can get, Ghislaine Maxwell, and given her this cushy, very unusual deal.

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No other sex trafficker ever would ever, ever, ever get.

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Would ever get. They have the attorney, the deputy attorney general on purpose going down to interview her to make sure that whatever she says is something that they can release. Who is Trump's criminal defense lawyer? Who is Trump's criminal defense lawyer? going down to interview her to make sure that whatever she says who is something that they can release. Who is Trump's criminal defense lawyer. He's threatening Republicans to make sure they don't vote for this.

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In my opinion, you can trace almost everything Donald Trump is doing. And the boys did not agree with this. And maybe I'm being alarmist, but that's not usually my mode. So I'll take being checked on it. But as far as I'm concerned, part of deploying the National Guard to DC

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when there was absolutely not an emergency happening was to change the conversation away from Epstein. And I think lots of the things that Trump is doing, you can. Why does he want to redistrict Texas? Do a mid-decade redistricting which totally out of the ordinary, totally unusual. Obviously he wants... he doesn't want any oversight from Congress. He desperately needs Republicans to retain control of Congress so

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that there's no oversight of him. Like, if you just ask me, I could trace every single thing back to. This is a guy who desperately doesn't want—they just re-released a new round.

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A new round of files.

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—A new round of old documents. —It's the same ones!

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It's the same ones as before, except with a bunch of new pages that are all completely redacted. What—how stupid is everybody supposed to be? So George tell me maybe you're not crazy person to ask you're not the one to talk me down no i'm not gonna be able bananas i need to have a talk with your boys there

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um i i agree with you and let me but let me qualify it in a sense i think there are mixed motives here i think that a lot of the things that he has been doing are things he was going to get to, and I think he may have front-loaded them, in part maybe intentionally create a distraction, or more, I think instinctively, to get attention to himself about something other than Epstein. Again, you've heard my spiel about Trump 10 million times, which is he doesn't think in logical progression.

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He just spins off and does things impulsively. But those impulses are based upon instincts. And the instinct is, I think he does have this instinct that he needs to attack and attack somewhere else to avoid being attacked himself and so the way you attack is you go after all the fake enemies that you always otherwise go after. The Democrats, the mayor of Chicago,

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the mayor of DC, Gavin Newsom, immigrants, you name it. And so that's his instinct is to coil up and then strike in some other direction when he feels threatened. And that's consistent with doing something to distract. But I don't think he separates all these things out in his mind. And I think also the pressure that he's feeling because of these files, the fear of being exposed

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as something, I don't know what exactly is in these files, I think it makes him more manic. And then I think it also makes the people around him more, they get the understanding that they can get more out of him and they can please him by saying, let's do this, sign this, say that. And I think he gets kind of hyper. And then there's also the aspect here, again, to talk about the mixed motives, I do think he's worried about his own mortality that which is another subject but i do think you know this bit about i want to go to heaven and i think he's feeling. I want you to i think he's feeling pressure in a lot of different ways it's causing him.

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To become more i don't know if manic is really the right word but but hyper.

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So i buy the mix motive like i buy the idea that he was always going to try to take over the Blue Cities. But part of it, to me, it is part and parcel of an ongoing pattern of two things. One is, it's always projection. So when you say he doesn't necessarily game it out, I do. But I also think projection is part of what happens with him.

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It's always projection with him. So to distract from his own criminal stuff, he goes after other crim- Like he's like, well, we're going to focus on crime. Real crime in the cities, right? And particularly black ones, people in cities where,

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you know, like something where he feels like he can get at other people's, like, I'll give you a different enemy to focus on. That's one thing he always does. The other thing is, is his go-to move, always politically, is to go to immigrants, right? Like, it's the caravans are coming.

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The caravans happened to coincide with the run-up to the 2018 elections.

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And then they disappeared. They were an emergency and then they weren't, which is the thing about what he's doing in the cities is declaring emergencies. And my contention is that the emergency part of it is Epstein, right? That it's not an emergency. The only emergency is if it was an emergency for Trump to get a different story going. But I agree with you that there's multiple

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sort of ways that he's doing it. Yeah, I mean the declaration of emergencies is a recurring theme that, you know, some of the decisions that we may talk about or have been talking about, you know, it's all about whether the president's declaration of emergency holds water and if so what does it allow him to do? And he has gotten into this position where he has figured out that if he says something is an emergency he can do whatever he wants. And that could be things he wants to do anyway or it can be things that distract from things that he's fearful of or both simultaneously

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which i think all of these things are going on at once yeah i agree okay speaking of other topics we need to get to we do need to keep moving but first we've got an ad and this show is sponsored by inda cloud the only thing growing faster than your inbox is your to-do list. IndaCloud gives you permission to ignore both for a little while anyway.

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Yeah, but I tried their sleep gummies. I love sleep. Sleep is the best. OK, back in March, Trump attempted to fire FTC member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who was a Biden appointee.

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You might remember this, she contested her firing because federal law says commissioners can only be removed for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. This week the DC Court of Appeals upheld the district court decision to reinstate Slaughter pending appeal. And so this was interesting because it also has implications for the recent firing of the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, which is sort of the most recent firing. So do you take this as a good sign that these – I'm sorry, actually, before I ask this question, George, I guess I want to say something more broadly about this. We're going to run through a bunch of good decisions here. I'm about to go through a bunch of appellate court, lower court decisions,

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all of which are really good. And so part of the reason this is an action packed episode is because there's a ton of good decisions, lower court decisions in here, but I think I want to add maybe up front a note of caution that before I want to be happy, I want to take happy moments where we get them. The courts are being are doing a real like these lower courts are doing I

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20:48

think making good decisions. We're only halfway through the game though. Most of these we're gonna get kicked up to the Supreme Court and that's a

20:55

different vibe. Maybe we can rate the decisions based upon like gummies. How many gummies do you need when you read the opinion? I actually could cut both ways. You're happy about the decision, you can take a gummy. If you're sad about the decision and you want to go to sleep, you can take a gummy. These are all 10 gummy decisions. But I want to say, do you take this as a good sign, or are slaughter and cook just on borrowed time until their cases hit the Supreme Court? I take it as a little of both.

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I just think, obviously, this is not the last stop for this case. And let me just go. We've talked about this before sometime last year or sometime earlier this year. I mean, the short story here about the law in 30 seconds, and you could basically have, you could teach an entire separation of powers law school seminar on this area of law that I'm

21:59

about to summarize in 30 seconds. Basically, there's the question of what restrictions Congress can place on the president's power to remove officials who perform executive functions. The strong version of that power has been argued for by conservatives like Justice Scalia and many academics, and I'm pretty sure that Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh agree with this. They call it the unitary executive theory, but I don't even think you have to go as far as unitary executive as the way some people use it.

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Article 2, section 1 of the Constitution, which establishes the presidency, says, basically says, is the executive power of the United States shall be vested, the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States. And so what conservatives have always taken that to mean,

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or at least taken that to mean the last 40 or 50 years, is the president wields ultimately all executive power. You can delegate some of it, and people can act on his behalf, but it's ultimately the president. And in order to do that, the president needs to have an unfettered power

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to remove people who have that delegated responsibility. And so the question is, can Congress restrict that in any way? And some people say, really, no. But the Supreme Court has taken a different approach over the years.

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When the FTC was created 100-plus years ago, I don't even remember the year now, but the FTC is an agency that deals with consumer fraud today and deals with antitrust issues. example if you want to do a merger. You have to get either approval of the d.o.j. or the f.t.c. depending on the circumstances and the f.t.c. is so called independent agency it was created by congress really check the power of the president. or to make sure there was antitrust enforcement from administration to administration. And it's a commission of five members, no more than three of which can belong to the president's political party, and it has a chairman. And there are restrictions on the president's ability to fire

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these individuals. There has to be four causes, and the cause has to be pretty specific under the statute. This was challenged in a case called Humphrey's Executor Against the United States. It was a challenge involving the Federal Trade Commission, the same body, which exists in largely the same form, although it has more powers today than it did back then. And the Supreme Court basically held that, well,

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the FTC exercises administrative and judicial functions. There are things that you can argue before FTC administrative law judges and go up to the FTC and they functions, right? There are things that you can argue before the FTC, administrative law judges, and go up to the FTC and they decide whether a merger violates Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

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And so, it's not really executive. That's what the Supreme Court said back then. Now, that's not really true. The truth of the matter is the Justice Department does a lot of stuff that the FTC does, and the Justice Department reports to the President.

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This is executive power when the FTC is the government and says that merger is unlawful. So over the years, there's been this inherent tension in the case law, like, well, we're saying these things, these independent agencies aren't really executive, but they really are. And so what the Supreme Court has done over the years is kind of narrowed Umprey's executive without

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overturning it and basically said that, well, if it's a multi-member body, it's different. Like, there are all these agencies, the SEC, the FTC, uh, you know, there are all these agencies the sec the ftc the um

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cp cfpb, uh You can the ntsb all The all you can name an alphabet soup of agencies that are multi-member agencies. There's no Single director there's a chairman and there are four members and they vote on stuff And so that has been something of an exception to the idea that the executive power

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has to be exercised by people who can be fired at will by the president. So the rationality of the original decision doesn't really match up today. And there have been, the conservatives are critical of that. They're just saying, well, this is a distinction

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without a difference. What difference does it make whether five people are acting to execute the laws or one person is doing it, one chairman of a commission? Either way, they're exercising presidential executive power under Article II, Section 1, and they have to be removable at will by the president. So Humphrey's executive

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has been perceived by most legal scholars as really having a potentially short remaining life. And this was even before Donald Trump came on the scene, even before he was reelected. And now you have a circumstance where people think there's a decent chance that the Supreme Court will overrule Humphrey's executor. I don't know whether they're going to do it this year, they may do it this year, they were going to do this, or largely expected to do this. And nobody knows what standard they may come up with, if any, to restrict the president's power. And the problem is, of course, is we're coming at a time where the executive power is being

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wielded, and the laws are being executed by someone power is being wielded and the laws are being executed by someone who doesn't want to execute the laws and who doesn't want to exercise executive power and consistent, consistently with his oath of office. The problem is here is we have a lunatic, who's president, who's a criminal. And so it's a really, really, it's a huge problem and it's, and that's the circumstance we face ourselves and we're faced with.

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28:27

And this case involving the FTC commissioner, you know, it's directly on point with Humphrey's executor. So they basically have to choose in this case when it goes up, if it will, I think it will, um, you know, are they going to basically let Donald Trump fire everybody in the government, every, every executive executive person wielding executive power, every agency head, everything, or not? And you know, I don't line that with the FTC because I always thought it made no sense

28:55

to have the DOJ and the FTC together enforcing the same laws. I never really particularly, I was a securities litigator. I don't have fond feelings for the SEC. I think it's necessary to have a securities regulator, but I don't think they're necessarily my favorite agency. And it doesn't make sense why you have US attorneys enforcing the criminal provisions of the securities laws and the SEC doing a completely separate operation enforcing the same laws against the same people civilly, I think it's a mess. On the other hand, it

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disperses power in a way that is not necessarily bad. And the problem here is it really expands the power of somebody who's trying to grab so much power. I don't think he knows what to do with it. He's very dangerous. And then the ultimate example of why you should be scared of this is the Fed. And we're going to get to, obviously, we're going to get to the lawsuit by, you know,

30:01

Trump has trumped up these charges of mortgage fraud against an FTC commissioner purporting to fire her, the one black woman ever appointed to the Fed. Is the Federal Reserve, this is Lisa Koch. The Federal Reserve, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is the official title of this body and he wants to remove one of these officials which in combination with a recent resignation or term expiration would give him control of his appointees or people

30:33

favorable to him control of the Fed. And he's a notorious being the real estate debtor and borrower and defaulter and bankrupt that he is, he loves lowering interest rates. And he loves lowering interest rates just because of his instinct there. And he loves lowering interest rates because he perceives it as goosing the economy and thinks that if interest rates are not reduced, that puts him into political problems. In fact, several years ago, he was attacking Jerome Powell,

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who he appointed. Even in his first term, he was attacking Jerome Powell. This is a very, very dangerous thing thing and that's the ultimate example of what is the practical danger of Trump getting this power to remove officials. The Fed, you know, the credibility of our monetary system, the credibility of our financial markets, depends on the perceived and actual independence of the Federal Reserve System. Just the same way it is with any central bank of a major

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Western country. And this, you know, this is, this is, they're playing with economic fire here, not just legal fire, but economic fire. And that's sort of, and I think the Supreme Court knows that. I mean, that's the one reason why everybody thinks Humphrey's executive has been left alone all these years, even though it has cracks in it, and even though people criticize it,

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even though it's kind of contorted, is that, you know, well, geez, what about the Fed? And that's kind of scary.

32:30

Well explained. Let's keep going. All right. We got to go to our next one, which is the posse

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Kamatata sect. Yes. Commodities. Commodities. Uh, Kuna Matata's, uh, last week, Andrew Weissman. And I feel like there should be, I feel like there should be Western music when we talk about that law. I don't know why. Because the posse's coming? Let's rope up the posse's. Let's rope up the posse's, Sarah. Get them horses out on the road and get them outlaws.

32:54

Andrew Weissman and I, who was on last week, I don't know if you listened to that episode, it was good, we talked about the National Guard deployment in DC. And of course, Trump had federalized the National Guard in L.A. earlier this summer, and he's threatening to send the Guard to Chicago, and then yesterday he talked about New Orleans, too. There was a multi-day trial last month about whether the Guard has been illegally deployed in L.A., and this week, Judge Breyer, who was the brother of Justice Breyer, Supreme Court Justice Breyer, issued an opinion that

33:25

started with this, which I'm going to read. Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, defendants, President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense deployed the National, and the Department of Defense deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure

33:51

that federal immigration law was enforced. There were indeed protests in Los Angeles and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protest and enforce the law. The evidence at trial established that defendants systematically used armed soldiers, whose identity was often obscured by protective armor, and military vehicles to set up protective

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perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act. That feels significant if it's upheld, considering that Trump is talking about, and this, we have to sort of leave aside D.C. because of home rule. There's a lot of complicated reasons why D.C DC is different from

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other cities across the country. But with Trump talking about deploying this to other places and I have this is a good question I have. We were talking about it actually on the next level. How significant is it? And will the ruling in L.A. make them think twice about one of these going into these other cities?

35:06

I think it's significant. I think it should be upheld. But again, I thought Judge Breyer's earlier ruling should be upheld. Here's a short description of the bid and ask here, what happened here.

35:21

So we talked about this a few weeks ago. What happened was, as you mentioned, Trump purports to federalize the California National Guard. And then the question is, is that lawful? He's not invoking the Insurrection Act. He's invoking some other provision. And Judge Breyer said, well, this is not, you can't, he can't do this. It's not really the kind of, the trigger in the statute, which called number 12406 wasn't really met because there really isn't, wasn't an emergency, it was kind of trumped up. And the Ninth Circuit stayed that temporary

35:53

ruling in an opinion, with an opinion that said, we're not going to second-guess the president on what an emergency is. Okay, so that, that dealt strictly with the question of, and it wasn't after a trial, it was just a preliminary, very young, on the papers ruling, very, very brief, very quickly done. That dealt with, can the president take command of the state's National Guard? It didn't deal with, okay, what can he do with the

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36:26

National Guard once he's taken control of it? And that's the issue that came up in this decision, which occurred after a full trial. And the question is, are they engaged? The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal military forces from law enforcement. Now what does that mean? And subject to it, there can be exceptions, unless Congress actually provides otherwise, and one of the exceptions is the Insurrection Act, and there's no insurrection here, and the government doesn't even claim yet that there's an insurrection.

37:01

The government made a couple of arguments. The government argued that, well, the statute that allowed the president to nationalize the state guard is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. And it isn't, okay? It just, the judge rejected that. And the other question is, okay, what exactly are these people doing?

37:22

Are they engaging in law enforcement? And the smoking gun piece of evidence that came up was a slide, a slide presentation that was sent around the National Guard or in the Defense Department or I forget who the recipients were. But it said, here's what the Posse Comitatus Act says. You can't do the following X number of things.

37:49

Let me pull it up. This is Breyer's opinion. And in the middle of the opinion, he puts this slide in. This slide was part of training materials given to Force 51, which was the california national guard that was federalized. And it says the PCA the posse commentators act.

38:14

Prohibits active direct pursuit arrest apprehension series search seizure secure the and therefore things in red security patrol patrols, traffic control, crowd control, and riot control. And then evidence collection, interrogation, and informant.

38:31

Okay?

38:32

What this slide says is, these things in red are prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act. Okay? The government concedes it is doing those four things, and you can see video of them doing those four things. And their argument was, well, the Constitution Article 2 permits, creates a constitutional exception here. And there is no constitutional exception for that. So essentially, by the lights of this own, the government's

39:05

own PowerPoint here, they were violating the Cosse Comitatus Act, and that basically is the core of the decision. And so the real question is going to be, I think, on appeal, I don't think there's any question about what they are doing and whether or not it is law enforcement. I think the question is going to become a purely legal question of whether Section 12406, the provision that authorizes the president to federalize the National Guard, creates an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act.

39:35

And I don't think it does. I don't think there's any way that the governor should win that, but who knows?

39:41

Okay, so I did look up posse comitatus. And it is a Latin phrase meaning the power of the county and refers to the traditional legal concept that a sheriff or other law officer can call on citizens to assist in maintaining peace or apprehending criminals. In the United States, the phrase

40:05

is also known for the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law passed in 1878 that prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes, with certain exceptions authorized by Congress or the Constitution. So that all makes sense, right? It makes sense

40:20

to the power of the government. That all makes sense. It makes sense. That's why I keep thinking of the Western music. Well Sheriff Lowell, she's getting a posse together to ride out at dawn to get them cattle rustlers that we have been causing real harm to our cattlemen.

40:40

Who knew that rounding up a posse was Latin? It came from a Latin derivation.

40:46

They had horses there, but they were wearing togas. I don't know.

40:50

I think that's the Greeks.

40:52

I don't know. Speaking of the clothing that people wear, I saw this ad on Instagram for the perfect gene, making some very extreme claims. Perfect gene. Perfect gene. I can't see your, there we go. Perfect gene. Perfect jeans. Perfect jeans. I can't see your, there we go.

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This is the patriarchy at work.

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So George, tell us what you love. And they're here in New York. They're probably just a few blocks away. Oh yeah, because it's in their URL. I'm in the East Village right now. Yeah, it's Perfect Jeans NYC.

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All right, so how do they compare to your old jeans? What do you like about them?

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You can have peace of mind knowing that your order is completely risk-free. It's funny, the guys here, one of our producers, has like four pairs of these Perfect Jeans now. There's a lot of Perfect Jeans going on on the men at the Bulwark staff after hearing this. So be like them, head to theperfectjean.nyc.

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43:13

So Harvard, I didn't want to miss this one with you because you and I have talked about Harvard a couple times and I remember when you were so glad that they were doing, you know, they were pushed, they were getting pushback to the administration., sent them money for the first time. Well, in another big district court opinion this week, a federal judge ruled that the administration's attempts to freeze more

43:34

than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard University was illegal. The judge wrote, review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used anti-Semitism as a smoke screen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country's premier universities. Which is, you know, here's the thing,

43:59

because Carver's been wobbling lately, right? They've been looking like they're gonna maybe give in on some of these things. We don't know where those stories have been coming from that's true be. I mean i assume it's sourced well but of course the administration has every reason to kind of leak. That they're making progress because it makes them look powerful and puts pressure on harvard but. Yeah i mean it's been upsetting to see these new stories particularly in the new york times report is by some very good journals like michael schmidt.

44:33

That said that they were making progress to settle and it was upsetting to me as a harvard alum who recently gave a lot of money to harvard because they were fighting back to read those stories i start getting this pin in my stomach and it's a one of the reasons why was so maddening is somebody's gotta fight these people somebody's gotta stand up for their rights because of harvard can't do it and no other universities gonna do it watching anybody else. And the other aspects of it is that. How i put this, what makes it worse is it's a no-brainer of a case. I mean, the government is not even pretending to really be serious about the anti-Semitism contention, okay? And not because most of what it's asking for is not, doesn't have anything to do with anti-Semitism or what happened at Harvard during the Gaza protests a couple of years ago. And Judge Burroughs, the district judge in

45:36

Massachusetts in Boston who wrote this opinion, just wrote a fabulous opinion and just went through the evidence, including tweets of or truths of a certain person, the President of the United States, where it's like, okay, is this really about fighting discrimination or anti-Semitism under Title VI, the law that prohibits universities from engaging in discrimination on the basis of religion or whatnot. He's talking about, you know, he's having these outrageous sprees in all caps. They hired left-wing Democrats like Lori Lightfoot and just sort of attacking them

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46:18

for being left-wing, which is like, okay, you don't like their politics. Okay, some of the things that you're asking for have nothing to do with the model. Most of the things they're asking for have nothing to do with politics. It's about you want to have more intellectual diversity on the faculty. Now, I want more intellectual diversity on any faculty. I'm good with that. But the government can't do that because the government doing that is a violation of the First Amendment. And it's just that it was just a no-brainer.

46:47

And that's the reason why I was just so upsetting to hear suggestions that Harvard would cave. Although, you know, Harvard has reasons to because it's like fighting, you know, it's like you're bleeding while you fight. Even if you get these stays, people,

47:00

there's just all this uncertainty overhead

47:01

and they wanted to have certainty. Yeah, but here's the thing I wanted to ask you about. So they win. They've just won, right, this big district court opinion, and says that the administration can't freeze the billions of dollars of committed federal funds. And it just seems to me that most people who

47:18

stand their ground, like the law firms that stood their ground and fought Trump Harvard when it stands its ground and fights Trump anybody who fights him in court they're they're winning so like why hello Paul Weiss are you out there at least in the locks north of here yeah at least in the lower courts they're winning yes why isn't it gonna win this they win this in the Supreme Court there is no there is no reasonable construction of the factual record.

47:48

I mean, the government here is basically brazenly threatening and bullying Harvard to engage in political choices that Harvard doesn't want to make. And you just can't do that under the First Amendment. It doesn't matter whether it's a university, it doesn't matter whether it's the bulwark, it's just you cannot do that and there's no way that this decision would not be affirmed on appeal including by the Supreme Court of England still. So okay so the question is

48:17

what does that mean in terms of will Harvard try to settle now? I think in some ways it can make it harder for harvard and other universities to settle. I know that when all when these four law firm injunctions were issued there were. Trump administration actually went away stop bothering law firms and law firms started getting the backs up so maybe that could be that could be that could that could be a positive on the other hand. I'm hard to think well you know we're still going to end up with myriad fights

48:53

because these guys never take no for an answer and maybe what we can do is we can talk them down money wise and talk them down in terms of some of the restrictions that they seem to be insisting on that infringe upon our academic rights and just pay them off once and be done with that that that might be a normal thinking process if you were dealing with. Normal people trustworthy people on the other side but they're not. Okay, we're dealing with a mob organization, the governor of the United States, run by the chief orange mobster. And you can't trust them.

49:28

They'll come back at you with something else. And unless it's airtight, I guess the Harvard thinking would be like, we'll get it into a consent decree issued by, so ordered by a federal judge. It's like, I just hope they just don't settle. I think they've had the upper hand. They've always had the upper hand.

49:46

I think the damage that would be done to Harvard as an institution and to higher education in the United States generally, and to the rights of all of us who want to stand up to abusive government and government that seeks to impose its political views on everyone. Harvard needs to do that and take one for the team, but it's not taking a big one for the team because it's going to win.

50:12

Yeah. I mean, the lesson here is you can fight back. And also, like I said up top, the law is still working to some degree. Like I know we all feel like nothing matters and this guy's just ignoring the law, but like they're still, in some cases, like in the TikTok case, like there are places where they're, but they're not acting like the law doesn't exist, right?

50:37

They're still-

50:38

Yeah, they aren't acting as if the law's, I mean, I've been warning for months. I've been expressing a fear, which has only somewhat come to pass that they're gonna violate court orders, right? And that they're, but more important,

50:53

that they're going to intentionally violate court orders and basically say, F the courts, the way Emile Bove told people at the Justice Department. F the courts. My fear has always been that he will basically say what the courts were not going to obey anybody. He hasn't done that yet although they have been doing things to try to avoid compliance with judicial rulings by lying to courts gaslighting to courts trying to miss reading.

51:20

What orders doing shit in the middle of the night so that nobody can go to court to stop them. They've been doing all that stuff. Now, the people who have been doing just an absolutely fantastic job in keeping the rule of law alive are the district court judges, the federal district court judges of the United States. Hundreds of women and men of both political parties, some appointed by Donald Trump even, you know, they have been standing up and saying, this is the law, you can't do this, you can't ignore the law, you can't make these

51:58

disingenuous arguments, you're insulting us by making these disingenuous arguments. The one court that hasn't done quite as good a job, sometimes it has done a good job, and other times it's like, what are they doing? It's the Supreme Court of the United States. And one of the things that's happened, the Supreme Court, a couple of the justices have been critical of lower court justices, and particularly in one Massachusetts case involving the resettlement of refugees to a third country, some of them feel that district courts are

52:29

just defying them or want to defy the court. And Judge Burroughs, in this Harvard decision, wrote this amazing footnote where he says, look, we're trying to get the law right. We're working hard. We're working late nights, essentially.

52:49

And you are just issuing these decisions, these decisions, Supreme Court, that we can't even make sense out of. You're not explaining yourselves. You're not even agreeing amongst yourselves. And so don't criticize us.

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53:04

We're just trying to get the job right. If you want us to do what you want us to do, tell us what that is. It's a remarkable footnote, a footnote eight. I commend it to all you lawyers out there, people who like to read footnotes.

53:18

And that is sort of a theme that we're starting to see with federal district judges generally. We saw it with the Boasberg judicial complaint, where Boasberg was expressing in a judicial conference, Judge Boasberg was expressing to the Chief Justice concerns that district courts have that the government isn't following

53:40

orders, and we need backup here. And there was an article on an NBC News website last night about how the reporter interviewed 10 federal judges on back, unnamed, and 10 federal district judges, and they're saying, we don't think the Supreme Court has our back and they're not helping us. They're not... Basically the same criticism that Judge Burroughs put in her opinion. And then it happened again in the FTC case that we talked about about 40 minutes ago now.

54:13

In that case, the government was essentially arguing that it should win and be able to, Trump should be able to fire the FTC commissioner, notwithstanding Humphrey's executive, which is a case that directly on point says the president can't do that. And one of the things that the court, it was a two to one decision,

54:34

there was a Trump judge from Trump one who dissented, but one of the things in that order that the majority on the panel pointed out, it was like, you, the government is asking us to defy the Supreme Court. Which is like, the Supreme Court doesn't want us to do that, they just told us, don't defy us.

54:55

And here's their existing precedent that they haven't bothered to try to overturn in eight decades. So it's a very, very interesting by-play. The tension between the Supreme Court of the United States, which has the 6-3 quasi-Trumpian majority, not quite all there, and these district judges. And there's another aspect of this which I think is sort of not been written about enough. The Supreme Court justices, I mean, they're lawyers, they've been law professors, some of them have been appellate advocates.

55:36

There really aren't justices on there. I have to think carefully. I don't think Kavanaugh has ever tried a case. I don't think Roberts has ever tried a case. I know Thomas has never tried a case. I could be wrong. Alito was a prosecutor. So he knows, he knows how to try a case. And Gorsuch has never tried a case. I don't think Gorsuch was a real practicing lawyer. I don't know. Maybe I could be wrong there. He was on the 10th Circuit for a long time. It's like, they don't know how they're not

56:09

good at dealing with things that are roughly packaged. And when a case comes to court, and it's an emergency case, it's like, you don't necessarily know what all the facts are. Legal issues are being identified, new ones every day because the lawyers are thinking up new stuff as they go along and then events change.

56:32

It's a messy thing to delve into if you're an appellate court two levels above the district court where all the fact-finding is happening and you're a multi-member court where you basically have nine people who can think nine different things about what's going on and they could all be wrong and they could all be right. You know and it was mostly was really shot surprising in a recent decision where.

57:00

There was a 414 split the4 split, the Libs plus Roberts, and then the four other Republican appointees other than Barrett, and then Barrett. And essentially, Barrett's opinion controlled because the narrowest, the rule is that the narrowest vote determines the rule when everyone disagrees and her opinion controlled even though eight justices disagreed with her. What's the district court supposed to do with that? And it's just a mess and the Supreme Court has made it worse because they don't, funnily, they don't know what they're doing here, okay? They don't know what they're doing here okay they don't know what they're doing here because they're not experienced with expedited litigation they're not trial lawyers there they're used to working on well developed records when issues have been narrowed to one issue that's when they do their job the best.

57:56

Doing things in the middle of the night on weekends is not their thing, particularly since they've never, like most of them, have never ever tried a case in a federal district court. And I got to say, these opinions written by Justice Breyer, I mean, not Justice, Judge Breyer, Judge Burroughs, these are great. These people are every bit as smart and every bit as talented, if not more, than some of

58:20

these justices. And I think we all need to stick up for them. Yes. Great. Great. Okay. All right. We got to keep moving. We're an hour deep. This show is sponsored by dupe.com. Have you ever fallen in love with a couch, lamp, or rug online?

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Thanks, dupe! Alright, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a decision striking down Trump's tariffs back in May, and on Wednesday, the administration petitioned the Supreme Court for very expedited review. Which is funny, because if the administration is claiming this is an emergency now, even though the original decision was back in May, and it's been

1:01:10

working its way through the appellate process. Like, what is, why do they need this emergency now?

1:01:16

I have not had the opportunity to read the government's petition for Saoirse Rare-iorari, which was literally filed late last night, on the same, you know, not long after this Federal Circuit decision came down this week. And what, when you see a cert petition that's filed within hours or days of a decision, it tells you one thing. The government knew it was going to lose. And the government has known it was going to lose in the Federal Circuit, it knew it was going to lose and the government has known it was going

1:01:45

to lose in the federal circuit. It knew it was going to lose in the court of an emotional trade and obviously this is going to go to the supreme court and they're going to have to take it. The question is how quickly are they going to take it? The legal issue we've talked about before it's under the international emergency, economic emergency something active i forget what year. What basically what it comes down to is it allows. No in in in it's really up. allows the government, you know, if there's a political crisis in the world, military crisis, or something like that, it allows the government to say, well, we're not going to import stuff from

1:02:28

the Soviet Union, or we're not going to import stuff from these bad actors of this country we're not having good relations with. And it talks about regulating stuff. It doesn't talk about taxes, it doesn't mention tariffs, and the government's position is well the power to regulate includes our issue. And the the federal circuit like the court below did a very good job of rebutting that came up with a very very good analogy which really was stuck in

1:02:58

my head I would talk about the SEC what is the SEC do the SEC regulates security training and on Wall Street. By the logic used by the government here, that power to regulate, because I'm sure it says, the word regulate must be somewhere in the securities laws because they could pass trading rules and whatnot. And so there's a lot ofures Trading Act. Does that mean that appropriate regulation could include, well, we're going to impose a 1% tax on all stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange,

1:03:33

or 1% tax on all commodities trading on the CBOE? No. That would be bizarre. And when Congress wants to talk about taxes, and Congress has the sole power to impose taxes under Article I of the Constitution, it says so. And that's basically the simple point of the decision.

1:03:55

Now, the Supreme Court is going to get the last word on this. And I think the question is going to be, how quickly will they do it? I think the government will ultimately lose, I hope. And the question is, how quickly are they going to do it? And the Federal Circuit did something interesting here.

1:04:15

They take the pressure off a little bit. They stayed their own decision. They didn't say that the tariffs must immediately cease, even though they could have done that. So maybe that's going to allow the court to take this on a less expedited basis, which I think probably would be better because, as I said, I think they do better when they take more time with things, although that's not always the case, see e.g. Trump versus the United States.

1:04:44

But again, this is all, this is going to go up to the Supreme Court of the United States. I think the only argument, and again, I haven't read the cert petition that the government could make about how it's being harmed here, is if these tariffs are struck down after six more months or a year or something like that, I think they have to refund. Somebody could bring a lawsuit. People are going to hundreds of people, thousands of people, and we can bring

1:05:09

lawsuits saying we want our money back importers and that would kind of, that would be kind of bad for the treasury, which is, you know, lacking in funds because we cut taxes, um, um, more than we cut spending.

1:05:25

Yeah.

1:05:25

I mean, this is just, this issue is like pretty straightforward in terms of this now is, now we got to go up to the Supreme Court. It continues to be a totally, a business environment in which nobody knows what's going on, right? Like, and that's just an impossible business environment. I am shocked that it is not reflected more in the markets. Like, I don't know why this level of uncertainty doesn't seem to be spooking them more, but this level of

1:05:54

uncertainty is high. All right, George, close in. We're coming into the home stretch here, okay? Last time. It's almost tomorrow already. I know. There's gonna be

1:06:06

Yeah, there's gonna be more decisions while we're taping. I want to talk about immigration before we get out of here. I want to talk about a few of the cases that involve removal of undocumented people from the United States. So at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning of Labor Day, right, it's Labor Day weekend, it's the Sunday of a holiday weekend, a D.C. judge issued an emergency order halting the Trump administration from sending more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children back to their

1:06:35

home country. According to lawyers for the children, the administration is preparing to send them back to Guatemala without notice or a chance to contest their deportation. The government says that all the kids have guardians in Guatemala, but the lawyers for the kids say that isn't true in all cases. And without any sort of hearing, I'm not sure how the government would know which kids have family in Guatemala

1:06:55

and which don't. Uh, I gotta say, man, man with the kids, like the cruelty is, I don't know, man, when you have, I've got kids, the thought of cruelty is i don't know man when you off the charts i've got kids

1:07:08

the thought of this i don't know i can't i sort of can't um think there used to be a bipartisan consensus that we need to help kids and take care of them and not abuse them used to be yeah but i

1:07:21

mean just like the thought of a child trying to navigate our immigration system in this way.

1:07:27

That's why there's a law actually, which was an issue there. So, I mean, look, what happened there.

1:07:33

Yeah, tell me about this case.

1:07:35

No, no, what happened there is that this case, they decided to do this on a weekend hoping that they could slip these kids out of the country without getting enjoined.

1:07:49

The plaintiffs, I guess, I think the groups included the ACLU,

1:07:54

filed something late on, I guess, was it Friday night? And essentially, the judge got woken up in the middle of the night, and she said in the hearing the next morning that she had been up since 2.30 and that her law clerks had been up since 2.30 because they had to actually read the briefs and do some research and to figure out like okay what what is going on here in the middle of the night. And the upshot was the government, you know, like the government came in and had nothing really to say about what was what was legal what was how this could be legal and it couldn't be legal because there is something called because we love because we love kids there is something called, because we love kids, there is something called the Torture Victims

1:08:27

Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. And it deals with torture victims in part, but it also deals with refugee children. It deals, it says, there's provisions in there in the TVPRA of 2008 passed during a Republican administration, as I said, back when there was a consensus that we should help kids. It says that if

1:08:55

any unaccompanied minor is in the United States, a bunch of things, protections kick in. One is they have to be held by something called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. They can't be held in a normal INS whatever, or Alcatraz or anything like that or anything you could possibly create. There is a specific agency that is designed to help refugees resettle in the United States and they're basically nice to people. I'm surprised they still have funding. Maybe they don't.

1:09:28

Well I think they've been busy settling white Afrikaners.

1:09:33

Oh right, right, right, right. I forgot about that. Yeah. So the OR has to keep custody of these. So ultimately the order was send them back to the ORR. But anyway, that's one protection they get. Another protection is they get full removal protections, removal hearings. You have to have a full hearing. No expedited shortcuts, no nothing. It says they get a full hearing. Not only that, the government has to find them counsel and pay

1:10:01

for it. Okay? So you can't put kids in the middle of the night on an expedited basis, just take their cases off the immigration docket, not give them lawyers, put them on a plane and send them back to Guatemala. It specifically violates multiple revisions of the TVPRA. And it was a no-brainer.

1:10:21

But, you know, and, you know, the funny thing is the judge, again, judge, again, well, he wasn't, she wasn't taking any risk here with the government, you know. She was just basically saying, you understand what this means.

1:10:35

ORR, you have to take the kids off those planes and put them back at the ORR. Do you understand me? They're not, no more kids will be sent to planes and certainly nobody leaves the country. Basically, do you understand me? I mean, essentially that's what the judge had to do. And then and then what happened after decision was actually equally appalling. The Magas started attacking this judge because she is an immigrant. Yeah, she's from Trinidad and Tobago.

1:11:07

Okay.

1:11:08

So Stephen Miller tweeted about her, calling her a Democrat and implying that because she's foreign-born, she is untrustworthy.

1:11:14

Right.

1:11:15

And there were a bunch, there was a bunch of social media commentating from the racist right about that, including a tweet from Laura Loomer that said, I won't even say what it said, and I responded to her, I think I responded to that tweet, you know, oh yeah, they said something like, no, maybe that wasn't the tweet. There was a tweet online that basically said, the framers didn't intend for foreign-born judges to be telling the president of the United States what to do. Right? I don't remember who tweeted that out. And I quote tweeted and I said, you know, 51 of the 85 federalist papers were written

1:11:54

by a guy from Nevis.

1:11:56

Alexander Hamilton.

1:11:57

Yeah.

1:11:59

Not to mention, I didn't you tweet this though? I thought what I thought you were going to say was, wasn't Aileen Cannon not born in the United States? MAGA's favorite judge?

1:12:09

Yeah, that was Lumer attacked the judge in the TVPRA case. And I responded like, yeah, we absolutely have to get rid of all these foreign-born judges. And I posted a picture of Wikipedia screenshot from Wikipedia of Eileen Cannon and her bio summary that said she was born in Cali, Colombia.

1:12:32

Not in the United States, interesting. Yeah, yeah.

1:12:37

Yeah, no I appreciate it. Why should this foreign-born judge have the right, I mean she was a citizen at birth because her father I think was from Indiana, but let's leave that aside. Why should this foreign-born woman from Colombia, born in Colombia, have the right to say that the President of the United States gets to steal classified documents? Where does it say that? Where do the framers intend that?

1:12:55

All right, sorry, you got me all riled up. that we could do it. We did a lot of it on TNL, but like the blood and soil tribe here is really out in force. They were all over the Nat National Conservatism Conference. I can't, uh, it is, it is wild how quickly this has taken root. No, it's not how quickly, I mean, it's been around forever, but like the, the zeal and the, the lack of shame now, I mean it is our friend greg naziata had a tweet that it was like I think He said it's as dangerous as it is on american this thing, which is completely true

1:13:31

um, completely the arian workers are

1:13:36

It's crazy, where did all your grandparents come from guys laura loomer or did your parent could your great great great There are they may were they over on the mayfair? Are they native american? You tell me everyone. Jeez. This is ridiculous. Okay Did your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great to summarily deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Trump claiming they were members of the street gang Tren de Agua, or Tren de Aragua. This case has already made its way up to the Supreme Court and is probably headed back to the Supreme Court after this. What say you?

1:14:17

I mean, it's an absolutely correct decision by this panel of the Fifth Circuit. We've talked about this case before when the district judge issued the injunction. This is about the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president in times of war and invasion to remove aliens from the country that invaded us or we are at war with. So for example, Germany.

1:14:37

Germans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act in World War II. And here, the contention that there was an invasion or war is absurd. There are just a bunch of people who came to the United States that may or may not be narco-terrorists or something or narco-whatever. It's not clear that the government has a great track record on identifying these people, frankly, at

1:15:00

this point. But it's not an invasion when a bunch of people show up, some people show up at LAX, some people show up on the border, some people show up at IAH, some people show up at JFK, and they live in separate communities and they do whatever they're doing that the government doesn't like, if anything, that's not what's meant by an invasion. And these people are not representing the government of Venezuela, which we never got a war with anyway because we're doing something else that's illegal

1:15:35

do a whole program on that too. And we'll have to do it next time because I swear to God we've been at this for too long. No, it's crazy. Too long. And there's probably a couple things we forgot about. I don't even know. There are, but I gotta say, I tried to get in most of the things you've been texting me over the course of this week, but I wanna sort of wrap up by saying there's a lot of good news in here. There's just a lot of,

1:15:57

the people who are feeling helpless, people who have been feeling dejected, people who are feeling like the law, you know, isn't doing enough to protect us. Like, there's a lot that it is doing. This administration is being held at bay. They aren't summarily ignoring the courts yet. But also, people shouldn't get too excited because this Supreme Court has not, you know, it's been a little bit all over the place. It's not to be trusted as a purely

1:16:28

good faith interpreters of the Constitution and and like they want they're look you're gonna look for ways to give Trump what he wants but it will Be interesting to watch all of these Proceed when the court is back, but I think they sit in October and we'd probably get decisions in November, December on some of these? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, it really, yeah, look, they come back in October and we don't know what this, they're going to be issuing emergency orders between now and then.

1:16:57

They'll probably issue a bunch in October. And then the question is, are they taking, going to take some actual merits cases with for argument including for example That AEA case is probably going to go on by to the fifth fifth circuit but then there are some other cases kicking around like the firing of the FTC commissioner and the and the and the

1:17:18

And it's ours case in particular. So they're gonna be some actual there. This is gonna be a big term at the Supreme Court

1:17:23

Yeah big term So we got a lot that you and I are gonna be following in terms of the legal and illegal news But George, thanks as always for talking all this through with us. See you again, Sarah. It's great to see you my friend Guys, don't forget to hit subscribe leave us a review and we're gonna see you next week

1:17:40

Well George Conway, he's a man with a plan got to sit down with Sarah Longwell next week. Corruption to the legal tangles and troubles the growing fast. It's a storm that's gonna last Oh Oh From the

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