You're on Popok Live, New Year's Eve edition. We got a lot to talk about. I'm going to take questions through blue sky from a lot of people in the audience tonight. And I'm going to cover things at the intersection of law and politics you need to know as we leave 2024 into 2025. Let's talk about Eugene Carroll.
Not just the $5 million win she just had at the appeals court, the second circuit court of appeals in New York, but the upcoming $83 million she's going to take off with Donald Trump because she was the victim of his sexual abuse. I'm going to update you on a devastating loss for Donald Trump, Alina Haba, and all of his incoming criminal defense lawyers who have now been promoted to top jobs in the Department of Justice and the Solicitor General's office.
the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. We've got two laterals by Special Counsel Jack Smith before he completely goes out of business. One lateral is over to the U.S. Attorney for Miami, the Southern District of Florida, where I also practice. And we're going to talk about what he's just done, Jack Smith, to keep the 11th Circuit appeal alive to try to reverse the terrible precedent.
set by Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida, in which she found for the first time in 200 years that a special counsel can't be appointed by the Attorney General has to go through a Senate confirmation process and a new congressional funding resolution.
All wrong. All needs to be fixed at the 11th circuit and the lateral handoff by Jack Smith to Mark Kenzie LaPoint, who is the U.S. Attorney Miami might accomplish that. But I said there were two laterals. The second lateral is going to be Donald Trump.
And the final reports that special counsel Jack Smith is obligated under law to provide closing out the DC election interference case in front of Judge Chutkin and the Mar-a-Lago case. He needs to deliver those reports to
Merrick Garland, I believe he already has. They need to be reviewed. And then Merrick Garland has promised the American people, and I'm going to hold him to his promise that he's going to disclose those reports to us so that we can dive in and see exactly why Donald Trump was prosecuted, the evidence against him, and what the prosecutors concluding thoughts were that we're going to see likely
And certainly before January 20th and the inauguration, there is a MAGA civil war that has broken out that we have covered here over immigration. Well, of course it is. Of course, that would be it. MAGA woke up and realized they really don't like black and brown people despite the fact that fair numbers of them and Americans voted for Donald Trump. And now there's a whole fight that's brewing because, well, let's be frank, Elon Musk is uncontrollable.
incorrigible, and so is Aram Swami, or as the MAGA social media posts have started calling them the Doge twins, and that's not a compliment. And now Susie Wiles, who's the incoming chief of staff for Donald Trump, is trying to get a handle, trying to get some discipline in the confirmation process. And she knows that every time there's a social media post where one social media posts closer to a complete all out civil war in MAGA, so she's trying to restrain it with a memo.
She sent out, um, isn't that adorable? Susie Wiles, who I'm not sure how long is going to last as the White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, but she sent a memo that got leaked to the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's paper, probably on purpose to try to get all of the candidates, all the nominees for various cabinet positions. And I assume Elon Musk and others to stop social media posting from now until the confirmation process. Good luck with that, Susie. We'll talk more about that in a minute.
Then we've got a missing person alert, a silver alert. And missing is representative Kay Granger from the Republican from Fort Worth that represents the 12th district in the house. And the house has a problem. Mike Johnson has a problem because they can't find Kay Granger. Apparently, she's been an assisted living facility.
and has been in a dementia unit. This is the reporting by the Dallas Express on the ground and isn't anywhere near taking votes or doing her duties in the 119th Congress, which he has been elected to. And it's supposedly going to be sworn in. Remember, there's already the slimmest margin of any modern day Congress right now that the House MAGA hold only a three seat margin, which is going to drop even further when
uh, actually is going to drop to three after Donald Trump takes out certain Congress people into his administration. And if that if you subtract Kay Granger, you're down to two, which means say hello to Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries of the Democrats. We're going to talk about that, that curious case of the missing representative and why while positive now,
Why would MAGA and Mike Johnson try to hide the fact that a representative Granger is in an assisted living facility and suffering from possible dementia? Is it because it would undermine their narrative and their attacks on Joe Biden? We'll talk more about that.
And then I got some questions, questions, stump the Popok on blue sky. I've got about a handful of them going to cover right here on Popok live. I'm so glad you're with us on New Year's Eve. I think we've all gotten our groove back. I felt like I was jumping up and down on one leg on shifting sand since November. But I got my voice back. I got my groove back. And we've got our angle of attack on how to be the party in opposition.
and how to use that slimmest of margins to our advantage in the house, how to use our opposition party leadership in the Senate, how to use lawsuits already been drafted to go against the worst instincts of Donald Trump's abuse of power. Just ready, itchy finger, just ready to be filed as soon as Donald Trump tries to sign an executive order to take away our rights.
We got our groove back and you're here with me on Popok Live. Let's let me take a breath. Let me dive right in and catch you up on the EG and Carol case because there's a lot of kind of confusion, a lot of procedural issues. I'm going to try to break down for you here about EG and Carol. You will recall or I'll tell you straight that EG and Carol work for L Magazine as an editor.
And she wrote in a memoir in a book in a tell-all that in 1996, she was sexually assaulted. She went even further than that in a dressing room of the burgdorff Goodman department store, which is caddy corner to Trump Tower. She said she bumped into Donald Trump. Donald Trump started to, uh, it started to, uh, playfully banter with her about the purchase of a gift for a girlfriend. It then devolved into let's go to the lingerie section. Then the door was shut and Donald Trump was on her
immediately, and she says sexually assaulted. And two juries have believed her. At least one federal jury believed that she was sexually assaulted and that something was inserted inside of her by Donald Trump during that period. And so there were two separate cases filed by E. Gene Carroll. They were tried separately in front of two separate nine-person federal juries in New York.
The first case that she filed, we sometimes refer to that as Carol one was about statements that Donald Trump was about the sexual misconduct, but it was about the statements that Donald Trump that were defamatory.
when he was in office in 2017, in which he called her a hoaxster, a shakedown artist, not his type, ugly, never happened, and the like. That was arguably potentially covered by some sort of immunity, because Donald Trump was an officer, at least to be an argument to it.
And so about six or eight months after that first case was filed, New York passed a one year lifting of the statute of limitations, as many states did, many progressive states did, to allow adult survivors of sexual misconduct and sexual attacks to file charges, no matter how old they were and how many years before it happened, as long as they made this one year window. So she filed a second case under that statute.
And she also alleged that she was defamed again after Donald Trump was, so for sexual battery, and then for defamation for statements Donald Trump made after he was president. So first case is the defamation alone before he was president. Second case, Carol too, was for the sexual assault now that the statute of limitations had been lifted and new defamation that happened after Donald Trump was president, so no immunity issues.
Guess which case went to trial first, the second one. Sorry, that's right. So that case goes to trial. And at that trial, the sexual assault is proven in front of a jury.
It's, uh, Eugene Carroll testified, several other witnesses testified. Other witnesses about Donald Trump's sexual misconduct testified. They played the, um, the Hollywood, uh, the access Hollywood hot mic moment where Donald Trump infamously claimed that he could grab a woman by her genitalia and get away with it. That was all played. Lewis Kaplan is the judge there and the jury
Having heard not from Donald Trump live testimony, but from his deposition testimony and the witnesses of other people ruled, ruled for aging Carol and gave her $5 million total for punitive damages and for sexual assault. That took care of that case. That's the case that went up on appeal that we just got the decision on in the last 72 hours.
That decision, Donald Trump claimed that that $5 million verdict should be overturned because in his view, Judge Kaplan made a series of evidentiary mistakes, mistakes on the evidence about what he let in. He didn't like the fact, for instance, that two witnesses testified in front of the jury who claimed that they were sexually assaulted by Donald Trump in the past. A People Magazine reporter at Mar-a-Lago
another door shut in a closet and a sexual attack, according to her testimony, and a woman on a plane who had the misfortune of being seated next to Donald Trump in first class and testified that he sexually assaulted her and groped her. He didn't like that testimony. He didn't like the access Hollywood tape coming in.
Ultimately, the second circuit court of appeals disagreed with Donald Trump and their lawyers and found again for Eugene Carroll. She is this close to getting her $5 million. Donald Trump could try and appeal to the United States Supreme Court, but I don't see that happening because he tried an appeal on a related case involving Eugene Carroll and Trump before, and the Supreme Court wouldn't even take it up on appeal.
So that's the five million. But this leads to the $83 million because in the second trial, when Donald Trump decided he should testify and did testify, the jury really hated him. And the jury came back with an $83 million judgment for the new defamation against her after he was already president. So there was no immunity decision.
In that particular case, the immunity decision had already been made by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a prior proceeding argued by Alina Haba. And when she argued, they said, you didn't raise the immunity decision when you were supposed to in this case. So that trial is going forward without any immunity.
Now at the end of the day, that case is still up on appeal based on whatever errors that Donald Trump believes the judge made. And so we're waiting on the decision by the second circuit on the 83 million. Now when he lost the immunity ruling by the second circuit, Donald Trump took it to the Supreme Court, but they're not interested. It's been over a year and a half and they have not agreed to take that case to disturb the finding of the second circuit that Donald Trump did not have immunity to defame aging Carol.
So this is why she's gonna get, I believe, $100 million with interest between the two judgments between now and 2025. Donald Trump wants to take a victory lap on his way into the presidency and inauguration, but a cold hard reign is currently falling on him with all of these cases. We've got the E. Gene Carroll case. Then we've got a side note. We're waiting still on Judge Mershan
in the New York State Supreme Court case to make a decision about whether the indictment, sorry, the conviction, 34-count conviction against Donald Trump for business record fraud and for the conspiracy around the Stormy Daniels payoff, whether that should be thrown out or not. Likely he's not going to throw out the conviction. And then we get to the question of, is he going to sentence Donald Trump before the inauguration or just after?
That is still pending. We're still waiting on the appellate court in New York state, New York state court to rule on how much of the $450 million civil fraud judgment Donald Trump is going to ultimately have to pay is the first department of pellet division in New York going to cut it in half going to cut 30% off going to cut it down to size. We're waiting on that ruling.
Many of these things will come up between now and the inauguration, and I'll report on it in subsequent editions of Popok Live. Now let me move on to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals with the two laterals that we're watching Jack Smith do on the way out the door. The first one is, let me talk about the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals case.
the judge, judge Eileen Cannon before the election, decided that she would have the bright idea for the first time in 200 years of jurisprudence, federal jurisprudence, and constitutional law that she would find that the attorney general designed out the power to appoint a special prosecutor.
First time ever. In fact, it's completely against the law established by the United States Supreme Court in 1974 in a case involving Richard Nixon. But she said she figured it out. No special counsel has to be done through a Senate confirmation hearing and the funding has to be specially appropriated by Congress, not with the funding mechanism already used.
But that doesn't make any sense. So that's up at the 11th Circuit. It originally was an appeal involving Donald Trump, Walton Houta, and Carlos de Alviera. But after the election, Jack Smith dismissed Donald Trump, but kept the butler and the handyman in the case because they're trying hard to have the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in Atlanta, take this terrible precedent off the books.
I mean, I think Jack Smith feels a little bit guilty that a number of his cases led to some terrible precedent that will live on into the future. You know, he took on Donald Trump on the, you know, on the immunity case. We have a terrible immunity decision by the United States Supreme Court. He's trying to get this out the door and off the books with the 11th Circuit. It's a race right now.
because as soon as Donald Trump gets in, moments after January 20th, he's going to pardon Walt Nauta and Carlos the Al-Viera and you need a party in order for the appeal to go forward. So I think Jack Smith sending the appeal and assigning it, if you will, to the US attorney in Miami who has stepped in and appeared in the case is trying to hold the ring long enough to allow the 11th Circuit to rule before the 20th of January or all bets are off. It's up.
The other lateral that Jack Smith has done that we are also waiting on between now and the inauguration is the release of his special reports, special counsel reports about the Mara Lago and the DC election interference case through Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland, you promised the American people just like the Jan 6 committee release the reports.
Okay. Now you're caught up on E. Jean Carroll, all things New York and sentencing and the 11th Circuit and the two laterals by Jack Smith. Let's now take a slight diversion here. And let me talk about the MAGA Civil War that has opened up and what we can do about it as fair-minded people.
This is what happens when you have an undisciplined mind occupying the future White House surrounded by people who aren't disciplined and are rogue. And you got Susie Wiles, the new chief of staff trying to contain it all.
Elon Musk said some truthful things. It was like a Freudian slip. It was accidentally truthful about how he feels about MAGA that they are. And this is his words, not mine that he repeated when he liked something and commented on something in social media that people who don't believe that smart immigrants are important to our tech culture and our tech business are retarts, that Americans are retarts.
And if you didn't like that, then you're going to hate what Rahm Swami said, which is that America has a culture of mediocrity and they can't fill the tech jobs. Now that pissed off people like traditional OG MAGA, like Laura Loomer, who said, and I'm paraphrasing in a social media post, that she didn't vote to have two billionaires with an open checkbook, determining immigration policy, and letting in all Indians and Brown people into the United States, that that's not her MAGA immigration policy that she voted for.
and that they should get out of Mar-a-Lago and stop influencing policy. Well, when Laura Loomer speaks, a lot of maga listen, and now this little war broke out, Donald Trump tried to fix it by agreeing with Elon Musk that H1B specialty visas that are required for highly technical positions to let people come into this country from places like India and China and the rest are important to keep our economy afloat.
and Donald Trump sided with Elon Musk on that one against MAGA. This is why there's a tremendous amount of MAGA misgivings about having voted for Donald Trump, because everybody that he made promises to are now realizing that those promises are illusory at their fake, that they're phony, and we're seeing it play out every day. Susie Wiles
is worried that you won't be able to get any of these people confirmed. RFK, Jr., you know, Tulsi Gabbard, Hagg Seth, Cash Patel, if they keep posting on social media, stupid stuff. So she sent out a memo, a report, warning them, reminding them that they are not to post on social media, stop it, cut it out.
I mean, I feel like she's she's like the school teacher, the substitute school teacher who showed up in seventh grade and a food fight broke out. Now she's trying to regain control. Good luck, Susie Wiles. Remember Susie, the average time for a chief of staff for Donald Trump to be in office was about five months. You're on the clock is all I'm going to say. I don't think that's going to work. And
Then you've got this moving on for a minute. You've got this craziness with Donald Trump when he's not doing social media posts, going after our allies, trying to interfere with the German democratic election process, trying to interfere with one of our allies, trying to bring down the Canadian government and Justin Trudeau
Right? Try to bring down the French government. These are supposed to be our allies. We're not supposed to be interfering and siding with the alt-right in these countries, but that's what Donald Trump's doing. We're going after China with 20% tariffs, threats, and then China responds by authorizing cyber hacks of the Treasury Department and Donald Trump's cell phone. How's that going for you? Donald Trump threatens Putin.
and says there needs to be a ceasefire now in Ukraine. And he says, I reject your ceasefire plan and he bombs the crap out of Ukraine on Christmas Day. How's that going so far? Donald Trump says one thing and it destroys the financial markets. We've just seen that happen. What's going on with Greenland and Panama? Okay. Greenland, it's been corrected to me. Somebody has corrected me on blue sky. It's four times the size of Canada. I think I said it was twice the size of Canada. It has 56,000 people.
It is a protectorate of Denmark. It is part of the Denmark social state. There's a lot of amazing, great reasons to be
citizen of Denmark because of all the things you get as a mandatory obligation under their constitution as a social safety net. And those 56,000 people are enjoying the benefits of that. Donald Trump doesn't really want to take over Greenland. He just recognizes that Greenland as a buffer with Russia and China and with the environmental impacts
of greenhouse gases and the warming of the environment, which they deny, they want to take control of it. They want to take control of drilling and petroleum exploration and gas exploration and new maritime channels opening up because of the melting ice caps and all of that and get control of the Arctic. So they want at least Denmark to spend more of its money protecting Greenland so that Russia doesn't take it over.
because Russia is already encroaching on Greenland. So I kind of get the point, but they are an ally as is Denmark. So the Danes are like, what are you talking about? And you're not, we're not going to be your 51st state. And there's no way Donald Trump's going to be able through persuasion
or a vote of Congress to offer enough money to take Greenland off of Denmark's hands or to get Greenland to say, sure, we'll go with you instead. And there's no way he's going to take it by force.
It's sort of a stupid argument, but we keep talking about it because Donald Trump keeps sending proxies on places like Fox News that says, you know, we should, we should just add it to Alaska. And are you, are you kidding me? But let's be frank, that's not what Donald Trump wants to do. He just wants to deans to spend more on military to protect Greenland from incursions by Russia and China. All right. That's where we are with the catch up on Greenland. Panama.
You know, we helped. I know. We lost a lot of lives fighting in Panama and helping to dig it, dig the canal. I get it. But Jimmy Carter, great president, just died at the age of 100. You want to see a show stopping show of patriotism and not a dry eye in the house, January 9th, when Jimmy Carter lies in state in the Capitol.
that's going to be one not to miss, not the thing that happens on January 20th. But Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty and returned, which is allowed to do, and Congress ratified it to return the
canal to the Panamanians. Now, Donald Trump apparently just woke up and figured out that China is in the North America and in the Western Hemisphere and has been investing in infrastructure in the Caribbean, in Central America, South America for a long, long time. Wake up.
Wake up, they're building the bridges and the tunnels and the infrastructure and the hydroelectric plants and the wind turbines that Americans haven't been doing for years to try to get a sphere of influence in Central and South America and in the Caribbean. Just go to any of those countries, go travel, and you'll see these amazing public works all sponsored by Chinese money.
Just talk to the locals. So he just woke up and figured out that they're trying to do the same thing in Panama and that they're using the Panama Canal for their trade, you know?
Well, that's what happens. So threatening Panama who's already firing back the way he threatened Mexico and Canada is not going to work. And it's this kind of mental instability, this undisciplined mind that we have on display that is only emboldening our enemies to take advantage of what appears to be a completely erratic person. I had a conversation with somebody the other day.
a Republican. Fine. I have to have conversations with them. I enjoy other people's company and sometimes they're Republicans. They're usually Rockefeller, Reagan, Goldwater Republicans, not MAGA, but, you know, I was talking to this, you know, person, smart guy, works in financial services. And he said, I think it's better to have an erratic Donald Trump. I think that's better for our national defense. That is so upside down backwards.
We are just more vulnerable because our enemies are going to exploit this erratic careening from crisis to crisis, and social media posts, social media posts that Donald Trump exhibits in 2016. And does anybody think he's less erratic now? Right? He's less moving into his demented state? We saw him during the campaign. He was out of gas.
If that campaign had gone on another month, I don't think he would have made it across the finish line. So no, erratic. That's not a policy. That's not the Trump policy to just act crazy. It's not a movie. So that's not happening. So let me move on. Let me talk a couple of ways. Let me take just a quick breather here. Let me talk a couple of ways about how to ultimately support
minus touch and legal AF. We formed legal AF. My minus touch partners in me about two month, about two and a half months ago, not for the purposes of getting the Democrats elected, although that was a byproduct. It was about doing what we've always done and what I've always done, right? Not just speaking truth to power, breaking down at the intersection of law and politics with commentary and analysis that you can rely on. It's not always 100% accurate. I don't, I don't have a time machine, but
It comes from years of experience in the courthouses and courtrooms that I've been in my whole life at that intersection of law and politics in my political background, my Wall Street background, bringing it all together on legal AF along with my co-anchors. Ken, where did that come from? I combined Karen Friedman at Nifalo with Ben Mysalis and I got Ken.
than myself, my co-founder, and Karen Freeman, and this is what we do. So we formed Legal AF because we knew, we knew in advance of 2025 if Donald Trump got in.
that we would have to be at that intersection, that hot corner of law and politics, because it is going to be one of the ways that we save our democracy. It is going to be one of the ways the lawsuits that are going to be filed and flying out are going to be almost impossible to keep track of, except on legal AF.
by the, by the attorney generals of 17 states that are entirely blue and another set of attorney generals and public interest groups like the ACLU and the Southern poverty unit and, and crew and the rest. And we are all going to have to come together and meet your weekly daily on legal AF to get a handle on all the lawsuits that have been filed. Right? It was almost a thousand lawsuits filed during the first Trump administration. You can triple that number now.
And it starts on the day he starts signing his executive orders. Believe me, the major states and institutes have already drafted their complaints. They're already been drafted during this interregnum period, this interstitial period between the election and today, right? Sure, they, they licked their wounds for two days, but then they went into the drafting room and continued to draft. Some of them have been drafting these things since 2023.
knowing that it was a possibility that Donald Trump could come back. So that's where we're going to meet on a regular basis. Meet me at legal AF, the YouTube channel at legal AFMTN. And I'll be there curating some of the top stories, some of the top commentators at that same intersection. Okay, you can hit the subscribe button. Our goal half a million, half a million, first quarter 2025. Let's talk about the curious case of the missing Congresswoman.
Um, Kate Granger, Kate Granger, sounds like a red rover. Sounds like a game when I was a kid. Where is Kate Granger? Where is she? She had an honorable career. She was the first woman ever elected to the house from Texas. Last Congress, 118th Congress. She was the head of the house appropriations committee. You know, she's a big deal.
But we haven't seen her since July of 2023, apparently. And now there's reporting coming out of the Dallas Express who's on the ground, who's gone to the assisted living facility and has confirmed that she's been in an assisted living facility and maybe a dementia or memory unit all this time and hasn't been available for votes. And you know who hasn't reported that as they were supposed to to the ethics committee of the house?
Her staff, her chief of staff, her communications director, her policy director, and none of them have responded to inquiries from the media. Where is she? When they tracked down her son, who runs a restaurant in Dallas, he got abusive and said he would beat the crap out of a reporter who asked about his mom.
That only gets my antenna up that there's something wrong with K Granger. And here's what I'm positing. Did MAGA and Mike Johnson and Donald Trump and the others, were they hiding the fact and not leveling with the American people about the fact that their slimmest of majorities, the slimmest in American history in the house, got a lot slimmer?
with the loss of Kay Granger, and it would undermine their narrative against Joe Biden, because they wanted to constantly attack him as demented Joe Biden, as mentally impaired Joe Biden, as mentally incapacitated Joe Biden. But they couldn't necessarily do that when Kay Granger was in a memory unit in an assisted living facility, instead of doing her job for which she was paid by the taxpayers. Is that why Mike Johnson?
You'll have to answer to the ethics committee. There should be a full ethics investigation. Even Republicans are calling for it. You know, they went after, you know, Diane Feinstein, the senator from California before she died about her abilities. They go after Joe Biden, even to this moment. What about Kim? What about Kay Granger? And so I'm going to continue to keep the pedal to the metal until we find Kay Granger. Now, let's talk about margins.
When the 119th Congress comes in, it's going to be the slimmest margin in the history in terms of seats in the history of modern history of Congress held by MAGA held by Congress. And they're not all MAGA. That's the problem. There's a fair number that aren't MAGA and aren't beholden to Donald Trump. In early 2025, after the administration comes in, they're going to be down to just three.
Just three. No, sorry. Let me get the math right. They're currently a five seat. They're going to lose three and they're going to be down to just two. And that includes K Granger.
which means they got a one C majority, one C majority. You know what that means? I'll be, I'll give you a popok translate. Welcome speaker of the house, Hakeem Jeffries. You thought the 118th Congress was a do nothing Congress, which they were. You thought they couldn't get anything done and to answer a question that came out of blue sky. If there's no speaker, you can't conduct any business. So if they don't elect a Mike Johnson on the first or a hundredth ballot and there's no speaker of the house, they can't do a darn thing.
They can't, they can't make any laws. They can't do any business. And it's arguable whether they can certify the election. You know, we might be dropping down in the list of succession as to who'll be president after, after Joe Biden. Uh, so that's why Donald Trump and the others are leaning so hard to get Mike Johnson on the first ballot or the 10th ballot or the, or whatever it was for, uh, for Kevin McCarthy, the 18th ballot or whatever it was. Uh, so you have,
anything major, appropriations, funding, spending, war resolution, anything to help the American people. It's going to be Mike Johnson knocking on Akim Jeffrey's door and asking for help, just like he did over and over again, because they're going to need 20, 30, 40, 50 Democrats to come across and help, because he's not going to be able to hold a one seat majority, especially when Kay Granger isn't anywhere to be found.
will continue to follow that. But this is an opportunity for the Democrats. That's why I said at the top of this Popok live, we got our groove back. The Democrats spent the end of the 118th Congress kind of get, you know, feeling it, feeling it, getting their tactics and their strategy, their parliamentary procedure. Yeah. How came Jeffrey's learned with the knee of Nancy Pelosi? There's no more disciplined leader of the house ever in the history of the Nancy Pelosi.
That's why the Republicans in Donald Trump hated her. Although Donald Donald Trump would always tip us out. She was the only person he did. He didn't give a nasty nickname to was Nancy Pelosi. Yeah. Cause she's tougher than he was or ever will be. How came Jeffrey's learned from her and she's still around as speaker emeritus, guiding, helping, coaching, strategizing. I like our chai. I like our chances with a one or two seat slim majority with a MAGA movement that's not in complete control.
they'll not, they won't get anything done in that Congress. Nothing without the Democrats say so. Period. Senate, a little bit different, a little bit different. They got a five seat lead in the Senate, 53 to 47. Okay. Um, Oh, check out, but can I go back for a moment in that two seat or one seat lead is also another person.
another Congresswoman who said she's not going to caucus with the Republicans. She won, she's not going to automatically vote Republican. So there's basically a no seat lead for the Republicans in Mike Johnson. Good luck on that. We'll have to watch on how long it takes them to select Mike Johnson Senate. They got a five seat lead, but the Democratic senators, Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, and the rest, you know, Blumenthal,
Tammy Baldwin. They are ready. They are ready. Klobuchar. A lot of them train lawyers or military people. They're ready to do a live autopsy. Every hearing against the Republican position in candidates.
And we're here for it. So we got the court system I talked about, the importance of the 250 or more federal judges that Joe Biden put in place. We have friendly, we still have friendly circuit courts and friendly federal judges and DC still mainly controlled by Democrats. And that's where a lot of these lawsuits are going to be filed against Donald Trump's wildest urges.
It's not going to be filed in Texas. It's not going to be filed in in Minnesota. It's going to be filed in DC. And we got a fair shot in DC, of course, up until we get to the United States Supreme Court. So that's the that's the missing the case of the missing
Congresswoman and its impact on the margins. Let me take a minute, just a minute and talk about this 14th amendment thing that still seems to be brewing on the internet and a march. I'm all for marches. You know, marches, peaceful protest.
are a way to have in a participatory democracy. That was a lot harder to say out loud than I thought it was going to be. A participatory democracy, I believe, in First Amendment speech and in marches. So I'm not going to dissuade anybody from marching.
but I am getting a lot of criticism which is uncalled for in my social media post about why aren't you getting behind the 14th amendment in section three and the ability to disqualify okay because I don't because I don't deal with magical thinking.
because I also know how to read. I also know how to read the decisions by the United States Supreme Court. And I can also read numbers. And I know how many votes there are for this. And I also, everybody focuses on Section three of the 14th Amendment. Nobody focuses on Section five, which the United States Supreme Court is says is the important aspect of the 14th Amendment that Congress has to act.
Everyone's like, no, Popok, it means Congress has to act to take away a disability. He is an insurrectionist. He should be already disabled. I understand that, but that's not what the Colorado case said. That's not what Anderson said. And if you read between the lines of Anderson, you know where the votes are in the United States Supreme Court. They are not going, let me make this, let me say this one more time. It is my honest opinion based on my constitutional scholarship and my understanding of the case law.
for having done this for a minute or two. It is my position that although technically, although on the face of the Constitution, the arguments to have Donald Trump automatically without any self execution, just by self execution without any act of Congress to deny him the seat as the president exists on paper. I understand that. But that's not what the Anderson decision said. And that's not what a logical extension of Anderson jurisprudence means.
Right? The progeny that's going to come from Anderson will stand for the proposition that Congress has to create either an impeachment mechanism, hold a hearing, hold a vote in order to deny this quote unquote insurrectionist, his, uh, his, uh, his, uh, position as president. And I, I, but that doesn't mean don't march. It just means march with a clear head.
Right? March without magical thinking. And don't get mad at your fellow Americans who have a lot of experience in this area, who don't agree with your analysis or what is being shoveled towards you in this area.
I'd be the first one to be claiming that. I've already done hottic after hottic after hottic. I've interviewed Judge Ludic. I've had everybody on and we've all said the same thing. We agree with you in principle, but it's not the way through the cheese grater of the Supreme Court, it comes out. You know, as hard as that is to hear. And so that's where we are on that particular issue.
Congress would have to act, two-thirds of Congress would have to act, a majority of Congress would have to act, and there's no way a majority of the Senate and the majority of the House is going to deny Donald Trump a seat, especially after the vote has already been taken. Okay. That's that. Let me go to questions. Stump the Popok.
Questions from Blue Sky. I posted today that I'd be doing alive and I'll take questions. And I got about, I don't know, 70 or 80 questions. I thought were very, very good. I could do a whole show just not questions. I may in 2025. Let me just go through some of the questions that I thought were interesting that I haven't touched on generally. First one was about the pick of the speaker on January 3rd.
in what happens if there is no speaker chosen come January 6th when it's time to certify the election. Well, let's go through this. Fundamentally, if there is no speaker of the house chosen on any ballot, despite numerous ballots, they just can't get to a majority vote on a speaker.
That Congress has shut down dead in the water, right? It's just listless at sea with no engine and no wind. It can't do a darn thing. It cannot conduct business without a speaker of the house.
So, you know, it'll be a lot of sitting around and shaking fists, but they're not going to be able to get a darn thing done. They can't do appropriations. They can't do committee assignments. They can't, which is how the house operates. They can't start working on hearings. They can't do confirmation hearings for the nominees, which everybody wants to get started on their MAGA side. They can't do any of that. And I would argue that they shouldn't be able to also certify the vote without a speaker.
Now, there's a special exception under the Constitution and the Electoral College Act that doesn't necessarily require that a speaker be in place, but I would argue that it needs to be in place. So we would object to that if they if they tried that at all. Somebody else threw up through in a question that there's a lot of chatter in Musk World about Elon Musk being Speaker of the House. Could that happen? And how could that happen if he's not an American or natural born citizen and could never be president since he's in line to be the president as a Speaker of the House?
The answer to that is you don't have to be a member of the House in order to become the Speaker of the House. The Speaker of the House can be chosen from outside, doesn't have to be an elected official, and they can be the Speaker of the House if that body decides that that's what they want to do. I mean, there was a rumor that Donald Trump will become Speaker of the House if he lost the presidency.
Um, somebody wrote, well, how can he be speaker of the house? Because he's fourth in line. I think it's fourth in line for the presidency. And he can't occupy the office because he's not natural born. Well, we'll just skip and they'll go to the fifth in line. I don't know. That is the head of the agriculture department.
I'm not sure. But I'll look it up at another break. But they just skip him. He would be the Speaker of the House, but he would be disabled for being President of the United States because he violates an aspect of the Constitution. So that's the must thing. I don't see this happening, by the way. But I don't think he's at all popular with the MAGA base, nor with MAGA Congress, Elon Musk. So we'll just leave it at that.
And, uh, 14th amendment update. I just gave you my view about the 14th amendment and how it does or does not apply. I've also argued that for the sake of good justice and good and welfare, the Democrats, the wrong has to be 20% of them should get together in the house in the Senate and object to each, if they can, to the irregularity of the electoral votes. Try it.
It can delay things. They can hold a hearing. It could be a lot of fun. I don't think it results in Donald Trump not getting put into the presidency. But it would satisfy our darkest urges to pay back Donald Trump for being an insurrectionist. So you could certainly try that. And then the last question I liked from the blue sky queries was from someone about Project 2025.
And look, Project 2025, I think it's about 800 pages. I've gone through it about five different times. I've got folders on my desk ready to go on Project 2025, which was created by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the architects of it are ending up in the Trump cabinet, his head of the Office of Management and Budget, who he's nominated, Russ Vought, is the father of Project 2025.
He's the architect of itself, professed. In Project 2025, when you go through it line by line, has very specific ideas about immigration, about religion in government, about women not having rights and taking them away and men being dominant in the society. And, you know, it's like going back to the 1940s.
But I assure you, every chapter in that book has a matching lawsuit that's already been drafted by progressive democratic, moderate, fair-minded institutes, policy institutes, think tanks, public interest groups.
uh, and attorney generals and we're going to be filing the good news. I said this early on in the, uh, during the campaign is that we have the playbook for the other side and be like playing a football team and finding it, you know, at halftime or the day before in a bathroom, the entire playbook for the team. You're about to play. We have the playbook for Donald Trump.
You know, he didn't distance himself from 2025 in reality, just then out of the campaign trail. He brought in half the people in his cabinet are coming from the Heritage Foundation.
which drafted Project 2025. JD Vance was part of the architecture of Project 2025. And so we know the playbook because they wrote it down and we have the receipts. So that's what we've been working on in the meantime. That's why again, legal AF will be your home, not to get annoyed, not to get sad, to get enlightened.
The more we focus and train our focus on these issues and joined together, shoulder to shoulder, arm and arm linked together, the better chance we have at holding government officials, elected officials, people in power and judges accountable. It's not about, you know, as I've said before, many, many times after the election, resignation, right, giving up is not a strategy.
We have to be in vigorous opposition for the next two years and make Donald Trump the lamest of lame duck presidents. The sooner we can nail him in courthouses in courtrooms around the country for his executive orders, not his crimes, that those days are over.
His actual policies reflected in executive orders that are unconstitutional, that are illegal. The sooner we do that and tie him up, let me give people a bit of confidence going into 2025. Donald Trump doesn't have the intellectual stamina.
the intellectual discipline, nor the people around him to pull all the levers of power all at the same time that are necessary to run the government and accomplish all of the worst ideals of Project 2025 and his MAGA movement. He can't do it all in the short amount of time that he has. Thank God he's a one term president.
And you know, I mean, for those that have watched it, especially when you know in advance, he's a one-term president, like the second term of somebody elected twice, you see how little they can really get done in that short amount of time. He's got about 18 months to get stuff done, and he can't get it all done.
because he's got a lot of rogues within the cabinet that don't see eye to eye with him, that have huge egos and want to do their own thing. So while he's busy hurting this crew and reigning them in and dealing with his own undisciplined mind and lurching financial markets and our enemies and our allies and lurching them left and right based on three o'clock in the morning social media posts and then trying to run his businesses on the side,
not even on the side front and center. I'm sure he's going to spend three, four hours a day trying to run Trump organization and cryptocurrency.
and the rest. So, again, legal AF, the YouTube channel, come on over, hit the free subscribe button, help us. Let's see a big 5000 person jump between today and the weekend over at legal AFMTM for Midas Touch Network. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad the Midas Touch Network said to be Popok.
do Tuesday Night Live, do Popok Live on Tuesdays. I said, work immediately, sign me up. And I'm glad you're here. We've had a tremendous audience here. We've been averaging almost 400,000 people per episode every Tuesday, 8 p.m., make it must see a YouTube right here on the Midas Touch network. So I wanna extend a heartfelt and direct message to the legal aid efforts in the Midas Mighty for 2025.
We've been through war together. We've been through the battles. Didn't turn out exactly the way we wanted, but we're still here on the other side. That, which does not kill us, has made us stronger. We at the Midas Touch Network and LegalAF, we have our bearings. We have the North Star. We know how to get us to a resounding victory at the midterms. Stay here. Stay educated. Stay engaged.
And we will, and I will make it my life's work to keep you enlightened about law and politics from now until 2025. I'm doing this as a full-time gig now, full-time gig. This was sort of my side gig for a long time. This is now my full-time gig. That's how important the results of the election were to me, my family, and my best touch. Popok, full-time, minus touch, legal AF, join me.
And I'll see you on the other side of 2025. We've got a New Year's Day.
It's hard to believe. We're doing midweek, legal AF New Year's Day. So join us at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on YouTube tomorrow, New Year's Day for midweek. I'm doing it with, of course, with Karen Freeman at Liveflow Saturday with Ben Mysalis. And I'm busy cooking, cooking, cooking, content and videos over on Legal AF The YouTube channel. So signing off for 2024. See you on the other side. I'm Michael Popok.
In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the LegalAF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at LegalAFMTN. That's at LegalAFMTN.
