Ep 236 — Is Trump's Newest Lawyer WORSE Than Alina Habba?

I want to cut my energy bill. Can solar panels help? Yes, that's good energy. And they'll help lower my carbon emissions too. That's good energy. And I can get paid for the energy I don't use. Yes, that's good energy. And you have 25 years experience in-house engineers and a five-star rating on trust pilots. Yes, that's good energy. Sounds great! One more thing, the solar panel's battery is another hardware. It's all quality tech that's built to last. Of course! Making solar simpler for your home. That's good energy. Visit goodenergy.co.uk. If you still feel like you're operating from feelings that prevent you from deliberating fairly with your fellow granddaughters and from applying the facts, the law to the facts here, then tell your fellow granddaughters that you can't deliberate. She asked them to self-deport! I don't... Yeah, that is not bad. I mean, it's not much better than what got her admonished, right? But Mecklenburg wasn't done. Welcome to Law and Chaos, where the grand jury transcripts are out in the Broadview Six case. The January Six slush fund refuses to die, and Donald Trump has somehow managed to find a lawyer worse than Alita Habba. We've got a lot to cover, so let's get after it. Happy Friday, cast monkeys. I'm Liz Dye, and with me, as always, is Andrew Torres. I'm a great man. I'm a great man. I'm a great man. I'm a great man. This is Andrew Torres. Andrew, how are you? I am great, Liz. How are you? I'm great. I have so much work to do this weekend, and so many fun things planned, and I don't know how they're all going to happen, but they are all going to happen. It is pool weather here in Baltimore. It's been 90 degrees, and I have joined the local pool cribbage league. I have you. I have no idea what cribbage is. Yes, you do. Come on, come on. It's like cards and numbers and a board. I've never played a game, but all I know is that I'm very, very competitive, so I am looking forward. Look at pool. It's like a play date for 57-year-olds, and I love that for you. I know you're not 57. You're not quite 57. Not quite. We are the same age. We are so not the same age. We have a ton of stuff to talk about in the subscriber bonus. We're going to see if something happens with the UFC octagon. There is a lawsuit that was filed to stop it, and we've got updates in a lot of our litigation. We're also going to have a fun doofus of the day. No spoilers, but before that, duck it alerts. Okay, tomorrow or today, as you are listening to this, June 12th, as the show drops, is the deadline for Donald Trump's name to come off the Kennedy Center per Judge Cooper's order. As of this recording, it had not come off. Although, there was a cherry picker on this live stream someone set up on YouTube. I think it's like someone who lives in the apartment across the street in the Watergate. When I went to college, I did all my grocery shopping at the Safeway that was underneath the Watergate. DC is like that. It cannot happen soon enough, although the funniest thing happened. Oh, do go on. So Judge Cooper put out this order 14 days ago. He said, you all have 14 days to June 12th. To get Trump's name off the front. Now, if you did not intend to take Trump's name off the front of that building, there were things that you, as the board, could do, like file a motion for stay, or file an appeal. Or both. Something like that. None of that happened except at the Washington Post reports that today, June 11th, as we were recording, the board voted to appeal and try and keep Trump's name on the side of the building. And I don't think that's going to work. That is not how that goes. But it would not surprise me. I want to lay down my marker here because it will be a prediction for tomorrow that they file an original action in the U.S. Supreme Court under, I don't know, they can claim Donald Trump as a sovereign nation or something. I know you think that. And we did talk about this before we went on the air. But I just want to lay out what was supposed to happen. If you want, they were perfectly within their rights to appeal. You must, under the rules of civil procedure, ask the trial court or the court which has imposed this order to stay its own order before you go to the higher court and ask for that state. I mean, for them to go all the way to the Supreme Court would be like, many, many, it would be so out of order. Particularly having waited. You can't say this is our emergency and that's why we waited two weeks to tell you guys about it. Now, I'm not saying that they won't get it. How is his name on the side of a building an emergency anyway? It's not. It's not. But I think that it's not going to happen and I think that tomorrow, look, there was the cherry picker there. It has to come down by tomorrow. I think that's right. I think it will come down. And in other acts of wild optimism, good news, good news, right? Congressional candidate, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was found not guilty of causing a disturbance on federal property and blocking the elevator in the federal courthouse. That's the courthouse that they are using improperly as an ice detention center. Yeah, a couple of floors. Yeah. So prosecutors at the Southern District of New York charged Lander with a misdemeanor for a protest in September where a bunch of people brace yourself for this, Liz, sat on a floor in the hallway, which, you know, was amazing publicity. We've all seen the video of him getting arrested. Right. For a guy, you know, running to unseat incumbent Representative Dan Goldman. Magistrate Judge Henry Ricardo held a one-day trial and acquitted Lander, which is you know, another Trump administration massive waste of prosecutorial resources. Yes, indeed it was. Okay, now we have yet another story of the Trump administration failing to govern because they're far too busy trolling and trying to use the government to seek revenge on Trump's enemies. This one has to do with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed in 2008 to give the CIA basically unlimited authority to intercept communications of non-U.S. persons. When you put it that way, Liz, it sounds kind of bad. Right, which is why 702 renewal is always kind of a political football. I mean, look, it didn't become a major public issue that normal people thought about until Trump's buddy Mike Flynn got picked up during the presidential transition between Obama and Trump having a wiretap conversation with the Russian ambassador and then Republicans spent 10 years trying to pretend it was somehow illegal for the White House to unmask the U.S. person who was caught offering sanctions relief to Russia in December of 2016. But libertarians and privacy advocates have more or less always argued that maintaining this vast system, this surveillance system that sucks up a billion people's comms and uses AI or whatever secret tech the government had before that to eavesdrop at beyond industrial scale is terrible, right, in Violate Civil Liberties. It is terrible. It does violate civil liberties. I mean, like just because Rand Paul says it doesn't make it's wrong. Right, right. I mean, he's right a couple of times a year and he's right about this. So in April of 2024 Congress reauthorized section 702 for two years. In February of 2020, the! The the FISA court considers itself to be on an annual license and the last time the law basically continued to operate as usual. But okay, that is weedsier than we're going to go in a Dock and Alert. The point is that on Thursday, today as we're recording, the House voted down a FISA renewal bill 218 to 198. Which Republicans of course claim Democrats because none of them can math. I believe they can't keep their own caucus together. It must be our fault. But look, the real culprit here is the president, right, because now he wants to make Bill freakin' Pulte, the acting director of National Intelligence. Now that Tulsa Gabbard got pushed out, reportedly with big push from Pulte himself. Right, so what does FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act have to do with Bill Pulte? Well Pulte is the loon in charge of the Federal Housing and Finance Agency as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, where he spends most of his time pawing through Democrats' financial records looking for something that he can pretend as mortgage fraud and then make a big stink about it and refer to the DOJ. He still has it. He was the one who tried to dirty up Letitia James. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Lisa Cook, one of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Okay, Pulte did in his previous life, he did his family builds houses and I guess that's some nexus to you know, this housing position that he's in. He has no intelligence or national security experience. He does however intend to keep both of these jobs. So he intends to supervise the nation's housing and at the same time hold this incredibly sensitive national security position so he can do God knows what. I think we know what. Right. And look, this is freaking out Democrats obviously, but also Republicans because no one in Washington DC thinks Bill Pulte is a good choice for this job. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Besant admitted in testimony to Congress that he threatened to beat him up in the Oval Office. I'm probably not the only one. Yeah, right. Pulte already blew up the prosecution of Adam Shifty Schiff by screwing with the grand jury. We talked about that on the show. And he was the one who single-handedly walked Trump into that disastrous showdown with chairman of the Federal Reserve General Powell. A showdown which Trump lost pretty definitively. And Pulte's biggest policy idea, his only innovation was 50-year mortgages. An idea so stupid that the administration immediately memory pulled it because it's like basically indentured servitude. Yeah, so look, the bottom line is no one wants this guy as DNI. But Republicans don't want to challenge Trump directly. Democrats are going to vote for FISA reauthorization eventually. They always do. They always do. They shouldn't. But they are blocking it now as a way to get rid of Pulte as ODI. And today Trump blinked. Kind of. He said that he's dominating Jay Clayton, current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York as his DNI. Now Clayton has no more national security experience than Bill Pulte. But I mean, he's not manifestly insane. This is so dumb. Clayton is in no wise qualified for this job. A job which by statute requires the holder to have a national security background. And Clayton is in the lead up to this. He's really been going out of his way to prove that he may have come out of big law and been a normie. But now he's maga man through and through. Last week he went on television and parroted lies about fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral election. Something which he has zero knowledge of or jurisdiction over. He's in New York, right? And also it's manifestly false. And to tie everything together, it was Clayton's office that prosecuted Brad Lander or, you know, tried to. They could not even get him on a misdemeanor. And yet now he's going to get this big promotion. Yeah. Okay. In the meantime. Failing upwards. Democrats are not budging because Trump says he still wants to have Pulte go and serve as acting DNI until Clayton gets confirmed. Governing is hard. Right. Right. And that is why 702 reauthorization didn't pass today because of Bill Pulte. And because you know, it's not really their priority to govern, right? They're just in this doing all kinds of crazy shit. Yeah. Okay. Stick around. We're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back with our doofus of the day. Don't call my name. Don't call my name. Alejandro. What? I'll explain it to you during the break. It's not an Alpes song. Okay, Andrew. I'm kind of workshopping something like now that Justin Baldoni and Blake lively aren't suing each other anymore. Maybe we should have a new segment called Alejandro Brito teaches us Civ Pro. Yeah, we can subtitle it. How to piss off judges and lose cases. Yeah. So on Tuesday, we talked about Brito's effort to extract cash from the BBC for tortuous editing of Trump's January 6th speech on the Ellipse. When last we left our hero, he had blown off the deadline to file an opposition to the BBC's motion to dismiss, which prompted Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee to put out a minute order instructing the president and his counsel to explain whether we should consider the motion to dismiss unopposed and why we shouldn't sanction the plaintiff's counsel for their apparent disregard of court deadlines. Brito filed his response on Tuesday saying he was just, you know, so busy that he missed the deadline. Oopsie poopsie. It's just 30 pages. How could he possibly? He then filed it under seal. We can talk about that, but that was not the end of his stupidity because on Wednesday, Magistrate Judge Angelique Lett responded to Brito's earlier motion to recuse her as the magistrate because she previously worked for a firm that represented one of the defendants in Trump's Rico Troll suit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and about 40 other parties. That was the one where Donald Middlebrook sanctioned everybody involved. Including Alito Hava, who represented him in the trial. Right. And Lett was working for the firm that represented one of the collateral parties in that case. Anyway, in response to the motion for recusals, she said, first, that this issue was waived, Donald Trump, because you failed to raise it six months ago when I was assigned as the magistrate in this case. And do not tell me that that's because you just figured it out now, Alejandro Brito, because you represented Donald Trump personally on that appeal. And this was great because she actually cited to the docket appearance issues, like see, notice of Alejandro Brito. And she's like, if you didn't notice, my name in the signature block back then, like, that's on you, buddy. Yeah. So, you know, she also added, as you would expect, that even if Trump had raised this in a timely fashion, he would still lose because I did like, this is just not a conflict of interest. Right. So that's embarrassing. Yeah. But wait, there is more. So here's where I get to dive into the minutia litigation practice, right? So thank you for that, Alejandro Brito. Gotta be good for something. Judges often assign cases or majority of the heavy lifting in cases to a magistrate judge for most of the pretrial work, particularly supervising discovery disputes. So Judge Altman handed this piece of case off to magistrate judge Let back in January. And Judge Let put out what is probably her standing regular discovery order, right? It's in a bunch of boiler plate procedural stuff. But also I, and I'm summarizing here, we're all grown-ups. Act professional. Don't come to me for every dumb thing. Work it out yourselves. Which, by the way, is what every federal judge, magistrate judge, state court judge, every judge is always like, come on parties, work out discovery between yourselves. So her order included a clause that said, and I'm going to quote the language, before requesting a discovery hearing, the parties must first confer in a good faith effort to resolve the dispute in compliance with local rule 7.1A2. Under this local rule, counsel must certify that they made good faith efforts to confer. Okay. Again, a hundred percent standard. It's a totally normal thing it is required in every court that I have been in since time in Memorial. And what you do is, at the end of your motion of your request for hearing, whatever it is, below your signature block, you include a certification and you have to sign it. You can do a digital signature and you include this signed certification that you met your meet and confer obligations that you called up opposing counsel and you have to say they either agreed to the relief that you want or they disagreed. Then that's why you're requesting it, right? Because what the magistrate judge wants to know here is do the sides agree or do, you know, if so, that makes it easier. Right. She can just grant the motion, right? So far so normal. Right. But Alejandro Brito did not get to be the president's lawyer by being normal. So I told you that he tried to revoke his consent to delegating discovery to the magistrate in order to file this recusal motion to try and get judge led off the case. And for reasons that I cannot fathom, he seems to have thought that obeying, that complying with the discovery order would function as consent to her remaining on the case. I honestly am struggling to imagine what his thought process was here. So on May 26th, the BBC files a motion for a discovery hearing and at the bottom in the section labeled local rule 7.1 certification, right, the otherwise standard boilerplate language, it says, pursuant to local rule 7.1a, I hereby certify that defendants, right, that's the BBC, have attempted to confer in good faith with plaintiff prior to filing this motion as described above. Plaintiffs Council has requested that the following statement also be included in this certification. In the party's conferral efforts, Plaintiffs Council expressly represented to defendants council that defendants do not have Plaintiffs authority to file this motion as a joint motion for discovery hearing. Plaintiffs Council further represented that Plaintiff seeks to preserve any enlargement Plaintiff made in his motion for the recusal of Magistrate Judge Angelique E. Litt for reassignment to a new Magistrate Judge to supervise discovery and for brief stay of discovery with incorporated memorandum of law, including the request for a brief stay of discovery while the motion for recusal is pending. Plaintiffs Council further represented to defendants that Plaintiff reserves all rights and waives none. Sir, this is a Wendy's. I do not know what to say to that. Wait, just to draw this out for our non-lawyer listeners. The right answer was Plaintiff opposes the requested discovery and any related demand for a hearing. Yeah, whatever, right, done. You know, he did not need to go in there and say the judge is not the boss of me and I'm not going to answer your question, right? I mean, that's the equivalent of saying I'm a sovereign citizen and this court can compel me because the flag has a fringe. I don't I don't understand what he's doing. No, in any case where you have to preserve your rights and it is a procedural issue, what you do is comply with the procedural issue and if you wanted to say at a comma that says subject to a reservation of rights, you could do that, right? It was probably unnecessary here, but okay, that would have been fine practice, but this is not complying with a magistrate judge's order anyway. This is complying with the local rules. This is complying with the thing you have been doing in the practice of law since you got admitted to the bar, right? Yeah. So, okay, refusing to abide by your meet and confer obligations went over like a ton of bricks with Judge Lead. So today, she put out an order saying while counsel are free to disagree with the relief and the basis on which the opposing party may seek said relief, they are not permitted to disregard the court's orders and procedures. Plaintiff is hereby ordered to respond to the defendant's motion for hearing failure to do so may result in sanctions including granting the relief by default. This guy, man. I'm a wait list. He is still going. So, okay, let's zoom back a little bit. Trump filed this dumb lawsuit with the demand for $10 billion. Over a broadcast that never aired in the United States. Right, right, right. On the theory that it was defamatory for the BBC to imply that Donald Trump told his supporters to go attack the Capitol. Which they did. It does not seem to have occurred to Donald Trump that making this allegation would involve discovery over whether he intended his supporters to go attack the Capitol. Right, or was, you know, otherwise warned that that would be the likely result of that inflammatory speech that he gave on the ellipse. Right, like it genuinely does not seem to have occurred to Donald Trump that it would also involve discovery into his finances. Like when you ask for $10 billion that judge wants to know, like how were you damaged? I honestly don't think he thought there was going to be any discovery of him at all. I think he thought that they would cave or something. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. So, okay. When you're litigating, one of the things that opposing counsel does is you send discovery requests, right. Those are requests for production of documents. Those are interrogatories. And then there are requests for admissions, right. And those three each fulfill kind of different roles. Document requests are what it says on the tin, right. Like produce all communications you have with respect to, you know, whatever. Produce all your tax returns. Produce all documents that support your claim for damages. Interrogatories are explain, you know, this contention that you've made. You've said that this was made with actual malice. Describe, you know, what you think the notice that the BBC had, right. And requests for admissions are ways to introduce as evidence things that are not contested by the parties, right. So, you say I request that you admit that the BBC is a British corporation, right. Like so that way as a matter of law, you now have a concession from the other side, right. Like, or if they deny it, right. If they say, oh, we don't know, then you know, then you know you have to conduct further discovery and otherwise prove up that element. So one of the things that is just kind of astonishingly out of touch is that this description of the dispute. So this is a joint request for a hearing to resolve discovery issues, right. So the plaintiff sets out their position. The defendant sets out their position and you're saying to the magistrate judge essentially like they've asked for this and we don't want to give that to them, right. And the section and look like sometimes you have a legitimate dispute and you're not sure how the judge or in this case the magistrate is going to come out, right. Like one of the things that often comes up when you're requesting damages is I'd like to see your tax returns, right. And like courts are about 50-50 on whether you have to turn over your tax returns to substantiate your damages, right. Like the more if it's, if somebody says you know I issued you a loan you can say okay well I want to see that you you know recorded that on your taxes but if it feels like it's just spelunking sometimes courts will say well you know what like you don't really have to, you know that seems more intrusive than probative. But here Trump complains about and I just want to read this to you. Defended's request for admissions do not probe relevant information. Instead they seek wide ranging admissions that do not even have a tangential connection to the defamatory statements at issue and here's where they list the things that they think the judge is going to think are outrageous and it is things like admit that you lost the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Admit that on the night of the 2020 election you and Rudy Giuliani agreed that you should declare victory that day. Admit that between election day 2020 and January 6th 2021 you and your allies repeatedly made dozens of public statements about Dominion voting machines being faulty or fraudulent right like things that are well not right like they fit into RFAs request for admissions because we all know this he did this as a matter of public record. Right and I think it's important to establish that Brito's argument here is that the only thing that matters is whether you edited this video and then that's not really right defamation as we said it has multiple elements and one of them is falsity and so what they're trying to establish is is it false to say to imply that you went out and told your supporters to go attack the capital in which case is absolutely relevant whether that was your intent is that what you intended to tell them were people telling you that's what you were going to convey to them did you know that they were going to do it in which case is not defamatory to say that you know or to imply by editing that that was the intent of your speech and besides which discovery is pretty broad right that they seem to kind of have this imaginary definition of discovery that is so narrow that it only benefits them they're astonished that the BBC wants to interview witnesses they're they complained about like they issued 47 subpoenas and it's like you asked for 10 billion dollars exactly right right right and just by the way Trump and Brito asked for and got discovery early discovery in this case right because the the BBC said we shouldn't have to go through discovery because we're going to win on our motion to dismiss on venue because this documentary was never aired in the United States and we don't have to answer in this court and Judge Altman who is again a Trump appointee gave Trump what he asked for which was early discovery during the pendency of this motion while it's out there and which will almost certainly succeed unless Judge Altman wants to be a Judge Cannon and so now they're really pissed Brito is really pissed like I asked for discovery but I meant on them not on us and like friend that is not how this goes I you cannot bring a lawsuit for defamation that says you have defamed me by suggesting that I sent an angry mob down to the Capitol demanding that they riot over a stolen election and not ask do you admit that the election wasn't stolen like how did you how did there was no way no competent lawyer could not could have failed to advise their client that that's going to be the first question they ask you yeah alright so we are going to come back in a hot second and talk about those grand jury transcripts from the Broadview 6 unless you're a subscriber at patreon.com slash lawandcaespot or lawandcaespot.com in which case no ads for you not today and not ever again and and and and and and we're back okay the grand jury transcripts from the Broadview 6 case are here and they are amazing this is the case of the protesters outside an ICE facility in suburban Chicago who were charged with conspiracy to intimidate a federal officer in his official duties prosecutors dismissed the case after they were finally forced to disclose the grand jury transcripts to the court and now we know why when judge Perry said in open court she had quote never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that she saw in those transcripts she might have actually been under selling it I mean this really is an astonishing display of prosecutorial misconduct and considering that the US attorney for the northern district of Illinois Andrew Butros was there for a significant portion of it in the grand jury room yeah I think it is fair to ask if this is now standard operating procedure inside his office yeah or in other US attorneys office yeah they've all been simultaneously politicized and denuded of a lot of their experienced staff I mean look Butros is a real lawyer with significant experience as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer and lots of the people Trump is putting in charge of these US attorney's offices are not yeah and in fact we're already starting to see defendants across the country cite the broad view six cases evidence that they too should be able to see those grand jury transcripts yeah I imagine that every criminal defense lawyer in federal court is moving to unseal grand jury transcripts in their cases as we speak this is an incredibly rare remedy like I literally have never seen it prior to now I should also add that just having defects in the presentation by prosecutors to the grand jury does not mean that your criminal defense case gets dismissed in fact the presumption is the opposite is that they don't right the reason that this case got dismissed was not an adverse ruling by Judge Perry it was that USA Butros voluntarily dropped the charges against the broad view six now he did that to try and put an end to court-ordered discovery into how badly his office had behaved in this case I mean I should also say his office was going to lose this case anyway if it ever got in front of a Chicago jury but Butros tapped out at the moment that Judge Perry looked at those grand jury transcripts because he knew that the least worst outcome was going to be for his office to walk away and and and now we see why right so there were three presentations to the special grand jury in northern district of Illinois on successive Thursdays last October the first one resulted in a no-bill that is the jurors failed to indict the second was stopped by US Attorney Butros because the prosecutors broke so many rules and the third is when they finally got the indictment and Judge Perry identified three major problems in these in these grand jury presentations the first is vouching which is when the prosecutor makes representations of fact or it tries to bolster a claim by saying you can trust me right the second were ex parte communications which are improper discussions outside the forum in this case the prosecutor Sherry Mecklenburg who was a 20-year veteran of that office spoke with grand jurors in the hall about the matter before right or anything but but particularly bad about the matter before them and third she kicked off grand jurors so as to prevent them from deliberating and a fourth problem which Judge Perry called the most problematic which was that the US Attorney's Office redacted the transcript in such a way as to try and hide their misconduct from her which violated among other things their duty of candor to the court right so okay let's start on October 9 that's the first presentation where a USA Sherry Mecklenburg literally opened the session by using the word vouch she says I purposely asked if I could wait for the Thursday grand jury I did Matt will vouch for me I said I wanted to go in front of the Thursday grand jury because I know you and I trust you and you know me and you trust me and I would never ask you to chart somebody if I didn't think there was probable cause Oh my God! Mecklenburg look up the definition of vouching in the prosecutors manual and then just like read it off verbatim I what is even happening here? So this is the thing that Matthew Skibe her assistant US Attorney tried to back away from in that hearing before Judge Perry where everything went to shit he said your honor I started this office on July 14th I'd been with office for less than two months Mecklenburg is not here to defend herself and I'm not trying to deflect blame but I was with a 20 years plus senior veteran I remember what you referred to as the vouching incident I remember thinking at the time I would never make that statement as a matter of personal style but I did not know then and what only became apparent as we were discussing dismissing these charges is that it's beyond personal style and that it's at a minimum arguably misconduct arguably I she is essentially testifying to the grand jurors I Sherry Mecklenburg believe that these people are guilty and you the grand jurors should believe me because we have a trust relationship and and and they do right like this is a special purpose grand jury and so they have sat for multiple hearings by the time that she's been right they were in June is maybe when they sat yeah yeah and so that they do know her and I just I can't tell our non-lawyer listeners all the ways that this is so inappropriate that they should just make any lawyer skin crawl like Mecklenburg is not a witness her beliefs are not evidence and like think about if you could do this right like what would that mean for all of the other cases that she takes the graduate where like the implication is sure you know sometimes I bring you cases that are bullshit where the defendant might be innocent but this time I mean it this time is definitely real right and both she and her younger colleague Matthew Ski but did that throughout the presentation I mean they only use the word out a couple of times more than zero times right and some of that didn't twig for me to be honest but I spoke to a former criminal assistant US attorney with extensive grand jury experience and that person said that making factual representations to the jurors about new new facts is a form of vouching so on the second day that's October 16th before the witness showed up Mecklenburg and Ski started off by playing the video footage and narrating it telling the jurors what it showed so they say as the video shows Michael Rabbit that's one of the other defendants hung on to the passenger side of the car he pushed and banged on the side of the car cat apigazale placed herself in front of the vehicle she pushed on the front of the vehicle with her hands and body to prevent the car from continuing and cat sharp did the same and Brian straw similarly moved through the crowd to the front of the vehicle and like cat apigazale and cat sharp pushed up against it with his hands leveraging his body to prevent it from continuing that is testimony when Mecklenburg says you can see him push his way to the front that is an unsworn assertion about what the evidence shows the grand jury is supposed to evaluate the testimony of a sworn witness not the narration of a prosecutor yeah let me see if I can't unpack that a little bit for our listeners I am not a criminal lawyer but anybody who's ever tried a case knows that what Mecklenburg is doing here with identifying people on the video is in fact testimony right like the what you have to do the proper thing to do in any case civil or criminal is you put on a fact witness to testify who those people are right like you you put on and Mecklenburg did this when the witness right that was the the agent the ice agent that was driving the car was in the room to answer for himself right so what she could have done was say we're going to play the video and I'm going to pause it and you're going to identify who's that person there and the agent can say that's Kato Abukazale the agent can say that's Kat Sharp right but you as the prosecutor can't introduce as evidence that's a defendant it did just beyond inappropriate and look I think we have pretty good idea why she didn't want the agent to testify as to the identity of these people because for example when the agent was testifying on the first day he testified I was afraid of running these protesters over so I drove really really slowly testified like I drove between zero and one mile per hour and and and again in a grand jury presentation the the other side isn't there there's no cross examination but the grand jurors can ask questions and one grand jurors very sensibly you know raise their head and ask if he's afraid of running over people isn't the right thing to do to stop right and instead of letting the agent answer Mecklenburg jumps in and it monishes the grand juror and says didn't you hear the testimony that he said he was afraid to stop because he was afraid they were going to break the windows and pull him out and he would be injured and again all of this is just it's so improper it's testimony and Mecklenburg as you said 20 year veteran in the office she knows better right okay so let's get to what to me is the most shocking aspect of this case and that is the way the prosecutors deliberately kicked out any grand juror who didn't want to vote to indict and excluded them from the deliberation so on October 16th Mecklenburg comes back and she you know she got no billed on the 9th and she she starts with this theatrical self-deprecation she says I did not do my job I did not explain it to you well enough I didn't explain the law to you so then she says this time her associate professor Skibo will be doing a little law class for the jurors I Skibe is not a professor no and and if she'd only said it once like as an off-handed joke it would be you know be fine whatever but she did it repeatedly which in itself is a form of vouching it's another way of saying you can trust us because we're experts considering the way that Skibe mangled the law I sure would not trust him but but but let's let's come back right so ten minutes into this law class a juror pipes up and says you know what actually let's Andrew let's you and I read this exchange you want to be the juror and I will be Mecklenburg sure so the green juror says are you actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side okay I'm feeling the skepticism already this is Mecklenburg are you gonna be able to listen with an open mind tell me the truth I no okay then you have to go I heard this case like last week and I was a crock of shit then and I still think it is okay thank you for your opinion for everybody I kind of had that impression from last week but thank you do you have any evidence other than the and then there's like this crosstalk okay have a good evening pardon me I'm asking if you have no new evidence I didn't say there was no new evidence if you feel you can't be impartial then excuse yourself that's fine there's still 16 because there's a 16 you know you have to have 16 grand jurors there to vote and thank you to those of you who are staying with an open mind and see okay so that's bad on like 15 different valences and we will break it all down after this brief ad break okay we first talked about this case I said that this was inappropriate to get rid of grand jurors because the whole purpose of a grand jury is for them to deliberate among themselves by excluding anyone who disagrees with you you short circuit the entire process and this whole there's no voir dire of grand jurors you don't get to ask them these sorts of this is just not a thing right and what Maclinburg did was essentially impose voir dire but she did it after the case had already been presented and you're absolutely entitled to have an opinion about the case after you've heard evidence that is not bias or some kind of impermissible developing your opinion that's judgment that is a juror's job notice that Maclinburg did not say if you've already formed an intent to indict to come back with a bill then you're also biased and you have to get rid of it the purpose of voir dire when you ask that question can you listen to the evidence fairly you ask that at the outset before either side has produced evidence to say if you are if you would never vote to convict if you would never vote to acquit and you kick those people off of a pedigree deciding factual matters right the idea that you would take a grand jury present a case to them and then say okay who here thinks our case is a crock of shit okay you guys go get out like that that's just beyond inappropriate right and and the fact that she didn't say who here thinks our case is great and you've already made up your mind gives right right so now let's talk about the ex parte coliquy because it turns out that the ex parte coliquy was with those two jurors that she threw out including mr this case is a crock of shit dude okay and by the way that presentation where she kicked out the other people never went to they never voted the jurors never voted because butros put a stop to it because you know that was totally inappropriate yeah to kick out the jurors so on October 23rd they come back and mecklenburg says she's chastened right she's already been told don't do that again so she says I'm not gonna ask you today if you can keep an open mind and deliberate fairly and apply the law to those facts instead I'd like you all to stay and hear our evidence and our law and our testimony okay good good job she got read the right she knows she's got to be on the straight and narrow but she cannot help herself she says all I ask is that you all listen and then when it is your time to deliberate that you be honest with your fellow grand jurors if you still feel like you're operating from feelings that prevent you from deliberating fairly with your fellow grand jurors and from applying the facts the law to the facts here then tell your fellow grand jurors that you can't deliberate she asked them to self-depart I can't that's that is not that I mean it's not much better than what got her admonished right but but mecklenburg wasn't done she says before we start I have to do a meck culpa because I'm the one who knows the rules and I did something today that I'm not supposed to do I had conversations with two grand jurors outside of the grand jury room so I need to put it on the record girl what the first time I had jury duty I I ran I was outside I asked the prosecutor in the hall where the elevator was and she would not answer me right this shit ain't hard okay so the prosecutors not supposed to have private conversations with grand jurors between sessions full stop regardless of the content even if the conversation was entirely benign which pretty questionable here the fact that it happened at all is a serious breach yeah here's how mecklenburg described her interactions the first one was one of the grand jurors and I ran into each other in the elevator this grand juror apologized to me from last week and I told the grand juror that I accepted his apology I wasn't mad I understand people have feelings this grand juror said at the time that he did have feelings and he's sure that he's right but he shouldn't have walked out the way he did so that was one conversation and then I had another very brief conversation I was up here and one of the grand jurors said to me something about last week and he said I'm sorry I can apply the facts to the law I understand that people have feelings but we have to apply the facts to the law and I said that's true those are ex parte communications with deliberating grand jurors I mean full stop right yeah and in those communications she reinforced this lie the jurors have to have no opinion at all or at least no opinion other than a willingness to sign the indictment and that's not something that could be cured by putting it on the record no okay so that's all very bad and any prior department of justice that would have led to immediate professional sanctions right but before we leave this topic I want to briefly talk about professor Skipe's presentation on the law which we did write about this on the blog yesterday for subscribers Skipe's job before this grand jury was to explain the elements of 18 USC section 372 that's the felony they were there just conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer that statute requires quote force intimidation or threat on the part of the defendant right that the prosecution has to prove that now from the outside an agent in a giant SUV being confronted by armed protesters who are clapping and chanting would not appear to be in any reasonable danger of force intimidation or threat right particularly since there were a lot of cops around there were ice agents firing pepper balls into the crowd I mean the agent testified that he slowed down so that he would not run anyone over with his car which that does not sound like he was scared of them but he he added I don't want to say he was coached to say this but but but he added that he feared if he came to a stop that the protesters would break the windows and drag him out of the SUV yeah well in the thug group chat that very day he said that riot control was fun but okay let us assume that he is the giant f***ing loser Wim he described himself as in his testimony I'm willing to believe it okay so professor Skipe needs to convince the researchers that beating on the SUV and making it slow down for a minute or two amounts to force intimidation or threat so on both the October 16th and the 23rd those recessions 2 and 3 Skipe refers to this case out of the western district of Texas he does not cite it on the record I think it's up on his PowerPoint presentation but you and I tracked down the case it is Cervini versus Cisneros and as you may note from the absence of United States in that caption that's a civil lawsuit and to be fair Skipe does say to the grand chers this is a civil statute but it's a civil statute that is mirrored exactly in relevant part like the 372 criminal statute that we're presenting here and then he quoted from that case the most commonly understood dictionary definition of intimidate is to place a person in fear okay so that's not actually a quote from I mean they may have said it somewhere in the case but that's a quote from United States v Hicks which is a fifth circuit criminal case from 1992 that involved two airplane passengers playing their boom box and cussing out the flight crew whatever the misattribution of the quote is like the least of the problem Cervini arose from this incident in October 2020 when dozens of trucks flying Trump flag surrounded the Biden-Harris campaign bus on interstate 35 in Texas and then boxed it in so we could only move it 15 miles an hour and and in fact they almost ran it off the road multiple times one of the Trump flag vehicles actually side swipe to campaign staffer's car so yeah that was intimidation right and and the Biden campaign actually was intimidated they canceled three events in the area as a direct result and critically the department of justice charged nobody in that incident right that for this event that the DOJ is now saying supposedly proves that you can intimidate a person in a vehicle by slowing them down great work skis and and one more bit I mentioned this in our social media post but in that Cervini versus Cisneros case the Biden-Harris surrogates on the bus who sued those Trump train assholes they mostly lost right like the jury did find one defendant liable on the Ku Klux Klan act that is 42 USC section 1985 that was a claim for conspiracy to intimidate their voting rights which they clearly did there was direct testimony but that jury mostly found $0 in damages and the same jury found for the defendant's right rendered a defense verdict no liability whatsoever on the count for civil assault which civil assault has that exact same reasonable fear inquiry that Skibe is trying to use this case for here okay so that was bad but just as a whole Dakota to this whole sorry episode there is this other high profile case in the northern district of Illinois that looks to be imploding thanks to Mecklenburg's shenanigans in front of the grand jury in fact it was that same Thursday grand jury from the Broadview 6 case that's like she said I know you guys you're the Thursday grand jury and we have this you know we're Simpatico this case involved four executives at Loretto hospital who were charged with COVID fraud. Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ordered prosecutors to turn over transcripts to the defendants of the grand jury presentation in that case too. And apparently those transcripts were bad. According to the Chicago Sun Times, defense lawyers cited Mecklenburg's quote, "'Inflammatory characterization of the defendants, including name calling and folk wisdom metastores.'" So grand jury transcripts are secret. We haven't seen them. We don't know the kind of, but I suspect that defense counsel here is actually playing it conservatively. Like I think those transcripts are probably even worse than they have suggested in their pleadings. And one of the reasons that I think that is because they know that the judge here is basically on this. I mean, Judge Coleman basically flipped out and when she saw this suggested that the only remedy here would be for prosecutors to dismiss this case right now. I think the problem, and the only reason I'm saying that is because, right, the Chicago Sun Times story says folk wisdom metaphor. And I think the problem is way more serious than foxy wisdom. Yeah, just to make that real clear, that these defense lawyers know that they can't reveal what was in those transcripts, even though they've seen them, because they don't wanna run afoul of this prohibition on revealing grand jury information. They still have ethics. Right, so they're just gonna like kinda wink at it because they know they don't have to throw a fit because the judge has already thrown a fit for them. So I would assume that this was Mecklenburg kind of saying like, well, you know me and you trust me and not like chit chatting with the jurors like their old pals. And just to connect this up exactly as in the broad view case, it looks like US Attorney Andrew Butros is trying to make this problem go away by extracting a plea or he was anyway before, again, Judge Coleman said in court on Wednesday, there is one way out of this problem for your office and you know what it is, which again, I would interpret as functionally a direction to drop the charges. Yeah, okay, we're gonna keep watching what happens in Chicago. I think that there is gonna be plenty of fallout from Assistant US Attorney Mecklenburg who is no longer employed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. I think she may be talking to some lawyers. And if not, girl, you should be. Okay, one quick update on my side. We tried to push this off as long as possible. There is a pending request for a temporary restraining order to block the UFC fight on Donald Trump's birthday on the White House South Lawn. The merits of that case are very, very clear but the standing is a real problem. As of 9 p.m. tonight, Judge Mehta has not issued a ruling on that request for TRO. But you know who could issue a ruling? Mother nature. Yeah. We are, as we are recording this, there's a lot of thunder here and I'm thinking, oh, the funniest thing could happen. That would be outstanding. Yeah, I think it's not likely to get blocked for all the reasons that we said on Tuesday show. But it might bring. God knows, it is so unpleasant here right now. Like, have at it, fellow, you paid a million and a half dollars to sit outside in this horrend, it is so horrendously humid outside. Okay, we do have one quick update in the Kennedy Center case which is that while we were recording, the Kennedy Center board did in fact appeal to the DC circuit. So at this, I assume that in the next 10 minutes, they will dock at their request to stay with Judge Cooper and he'll say, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And then they'll keep their fingers crossed for an emergency panel to their liking, the DC circuit. Actually, I did think that they might be holding off to see who the emergency panel is, is like three Trump appointees who are super reactionary and who all think that they're gonna be on the Supreme Court in which case they might get what they want. They waited long, I mean, generally, you don't get your emergency stay when you wait. The irreparable harm of having to take letters off a building. Yeah, okay, all right. That is gonna do it for us. We will update you on all of those stories on our Tuesday show. If you are a subscriber, stick around, we're gonna talk about the slush fund. Oh, I'm sorry, the anti-weaponization fund. Is it dead? Is it alive? Is it like those locusts that bury or themselves underground and come out every 17 years in this part of the country? I do not know. We will find out, we will discuss. Have a lovely weekend, you guys. Thank you so much for supporting the show. And if you could leave us a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Thank you so much. Law and Chaos Podcast is production of Rays of the Media LLC. Is intended solely as entertainment, does not constitute legal advice, and does not form an attorney-client relationship. This show is research and written by Liz Dye and produced by Bryce Blankin-Angle. Law and Chaos Podcast, operate Rays of the Media LLC, All Rights Reserved.