Ep 214 — We Were Gonna Do A Show…And Then We Got High

And I think he deftly parried that. Yeah, I think that's right. And I should add by contrast that on defense, Afriman's last witness was Randy Walters' ex-wife, whom they called to the stand. And here's the, I think this is really kind of the only interesting witness that they put up. MUSIC Welcome to Law & Chaos, where today is all about lemon pound cake and sad police officers in Ohio. And also the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey, where things are popping off. We've got a lot to cover, so let's get after it. Friday, cast monkeys, I'm Liz Dye. And with me as always is Andrew Torres. Andrew, how are you? Great, Liz. How are you? I'm all right. Ready for the weekend, although I'll probably will work a lot this weekend, but I'm okay. It's good. Me too. I am humming a little lemon pound cake in my head. All right, look, we got a million messages from you guys about the Afro Man case. And I must say, my podcast partner, who reads all of these legal filings until yesterday had not heard about the Afro Man case. It's we are not the same age. Being a fellow Gen Xer, I, of course, know Afro Man is because I got high. But did you? Absolutely. You did not know that. Of course, I knew that song. I did not know the rest of them. So why don't we get straight to the what is apparently the lawsuit of this entry? OK, this case is Cooley v. Forman, a civil lawsuit in the court of common pleas of Adams County, Ohio. You probably know it as seven cops with hurt feelings versus the artist known as Afro Man. Here is what happened. Working off of a bad tip from an informant, working off of a bad tip that Afro Man was engaged in kidnapping and human trafficking, the Adams County Sheriff's Office secured a search warrant for his house. Afro Man was going to do a lot of things, but then he got high. And one of those things that he did not do was kidnapping or human trafficking. But the sheriff's waited until Afro Man was in Chicago to execute the warrant, at which point the cops broke the gate to his driveway, kicked in his front door, went through the house with their weapons drawn and searched his personal stuff. They found nothing except some blunts and pipes that were made for him by his fans. To be clear, this was a valid search warrant, even though it was based on obviously bad information. And that really illustrates the difference between the very low threshold that law enforcement needs to get a search warrant. That's just probable cause to believe that there is evidence of a crime and they're actually being a crime. Right. There was no crime going on in his house. So I point this out because when we talk about things like ice claiming that their agents can arrest people without even probable. That's less evidence than one bad informant who says, I'm pretty sure that guy's a human trafficker. Yeah. Here's the thing. No. At first, the cops did not realize that the house had multiple security cameras inside and out that were recording them and that the raid was being captured, the whole thing, more or less, on camera. And if you've been reading the news at all this week, you know what happened next. So here's exactly 30 seconds of the song Lemon Pound Cake about Deputy Sean Cooley. It made the sheriff want to put down his gun and cut him a slice. OK, I gotta say that song is a genuine banger. I mean, under the boardwalks of Gen-Growth. Fair, fair, fair. Afro Man also wrote an eight minute song called Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera that is also, to be honest, we could just skip today's show and play the entire diss album that he created out of this incident. I will link to a bunch of those songs in the show notes. And he's he's got merch, too. So enjoy. Afro Man went on Instagram and posted a picture of himself in a T-shirt that had a picture of Officer Cooley next to a picture of Peter Griffin from Family Guy with the Caption. Congratulations to Police Officer Pound Cake. Thank you for getting me 5.4 million hits on TikTok. I couldn't have done it without you. Obviously, congratulations again. You're famous for all the wrong reasons. As you can see, all my pound cake is gone. Officer Pound Cake confiscated my pound cake. He said something happened to his body camera on the way to the evidence room. LOL. So while Afro Man is busy monetizing Officer Pound Cake, seven cops who were the butt of the joke decided that the money should really go to them instead. Right. So on March 13th, 2023, all seven of them sued Afro Man in their individual capacity, right? Not as members of the Sheriff's Office. And that complaint alleged five counts of action. But the gravamen of the lawsuit was really count one, right? Like that was misappropriation of likeness. Their argument back then, their theory of the case was, hey, why is this guy making money off of songs and selling merch with our face on it? Right? Like, to be fair, they didn't like much being made fun of either. But like mostly what they wanted, and this is the financial demand from count one, was quote, the profits made by the unauthorized use of plaintiffs personas. So Afro Man moves to dismiss and he does indeed get counts one, two and five thrown out. But that left two counts for the trial, one for false light and the other for the common lot toward of unreasonable publicity given to private lives. So that meant that between filing the complaint and going to trial, the cops theory of the case had morphed from you profited off of our likenesses. That's no fair to we've suffered emotional harm because you said mean things about us, which is also no fair in their argument. And I have to say that shift is one of the things that I really like about how this case got framed. We're going to talk about the arguments that were made at trial. And just to get this out of the way, in early 2024, Afro Man remixed because I got high as because Hunter Biden got high. Right. And then he showed up on the campaign trail with Donald Trump. And you know what? I do not care. Nope. And neither should you. This is about free speech. It is about whether you can make fun of the cops. And hell, yeah, you can make fun of the cops. You absolutely should make fun of the cops. Yes. So let's situate that. Right. So the and talk about the two remaining civil counts of action. There they are both common law towards meaning law that has developed over time since 13th century Saxony, as opposed to statutory laws that were passed by the legislature. So the first is false light invasion of privacy, which allows you to recover damages when someone spreads false rumors about you that paint you in a way that is highly offensive to a reasonable person. As the plaintiff, you have to show that the actor had knowledge or acted in reckless disregard as to the falsity of the publicized matter and the false light in which the other would be portrayed. And that sounds pretty close to defamation, but there are four important differences. First, every false light plaintiff has to prove what is in effect actual malice. That is reckless disregard for the truth. You know, defamation action, private figures only have to show negligence. Right. But that's not relevant here because the cops clearly qualify as public figures and aframan speech about them was on a topic of public concern, right? You know, whether the search was justified. So that wouldn't be a distinction in this case. Right. So the second distinction is that false light invasion of privacy has a greater publication requirement. That is, you can defame someone just by telling one other person. But false light requires publicity. That is, the objectionable thing that you're saying has to be widely disseminated. Right. Also not relevant here because tens of millions of people have played aframan, including us several times. Right. So now we get to the real reason this wasn't brought as a defamation claim, but is sort of slightly adjacent, which is that defamation requires you to say something that is false. We've made fun of people like Alan Dershowitz and Donald Trump who filed defamation suits, where they're not saying specifically what precise statement is actually false. Yeah. And you have to do that. False light builds in that gap. It's right there in the name. Right. So the classic example is if the newspaper is running a story about, let's say, criminal priests, and then they put a photo of the local priest next to that story. He's not a part of the story. Right. If the text of the story never mentions him, then that priest would not be able to sue for defamation. Right. There is not technically a statement that they have made that is false. But what he could sue for is being placed in a false light. Right. Because as you're reading the newspaper, it's a story about criminal priests and you see the priest picture there. You would draw that inference that he's part of the story. Right. And the way that you calculate damages is different as well. In defamation, as we've talked about in the Trump cases, you get compensated for the objective injury to your reputation, which in the Trump cases is like nothing. Right. And probably did out of for Hunter Biden. In false light cases, you get compensated for the subjective emotional harm and mental anguish that you suffered by having nasty things said or implied about you. And all of that means that generally speaking, it's easier to bring a false light claim than a defamation claim. Yeah. So you might be wondering, how come Donald Trump, serial frivolous litigant, doesn't file false light claims? And I think there are two reasons for that, but probably the first is sufficient. And one is remember, we said this is a common law claim. And that means not every state recognizes the tort of false light invasion of privacy. And, you know, some state Supreme Courts have said that it's duplicative of defamation or other. Anyway, Florida is one of those states. So we couldn't in Florida and Florida is where he likes to file those lawsuits. I also think there's a second reason, right, which has to do with what you just said, Liz. And that is if the damages result from subjective injury and hurt feelings, then in every single one of those cases to be a plaintiff, you know, you're going to have to be deposed. You're going to have to put into evidence what your feelings are. And Donald Trump definitely does not want to be deposed. Right. He doesn't want to be deposed on anything as we saw in the E. Jean Carroll trial. He's a terrible witness. And what's he going to do? Get up on the thing and say, like, I cried and I hurt my feelings. I was like, that's kind of intention. Right. Right. Yeah. OK. So that's count one, the tort of invasion of privacy false light. The second count on which the plaintiffs want to try is is the tort of invasion of privacy, unreasonable publicity. And it's kind of the mirror image of that false light claim. Right. You can also recover when someone widely disseminates true things about you, if those true things are not of legitimate concern to the public. So that that is, you know, what you might think of as the classic invading someone's privacy, right? Like don't camp outside your neighbor's house and live stream what they do. Mm hmm. So this tort is virtually impossible to prove as a public figure. And as you might imagine, there are a bunch of cases saying that people have the right to criticize cops. Yeah, I was surprised that this claim survived the motion to dismiss. And if I had to guess and I'm sort of steel bottoming the best arguments, I would say that the trial judge who is retired judge, Jerry McBride, slays the salami very, very thinly on this count. Right. So, for example, when when Afriman sings about how the cops broke down his door and stole his money and his pound cake, like that can't be unreasonable publicity. But what he sings a song about having sexual intercourse with one of the cops is now X, Y, that is personal and private and and false. Yeah, for the record, false. I write a good point like that. It's it's hard for me to find a true private thing that he talked about. So OK, but but let's summarize those two counts. Plain ifs go to trial this week to show that Afriman, primarily that he said false things about them that cause them significant personal mental anguish and emotional distress. And we will get to the trial itself from which we have so many clips. Because we just take after this brief ad break unless you are a subscriber at LawnCaosPod.com or patreon.com slash LawnCaosPod, in which case, not today, not ever. And we're back. OK, before we situate how both sides wanted to try this case, I do want to make sure that we're being clear about Afriman's parodies because look, Officer Pound Cake is just funny. And you might be tempted to say, oh, you know, get over it, right? Like, Afriman himself is a big guy. He's got a song about himself that, yes, I also listened to called Old and Fat. We cannot play 30 seconds of that song on this show. Look, objectively, it is funny that he has footage of this officer walking into his kitchen, eyeing the dessert and opening the frit. Like, it's funny. And evidence came out during the trial that the sheriff's office thought it was funny, too, right? Like they had a Halloween party and some of the people attendees at the party brought Leban Pound Cake to the party, right? Like so. Exactly. So but but I think we are not framing this discussion correctly. If we imply that Afriman just made fat jokes about these cops, right? Like he called one of the cops a pedophile, right? He wrote a song called Randy Walters, his son of a bitch that explicitly calls him a drug addict, right? And I think the less I say about the song, Lickham Lo Lisa, it's super misogynist. It goes after the only woman officer for having a low voice. It implies that she's gay and her trans. Look, I don't think some of those jokes are not jokes I would make. But again, I do not care and neither should you. Yeah, First Amendment is for all of us. And it's also important to review this trial through the lens of race and gender and politics, right? Adams County, Ohio is 27000 people in 2024. It went 83 to 17 for Donald Trump. It is 96.4 percent white. And one of the things in this trial that was front and center was this racist trope of a big, scary black man and a crying white woman, right? Of the seven officers, only one was a woman, Lisa Phillips. She's the one who he wrote that song, Lickham Lo Lisa, about the plaintiff's lawyer played that entire 13 minute, 44 second long song for the jury. In what was pretty clearly an attempt to try and kind of infuriate them at this poor white woman being humiliated by a black man. She's their star witness. She cried on the stand and said it was sexually humiliating, which I am quite sure that it was that doesn't overcome the First Amendment. And then to close their case in chief, the plaintiffs themselves called Afroman to the stand, which was. Well, we're going to play his testimony. But but I just want to add a couple of thoughts before we get there. Right. So first, how they could call him to the stand, right? And unlike in a criminal case, in a civil case, if you are one of the part, you can't plead the fifth and refuse to testify. Right. So that's how they could do it procedurally. But it's a weird choice, right? Because the plaintiffs knew that Afroman was always going to have to testify in his own case in chief, right? Like they could have waited and just cross examined him and and strategically as a trial lawyer, I made this choice myself. Like you think a lot about the first witness you call and the last witness you call to the stand, right? In your case. So this was the last witness that they put on. This was what they wanted to leave the jury with as the impression of their case. It was definitely intentional. And I think Liz that you nailed it exactly right. Showing an all white jury, a scary black man. And and I think there was a second strategic layer to this as well. And that is that Afroman was either going to go one of two ways on the stand, right? Either he was going to be the same outgoing flamboyant, larger than life in your face personality, which I think the plaintiffs lawyer thought would not play well with this jury, or he would be coached to to have been moderated and then he would have been able to make a big deal about that and say, like, oh, yeah, when he's recording this music, you know, he records it in this way. But then he came in here and you you heard him express concern or back down or what? You know, in other words, try and show some sort of inconsistency to try and have him come off as as inauthentic. Well, that's not how it would. No, we're going to play a little bit of Afromans testimony in which he's he's defiant. And and he says, look, you guys keep trying to say that you're the victim. I was the victim here. You guys came in my house and broken my house based on the flimsiest of evidence and cut the wires to my camera and stole money from me. And I mean, he says that they stole four hundred dollars from him. You can see it on the camera. Right, right, right. I mean, he's like, how do I not get to be a victim, but you're an acceptable victim, right? You came in my house, you kicked in the door. You had your guns drawn, you know, you didn't clean up your mess. And now you want me to pay you. So OK, here here, we have three brief clips from this trial from his testimony. Is it fair to say you were angry and upset about this search? I wasn't happy. And is that why you posted the things we've seen this week? Because you weren't happy? No, I posted it because the sheriff's never supposed to raid in my house in the first place. The whole raid was a mistake. All of this is their fault. If they hadn't have wrongly rated my house, there would be no lawsuit. I would not know their names. They wouldn't be on my body. They wouldn't be on my home surveillance system. And there would be no songs, nothing. My money would still be intact, nothing. So all of this is their fault. And because they executed a search warrant on your home, that gave you the right to post the things that we've seen this week on the internet. Because they... Is that right, Mr. Forman? Yes, tearing down my door, not my house. Yes, tearing down my door, not paying for it, not being apologetic. Me being a sport, doing something peaceful to raise the money to pay for their damages. Me having the freedom of speech as an American, to talk to my family, friends and fans about what the sheriffs did to my home. Yes, I had the right to my freedom of speech. After they left, I had the right to kick the can and to do what I had to do to repair the damage they brought to my house. Yes, I did. That includes the right to post the videos that you've just been posting up until Friday and beyond, right? Yes, I have freedom of speech. I'm a rapper, I entertain, I write fiction comedy. I... Yes, I mean, I entertain for a living like you practice law for a living. So I have to go to work. Yeah, my whole thing is they never should have rated me in the first place. That's your whole thing. That's my whole thing. That's the point. If they never would have showed up, there would be no songs about them. I wouldn't know who they are. Their faces would not be on my video cameras. None of this, we wouldn't be in this room right now. If they had narrated my house and didn't press no charges, didn't even know what they was doing, this whole thing is their fault and they're suing me for their mistake. So what they did, searching your house, gave you the right to do everything you can. Under the circumstance that I got freedom of speech, after they run around my house with guns and kicked down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time. Yes, I do. And I think I'm a sport for dealing so. Because I don't go to their house, kick down their doors, flip them off on their surveillance cameras, then try to play the victim and sue them. You were at Lisa Phillips's deposition, correct? Yes, sir. In your lawyer's office? Yes, sir. Same office where you filmed part of that video last Friday? Yes, sir. And you saw how upset she was when she was answering your lawyer's questions about how this had affected her, right? Yes, yes. And you saw your attorney say, should we, do we need to take a break? Yes. And you saw her say, no, let's go on and get this over with. Yes, sir. You saw all that? Yes. You knew she was upset? Just like she knew I was upset when she was standing in front of my kids with an AR-15 with her hand around the trigger ready to shoot me, just like she knew I was upset when she cut my cameras, but I'm not a person she is. So I'm sorry for being a victim. Let's talk about the predators. Okay. So you saw all that, you saw how upset she was. You heard the testimony about her children. You heard the testimony at the depositions about Randy Newland's daughter who came home upset. You heard all that, but you're still posting stuff about her. Yeah, because I understand it was Randy's fault and all of their fault for coming to my house in the first place. So if they hadn't came to my house, their children wouldn't be saying nothing. None of this would be going home if they had a, did their research and did things right. So all of this is their fault. And now they want to sue me for their mistake. Is there anything that could change your mind about what you're doing to these deputies? Is there anything that can change my mind about the fact that they shouldn't have been at my house in the first place? Is there anything that can change my mind about how my money shouldn't have been touched in the first place? No. I mean, he's 100% right, right? He is throwing this trope of the white woman as the victim back in their faces and saying, how come my children aren't victims? How come I'm not a good enough victim? She's 100% right. Challenging that baked in, you know, baked in racism was, I think, a terrific choice. I think he was a terrific witness. And I think that you're 100% right that the plaintiffs' lawyers were hoping that he would either be obnoxious, or not obnoxious, and then they could say, but you're obnoxious in your music, which is the real you. And I think he deftly parried that. Yeah, I think that's right. And I should add by contrast that on defense, Aframan's last witness was Randy Walters' ex-wife, who they called to the stand. And here's the, I think this is really kind of the only interesting witness that they put up. Randy Walters, undirect, had said that Aframan's parody songs where, again, Aframan claimed to have had sex with Walters' wife, that those songs ruined his marriage and caused his divorce. And so then they put his ex-wife on the stand and she said, no, that wasn't true at all. Right? She had to get a restraining order against it. She's a schoolteacher, right? And she said, yeah, I found out about this in class. Like my kids in my class came up and teased me about it. But like, they're kids. They say horrible things to each other. They say they would tease me about something else if it wasn't this, right? Like no one, and this was the key part of her testimony, no one could have taken this seriously. Right, right. And by the way, the reason that he would say that about the wife, even though it wasn't true, was to say these were the emotional damages that I suffered to substantiate his claim for millions of dollars and damages. And I think that this woman was an excellent witness. But yeah, let's go straight to closing arguments because both sides' lawyers kind of accept this framing, right? It comes down to an express pitch to the jury. Are you going to let this guy get away with saying mean stuff about your local cops? Aren't you angry about this and doesn't your feeling that it's not okay matter more than anything to do with the law? Mr. Foreman perpetuated lies intentionally, repeatedly, over three and a half years on the Internet about these seven brave deputy sheriffs who've lived in this county for years, risked their lives for this county for years, done their job, been in the community for many, many years. Mr. Foreman did it intentionally. Mr. Foreman knew that what he posted on the Internet were lies. He knew there was no theft. He knew there was no sex with Randy Walters' wife. And he certainly knew all of the stuff he's repeatedly posted about Lisa Phillips up until Friday and probably later were lies, too. What are we going to do about that? Mr. Foreman told you from the witness stand there's nothing we can do to stop him because he has freedom of speech to lie about people intentionally. That's what you think. That's what the community thinks. That's what decent people think. But Mr. Foreman thinks it's okay to do what he's done over three and a half years because they executed a search warrant that broke down his door and disconnected his cameras. You heard from the witness stand from Mr. Foreman the callous indifference that he showed to what he's done, the harm he's done. It's imprinted in your minds, I'm sure, like it is in mine. The tears, the agony from some of these witnesses. Don't forget that when you're back in the jury room. That's what this case is about. If you were taken aback by the lawyer for the plaintiffs saying explicitly to the jury, that's what decent people think, right? That rappers shouldn't be able to make fun of you. You ain't seen nothing yet. Now I want you to listen to this lawyer. You will not believe me. I'm going to tell you and then you're going to listen to it. He tells the jurors that they were specifically chosen by God. He uses the phrase, the chosen people to protect the decency of this all white community. You're all here now in this place, in this courtroom for a reason. And I believe there's a power higher than us that brought you here today to do this job and that you are the chosen people to do it. Nobody else is going to do it. There's not going to be another trial. There's not going to be a second chance. This is the day to decide whether Mr. Foreman gets away with what he's done and whether these plaintiffs deserve something to make up for what they've been through and whether the community is told that what he did is unacceptable. It's not okay. Okay. So yes, that's horrifying to me as your friendly neighborhood atheist on the podcast. But here's the thing. That argument was not for me. I actually think we're going to play some clips of the defense's closing argument too. I actually think the plaintiff's lawyer is making the best argument. He can't understand. I think he's probably the better lawyer in the room. No, interesting. Yeah. Comparing skill level. Like I don't think the cops could have had a better strategic presentation for their dog shit case. And so that pitch, right? This is up to you to defend our community flows into an ask of $3.9 million. And to your point, Liz, the way that broke down was a demand of $1.5 million to compensate Lisa Phillips. A million dollars each for Sean Cooley. That's Officer Pound Cake and Randy Walters, son of a bitch. And then the other $400,000 was split among the other four guys who feature in the background of the, why you shutting off my video camera video. Like one of them got called King Kong Bundy, which is does kind of like King Kong Bundy. I mean fair. But again, the cops lawyers pitch this as a stark choice to the jury. Right? Either give his clients a significant amount of money or you'll be sending a message to the wrong people. And we all know who the wrong people are looking at the future. If there's a verdict for the plaintiffs and you award the plaintiffs a fair amount of money. What happens? The plaintiffs are vindicated. The court of public opinion out there, the press, which I know you haven't been looking at. They don't know the facts. You know the facts. And the verdict for the plaintiff will say they were wronged. He was wrong. A verdict for the plaintiffs will make up in some way for what they've been through. A verdict for the plaintiffs will say that we don't condone. We don't approve. You can't get away with what Mr. Foreman's done. Not in this community. Not in this country. That's not freedom of speech where we live. That's what a verdict for the plaintiffs will say. Let's look at another possible future if there were to be a verdict for the defendant. Or if there were to be a verdict with a small amount of money attached to it. In that case, in that world, in that future, the world is told what he did is okay. What they went through is no big deal. We don't really care. We think it's fine. That's what a verdict for the defendant or a small verdict would say. They would go home subject to even more ridicule. You took him on and you lost. See what he did was fine. I don't have to tell you. That's not the message we want to send. It's not the message you want to send. Yeah, not subtle. Okay, so we talked about how this is situated in the context of a very white, very conservative community. So now it's time for the defense's closing argument. And he's got to start out. I mean, this is number one first sentence out of the gate. What is all this rap stuff anyway? We started this time. I talked about this case. It was about freedom of speech. But let's talk about what it's also about. It's also about music. Not all music is tasteful. Not everybody likes all music. There's some songs I hate. I think we can find plenty of people that find songs they do not like. But Mr. Foreman, Joe is a rapper and comedian. It's what he's done his whole life as rap, make songs. We got to think of what rap is because music does not exist in a vacuum. Music evolves over time. Take a look at jazz. It's evolved at one time. It was distinct in a certain subculture and it has now expanded. Rap is the same. Rap started out as a means for people to express social commentary, opinions through entertainment. Look at the song by N.W.A. Or they called it, fuck the police. I think I said that right. It's a social commentary on what was going on in their lives. Their personal effect, the personal things happening to them, combined with entertainment, which unfortunately is exaggeration. Opinion, nothing affecting that song. It's a commentary on society. And so when you look at rap, you see that over and over again. I had my secretary print me a couple songs, a rap songs, while I was pouring a cup of coffee. And the first one was Carly B, WAP. I find it bad to say what WAP means, but it's a popular song. I think it's somewhat derogatory, but then again, I'm not the audience for that song. And I know that. I know nothing in that song. Nothing talking about is true. I know it's not. I know it's entertainment. I know it's social commentary. Miss Grooms, testified even her students knew that at a young age. The same thing I knew when I was watching Johnny Carson, The Late Night Show, and SNL, Saturday Night Live, with my grandfather when I was a kid. That's all entertainment. They make fun of everybody for entertainment. And some of it is a social commentary, but it is not fact. And everybody knows that. Nobody looks at little Wayne's song, Pussy Monster, and says there's a monster in that song. Everybody knows it's exaggeration for entertainment. Is he commenting on something? Sure, but it's not fact. And I can keep going. Megan, three-style, you know, sex talk. I mean, it just goes on. Okay, Liz, I got a bit the first time I was selecting this clip. I almost cut it off before the is a real monster. You're welcome. But again, from a litigation perspective, I think this is probably pretty endearing to the jury. And I wonder if maybe he didn't botch some of these names on purpose, right? Like when he said, I think I said that right. Like, look, even I know it's not Carly B and Megan three-style. Do you really know you don't make your big Megan this time? It's fifth. Okay, but look, now we know what rap is. Now you can hear Afro-Benz lawyer directly take on the plaintiffs framing. And as we play these next clips, Bob is the plaintiffs counsel, by the way. So you hear the argument. And again, I like how both sides accept the framing. We listen to Lemon Pound Kick. You heard the iteration. You heard how it came together as entertainment. So we don't exist in a vacuum and a reasonable person doesn't exist in a vacuum. As the judge has said, you are a reasonable people. You get to decide what's reasonable, which means you get to use your experience. You get to use your understanding of what those are, of your understanding of Joe, of your understanding of rap music, music in general. I'm not going to sit here and say that these seven people were happy about what happened to them. I'm not going to say that. That'd be stupid. But what I am going to say is, they are public officials. We see it on the news all the time, public officials made fun of them. Look at that suit. Does this look like a man who thinks that everybody's going to assume that everything he's saying is fact? I mean, he's like a comedian. He exaggerates for the sake of entertainment. That's who he is. I'm not going to say it's tasteful to everyone, but some people do find it entertaining. I asked an important question about them. I said, do you believe everything in the newspaper? No. Do you believe everything you read on the internet? No. We all know that to be true. A reasonable person knows that. People can post opinions, social commentary, and hurtful things all over the internet. And it is just to be expected. That's why we are supposed to use our own filter, use our common sense, use our experiences in life. So while hurtful, it was not fact. It was music, entertainment. Stuff that no reasonable person would understand. Especially not a public official, because we see it on TV all the time. We see it on the internet. You see it on Facebook. Sometimes people want to turn off Facebook because there's so much political commentary and stuff. But that's expected. Do I expect everything I read is fact? I don't think most of it's fact. I think it's everybody's opinion, and opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one and it stinks. But that doesn't mean they can't have it. That doesn't mean they can't express it, and that doesn't mean they can't make a song about it. Truth is a defense. That's why we talk about theft. That's why we show it all down. Because I wanted you to see how the money was handled. There's a lot of confusion around it. And for that reason. Before I get to another point, I want to address something that's bounced around my head. Bob says, what does this message send if you find for Mr. Forman? I rephrase that question a little differently. What does this message send if we find that music and social commentary, well maybe not the most tasteful thing in the world, is silence because a public official, while hurt by it, yes. Unhappy by it, yes. Pissed off, yes. Emotional, yes. What opinion does that sound? I mean, if you can sue people, music artists, comedians to shut them down, that's what we're looking at here. I'm sorry they feel the way they do. But there's a certain amount that you have to take as a public official. As part of the duties as a job. Bob went to Great Links to say, nothing will stop him. It shows us we're right. We got to stop his expression. We got to stop entertainment. We got to stop exaggeration. That's what Bob's talking about. What chilling effect does that have on the world we live in? Yeah, I mean in that last clip he makes the subtext text, right? The plea is we've got to stop him, I mean him being Afro man. And that carried through when Bob got back up to give his rebuttal. We'll play all of it. It's less than two minutes. Nothing Mr. Osborne said about sexually explicit songs out in society refer to specific people in the community like the songs that are at issue here. It's not the same thing. We all know that. These weren't opinions. Mr. Foreman didn't say, in my opinion, Brian Newland is a pedophile. In my opinion, they're all thieves. In my opinion, I fucked his wife doggy style. He said it like they were facts. And I think Judge Hine is going to instruct you based on everything that's happened so far. That these were not opinions. They were stated as fact. And your job is to decide whether those facts were true or not. And we know they're not. The case isn't about lemon pound cake. It's about intentional lies designed to hurt people and they hurt people. If somebody in the jury room says, well, what about his first amendment rights? You know, and the law tells you, that doesn't allow lies that hurt people. Yeah, there you have it. This trial is about can Afro man tell lies that hurt people? And the jury, after a somewhat lengthy six hour deliberation said, yes, yes he can. Yeah, Andrew, you had thoughts about the jury deliberating. You want to share that? Yeah, there was a little nail biting there, right? Because usually when you're waiting for a jury to come back and you're watching media coverage, it's in a criminal trial and you can infer certain things about it. Because in a criminal case, you need unanimity, right? All 12 jurors have to agree. The burden of proof in those cases is beyond a reasonable doubt. And so you see these cases where the jurors take days to come to a decision because coming back as a hung jury can be so consequential. We've talked about the Allen charge where the judge can say to the holdout jurors, like you should strongly consider whether if the majority of your fellow citizens are voting to give a... Right, like and try and push them towards an agreement. None of that was the case here, right? Civil juries are different. And under the Ohio Constitution, Article 1, Section 5, A, you don't get a 12-person jury in a civil case. It's eight and there were two alternates. And you don't need unanimity. You just need 75%. So that's six of the eight jurors. And the burden in a civil case is just more likely than not, 51-49. And so all of that means... It was a little surprising to me to see it take that long to unfold, right? And so I thought that maybe that meant we were looking at a breakdown of let's say... Because the first thing you do is come in and the four-person polls the jurors, right? It says, where are we, right? And I thought maybe that meant that we had five jurors who wanted a defense verdict. Wait, is that what you think happens in a jury room? Go ahead. No, no. I mean, I've served on a lot of juries. I've talked about it on this thing. No, it's always really awkward and chaotic. And it's funny that you think that the four-person takes charge and polls every... You've never had jury duty? So I have frequently had jury duty. I have never been assigned to sit on a jury. But I have talked to jury four-persons. All the time. No, it's... I have that. That's what they told me. So this is great. Tell me what happened. No, I mean, I don't think that they take a poll and say like, where are we? Like every time that I've done it, because I think jurors are actually... I'm glad that you talked about this. I think jurors take it really seriously. It is... We all kind of roller-eyes about jury duty. Every time that I have done it, everybody took it really, really seriously. Everybody really cared. And so every time we went through the evidence... And look, if it's a long trial, you've been stuck with these people, even if it's a short trial. You know, you've all been in the room waiting to be called. You've made chit-chat with these people. You've sat in the box with these people. It's an awkward thing. And we've all kind of talked through, spent a lot of time talking through what involves each charge. You know, what each charge involves. And so I don't think they take a poll and they go, cool, we're done. I think jurors are not glib in that way. And that it is one of the things which is keeping this country afloat is that jurors don't cut corners in the main. I really don't think that they do. And that we've seen so much jury... I don't want to call it jury nullification, right? But what we've seen is grand jurors and peddate jurors alike saying, I'm not going to sign off on this bullshit. And it's one of the things that's still working, you know, in the main. So don't... I'm not going to let you... I'm on my hobby horse. No. I love your hobby horse. I want to be clear. In no way was I implying that they were cutting corners. No, no, no. I was saying, I have... People take it serious. I think that's right. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I was suggesting that I have been told by two separate jury four persons that they began by surveying the landscape, right? Figuring out where the body of the jury is from which I inferred that there was probably some split. Well, lots more city jurors. We take it serious. You keep saying it. I'm not... There's no implication of not seriously. Okay. But at any event, however it began by the end of that six hours, by the end of the day on Wednesday, we had a unanimous defense verdict, right? No liability on either count to any of those seven plaintiffs. And I thought that was incredibly encouraging, right? Like the question was put front and center. And we got the view from, you know, a rural red state wildly pro-Trump community. And, you know, that those are not voices that at least I hear a lot of on a daily basis. And I was glad to see that, you know, that the First Amendment is alive and well everywhere. All right. Well, God bless the heartland. And we will be back to talk about New Jersey after this brief ad break. And we're back. Okay. Let's talk about the ongoing fireworks in the district of New Jersey. We wrote about it for subscribers on the blog, but I want to talk here about how this kerfuffle fits in to this wider war between the Trump administration and the judiciary. The case involves the prosecution of a defendant named Francisco Villafone for possession of child sex abuse material or CSAM. On Monday morning, the parties appeared before Judge Zahid Karashy for what was supposed to be a routine sentencing, but turned out to be anything but. In fact, the judge actually threw the government prosecutor out of his courtroom. Well, to be fair, I think the government was hoping that this would be a routine sentencing. But Judge Karashy was pretty clear a week beforehand that this was not going to be just a normal morning in this court. And that's because of two issues. The first is the prosecutors badly screwed up this case. And we're going to talk about that. And the second is the ongoing dispute about the leadership structure of the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey. The three hat dances dead and long live the triumvirate. True. But okay, let's talk about the case itself for a minute because this is disturbing. Oh, God, such a shit show. So back in August, when Alina Habba was pretending to be the U.S. Attorney, the government inked a plea deal with this defendant, allowing him to plead to one count each of receiving and possessing CSAM. At that point, when this thing got signed, the FBI was still reviewing the defendant's phone. Why did they let him plead before seeing what was on his phone? No one has a really good explanation. But after they'd let him plead to the two counts, the FBI came back and said that they'd found at least 116 more series of images, including some that are classified as extreme because they involve very young children. And these images had been panged by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as known images with identified victims. Nick Mick is like a clearinghouse where websites aggregate known CSAM that shows up on their servers, both so that they can tag it digitally and it automatically will the servers will recognize it. The websites will recognize it if it reappears even in DM and they'll turn it over to law enforcement so the victims can seek restitution. Yeah. So in October, the government comes to Judge Koreshi and says, Oh, whoops, we need to delay sentencing in this case so that we can reach out to all of these newly discovered victims and see if they want to seek restitution, which infuriates him who used to be a prosecutor himself. Judge Koreshi was also a Jaguar. He was a federal magistrate. He was chief counsel for ICE. Oh, and by the way, independent of all of that, the sentencing that the Department of Justice is recommending on the two counts to which they pled this guy is well below the guy. It's a third of the guidelines range, right? So Judge Koreshi is livid that they've screwed this case up. Right, right. In case that wasn't abundantly clear, they cannot charge him for all the newly discovered stuff because they already pled him out, right? And so there's nothing, right? He gets the sentence for the two, for the stuff that they originally found. He doesn't get charged for any of the extra stuff and there was a lot and it was bad. So Judge Koreshi's mad about that and he was already angry at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey, of which you said he's an alum because of this deluge of habeas cases that we talk about here every single week, right? And the government insists on continuing to break the law so that ICE can pick up people who should not be detained and courts have to constantly adjudicate the same case over and over and over again. So in February, Judge Koreshi said that the next ICE habeas petition that lands in front of him is going to involve live testimony from supervisors at both ICE and DOJ to explain why they keep ignoring the rulings of the court. Yeah, so that's how Judge Koreshi is feeling generally and like the Villafone case is really, really bad. And now, layered on top of that, you have this problem with the U.S. Attorney's Office for a full year now because Donald Trump refuses to nominate some normal Republican who can get the buy-in from Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim under the blue slipper. Instead, Trump insists that he has the absolute right to install his cronies as U.S. Attorney starting with Alina Habba, who was sworn in a full year ago. In August, Judge Matthew Brand, on loan from the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Habba was never lawfully appointed. She stuck around until December, still calling herself the U.S. Attorney, until the Third Circuit affirmed Brand's ruling, at which point she flounced off in a hop. Apparently to Florida, the New York Post said last week that she left her husband and moved to Palm Beach to be closer to Trump's political operation. No, I believe her last words were, you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you can't take the New Jersey out of the girl. But you can take her to Mar-a-Lago. I have no idea. Okay, so Pam Bondi vows to appeal that Third Circuit ruling. In the meantime, she seizes on this footnote in Judge Brand's opinion where he said that he was not deciding at that time whether the Attorney General could divide the responsibilities of the U.S. Attorney's office between multiple people. It said she couldn't delegate them all to Alina Habba, but he left that question open. And the reason that Judge, I think there are really two reasons why Judge Brand wrote that footnote. First, because at a oral argument, he was testing the limits of both sides' advocacy. So he asked that question of the lawyers, of both sides, both the DOJ and those representing the criminal defendants, to test the limits of their advocacy. And nobody had a really good answer to that. And second, Judge Brand knows that he went first in this. He issued the first ruling disqualifying Alina Habba. And all the other judges that have been dealing with these three-hat dance goobers have been reading his opinions really, really closely. So I think that's why he went to a footnote and specifically said, look, I raise this as an intellectual question. I'm not deciding it because that would be dick-dead as for another day. Right, right. And just to remind everybody, the three-hat dance is kind of our joke name for this process by which Attorney General Pam Bondi tries to get over the three-hat dance. And he tries to get around the requirement that U.S. attorneys be sent and confirmed by making them kind of special counsels and then purporting to give them all of the authority of a U.S. attorney. And also by making them their own assistance and then letting them kind of exceed or get promoted by automatically. But the courts have said, no, that's not a thing. Right. So again, any normal administration looks at that and says, all right, we can't do it. This is not a normal administration. Pam Bondi looks at that footnote and says, cool, I'm going to drive a truck through this unresolved question that you flagged for us, Judge Brand. And so she promptly put three lawyers in charge of the office in New Jersey dividing the duties of the U.S. attorney's office amongst those three people. I mean, it's a good troll. I will give them that. But not a legal one, as it turns out. So on March 9th, having now been faced with having to resolve this question, Judge Brand ruled that the triumvirate structure was illegal. And this time, he went even further saying that he was now going to reconsider whether the presence of line attorneys could save individual prosecutions if their supervisor or supervisors were serving in the office unlawfully. Because remember, the first time around, Judge Brand came in and said, I am not, even though I'm going to rule that Alina Habba was illegally appointed as acting U.S. attorney or whatever, I'm not going to dismiss the prosecutions that took place under her auspices because there were other lawyers who were working on them. And they're valid there. And every court that came after him, except one, has ruled similarly and denied the defendant's motions to dismiss based on the unlawful appointment of the acting U.S. attorney or whatever. The only case that came out differently was in the Eastern District of Virginia where judges dismissed the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James. And that's because the only prosecutor who got those indictments was the illegally appointed Lindsay Halion. There was no one there to save her. But now, for reasons that we got into in more depth in episode 211, Judge Brand said, you know what? You made me get so deep into the weeds on the funding structure of the attorney general and the U.S. attorney's office when I was trying to unpack this dumb triumvirate thing that now I'm not sure about my prior ruling. So I'm going to need briefing on that issue because maybe everything that happens in an office that is run by an illegally serving U.S. attorney or triumvirate, maybe all of that is null and void. Right. So Judge Brand stayed his disqualification order of this triumvirate to give the government time to appeal. And at the same time, he said, I'm going to take briefing on this other question, right? But he warned that the staying his order did not undo the logic of it, right? He says, a stay cannot validate an unlawful appointment if the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place. It does so at its own risk. So in English, she's saying, if you continue to run this office without illegally constituted leadership structure, you take the risk that every criminal case that goes through here is going to wind up dismissed because your prosecutors were acting without legal authority and poisoned everything that happened. Yeah. So Judge Brand issues that stay on March 9th. On March 10th, Judge Koreshi puts out a minute order in this case, right? Saying to the prosecutors in the Villefane case, look, I strongly suggest you adjourn this case in light of Judge Brand's ruling adjourn, meaning postpone. And then Judge Koreshi warned the government essentially that if it didn't just take this lifeline and wait it out, it was going to need to send someone to his courthouse to quote, address questions from this court as to the current structure of the U.S. Attorney's office for the District of New Jersey, the legal authority for the assistant U.S. Attorney's appearance in this case, the assistant U.S. Attorney's personal knowledge of the content of the 130 page opinion by Judge Brand. These are all his words. The legal sufficiency of a waiver if defendant agrees to proceed despite these circumstances and any additional inquiry that the court deems appropriate. Yeah. So a rational prosecutor's office would have taken the hint and postponed this sentencing hearing. But these guys are not rational. They always double down. They always take the position of maximal defiance and they weren't about to do anything that even tacitly deferred to Judge Brand's order and treated it as potentially correct. So the line attorney, Daniel Rosenblum, replied the next day and he said, the government is not seeking to adjourn Monday's sentencing hearing. Among other considerations, this is a victim case. The under-signed assistant U.S. attorney will be prepared to address at the sentencing hearing to questions the court outlined in its Thursday text order. What? That was the entirety of the letter that Rosenblum sent. And what an unbelievably ridiculous thing to say. Oh, yeah. Invoking the victims was a stupendously poor idea considering, you know, you've known since October how furious the judge is about the government's disregard for the very many victims that it did not know. Before it entered into this plea deal, right? And beyond that, Judge Koreshi has said, if you don't postpone, I'm going to grill the hell out of you. Like, I don't know that anybody could have answered those things. Now, hiding behind the victims as a reason for doing this, you had to know this was going to be like waving the proverbial red flag in front of the bull, right? Right. So Rosenblum shows up. He also shows up with a minder, a guy named Mark Coyne, who says that he's verbally entering his appearance on behalf of the government. Yeah. So Coyne is the supervisor and he shows up and says, I'm here and I'm going to speak. I mean, Andrew, you've practiced law for a long time. How weird is that? I'm rare. Like, you never. I literally, I have never seen it, not just in my cases, but in any case ever, I suppose, you know, given that. I've seen the DOJ too. Because, right? Because everything's proceeding on an emergency basis. Right. Exactly. Exactly. That I mean, in the normal course of events, a lawyer who is going to be in a case will enter his appearance. We talked about Matthew Isahara, that JAG lawyer who got disciplined, who got held in civil contempt in Minnesota in that case because the habeas petitioner didn't get his ID back and the judge said, you know, I'm going to find you $500 a day. She did that because Isahara never even bothered to enter the appearance in that case. But in every case, you enter your appearance to show your judge like, I am responsible for this. It is a one line form. Enter electronically. And US attorneys are exempted from having to be admitted to the jurisdiction. Right. It is literally the most trivial thing ever. And Koreshi put out his order on Thursday for a hearing on Monday. So that's four days. Which you could have found. You know how trivial it was? It was so trivial that COIN staff did it for him during the hearing. And he's like, they just did it for me. And the judge was like, I don't care. Right. Okay. For subscribers, we're going to have a discussion about DOJ staffing and whether someone who graduated from law school in 2021 should be running the US attorney's office when the line prosecutor graduated in 2015. No. The answer is no. I mean, that's not a super hard math problem. Okay. For everybody else, we will be right back after this brief ad break. Okay. So before the break, we said that Mark COIN, the supervisor for prosecutor Daniel Rosenblum, tried to verbally enter his appearance. But he got shut down by Judge Koreshi who told him, you cannot speak. You could only offer moral support to Rosenblum. I think he said something like, you could pass him a note. Yeah. You pass him a note. And then COIN reluctantly manages to sit on his hands while Judge Koreshi yells about how badly the US attorney's office botched this prosecution, which they did. And then the judge says, the reason why raised the issue, it's not an adjournment for all time. It was a short adjournment so that we could all appreciate not only your office and the defense bar in the court, appreciate the impact if any of Judge Brand's recent decision where once again, your office is deemed to be operating on lawfully. So I don't think it was unreasonable for me to hand you that lifeline. You didn't take it. And so here we are. After where it's Rosenblum starts mumbling about the victims. Mistake. I'm not even a criminal lawyer. And I know this is a mistake on multiple levels, right? As Judge Koreshi begins with, every pretty much every criminal case is a victim's case, right? The Crime Victims Rights Act allows anyone who is the subject of a crime to present testimony. So saying this is a victim's right, they're all victims' rights cases, right? And then he pins Rosenblum down so that the more precise mistake is on the record. And I want to unpack that here. Villafone is in custody right now pending trial, right? So he's in prison. And even the overly light sentence that the government plea bargained in this case would be for several years, which would be more than time served, which means that there was absolutely no impact to the victims or to public safety or to the defendant if his sentencing hearing is in April instead of March, right? There's no rush to get it out the door. And what Judge Koreshi leaves unspoken is that obviously the victims would prefer an extension of time so that the court can evaluate the parameters of this sweetheart deal, right? Maybe there's something else that can be done. I don't know, but let's not lurch forward, you know, rush forward to sentence someone while there are these pending questions. Ultimately, I think Judge Koreshi is mad because he sees Rosenblum using these victims as a shield when the office has already let them down, right? Like that. And to make all of those arguments to a judge who was a former prosecutor is just... I wouldn't do it. Yeah. So Koreshi's pissed and he's even more pissed when he starts to ask questions about the structure of the office because surprise, Rosenblum knows nothing. He's never had a conversation with the three lawyers running this office. Jordan Fox are a Fontechio and Phil Amporello. He cannot even say for sure that Alina Habba is still in charge. You know, I wasn't sure what the Habba questions were about. I've seen no reporting that she is at all involved in the... I mean, she's off the Mar-a-Lago. But whatever the reason, those questions, even though Judge Koreshi had flagged them in his Thursday order, he said, I'm going to ask you about it. That's what set Mark coin off. And he got off of his hands, jumped in and started insisting that Habba wasn't making the decisions at which point. Judge Koreshi said, I am directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coin. Mr. Coin, I told you not to address this court. You didn't file a notice of appearance. You don't get to blindside this court at which point. Coin rather smartly agreed that he would leave under his own volition. But then Judge Koreshi kind of lost his shit, right? He made Rosenblum read the last sentence of Judge Brand's opinion, which we read it before, but it says, if the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk. And then the judge said, here is your risk. This is your risk. So your authority to operate is while he has stayed the opinion, when he says literally on the last page, you don't even have to go through all this. All you have to do is turn to the back and it says, if the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk. What you've told me today, what your representation is, which I don't believe, by the way, I won't believe it until you testify. That is what has happened to the credibility of your office. Generations of assistant US attorneys have built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year. So I don't believe who is running the office. If the triumvirate is currently operating in the office, then one court has already deemed that unlawful and it's the third opinion that your office has received. Yeah. You are looking at me with the shocked face and like, yeah, I don't know how to say beyond that is something I could not imagine a sitting Article 3 judge saying to the US government. And let me kind of drill down on exactly what Judge Koreshi is saying between the lines. At any point previously in history, if a lawyer says to a judge in open court, your honor, the answer is X. I warrant to you. Right. Exactly. Then everybody knows, right? That's okay. Fine. You're an officer of the court and I can take your word for it. Judge Koreshi has seen this DOJ send drew in sign in to lie to Judge Boasberg's face. Right. He knows that what he wants is not something on the record that the next guy can come in after they've burned this guy and, you know, say, well, I'm sorry, I didn't know. I wasn't the one who said it. I'm not. He wants someone to testify under oath, meaning under penalty of perjury. And the reason to do that is because you are explicitly contemplating potential criminal sanctions. Right. That's the reason to do that. Right. And like we talk a lot about the presumption of regularity, he's saying, I don't believe anything you say. You, because you are associated with this DOJ, with the U.S. Attorney's Office, it's the New Jersey, you have less credibility than any other lawyer. Right. That if another lawyer got up and said, your honor, I warrant to you that this is the case, I would believe them, but you, I don't trust. That is crazy. I'm thinking back to you talking about having served on a jury, right? One of the questions they always ask you in Vordir is, you know, would you treat the testimony of a police officer differently than the testimony of other witnesses? Right. And like they're looking for it either way, right? Either I would give the police more credibility than a normal witness or I would give the police less credibility. There's a judge saying, I'm giving the words of a lawyer for the Department of Justice, less credibility than any random person walking in off the streets. It's amazing. And I think that's why Judge Koreshi took the position that until Mark Coyne officially entered his appearance, right? Like that would have left open the possibility for the Department of Justice to argue, well, look, he had noted his appearance. He wasn't formally speaking on behalf of the government, so we're not bound by what he tells you. And Judge Koreshi was having none of that. Yeah. That's interesting. I think he did it mostly because he was pissed. But your explanation is good too. But then Judge Koreshi did something which I thought was sort of mean. He said to this poor guy, Rosenblum, have your supervisors discussed a plan B with you if Judge Brand rules against you and says the illegal leadership team means everything the office does as ultra-virus type of paraphrasing. That's not exactly what he said, but he did say, do you have you discussed a plan B? Right. And Rosenblum says, you know, I'm gonna hold on, I'm gonna like, yes, but I can't tell you what that plan is. At this point, the judge pounces and says, well, doesn't that seem like tacit acknowledgement that what you're doing here is at least problematic? And you should have adjourned this sentencing hearing until you got clarity because you don't have to have a plan B. If you're sure, plan A is going to work. Koreshi is kind of a wolf in a robe. OK, so the judge goes back to his chambers, does not sentence Billifani says, like, I'm not doing this. And he reschedules it for April 1. But he says at that hearing, he will have Jordan Fox, Phil Lamperello and Ari Fontechio testify first so that he can assure himself that they really have authority to accept a plea. Meanwhile, as you flagged, Mark Coyne has texted somebody else in the office and said, enter my appearance. Right. And they've managed to enter his appearance. And then after the hearing ends, Coyne files a letter motion that says we we we would like that adjournment after all. Oh, the three people larping as US attorney in New Jersey don't want to get on the witness stand and explain exactly what they're doing and how they're getting paid and by what legal authority they think they have the power to run this place. Like shocker there. In that letter, Coyne says that maybe Judge Bran will have ruled in 30 days and decided that the presence of the line attorneys will save the day even if the triumvirate is acting ultra virus. I mean, like they've they put Daniel Rosenblum. That's what they're saying. Daniel Rosenblum's presence makes this OK. And I suspect that that will work as a matter of law. Right. The US attorney's offices continue to function. Like even even if there's no sitting US attorney, the US attorney's office can keep on charging people and keep prosecuting cases. And so I think that that's where this is going to come out. Right. If the triumvirate is illegal, the position is effectively vacant. I'm not sure I agree with you, but I don't know that we have enough time. Yeah. Pack it right now. I'm going to leave a couple breadcrumbs right here. And I want to I want to point out one more thing which happened at this hearing, which is Judge Koreshi asked Rosenblum, why is Todd Blanche's name on the signature block of everything you filed? And Rosenblum says, well, that signifies that our authority is derived from the attorney general and the Department of Justice, right, which is the theory that you are articulating. Right. Let me just spell it out. The theory is that the line attorneys are acting on a delegation of authority from Pam Bondi and not from the supervisors, the US attorneys in their own office. And so if that position is vacant or if it's occupied by a usurper, it doesn't matter because they, the line attorneys are acting on authority from the attorney general and their presence validates the prosecutions. Right. And the attorney general does have that authority under 28 USC section 510. But, and here's where I think Judge Brand might be going and certainly where Judge Koreshi was going here. That doesn't appear to be what's happening in practice because Judge Koreshi asked Rosenblum if he's ever so much as talk to Todd Blanche. The deputy attorney general. Right. And Rosenblum says no. Right. Which is a directed mission that what they're doing is just putting Blanche's name on every document that goes out as a sort of like magic words, a talisman, that says like, you know, we have authority through the, through the main justice, through the attorney general. That's, that's clearly their plan B. Right. If we don't have authority through the triumvirate, we have it through Pam Bondi because we put the name of the deputy attorney general on it and we pretend like he's supervising our cases, but he is not. And I will point out Judge Brand got into the specifics of precisely how that office was funded. Like I want to know the line items to find out that Jordan Fox was being paid out of main justice, but Lamperello and Fontecchio were being paid out of the US Attorney's office. Like that's why I think Judge Brand might rule that everything the triumvirate has touched is ultra virus and void because he's so far, he has not been one to sign up with, well, you know, technically you might be able to say these magic, he said, no, I want you to tell me exactly how this is being done. So I don't know. We'll have to watch. I know. I got to say, I think that that's one of those things which he might say it, although I doubt he will, but I do not think that any appeals court is going to say that. I mean, like every other court before Brand disqualified Habba, it seemed to be an area of law that was pretty unsettled. But now you've had like nine courts weigh in on it and they've all come to functionally the same conclusion. And I don't think it's unsettled. And the the the theory that that you hope that Judge Brand bites on would cause this massive amount of chaos in like seven offices, right? Seven U.S. attorneys offices across the country, because courts in I mean, I'm going to up the top of my head. I think it's like New Mexico, Nevada, Los Angeles, New Jersey, obviously, Eastern District of Virginia, Northern District of New York. Courts in all of these places have said. The U.S. attorney is acting in an ultra virus capacity. But as long as there are other lawyers, it's fine. If that gets reversed and upheld on then everything that happened in those offices, probably for the past year, every case has to be dismissed. I just I think it would cause only so much chaos that no appeals court and certainly not this Supreme Court would allow it to happen. I I think that is a very, very strong argument. I guess the two things I would say in response are number one, all of those other cases, all of those other courts are outside the Third Circuit, right? So they they don't have that, right? They certainly the defendants in those cases would move for reconsideration. But courts would be free to say, we don't find this reasoning persuasive. And I guess I'm just going to leave one last breadcrumb. I don't know where the daylight is between the triumvirate being illegal and the triumvirate being ultra virus. And we unpack that when Judge Bran rules in about, you know, about a month or so. But I'm still holding out some hope. You are a chaos monkey. All right, that is going to do it for us. Have a lovely weekend. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with us on the show. If you want to support us, you know how to do it. You can become a subscriber at patreon.com slash lawncasper.com or lawncasper.com or and leave us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. Have a lovely weekend and hey, did you notice like zero Trump in this show? Almost basically. All right, see you guys. Law and chaos podcast is production of razor to media LLC is intended solely as entertainment does not constitute legal advice and does not form an attorney client relationship. This show is researched and written by Liz Dye and produced by Bryce Blank and Engel. Law and chaos pod copyright, razor to media LLC all rights reserved.