Ep 213 — As DOJ Implodes, Judiciary Shows Signs Of Life

Don't be scared off by the transcript requirement. GPA is not a strong factor. If you meet these two requirements, you have a shot. I know you're trying to bait me. And it's working. It's so working. Jerry Falwell's imitation law school, but GPA is not a strong factor. I had no idea how hard it was to get those jobs when we were coming up. It's crazy. It was so competitive. No, but you know, apparently if you've got a 2.0 from the nation's 141st ranked law school. Welcome to Law and Chaos where that Loon Janine Pirro got bench-lapped. The GSA is going to war with the judiciary and the Supreme Court did something right. We got a lot to cover, so let's get after it. Hey, guys. I'm Liz Diane with me as always is Andrew Torres. Andrew, how are you? I'm great, Liz. How are you? Oh, I am okay. I am really excited. We dropped our long-awaited Magic the Gathering subscriber only episode today. I'm super excited. I have not heard it, you guys. I'm just excited here. I am already getting questions on social media like, is red man a better than white man? And I'm like, maybe you might be misunderstanding the purpose of this episode a little bit. So not a strategy guide, but it should be a lot of fun. I am excited. Okay, we have a lot of ground to cover today. We will talk about Judge James Bollisburg, quashing the subpoena Janine Pirro, try to serve on the Federal Reserve. We'll catch up on the Live Nation trial and geek out over the Tony Act. That's all you, dude. And we will explain why the Judicial Conference is trying to throw down with the General Services Administration. But first, tuk-tuk, tuk-tuk alert. Okay, let's get started with some pretty good news about holders of temporary protected status from Haiti and Syria. Remember, departing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem revoked legal status for hundreds of thousands of people who've lived in this country, most of them for years. They underwent substantial vetting and were allowed to stay because our government deemed that their native countries were too dangerous, whether because of war or natural disasters to send them back to. Noem called them leeches and criminals because she's a degenerate liar. Trial judges in New York and DC said this was not a recent decision and thus violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Right. And obviously, the Trump administration did what it has done since day one, which is run to the Supreme Court and say, please, please, please let us deport half a million people. It's an emergency. And they pointed to an earlier shadow docket order from this Supreme Court where the conservative justices let Kristi Noem revoke the TPS status for Venezuelans. But this time, that's not what happened. Instead, yeah, the Supreme Court denied the stay and granted certiorari before judgment. That is, they took it for their own consideration immediately bypassing the appellate courts. They will hear expedited oral argument in April. But that means that between now and then, the lower courts injunctions are in effect. And that means that this administration's efforts to revoke TPS for Syrian seditions are put on hold for at least a month, right? Probably to July. Yeah. And those folks who have been living and working and raising their families are safe for at least a little while longer. And I have to say, this is the way it's supposed to work. Right. Like if the Supreme Court wants to put its thumb on the scale for the administration and say it's really, really important. Sure. Right. Grant expedited review. Hear the cases more quickly. But this idea that every lower court order that went the other way from the Trump administration should be stayed because it's a reputable harm when Donald Trump doesn't get his way is one of the enduring legacies of the Robert School. Yeah. Every day, I am more convinced that these justices are very sensitive to public opinion. That is, that and the moral approbrium of lawyers and lower court judges that they really are ashamed or some of them are in some way. I think that definitely Robert and Barrett Yeah. I wish I could share your optimism. I think if you work out of the flip side of that, that maybe Donald Trump's constant attacks on the Supreme Court make it clear that having loose this tiger, it's going to maul them too. Well, I mean, makes it clear to everyone except justices Alito, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Well, actually, we're going to come back to that. But more good news before that. All right. The government has dismissed the charges against Jay Kerry, the veteran who burned a flag in Lafayette Park on August 25th, the same day and in protest of Trump's executive order in which he purported to ban flag burning. Of all the illegal things that Donald Trump has promulgated for the executive order, that's a multi-way tie for the illegalists. The Supreme Court has said over and over again as clearly as it can. You cannot ban flag burning. That is core free speech. And particularly in this instance, Kerry was polusically clear that he was burning the flag to protest Trump's executive order. You do not get more speech-y than that. Which is why they did not charge him with flag burning or incitement. That was the one weird trick the Justice Department came up with as a justification to ban flag burning. They said, what if we pretend it's incitement because burning the flag is inherently so offensive that it satisfies the imminent lawless action standard for incitement under Brandenburg? Okay. Brandenburg v. Ohio was the landmark in 1969 Supreme Court decision that said, in effect, that the First Amendment essentially protects hate speech. Ohio had tried to prosecute the KKK for a speech that one of its leaders had given calling for revengeance under a statute that prohibited advocating for violence. I mean, revengeance seems pretty clear. And the Supreme Court said, no, in order to prohibit hate speech, it must, one, be directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action. And two, it must actually be likely to incite or produce that action. Every law school graduate knows this case, right? The problem with Trump land lawyers or a problem, I should have one of many problems, is that you can never tell whether they're genuinely stupid or just trolling performatively, right? So, okay, let me draw that out for a non-lawyer listeners. Brandenburg incitement means that you must be speaking to a sympathetic audience and riling them up to commit a crime. That's what incitement means. Now, when Kerry was burning the flag, he was at a peaceful protest of this policy. And any kind of imminent lawless action would not have been undertaken by his audience, but would have been by people observing him burning the flag and getting so mad that they have to come after him, right? And that is something else entirely. That's not incitement. That's the heckler's veto. And that comes from a 1949 Supreme Court decision called Terminello v. Chicago, which overturned a conviction for causing a breach of the peace when a hostile audience rioted against the speaker. And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't hold somebody responsible for what somebody else does, right? And the reason is really, really simple when you think about it, because if you blame the speaker when somebody else riots, then all I have to do if I want to shut down speech I don't like is get super violent. And like that's the opposite of what a rational society should want. So that's the heckler's veto. Yeah. So for nearly a hundred years, every lawyer in this country knows that the government cannot arrest you for saying something that somebody else finds offensive and starts a riot over, right? So I'm like 95% certain that even the DOJ lawyers know that, that they, you know, they just made this up because Trump said, we're going to burn flag burning. So, you know, lawyer us up something. But I don't know, 5% of me thinks maybe they really are the stomach. And boy, is that foreshadowing for a segment to come later in the show. Yeah. Well, someone at the DOJ is a real lawyer, since they did not charge Kerry with incitement. They booked him for two misdemeanors, lighting a fire in an undesignated area and lighting a fire in a manner that creates a public safety hazard. But the body cam footage of the officers who arrested him has them specifically discussing the executive order. So Judge Boasberg ruled that Kerry was entitled to discovery on the issue of vindictive prosecution. I love this so much. So as you might say, Liz, in English, Kerry presented pretty compelling evidence to Judge Boasberg that he was arrested pretextually for his protected First Amendment expression and not for creating a public safety hazard, leaving the grill on in a public park. Right. Right. Right. And that the government dummied up those misdemeanors after the fact. So all Judge Boasberg said was that Kerry could take further discovery. As you might have talked about, a selective and vindictive prosecution argument is incredibly hard to prove, right? It's not that he was ever going to get these misdemeanors thrown out. It was that the Trump administration absolutely did not want him to have whatever evidence of the conversations that took place behind the scenes. And I think everybody knew that, right? And so, yeah, as a result, they just dropped the case. Which is a good result. And also this guy got put through the ringer for nine months. It is still an assault on free speech, even if they don't finish it. Right. And speaking of, I regret to inform you that Brendan Carr is at it again. Oh, God. The FCC commissioner is, again, threatening to pull the licenses of television stations, which accurately report this time on the invasion of Iran that that it is in fact a shitshow disaster. Yeah, we have talked about this so many times. The FCC cannot revoke a network's license because networks don't have licenses. Right. Local television stations, some of which are owned by networks, but most of which are owned by companies like Sinclair Broadcasting and Nextstar, have broadcast licenses. And still, this is a massive assault on the first amendment. Like the point of this exercise, as you have implied, Liz, is to chill speech that this administration does not like. Yeah. Okay. In other, no, laws don't work like that news. Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts ruled that health and human services secretary Robert Kennedy cannot simply give us all measles just because he's in charge and he thinks it would be cool. I understand he's an MMA fighter now. They've been putting out the most insane AI slop. It's just embarrassing. It really is. But you know, it's even more embarrassing the DOJ lawyer in court attempting to defend this policy. I want you to just listen to this transcript excerpt that was quoted in the opinion. So the court, let's say that instead of revising the vaccine schedule, the CDC said, actually, we think measles is good for you. You should go have lunch with someone with measles and we are sponsoring measles lunches in every city. Come have some measles lunch. That would seem to go right up against the goal of preventing communicable diseases. Would such a policy by the CDC be judicially reviewable? And then the DOJ lawyer says, I think that would still be committed to agency discretion by law. As in not review. Right. Judge Murphy says, so even if what the agency was saying is we like communicable diseases and we think you should get more of them, that's not judicially reviewable. And the lawyer says no. I mean, there it all is right. The Trump administration says nothing we do is ever reviewable by any court. If we say every immigrant from Venezuela is a terrorist sent by Trendor, Raghla and Nicholas Maduro to invade the US, then no court can look at the correctness of that statement. And if we say pregnant women shouldn't get COVID shots, then they shouldn't and no judge can say otherwise. Which is not the law. No. And you know, I think this bumps up against your shaming the Supreme Court thesis because I have a slightly different take, which is the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear in its decision blowing up Chevron deference that the law is what it says it is. Not what Donald Trump says, not what an executive branch agency says, certainly not what lower courts say it is. And so I think there's that inherent tension between what the right wingers on the Supreme Court want versus what this administration wants. Right. But what you just said about the Chevron deference is absolutely true, right? That Chevron deference was this, you know, a generation of lawyers and people in government and courts understood that if an agency's interpretation of a federal regulation was reasonable on its face, then courts should not disturb it because federal agencies, executive agencies were the ones carrying out the law. And that's been a long target of conservatives because they don't like it when democratic presidents use regulations to like regulate and make the world better. Stop communicable diseases. Protect the environment. Exactly. Exactly right. So the the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court overturned Chevron deference under the Biden administration and said, whatever the agency says is how it should go, we get to have the final say. And so Judge Murphy says, you know, you don't get to have the final say because Chevron deference is gone, dude. Yeah. So let's dig into this case a little bit. So the plaintiffs here are several major medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. They have challenged four final agency actions under the Administrative Procedure Act for being arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with the law. Those are one, a May 2025 directive ordering the CDC to remove COVID vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children. Two, the mass firing of all 17 members of the advisory committee on immunization practices and replacing them with a bunch of weirdos. Three, three votes by the newly reconstituted weirdo ACIP in 2025, which downgraded flu COVID and hepatitis B vaccine recommendations. And four, a January 2026 memo by this Crackpot Investment Bro guy named Jim O'Neill, who served as interim CDC director for six months, he revised the childhood vaccination schedule, he cut routine vaccine recommendations from 17 down to 11, bypassing the ACIP, right, the advisory committee on immunization practices board entirely, right. So his theory was that he was ensuring vaccine compliance by cutting the number of recommended vaccines, which would give parents more confidence in vaccine. I don't know. I can't, did I mention that Jim O'Neill is not a doctor? I mean, he was in the, he did work in HHS, I think under George W. Bush a long time ago, but he is mostly a finance bro. So Judge Murphy said that the May 2025 order that was the first one in that list was superseded by the January 2026 order. So it was moot. They didn't have to consider that. But he said that the law required O'Neill to consult with ACIP or ACIP, I can't remember, before changing the vaccine recommendations, which he did not do. So his order that what are changing the cutting it from 17 to 11 is stayed. And he said that while Secretary Kennedy may have had the power to fire the original board, he did not have the power to replace it with a bunch of randos. Yeah, we talk about this all the time. It's a lot easier for Trump to do what he did in 2025, which was burn everything down than to do what he's trying to do now, which is rebuild it in his own image. Right. And if the regulation says that the board members have to be subject matter experts in vaccines appointed with notice and comment, you can't just stick in a psychiatrist and a surgeon and a pharmacist and an obstetrician two days after you follow the qualified board and say, oh, this is a new ACIP because no, it's not. Also, the Federal Advisory Committee Act says the committees have to be balanced. And a balanced team is not like one of each kind of rando. We actually talked in 2024, you and I, about suing Doge under the Federal Advisory Committee Act when Trump announced it because he said it was going to be a committee outside of government, which would have been better. We had Kell lined up at everything. Boy, we underestimated what he was going to do. Yeah. Anyway, the Goober's appointment was illegal according to the court. And thus, the things that they said, modifying the vaccine schedule, their orders are also illegal. Although, to be clear, they said a bunch of things, but only three orders were challenged by the plaintiffs in this case. And so those are the three. But those are the ones that ruin the whole vaccine schedule. And that's an important thing because insurers will often cover only vaccines, which are recommended by the CDC. Right. Right. Obviously, the administration is going to immediately appeal. They're going to seek a stay. They will not get it from the first circuit. I feel reasonably confident. But who knows what's going to happen at the Supreme Court? In the meantime, this is a good order by Judge Murphy. We should be glad about that. Yeah. Trump is going to try and defund the Massachusetts courthouse in five minutes. We're actually going to talk about that later in the show. But first, it is Tuesday. So, let us thank our new supporters. Yeah. Big thank you to those of you who signed up at patreon.com. That is a thank you to Kim Lemon, Evan Hopkins, J.A. John, Amina Shelman, Melvin Gromka. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Brock Williams, Mike, Brenna Rose, and Reeve Geary. Thank you all so much. And thank you on sub-stack at lawandchaospod.com to Chris and Childlike Ice. And Childlike Ice, thank you very much for your kind note. It really meant a lot to me. And if you'd like to join their ranks and you'd like to get the extended episodes, get our bonus episodes on geeky topics or whatever Liz allows me to do. Oh, no, I love that stuff. Yeah, me too. You know how to do that. Just head on over to patreon.com slash lawandchaospod or lawandchaospod.com. Sign up to give us as little as a buck an episode. You'll get this shout out here and you will get our undying thanks for helping make this thing that Liz and I love to do possible. And you'll also get to skip this ad break. For everybody else, we will be back in a few minutes. And we're back. Okay, just one more docket alert because I just have to break my Ivy League co-host brain here. Bloomberg Laws Ben Penn reports that the Justice Department is waving its requirement that assistant US attorneys have one year experience practicing law before being hired because the DOJ cannot hire anyone competent. A Justice Department spokesman who chose to remain anonymous says that under the leadership of Attorney General Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, this Department of Justice is proud to empower young and passionate prosecutors and offer attorneys at every level the opportunity to invest their talents into keeping their community safe, including from the predators the previous administration welcomed with open arms. I'm going to leave aside the manatee ball mad libs quality of that. Like, one year. I mean this with all due respect to any lawyers we have among our listeners who have one year of experience or less. I was once with you like, and let me say, you have absolutely no idea how to try a case when you were one year out of law school. I mean, I have been prepared for the soft bigotry of low expectations of this DOJ, but I think now we know why the Justice Department has been inviting randos to slide into their DMs and air dropping in JAG lawyers and immigration lawyers into federal court. Like, they got no one. They do. They do. They do. And they've had massive attrition offices in places like Minnesota where they've had these immigration dragnets are at half strength. So, you know, they don't have anybody. My editor, Joe Patrice, at Above the Law got this recruiting email. Someone slipped it to him. It was sent to students at Liberty University's law school. It says, the two most important requirements are you must, all caps, be aligned politically with President Trump and his administration, and you must be willing to work hard. Don't be scared off by the transcript requirement. GPA is not a strong factor. If you meet these two requirements, you have a shot. I know you're trying to bait me. And it's Jerry Falwell's invitation law school, but GPA is not a strong factor. No idea how hard it was to get those jobs when we were coming up. It's crazy. It was so competitive. No, but, you know, apparently, if you've got a 2.0 from the nation's 141st ranked law school, as long as you're pro-Trump, and by the way, if you're at Liberty University, you're pro-Trump. I mean, no, look, not necessarily. I have no idea whether they are or they're not. Obviously, that would appear to me to be viewpoint discrimination, but kind of. I don't know. This is crazy. And look, the DOJ is broken. I think that's no longer a controversial thing to say. We talked about it in our post on the blog yesterday, but maybe we should just start out by letting Jeanine Pirro express herself on the subject. Oh, the process should have been allowed to run its course, and it wasn't. And shame on them. Oh, cut it out. Do you know how many convictions we've got? Cut it out. You're in one lane. We have cleaned up this city. You're historic, really? I'll tell you what's historic. What's historic is that I prosecute everything other than 10% of the cases where the United States attorney before me didn't prosecute 67% of the cases. That's what's historic. I'm willing to take a not guilty. I'm willing to take a no true bill because I'll take all the crimes and put them in. Thank you. Thank you. That woman is so crazy. Not prosecuting cases you can't win is actually your job as the U.S. attorney. It says it in the justice manual. They call it prosecutorial discretion. She also looks like she's maybe unwell. I mean, I know slagging a woman because of her age starting to show is like a boomerang that is definitely going to come back and smack me in the bags under my eyes. But she really looks frail. She does not look well. Well, if she is, I'm sure Trump will tell us all about it. Oh my God. You guys, did you see that press conference today at the Kennedy Center with Mike Johnson? Trump not only says that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has breast cancer, but it's fine because she's going to be living at the White House while she gets chemo or something, which is like, what the hell? Then he says that Florida representative Neil Dunn received a terminal diagnosis because of a heart problem and wanted to retire to Florida with his wife and kids, but Trump told him he couldn't give up his seat because it would screw up, it would be like an even narrower margin in this closely divided house. So Dunn had to go to Walter Reed Hospital instead and stay in DC, although he says that he's doing better now. This country is in a deep dark place. Oh my God. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a state representative a few years ago who was a single mom and had to check in every day because there was a two vote margin in the state house and the Republicans would wait to see if the Democrats had three absences. And so everybody had to coordinate over email if you had to drop your kids off at school late because the snow, it's just, we should be held hostage like this. No. And people's private information should be private, right? Even Mike Johnson was like, I don't think that was public. Well, it is now. Yeah. But okay, back to Justice Jeanine Pirro who was mad because actual Chief Judge James Boasberg quashed a set of subpoenas that she tried to serve on the Federal Reserve. This, as you know, is part of Donald Trump's effort to drum the chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell out of office and replace him with someone that Trump knows will cut interest rates down to zero, which is inherently inflationary, right? Because if it's free to borrow money, then lots of people will do it and buy things. And then the price of those things goes up. Okay, I understand I'm grossly oversimplifying macro econ 101, but like essentially that's it, right? Like cutting interest rates is a thing that central banks do when the economy is contracting and they need to stimulate it is not a reward for getting the unemployment rate down or whatever, but Trump is economically illiterate. So of course he thinks it is and he has spent the past year screaming for Jerome Powell's head. Yeah, clearly Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has said that the markets would crash if Trump fired Powell and indeed the Supreme Court has also made noises like don't do that, that, that, you know, you do a lot, but maybe not that. And in fact, Powell's chairmanship is up in May anyway. And traditionally Fed chairs leave the board when their term is chairs up, although Powell's term runs through 2027. He does not technically have to leave. Yeah, as long as we're talking about tradition, Fed chairs traditionally get two terms, but Donald Trump refused to reappoint Janet Yellen because she's too short. True story. You have covered this at some length, Liz. We live in the dumbest timeline. Anyway, so Donald Trump appointed Powell, then Biden reappointed Powell and now Donald Trump is stuck with it. Yeah, there's yet another story where like if the Trump people could just shut up and act normal for 10 minutes, they'd get everything they want, right? They've got Kevin Warsh in the wings. He's Trump's guy. I mean, I don't, I don't know that even he's crazy enough to cut to zero in this particular moment, but whatever, they have their guy, they could get it. Instead, they worked up this whole stupid story about cost overruns in the renovation of the Fed buildings as evidence of fraud by Powell so that they could have an excuse to fire him for cause. You know, like, yes, of course, their cost overruns. There's always cost overruns. And by the way, like these are 100 year old buildings, they have asbestos, they have lead, they have foundation problems. It is what it is. So Piro's office drops subpoenas on the Fed and then Powell puts out this video saying he's being targeted because Trump wants to destroy the independence of the central bank, which is true. And it kind of backed Trump and and and and and pheasant and Piro into a corner. Yeah. So at that point, even Republicans in Congress, although mostly on the Senate side, not the House side, the Republicans lose their shit too. And Senator Tom Tillis, who sits on the banking committee, says he's not going to approve any nominees for the Fed until this investigation is over. And that includes Warsh. Right. And that gets back to your point, which is that this investigation could be over right now today. Yes. If Piro would just, as you put it, stop being weird for 10 minutes. But but because this administration is constitutionally incapable of doing that, her office instead filed a motion to compel, then the Fed's lawyers filed a motion to quash that motion to compel. And Judge Boasberg granted the motion to quash this week. Judge Boasberg said there is abundant evidence that the subpoena is dominant, if not sole purpose, is to harass and pressure Chairman Powell either to yield to the president or to resign and make way for a Fed chair who will. On the other side of the scale, the government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president end of actual quote. And then even Judge Boasberg offered the US Attorney an opportunity to present evidence ex parte of any crime. He's like, look, I'm going to give you every possible venue. Right. If the prosecutors don't want to tip their hand to the defendant in an ongoing criminal case, right, like they can under certain circumstances show it to the judge alone out of the presence of defense counsel. And interestingly, Judge Boasberg said that in other cases of challenged grand jury subpoenas, he gave the government the opportunity to present that evidence ex parte and they did. Right. But here, Liz, I know you'll be shocked by this. They chose not to. Instead, in pleadings, they just point to what they call questions about cost overruns and the fact that Powell testified. So maybe he lied in his testimony and perjured himself, which, you know, Judge Boasberg said, I really wish I thought of this analogy, was like investigating someone for mail fraud because he once sent a letter. Yeah, this opinion is a bench slapper. But I am not sure that it is going to hold up. It really does depend on the panel. It draws at the DC circuit, whether it's going to be an emergency panel or whatever. I mean, I think if they were smart, well, no, if they were smart, they wouldn't have done this, right? Because then then Powell would have walked away. One of the things that they said in their opposition motion is that Jerome Powell's personal lawyer, who I think is not Abby Lowell, but it might be because Abby Lowell represents everyone. I know, I know, but I don't think it's that. I don't think it's him. Abby Lowell's personal lawyer reportedly, according to Jeanine Pirro's office, said, if you drop this investigation, he will resign in May. But if you do not drop this investigation, he's not going anywhere and you're not going to get what you want. I do not know whether I credit that. Although I know that they did put it in a pleading. Yeah. But the reality is prosecutors have a tremendous amount of discretion. The subpoena power is brought. Pirro is not wrong that she doesn't need to have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe that a subpoena will yield evidence of crime. Yeah, it must just be reasonably likely. Right. Although, look, the point here is that Judge Bolesberg says there's no reasonable likelihood that you'll find evidence of anything. And she has no reason to believe that a crime was committed ever other than people jabbering on the internet. She says that she can issue subpoenas just to satisfy her own curiosity, which I think may be overstating it. Yeah. But, I mean, and on top of that, by the way, Congress itself has oversight over the Fed and Congress has subpoena power. Like if Congress thought there was a problem here, Congress could do something about it. Right. She said, well, the banking committee has questions. Well, the banking committee has subpoena power too. Right. Exactly. Right. If she's not really there to vindicate Congress's investigative authority. But the brass tacks here, where we really are is Pirro says, I should be treated like a normal prosecutor. I should get the presumption of regularity. And Judge Bolesberg says, no, you shouldn't because you guys don't do anything normal ever. And I am not sure where the DC Circuit's going to come out on that one. I think you were right to flag that. I think this case is moot in two months anyway. So if he leaves, I mean, if he's still there. Right. Right. I mean, they could moot this. It is interesting to me. I guess I will be interested to see whether they try and get an emergency appeal or just take an appeal in the normal course and see whether the thing resolves itself because he goes away in May, if he doesn't go away. I mean, but he might not. And this is another thing that Tom Tillis has said, if you appeal this, I will not approve anybody else. I'm going to keep my hold on these nominees if you continue this case, if you continue the appeal. So I mean, I don't know. I'm very interested to see how it works out. But look, it's another mile marker on the destruction of the Justice Department. Yeah, I agree. And we will be back with our next story after this brief ad break unless, of course, you are a subscriber or a Patreon over Patreon.com slash LawnCast pod, at which point, no ads for you, not today, not ever. Not ever. Okay, next up, we've got a little Andrew was wrong. Liz was also wrong, admittedly, but Andrew was wronger. Oh, yeah, I am going to take the big L on this one. This is, of course, about Live Nation, the concert monopoly that owns Ticketmaster. We talked last week about the Justice Department noping out of the antitrust case a week into trial, mid examination of a witness, leaving their 40 state co plaintiffs in the large. Yeah, obviously, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the half a million dollars Live Nation donated to Trump's inauguration or the fact that Live Nation hired Kellyanne Conway and MAGA insider Mike Davis to lobby for them. Oh, no, absolutely nothing. No, this is the DOJ's considered decision that a fine which amounts to less than 1% of Live Nation's annual revenue and a pinky promise to be better is good enough for the government. Okay, so when the federal government yanked the rug out from under the states, I said that would be the end of this litigation. I said there was no way on earth that the states would be able to pick up where they were and go forward with a complex antitrust trial. That, by the way, is what the state HGs themselves said when they moved for a mistrial. But then Judge Aron Subramanian in New York sent them to mediation for a week and the states kept saying that they were going to try the case, which, like I've said, I'm going to try this case. And, you know, sometimes I intend to try the case and sometimes it's a negotiation tactic and I really, really thought it was the latter. Yeah, I was watching the docket and I kept seeing lawyers enter their appearance, like 30 lawyers entered their appearance in this case. So I knew, I mean, I was like, I think it's going to go to trial. I know. And you kept bringing it to my attention. And even then I was like, nope, nope, it's just a tie. Even when the states withdrew their motion from this trial, I said to you, as a bargaining tactic, they're just playing hardball. Well, it turns out, no. No. The states, in fact, hired Jeffrey Kessler of Winston and Strawn, one of the coat factory law firms. He is one of the country's top antitrust litigators. And they picked right back up this morning, where they left off on Friday the 6th, that is on direct examination of Jay Marciano, the CEO of AEG, which is Live Nation's largest competitor in concert promotion. And Marciano is an important witness. Okay, I should be clear. This is in no way an attempt to minimize my loss. Like 10 states settled, right? Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Ticca, all red states, but not all of the red states in the suit. As of right now, Texas, Tennessee, and Ohio are still in, because people hate Ticketmaster in Ohio. People hate Ticketmaster everywhere in the country. And there are a lot of artists in Texas and Tennessee making music who don't like Ticketmaster either, because it, you know, rips them off and makes it very hard for them to tour. Okay, so as we said... Like a Royal Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. I feel like you slandered Ohio there. I would never slander Ohio on the air. Okay, so as we said, stop. So as we said, the court has to approve the settlement because of something called the Tony Act, which was passed in 1974, when Richard Nixon did basically the exact same thing. There was a well-timed donation to the RNC and an end of an antitrust investigation into a company called International Telephone and Telegraph. So this morning, I sent Andrew an email asking him to explain this weird docket entry. It's number 1231 about the Tony Act, because I was like, I don't know what this is. You sort this out. And then for the next two hours, he kept sending me all these messages like, wait, Chad Misellas in this? Laura Loomer, this story has everything. Which, yes. So Andrew, what do you got for us? Okay, on January 30th, 2025, so just 10 days after Trump took office in his second term, one of the very first things that the Justice Department's Antitrust Division did was to file a complaint against a proposed merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE, and a company called Juniper Networks. And Hewlett Packard and Juniper are the number two and number three players in the field for what's called enterprise wireless networks. That means the wireless networks that are on college campuses in large businesses and organizations. So pretty important market. Two weeks before trial was scheduled to start, the DOJ announced a settlement that would let Hewlett Packard Enterprises buy Juniper so long as HPE agreed to divest this instant on business and to license some of Juniper's source code to a competitor. Like, I could and I'm well prepared to get into the leads of the sweetheart deal. But instead, what I'm going to do is quote from contemporaneous reporting, which is citing an anonymous executive within the industry. So I assume it's a Cisco executive, but I have no idea the idea of this person who says, is ridiculous. I have no idea what the DOJ was thinking. Instant on has nothing to do with the enterprise business. It makes zero sense. Everybody that knows anything about the industry is scratching their heads. The whole terms of the settlement were absurd. Yeah, lots of things about that settlement were extremely weird. It was not signed by any of the DOJ line lawyers who worked on the case. But who was signed by Chad Micell, the former chief of staff at the Justice Department, and Stan Woodward, who was one of the Trump land delist lawyers. He was lawyer for one of Trump's chucklehead co-defendants in the stolen documents case. I mean, look, he's a MAGA guy. He's one that they send into a lot of this civil litigation to rat fuck it. What do you want me to say? That's what it was. Micell is also a character. He, in the first Trump administration, engineered, we talk a lot about acting officials, officials being appointed by Trump without being Senate confirmed. And he engineered something like that at the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. And five minutes later, his 32-year-old wife got nominated to the federal judiciary. And indeed, she sits in the middle district of Florida. And when Trump files in the middle district of Florida, he is trying to get on Catherine Micell's docket. Yeah, put a pin in her for a minute because she's coming back sooner than you think. Okay. So it's signed by Micell and Woodward. Right. These are two political guys. Right. And just to brass tax it, those are two political appointees. Those are not two people practicing the antitrust division. Right. And the absence of people in the antitrust division is a huge red flag. Yes. And the rumor that is kind of back channeling among legal circles is that those two overruled Gail Slater, who was the assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust. And by the way, that was Trump's own appointee. He stuck Slater in that job. Fueling that speculation beyond the sig block was one, that Chad Micell fired two of Slater's top deputies for what he called insubordination. Right. His word, not mine. And two, that Slater herself got pushed out just last month. But one of those fired deputies, who's a law professor named Roger Alford, got invited to a junket in Aspen, Colorado to give this speech for the Technology Policy Institute for him. And in that speech, he used the word bribe, literally bribe, five times. He said the Department of Justice is now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the antitrust division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs. Right. And he was talking about this case. So Alford said, I hope the court blocks the HPE Juniper merger. If you knew what I knew, you would hope so too. And by block, he's talking about the Tony Act. At which point it leaked that HPE had hired JD Vance's buddy, Arthur Schwartz, who was this weird MAGA, I do not have time to like go into like all of the randos that I know about in right wing land. But he's definitely one of the weirder ones, as well as this MAGA bully named Mike Davis. He's a lawyer who actually clerked for Corsuch and then just decided it would be so much more lucrative to be on the outside throwing snowballs. In fact, he's one of the ones who got he reportedly got a seven figure, a million dollar success fee in relation to this lobbying deal. That sounds a bit quid pro quo. It kind of does. And you know what else? It sounded like that to Laura Loomer as well. She said, Chad Misell forced this settlement on the antitrust division against their will because he wants his wife, Kat Misell, to be appointed to the 11th Circuit. If she gets appointed to the 11th Circuit, I will riot. It's between Kat Misell and Eileen Cannon. So you bite your tongue. You bite your tongue. Okay. And then continuing, Laura Loomer says, scoop. Now that Chad Misell has made it clear that he is open for business at the DOJ to the highest bidder, other consultants are now putting price tags on their lobby efforts to influence the DOJ to settle even more cases. God help me. I agree with Laura Loomer. Yeah, she is occasionally, you know, the broken clock. And if it is not clear from reading Laura Loomer deleted tweets with appropriate like this is a lot of MAGA on MAGA violence, right? Like at that same speech that we were talking about, Roger Alfred said that the problem was that Attorney General Pam Bondi delegated authority to direct quote, leaders like her Chief of Staff Chad Misell and Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward, who do not share her commitment to the rule of law and to one tier of justice for all. The Pam Bondi, the Pam Bondi, the one who has sacked the Justice Department on all of Trump's enemies, right? The one who put Alina Habba in in New York to arrest LaMonica McIver, the representative who was visiting, you know, conducting congressional oversight at the Delaney Hall in New York. I mean, Pam Bondi, who put Lindsey Halligan in, pushed out Eric Sebert, the competent prosecutor because he refused to indict Tish James and Jim Comey. I mean, this is, I have heard a lot of people say like, well, the Czar can, you know, doesn't know what his advisors are doing, but like, calm on, Professor. I appreciate you giving my brain time to reboot from that claim there. Like, but I will say that Alfred actually does draw the line from HPE all the way to Live Nation. Here's what he said about Live Nation. He describes it as the new normal for big companies to hire influence peddlers and asks, quote, will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the president's executive order just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy mega friends to roam the halls of the fifth floor in defense of their monopoly abuses? Yeah. Well, apparently the answer to that was yes. Yeah. So, okay, neither you nor I are really going to understand Roger Alfred's head. But, but I do think there are three things that are instructive about the Hewlett Packard Juniper debacle that are relevant to the ongoing Live Nation debacle. So first, timing, right? The DOJ negotiated the HPE Juniper settlement back in June of 2025. And there still have not been Tony Act hearings in that in that merger yet, right? It just it takes time to have the period of public notice and comment and for the sides to brief everything. So we will likely still be talking about Live Nation in 2027. Second, the Tony Act, we should be very clear about this, has never been used to block an antitrust settlement. I think a lot of reasons for that, right? I thought that that was the case on Friday, but I wanted to make sure that I thoroughly researched it before saying that on the air. Now I've run it to ground. Nope, not once. I have to tell you, the presiding judge in a Tony Act hearing rarely even convenes an evidentiary hearing. Yeah, it's probably not going to go to a hearing in the HPE Juniper case. And that's despite the fact that the judge in the case, Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California, as a Biden appointee and a former labor lawyer who came out of a public interest law firm. So, you know, if anybody was going to blow up the merger, maybe you would think it would be him, right? Although he's not an antitrust lawyer. But on Friday, Judge Pitts said that the government's motion for entry of a final judgment approving the settlement can likely be decided without an evidentiary hearing, although he did request that one expert witness be available by a video conference if he has specific questions. So, look, you can see the writings on the wall, that merger is going to go forward. And is it dirtier than the live nation? Like, no, probably not. Yeah. And that finally leads us back to the third thing, right? That docket entry number 1231. The one that I was like, Hey, what is this? Figure this out, please. Takes me a bit to answer the question sometimes. But I usually get there, right? And that's this. As we've just kind of laid out that the purpose of the Tunni Act isn't really meant to undo antitrust settlements, right? Judges do not see themselves as the final arbiter of how these cases go. One of the things that the Tunni Act is meant to do is to bring information to the electorate, out into the open that might not otherwise get out, right? Like, this is kind of left over from the Nixon era days. It's one of the ways in which the Tunni Act does that is through section 2G. So it's 15 USC section 16G. And that provision says that within 10 days of announcing a settlement, the defendant live nation shall file with the district court a description of any and all communications with any officer or employee of the United States about the settlement, right? And so the purpose of that is to disclose, right, the lobbyists roaming the halls of the fifth floor, right? It's essentially saying, you got to tell us who you talked to before you got this sweetheart deal. I don't want to overstate the requirements of this section, right? Like, Hewlett Packard filed a 2G certification in the Juniper merger, and it was all of three pages long, right? Like it basically said, hey, these guys, these six guys speaking on behalf of HPE, spoke to these 13 people at the Department of Justice, quote, relating to the proposed final judgment, including communications about the national security interests favoring consensual resolution of the action. And that was it, right? So the point of this requirement is for the court to say, oh, wait, why did you list Chad Misell and Stan Woodward on this list? I have questions myself. Yeah, exactly. And then it's up to the judge to order their testimony, if, you know, it looks hanky. And, and to your point, Liz, Judge Pitts didn't do that in a case that looks kind of just as dirty as this one, you know, on a similar order, right? So bottom line, entry 1231 is that disclosure requirement for Live Nation, that section 2G. In a few days, we will at least get to see who the Trump administration lined up to talk to Live Nation and who at Live Nation talked to them. So at least you and I are going to be able to follow that and make the public aware of it. Is it going to come to anything without massive public outcry? I don't think that it will. But I'm looking forward to see whose fingers were in the pie this time. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to seeing how this case goes with all of the states that are still in it. A lot of states, at least 25 are still in it. So I think that that's, I mean, I don't, I don't think that it's going to leave her apart, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which is what would really have to happen to occasion some change. But you never know, it is in front of a jury. That is right. Okay, we are going to take our last ad break and we will see you on the other side. And we're back. Let's talk Scotis. Well, Scotis and the judiciary writ large. Okay. First up, the president had a 959 word crash out last night. That would be Sunday night over the quote, terrible courts. He's mad about your own Powell and quote, a wacky, nasty crooked and totally out of control judge named James Boasberg, a man who suffers from the highest level of Trump derangement syndrome, TDS, and has been after my people and me for years. Trump is also mad about tariffs quote, the decision that mattered most to me. The court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this victory for our country and instead decided to potentially give away trillions of dollars to countries and companies who have been taking advantage of the United States Note, by the way, that even in that insane rant, Trump has to change his lie to give away trillions of dollars to countries and companies who have been taking advantage of the United States because while Trump spent the entirety of his first year in office trying to say that foreign governments were going to pay his tariffs, he can't make reality change just by saying so. Numerous economists have conducted research showing that somewhere north of 90% that the Kiel Institute says 96% for example of the costs of Trump's tariffs were passed on to U.S. consumers. A few importers also ate the cost that that happens. But look, the only way for foreign countries to bear the burden of Trump's tariffs would be if exporters lowered the costs of their goods because they were worried that they would be priced out of the market and overwhelmingly that did not happen. That's why the plaintiffs in all of these cases to get the money back are like Costco and Target because they're the ones that paid it in the first place. And by the way, I mean, I not to give credence to Trump's crackpot theories, but Malaysia just announced that the trade deal it negotiated at the, you know, with the knife at its throat, the tariff knife at its throat is null and void because the tariffs themselves are null and void, which maybe that's what he means, but whatever. Maybe, but let's not be distracted from the larger outrage in this, right? The court knew where I stood, right? Like Trump's supposition that the Supreme Court should decide cases based on how badly he wants something like that is not how the judiciary works. I mean, it's not supposed to. It kind of is at this point. Let's not bullshit ourselves here. Anyway, Trump yelled about justices who quote, disrespect the presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the land, a justice of the United States Supreme Court and go out of their way with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions to prove how honest, independent and legitimate they are. But there are a couple of interesting stories about the judiciary here. Last week, the judicial conference approved a new initiative called the Supreme Court Advocacy Project. This is intended to address the discrepancy in firepower between criminal defendants and the Justice Department lawyers. It will initially have four full-time staffers and be housed in the Eastern District of Virginia, but will eventually grow and become a separate entity to support lawyers, private lawyers who take Supreme Court Advocacy cases. I think this is really great. Like people often condescend to public defenders who are very often really great lawyers, just tragically overwork. The federal public defender is amazing. And this is important vital work to the republic. So thanks, Chief Justice Robert, but like for real, that's why I'm the one second. Okay. Hang on now. Let's pivot now to another story that is not so nice. This is about an ongoing dispute between the General Services Administration, GSA, and the judiciary over the ownership and maintenance of federal courthouses. Now, the GSA is a federal agency that acts as the U.S. government's internal support and procurement arm. So the GSA manages the federal government's real estate portfolio. It owns, leases, and maintains the buildings where the largely executive branch federal agencies operate. It also handles government wide purchasing, contracting, technology services. Essentially, what GSA does is keeps the machinery of the federal government running by supplying agencies with the space, supplies, services they need to function. And in December, Congress approved a real estate money guy named Edward Forst to be the head of the GSA. Now, Forst is a banker. He worked at Goldman Sachs at Cushman Wakefield. He has zero government experience. And of course, he came in acting like that's a good thing because he'll get rid of all the waste and fraud and make the GSA profitable, which was unfortunate because the government isn't a for-profit business and also because the executive branch is actually the landlord for the judiciary. Yep. And according to the Judicial Conference, the GSA is a terrible landlord. The judges claim that there is an $8 billion backlog of maintenance and infrastructure repairs, which has led to dangerous conditions in the courts. You have people trapped in elevators for hours, ceilings collapsing in courtrooms during trial. There's Legionella bacteria in the water supplies, mold that makes people sick, and just this general lack of attention to ongoing problems. The judiciary has at multiple points in the past 40 years asked Congress to give it control of its own buildings. And then when Doge came in and started looking for efficiencies, the issue really came to a head. Specifically, Doge wanted to sell courthouses. They fired a whole bunch of people at GSA. So now the people whose job it was to see to it that these courthouses were maintained were terminated for, quote, efficiency. And that made the problem much worse. Right. So on February 24, Judge Robert Conrad, who is the director of the administrative office of the US courts, sent a letter to Congress along with proposed legislation that would provide the judiciary with the same real property authorities held by the other two branches of government, each of which has its own real property entity. Right. So the executive branch has the GSA and the legislative branch Congress has the architect of the capital. Right. It's only the judiciary that is also dependent on the GSA. Yeah. I mean, when you put it like that, it certainly sounds like a reasonable thing to ask for. Yeah. Let me read a little bit of Judge Conrad's memo that accompanied that letter request. He says, in the aftermath of GSA's recent reorganization and reductions in force, those are the doge-driven ones, many fully funded construction projects have stopped because they have no GSA project manager. For example, as of the end of 2025, 18 critical courthouse security improvement projects are currently at risk of not being executed, as of December 2025, nearly 25% of courthouses housing five or more judges did not have on-site building managers. If a critical building system fails or an emergency occurs, no building manager could quickly restore operations at the facility. No one is monitoring GSA contractors performing work in most courthouse buildings. In some cases, contractors are abandoning projects prior to completion without accountability. Are you telling me that the doge bros did not usher in a new era of efficient government? They just fired everyone and pissed off to start AI companies or whatever those little assholes are up to? If you can even believe it, Liz. Okay. Continuing from Judge Conrad's memo. GSA increases rent and fees while reducing services. The $1.3 billion annually paid to GSA for rent and other services is a significant component of the judiciary's overall budget. GSA announced plans to increase the judiciary's rent by unilaterally imposing pricing policy changes that could cost up to $60 million annually beginning in fiscal year 2027 if implemented. And as a side note, we're going to talk about the regulation and how that violates that in a minute. In addition to rent, we're back to Judge Conrad's grievances. GSA charges a 3-7% overhead charge for every real property transaction. In 2025, the judiciary paid $280 million toward GSA's large overhead costs. In addition, GSA charged the judiciary $10 million to administer a relatively small portfolio of leases. The judiciary believes that we can provide better value with more productive allocation of these limited resources through real property authority. Yeah, and what they don't say in this memo is that the position the judges are in is acute because the executive branch has effectively declared war on the judiciary and made everybody so much less safe. They always were in this kind of precarious position in some sense, but they are so much less safe that they need to harden the courthouses. That's kind of part of the locus of this dispute, right? And on top of that, Trump is saying every week that he's going to withhold federal funds from blue states that don't do what he wants. How long until he realizes that he could do just that with the federal judiciary, right? No repairs to courthouses in D.C. or Maryland since judges there rule against him or he could blockade Scotis if they rule against his next round of tariffs. I would bet you any amount of money that Donald Trump does not know that the GSA is the landlord over these courthouses. Yeah, no bet there, but GSA Administrator Edward Forst may be looking to change that. On March 12th, he sent this incredibly condescending letter to Judge Conrad banging on about my experience as a chief executive officer of one of the three largest real estate service firms in the world. Exhibit 92 billion in why you do not put businessmen in charge of government. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. So in Forst's opinion, quote, the judiciary has neither the expertise nor the resources to successfully manage complex construction and renovation projects. And as evidence of this, he points to a government accountability office report from last year, which supposedly, quote, identify the types of fundamental systemic problems that could arise if the unelected judiciary gained carte blanche authority to determine courthouse expenditures at the expense of American taxpayers. Cart blanche, the judiciary is a separate co-equal branch of guy. The balls on this. Right, right. So Andrew, I actually did a little rabbit trailing of my own. And would you believe that that's not what the GAO said at all? You mean Administrator Forst was twisting the truth? Say it ain't so. No, no, it actually is so. The GAO report he referenced evaluated the judiciary's plan to change design standards for courthouses. And why do you think they want to change design standards? It's because they have to protect judges right now when they're facing persistent death threats, thanks to the maniac in the White House and his heavily armed supporters. I mean, I'm sure that ensuring more space in hallways and doing things like adding ballistic resistant material for the deputy clerk station in courtrooms is going to make courthouse construction and design more expensive. But I'm pretty sure the judges are better attuned to their own courtroom requirements than GSA or GAO. Forst says that, quote, the fundamental challenge affecting courthouse maintenance and cyclical reinvestment is the lack of sufficient access to appropriations from Congress. This is a money problem, not a competency problem. And I'm willing to bet that that's at least partly true, right? Congressional appropriations are what congressional appropriations are. But attacking the judiciary as Forst does and mischaracterizing this GAO report does not give me a lot of confidence that he's playing on the level when he says, like, we can manage these courthouses and we're doing a great job. Yeah, you know what else I don't have a lot of confidence in? Congress? Yeah. So the reason that Judge Conrad sent along proposed legislation is that all of this starts with the Elliott Fernald Public Buildings Act of 1926, which is today codified in Title 40 of the US Code. That bill provided for $165 million to construct various federal office buildings, courthouses, post offices, both in DC and throughout the country at a courthouse in Alabama was built at it. It also authorized the purchase of land at one first street in Northwest DC, which is the land on which the Supreme Court building would be built. And that act, which was then amended in 1959, is the genesis of why the GSA has the authority to construct own lease, operate, maintain and renovate buildings to serve civilian agencies of the federal government, which includes the judiciary. So pursuant to that grant of authority in those public building acts, which is now codified at Sections 581, 585, what the GSA has done is promulgated regulations about how it can carry that mission out, right? How it's supposed to serve the federal government. And what it's developed are things called occupancy agreements. It did essentially, you know, as you say, it's a lease, right? They're governed by Title 41 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It's part 102-85. Okay. But to oversimplify it, here's how GSA is supposed to charge rent. If they've leased the building on behalf of another government tenant, they're supposed to charge the tenant the actual cost of that lease plus a margin for the actual services that they provide. If they own the building, they're supposed to charge market rent for office space. And so when Judge Conrad is saying you're charging wildly inflated rates, part of what he's saying is you are not following your own regulations. Ah, okay. So this legislation would transfer management over the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building from the GSA, which is in the executive branch and under Trump's control, to the director of the administrative office of the U.S. courts, who is selected by the Judicial Conference of the United States. Right. And the Marshall Building is where most of the federal court offices are housed. But I have to tell you the really significant part of this proposed legislation is Section 604A, Subsection B, right in the middle. And it says that that director of the administrative office of the U.S. courts will then have the authority to establish what would be called the Judiciary Building Service. And the Judiciary Building Service can acquire any space or facility which the director determines to be necessary for the provision of court accommodations and manage that space or facility and its operation. So effectively, that would get the courts out from under the thumb of the Trump administration and the potential retaliation by the Trump administration, right? If Trump decides to try and shut down the District Court of Maryland, the Judiciary Building Services can immediately lease new space so the courts can go about their business and build a new courthouse. And the subsections let the director sign contracts for utilities and amenities and generally serve tenants and the public. Yeah. So this is a really great idea. I think so too. But Liz, I don't see that it has a chance in hell of passing Congress. Do you disagree? No. No, I don't. Until we solve our Article 1 problem, I think we're stuck with the GSA as the world's worst landlord. Yeah. I definitely think that we need to devolve powers from the executive because the executive is crazy. The executive is crazy and we now know how much those powers can be abused. Yeah. But okay, tomorrow or today as you are listening to this is the primary in Illinois. Yep. And we will probably, depending on how interesting it is, we might get Joe back to talk to us about it. There is kind of one of the big races that people are watching is District 9, the congressional race between Kat Abaguzale and Daniel Biss. Those are the two leading candidates. I believe Biss is the mayor of Evanston. So I'm really interested in watching that. Abaguzale is currently under indictment for a protest outside the Broadview facility when she kind of stood in front of a vehicle and banged on it, which they have now turned into a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Interestingly, the Justice Department dropped the charges against two of the defendants. It will be interesting to see if this case really does fall apart as so many of these prosecutions have done. Clearly, they went after this group because of Abaguzale's presence because she's such a public figure. So I'm interested to see how that primary goes. And you know, the whole thing, it's a big state. It's an important state. It's a blue state and it is a state we care about. So we'll be back to talk about that on Friday. If you're in Illinois, get out there and vote. Yeah, absolutely. And on Thursday, we will be back with written content. Until then, see you guys. Thanks.