The Kirkstag Fire

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:03 Matt: And I'm just going to be the big lawyer nerd here. The President of the United States can't designate a domestic terrorist organization. That's not a thing.

0:00:17 Jenessa: There is no reason to study a link between autism and vaccines. We already know it's not there. It's been done to death. It's over.

0:00:36 Jenessa: Welcome to Opening Arguments, the podcast that analyzes law and the news. With me is Matt Cameron, immigration attorney.

0:00:43 Matt: And of course, with me is Jenessa Seymour, Voting Rights Attorney, former U .S. scientist, and I assume current Antifa member. Are you keeping up on your dues?

0:00:50 Jenessa: Yeah, apparently there's a membership membership drive going around.

0:00:56 Matt: Usually they start calling around this time of year, but they've been a little more subdued. We're going to talk about the criminalization of dissent today, among other things. We have a lot to get through, but we're mostly going to to be talking one way or another about criminalization of dissent, and then also one way that the states are fighting back that you're going to be telling me about against our creeping fascism.

0:01:16 Jenessa: Good news, bad news on the RFK Jr. CDC front. I'm happy about what a lot of states are doing on this issue.

0:01:26 Matt: Yeah, great.

0:01:26 Jenessa: So fingers crossed. It's looking bad, but good. Huh.

0:01:29 Matt: I'm going to Be talking about not only the outsized responses to what I'm calling the Kirkstag fire, but also the different suits right now that Trump has going against different media outlets, including the ridiculous one recently filed against the New York Times. We're going take a look at this. And just for a fun footnote, I am going to tell you about the only time ever in history that a US president previously sued anybody for libel and how that went for him. We'll be finishing up with that with a fun historical footnote. So yeah, we've got plenty to get through here, so let's come on back. I'm going to go peel the Antifa bumper sticker off my car, and I will see you in a moment.

0:02:05 Thomas: Hey all, Thomas here. Just jumping in to say that things got a bit backed up in terms of the content. We had too much this week and we have to maintain a certain kind of schedule for the ad people and other things. So if you are looking for Vapid Response Part 2, the continuation of the Charlie Kirk stuff, and you should be looking for it because there's a lot more to respond to in the second part. I put it up for patrons and I've also put it on YouTube. So I've put it in on YouTube, so if you want to go to those two places to get that Part 2 right now, you can. Otherwise it's got a slot into the Monday normie feed slot so if you're okay with waiting and you're not a patron obviously catch it then if you're not okay with waiting well then become a patron patreon.com/law or if not hop onto the YouTube channel it's in the show notes or search Opening Arguments on YouTube one way or the other and you can find that part too we did too much stuff had to find a way to squeeze it all in all right hope you enjoy that and now back with Jenessa and Matt this

0:03:01 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:03:01 Matt: I wanted to start with a quick update on the Tyler Robinson indictment. Before we get to the Kirkstag fire, of course, we're talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk last week, the very public assassination by Tyler Robinson, allegedly, from what we can tell. It sounds like he has confessed to it, but he is still charged. The charges did come out, and we were talking a little bit about the indictment, I thought it'd be worth worth going through for a minute to talk about what's in there.

0:03:21 Matt: Not a lot of surprises for the most part, but some interesting factors here. So first of all, this is an aggravated murder charge because the enhancements here were the first that he targeted Kirk because of his political expression, which is in Utah and lots of other places, an enhanced sentencing factor, which makes sense. Also, violent offense committed in the presence of a child.

0:03:43 Matt: I guess they're gonna have to prove there was at least one child at the Charlie Kirk event.

0:03:42 Jenessa: Probably won't be hard.

0:03:47 Matt: Yeah, I'm sure there was. Was. Felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury. Count three is obstruction of justice. There's several obstruction and tampering charges here. One of the obstruction is that he concealed the firearm. One is that he concealed or destroyed the clothing he wore, which is all pretty typical for a crime.

0:04:02 Jenessa: Can I ask you about that? Because something that confuses me a little. I get that technically hiding evidence does obstruct an investigation. It kind of feels like that's all part of a crime. Like, I get how I could obstruct an investigation into your crime, but how do I obstruct, like, I don't know, it feels so strange to me that when I, in the moment of committing the crime, try to not get caught, like, I don't know, is running away obstruct? You see what I mean? It feels strange.

0:04:36 Matt: You should go straight to the UPS store and send everything to the police.

0:04:40 Jenessa: I guess.

0:04:40 Matt: Just package it up and send it on to the police with your bloody clothes and the gun.

0:04:46 Jenessa: Yeah, like, that feels weird, right?

0:04:46 Matt: And uh you know yeah it is no it is weird and some of these are strange and yeah often obstruction tampering charges tampering especially and in massachusetts and lots of other places uh tampering witness tampering is very broad statute obstruction can also be extremely broad like anything at all I mean the language here is to with intent to hinder delay or prevent the investigation apprehension prosecution etc etc no I agree that it is kind of typical of any given crime that you throw the gun and close away but uh you Know they're going with it uh we've got two counts of witness tamtering uh one was directing his roommate this is reading straight indictment, directing his roommate to delete incriminating text messages. We know that the roommate shared a number of text messages and conversations they'd had. The other one, directing his roomate to stay silent if police questioned the roommate. And that one does actually, I had to look up the Utah tampering statute. It sounds like he's telling his roommate in the text, basically, don't talk to the police and get a lawyer. Both of those are your constitutional rights. But in the witness tampering statue, Utah Code 76 -8508, it can be pretty broad like a lot of these.

0:05:43 Matt: Attempts to induce or otherwise cause another individual to testify if I inform falsely, withhold testimony, information, a document, or an item, elude legal process, et cetera, et cetera. I think that you could make an argument that he was just telling him his rights.

0:05:54 Jenessa: I I guess if you're going to charge everything in the beginning, fine. But, like I feel like if somebody actually got it on this one, you could totally appeal this and be, like informing someone of their constitutional rights as compared to saying delete the text messages. Which I think is way more clear, please destroy evidence. You know what I mean?

0:06:15 Matt: I mean, at the end of the day, you're alleged to have shot someone in the neck in front of hundreds of people to death.

0:06:19 Jenessa: Those ones will probably be the ones that stick.

0:06:22 Matt: Yeah. And, you know, these enhanced sentencing factors, especially with the political expression thing, like this is a very serious offense. Obviously, they're seeking the death penalty. I wanted to look a little bit at the indictment itself. We're talking about in the probable cause statement, which is pretty common in this kind of a speaking indictment where they give you the basic facts of everything. There's been a lot of talk about about the texts that are in here because they have extensive citation, just direct quotation rather, of the texts back and forth as it were made. I don't know. I mean, a lot of people are saying this doesn't seem credible. I think they look like texts between people.

0:06:45 Jenessa: Just considering how easily independently verifiable or I guess disverifiable electronic evidence is, it would be wild if somebody was making this up and we would figure it out. Like I just, it's not plausible. I suppose I could imagine that there are other texts that will provide additional context that make the jury think lots of things as opposed to one thing. But like the idea that this is invented whole cloth, like, no, it's too far. Yeah.

0:07:29 Matt: We'll have discovery and forensic evidence and it would completely tank the case, obviously, if the FBI just made up text messages. I understand why people in this time right now with this FBI think that it's possible. I get it.

0:07:39 Jenessa: Do I trust this FBI? No. Do I trust that they can keep a secret? Also no sure

0:07:49 Matt: Yeah but people are kind of questioning about why this much was necessary and the fact is because they are charging with these enhanced sentencing factors, including the political stuff. They have to show there's a political motive, and he talks pretty openly about his political motive here, more or less. There's a lot more that needs to come out. We still don't really know who this guy is or exactly why he did it. And of course, speculation is running wild, as we're going to talk about.

0:08:10 Matt: That's the basics right now for what's going on with Tyler Robinson.

0:08:09 Jenessa: I did also see some people talking about hey you know you're putting a piece of evidence essentially into this document and now everybody's seeing it doesn't this like mess with the jury pool and I guess my immediate reaction is like I don't know I mean everybody also saw this guy get shot and saw all the news reporting so

0:08:43 Matt: I mean, this is a probable cause statement.

0:08:44 Jenessa: I don'T know if it's terribly different but are there any specific rules around that like what you're not supposed to put in here or yeah you kind of have to right

0:08:45 Matt: So this is, you know, you assume, right, if you're going to lay out the elements of what you're saying happened, you don't have to have to. It really depends on the jurisdiction. This is pretty typical. I mean, you think about the indictments in any of the Trump cases, which I've studied pretty extensively. I've looked at those indictments more than I've worked at any indictments other than cases I've actually worked on. And those are very lengthy and have extremely detailed citations to different pieces of evidence and different statements and everything else. And Jack Smith was obviously well aware that he may not have had the chance to take this case to trial. Of course, he didn't. So there's quite a lot in there, I think, just to make sure that this story was out. I understand people are was saying. But like you said, this is going to be a local jury. I think it's going to be very hard to find people that aren't aware that a very famous person was recently shot in their jurisdiction, and they'll have opinions about it. But you'll just have to try to find people that have the least amounts of opinions. We'll see how that goes.

0:09:30 Jenessa: So it's worth noting I know we're talking about the FBI and everything but this is the state charging uh this is in Utah state court correct do we anticipate federal charges federal versus state charges do matter of course

0:09:47 Matt: I would think. Yeah, I don't know how there won't be federal charges. You think about Luigi Mangione, right, who was charged with federal terrorism. Now, actually, worth mentioning, Luigi Mangioni's state terrorism charges were just dismissed because it's ridiculous to say that this was terrorism because it requires that you're trying to to put a certain group of people in fear, and healthcare executives are not a protected class, at least not yet.

0:10:11 Matt: In this case, obviously, this is a political assassination. There's no way around it. I mean, no matter what the motive was going to be, you're going to say it's political, unless he actually thought he was shooting at a demon or something, or apolitical.

0:10:22 Jenessa: It's hard to imagine it being completely random or nonsensical

0:10:26 Matt: Yeah, right, right. I'm just going to shoot whoever's speaking at the university today. In that sense, and given how many people in the administration were personally close with Charlie Kirk, I wouldn't be surprised at all. If they're going charge Luigi with it, they're definitely going to to charge him. And it's much more of a terrorism charge than the Legion of Mangione, like far more, like it's mucho more sustainable. So speaking of terrorism, let's talk about the response now, of course. As I said, I was calling this the Kirkstag fire. I'm not even really joking. I mean, we've talked before about the Reichstag fire in the Third Reich, 1933, kind of early in Hitler's reign. And, uh, it gave the Nazis everything they wanted because they started it. They actually were responsible. We now know from history, and I'm não sei que isso aconteceu aqui, mas nós sabemos from history, that the Nazis basically set up a guy with some sort of intellectual disabilities. I think it was a Belgian communist or something. But they had incendiary devices planted around the Reichstag. They helped him out. They lit some of the stuff. There was a team. I think they went back up to Goering's office after blowing up part of it. There's a tunnel that we now know is between. Anyway, it's very well established at this point that the Reichstagsfire was not a mystery.

0:11:09 Jenessa: Probably

0:11:27 Matt: But, they needed this moment. They needed something to point to, a big spectacular thing that they could show everybody and say, look, this is who our enemies are. Now is the time to to come together and basically suspend the constitution. And I'm a little concerned about that's what's where we're going here. The Reichstag fire decree, I just thought it was worth pulling up here .The German constitution at the time, because I don't want to make direct parallels with all these things, the German constitution allowed for parts of it to be suspended in times of exception. In the Reichstag Fire Decree, we've got, it is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of opinion or expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic telephonic communications. It also allows for much broader warrants.

0:11:25 Jenessa: So obviously that makes it about 10 times easier to pull it off when it's in the law that you can can do this yeah

0:12:15 Matt: Yeah. Yeah, but as we're going to talk about, I'm very concerned that we're going to be facing our own kind of state of exception here. States of exception are how authoritarians work. That's where they find the margins they need. I haven't really seen media really putting these dots together, and I don't know about you, but I occasionally, as Thomas and I have often discussed in this program, we both occasionally hate listen to The Daily from The New York Times. And the host I will always think of as Mikey Barbs because that's his Instagram handle, Michael Barbaro.

0:12:45 Matt: Old Mikey Barbs was doing the Mikey Barbs thing where he was treating this like a serious news story to be analyzed as serious news of, well, let's consider why they might want to crack down on personal freedoms after the shooting. I don't remember who the guest was this morning, but he was talking in serious terms about how Antifa is an organization. They weren't even mentioning in 36 minutes, they didn't mention once that Antifa's not a thing, that there's no such thing as capital A Antifa, which is very much what we're talking about today. Antifa just reminded Mind Everybody, of course, is a set of organizational tactics and philosophies about how to fight fascism. And I think it's very telling that these particular people are so obsessed with people who don't like fascism, it really makes you wonder how much they know about themselves.

0:12:43 Jenessa: Yeah especially when you consider like you're saying some of our laws afford some ability for the president to do certain things and not others if there is you know terrorism or whatever of course they're not invoking that for all the right -wing domestic terrorism we're experiencing but it matters then in that case if we are talking about an actual organized group that's engaging in terrorist activity versus I don't know some random people who may or may not identify with the sentiment of a philosophy having no organizational structure like that That can never meet that definition.

0:14:06 Matt: It's neither a terror nor a group. It is domestic, given that, although it's not actually. Antifa is an international movement. Yeah, I mean, we're joking about our membership cards and bumper stickers and whatever, but there is no such thing as Antifa. And I don't know how many times we have to say it and how loud we have it needs to be said because there's going to be a lot of talk about this sort of thing. And I think there actually are a lot OF Americans who believe this. And you don't have to believe me. You can believe Christopher Wray from the FBI, who said specifically back in mid -2020, and there's all this Sturman drawing about the George Floyd protest, which drove a lot out of this at the time. So Wray was talking about Antifa as violent extremists, but he said specifically, it's not a group or an organization, it's a movement or an ideology. And again, that's my understanding as well. And the basic tactics of Antifa are not violent. They do anticipate the possibility of violence. They're very defensive, but they are not generally offensive. They are generally defensive, looking out for known tactics of fascists, because fascism, much like Antifa, is a set of philosophies and ideologies, just as much as Antifa is. It makes sense. There's an opposing force. I wanted to talk a little bit about what happened back in 2020 and 2021, because I remember this pretty clearly, and I feel like people have already forgotten the efforts to criminalize it then. And it's especially relevant because the day we're recording this just hours ago, Donald Trump did announce in a Truth Social post, as many of our policies are now announced, I am pleased to inform our many USA patriots that I am designating, and this is all in caps, Antifa, a sick, dangerous, radical left disaster, as a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly recommending those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.

0:15:50 Jenessa: Funding?

0:15:50 Matt: Yeah, funding AntIFA. That doesn't have to be true. That's the problem. None of this has to be real. So we have the the technology to listen to people now I have developed. So let's listen in on Stephen Miller. Now, you might remember that J .D. Vance actually did a podcast from his office, which was very inappropriate. He did the Charlie Kirk podcast in memoriam. And I want to acknowledge, just as a human, that it is clear, and I listened to a lot of this, unfortunately, that people like Stephen Miller and J. D. Vans, to the extent that these kinds of people can be friends with anybody, they were friends with Charlie Kirk. So they are hurting. And I just want to acknowledge they are people who are angry, and they're hurting, and they want to blame somebody. And that's a very human thing to want to do. But one thing that you shouldn't do in these circumstances is just make up some guys to blame. And that's what they're doing. So let's listen to, I'm very sorry to do this, but let's listen to Stephen Miller for just a moment on the Charlie Kirk podcast with J .D. Vance talking about the big plans for how they're going to fight Antifa now.

0:16:42 Clip: Organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger and incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people, it will happen and

0:17:16 Matt: We'll do it in Charlie's name. So Stephen Miller always talks like this because it gives him sexual pleasure. But he has this sort of Batman villain way of delivering things. It was fun to laugh at in the first couple of years of Trump, but it's not funny anymore. And he's He's talking, again, as one of the sort of behind -the -scenes organizers of how the Trump administration runs its policies and enforcement.

0:17:34 Jenessa: I think that behind the scenes is so important because I realize he's on a podcast there, but this is how he talks behind the screens. He mainly operates behind thescenes. And we're used to hearing that sort of bluster from a politician who's like running for office, giving a speech. Stephen Miller is not giving a speak. He is telling you his real concrete plans to like actually come after people. He means it in every way. He's not trying to get votes because he knows he can never win an election.

0:18:08 Matt: Right. He doesn't even want an appointed position because he knows he couldn't get through Senate. At the same time, he's also completely making something up. And this is what they've been doing for all of this. This idea that a vast network of terror cells, sleeper cells in different cities, it's insane. This kind of thing where you make up a guy and then get mad at him is a really important part of fascism. It was Hitler's entire MO was he would just get really worked up about things that he knew were bad faith -wise, or maybe he didn't. I don't know. Maybe he was really that insane, but I think he probably knew.

0:18:41 Matt: Things like there are Germans who are being persecuted in Poland, so we have to go to Poland, right? The same way that Vladimir Putin kept talking about how there were Russians getting hurt in Ukraine, so they have to get to Ukraine. Making up all this stuff.

0:18:50 Jenessa: We have to go denazify Nacrane, he says. Yeah.

0:18:52 Matt: Do not say fake. Exactly, right. With fascism, yeah. This is just typical fascist kind of talk, but I wanted to play it so you can see what they're saying and where this is coming from.

0:18:58 Jenessa: It also lets them take what is really grassroots. A lot of people are really upset at what's going on, and they're out on the streets making that clear. They are out onthe streets obstructing ICE. They are protesting. They are engaging with their local and state governments. And if you can frame this as like some weird isolated organized funded domestic terror group and not a huge portion of the population rising up of their own accord because they naturally agree yeah it's a good way to dismiss what people can't help but see happening in their own neighborhood

0:19:43 Matt: Those paid protesters, George Soros, throwing that money around. There's a White House press conference where he and Miller and some other people were talking, and he was talking about some dinner the other day that somebody stepped up and yelled at him. He's like, well, that was just a paid Soros protester. That's just the way they talk now. Because you can't have legitimate opposition. There is no such thing as legitimate opposition. Nobody would organically oppose you. Nobody Would Organically Stand Up to Fascism Just Because They Think It's a Bad Idea. We are not exaggerating when we're calling these people fascist, because again, small f fascist. This is all the playbook, everything they're doing here, of creating a state of exception based on lies, of making themselves simultaneously the victims and the most powerful people in the world. I just want to point out, and I'm just going to be the big lawyer nerd here, that the president of the United States can't designate a domestic terrorist organization. That's not a thing. Now, again, on this program, we've acknowledged more than once that can't doesn't really mean very much anymore, especially when it comes to law enforcement or national security type matters.

0:20:33 Matt: But I think it's important to know what the law is. And the law at the moment has a definition of domestic terrorism. That's what we were just talking about, what Luigi Mangione was charged under, what I'm sure Robinson will be charged under. That definition of Domestic Terrorism is talking about acts. It's talking about things that people do. So you can have something be designated a Domestic terrorist act under 18 U .S .C. 2331. And actually, this is relevant, so we're just talking about it with Mangione. If there are acts dangerous to human life, there are violations of criminal laws, which appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. You can argue that a politically motivated killing, which is supposed to intimidate or coerce people who agree with Charlie Kirk, that could be counted as terrorism. I think that's sufficient.

0:20:36 Jenessa: Let a jury decide it. Sure.

0:21:21 Matt: Yeah, it's defensible. It's absolutely defensible as not being terrorism, but it certainly makes more sense than charging Luigi Mangione. I just wanted to point out, because again, I do care about what the law is, there is at this point, and Congress might might change this sometime soon, but there's no vehicle for the president or anybody else to declare a domestic terror group. There is a vehicle for a foreign terror organization. This is something that comes up in my work pretty often, that if somebody is materially supporting a terrorist organization, it has to be a designated foreign terrorist organization as designated under INA 219, that they can be permanently admissible to the United States. They can't get residency. And one really scary thing, I think one of the scariest things actually that Trump did in his first term, and it even kind of stacks up to things he's doing now, was on January 5th, 2021, a memo that nobody else but me seemed to notice. A memo that came out obviously just the day before something that completely overshadowed it on January 6th.

0:22:13 Matt: This was a memorandum called Inadmissibility of Persons Affiliated with Antifa Based on Organized Criminal Activity. It was directing the Secretary of State and the Attorney General and the Secretary of DHS to review and assess whether to classify capital A Antifa as a terrorist organization organization under Section 1182, which is Section 219 of the INA, basically, knowing from their own FBI, they had already been told by their own FBI that Antifa is not an organization. He wanted to designate a terrorist organization so that they could exclude people from coming to the United States for associations with Antifa. It's scary. It is really scary because I've always said that they do the things to the immigrants first. They want to do it to us.

0:22:55 Matt: That's historically always been the case, right? So they just want to try that out. And this is the way they could do it because this designation of foreign terrorist organization, unlike the domestic terrorist organization, actually exists in federal law. This never really went into effect. Obviously, it was a last minute kind of Trump thing overshadowed by other events, but it was kind of the crescendo of a lot of talk in 2020 and 2021 throughout the George Floyd protests and beyond about how Antifa is a major threat to the United States, to the point that the New York Times had to run a story explaining about all the things they weren't doing because they were They're focusing on a terror organization that doesn't exist and is not an organization at all. It's all kind of funny in the sense that everybody involved has to know they're chasing shadows and that this is not anything real. The New York Times reported at the time that Trump was obsessed with the idea of domestic terrorism in the instance of Antifa, not his people, of course. But federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left -wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized.

0:23:51 Matt: So if there weren't sleeper cells in 2020, I don't think there are in 2025, but who knows? Well, I do know there aren't.

0:23:58 Jenessa: I was prepared for this in a way that either this event or some other event would instigate this desire to crack down in the sense of like, oh, we got to fight the violence. You know, they were kind of already doing this. We're going to put the National Guard in these places and all that. What I was really not prepared for was how aggressively and quickly this was going to affect free speech.

0:24:28 Jenessa: I mean, I get it. First Amendment protects you against the government and people getting fired from a private company is not the government, free speech is a broader topic than that. And the extent to which we are seeing even like media reporter figures, people who should be very protected, saying the mildest of things, saying The Truth, that this man spoke hate all the time, quoting his words.

0:24:55 Matt: Or just quoting him, just using his own words in context.

0:25:00 Jenessa: I don't even want to say where like I'm going to draw the line on what I think is too bad. But I get how if somebody said, this is great. I hope they kill more people. Yeah, you're going to get fired. We shouldn't be surprised by that. When somebody is like, condolences, political violence is bad. That was terrible. He was kind of a prick.

0:25:20 Jenessa: If you get fired for that, we don't have real free speech. I don't care that that wasn't officially, directly, technically the government. We all know that's because of government pressure and the climate we are in and that is getting really scary really fast in my opinion yeah yeah

0:25:39 Matt: It really is. And Trump has his claws in mainstream media. I mean, they just fired Jimmy Kimmel just a couple hours ago, let alone, I mean when you said the government, the government is also firing people like the DOD or DOW, what are you supposed to call it now?

0:25:53 Jenessa: Not you can't free speech you can make me call it that I will

0:25:58 Matt: Even when you're in the Gulf of America? Pam Bondi is saying it's hate speech. Even her own people were pushing back about that. I mean, it's not hate speech.

0:25:58 Jenessa: Not no yeah yeah she walked it back I believe leave.

0:26:09 Matt: I just want to make the very important point that I don't think has been made yet, but I'm sure will be over the next couple of days, that the president can't designate a domestic terror organization. But it doesn't matter, of course, if he wants to start treating all of us as domestic terrorists, he can have the government do that. So that's certainly, and we do have kind of a way too close to home example from May 2021. There's a pro -publica story involving an attorney I do know. I'm not going to name her because I don't want to give her any more trouble. And another attorney, two immigration lawyers who were stopped at the border coming back from Mexico after volunteering in Tijuana, which I also did a few times. They were held for quite a while and asked about their connections with Antifa and their opinions about the Trump administration. And there's a really terrifying CBP report, which is basically suggesting that, before we move on, I'm going to link to this report, but it's making a minor causal connection between Antifa, capital A Antifa. FIFA, and immigration lawyers, and talking about how these groups that are bringing the migrants up are arranging with asylum lawyers in advance, I guess, so that they're going to fill their pockets with these amazingly lucrative asylum cases. As we all know, that's one of the easiest ways to make money, is doing asylum cases? I have so many doubts. But generally speaking, you can charge a lot of money for asylum. I've really tried not to do that. I don't think that's the right way to do it. And even if you are charging a lot of money for asylum, it's still not going to be anywhere near as profitable as other forms of law. It just isn't. But the idea though, that when we went down there to talk to them, and I've talked to plenty of attorneys who have been down there, like we were all going there to just give basic advice about what you can expect when you get there, how it's going to work, talking to them about their claims, like getting a sense and being able to tell them if you even have a case, right? That's something people might want to know. And making sure they know their rights and how to handle when they're being taken in because everybody crossing the border was stopped and taken in and giving interviews. This idea, though, that we were down there trying to make drama business when every immigration attorney I know is completely overloaded all of the time because there aren't that many of us and there's a lot of business out there. I mean, we don't have to go to Mexico. We don't Have to import business like this just ridiculous. Kill us. But again, I know this has nothing to do with reality. I just wanted to point that out.

0:27:18 Jenessa: Yeah. How's that lavish life treating you? Yeah.

0:28:18 Matt: But this memo, just seeing it again, hadn't thought about this in a while, has terrified me. I mean, really just thinking about, because they've already declared war on us. They've already said there was an executive order that included immigration attorneys specifically saying that they think that we're all committing fraud and that they're going to do extra investigations of us. So good luck. But that's kind of just one example. But I was very concerned about where things were going by the beginning of 2021. And I'm very concerned about where they're going now? Because even if the president, quote unquote, can't do it, I think we all understand that there are ways they can do it and they can certainly try to prosecute us and make all kinds of problems.

0:28:52 Matt: I am happy to say I am an anti -fascist. I don't know if that makes me capital A Antifa because I haven't read the regulations of Antifa or the bylaws recently. I do not know. I dont know what else to say about this. It is pretty obviously a really terrifying turn. It's not unexpected. It is a little sooner than I expected. I have been expecting something like this for 10 years. But it is scary. And it's also scary to see how disconnected from reality in connection with this event it is, right? If it had been a bunch of black guys that ganged up on Charlie Kirk and killed him, you know, I could actually see how this would happen. Even if it's just a few guys in Utah, they would still try to make it into a thing, right. As far as we can tell, at the time we're recording this, he wasn't working with a vast network of terror cells.

0:29:32 Jenessa: It doesn't seem like it.

0:29:33 Matt: It seems like that would be obvious by now, but it's very dangerous. States of exceptions are generally dangerous. It's very to treat Americans like the enemy, but that's something that he's he's been intent on doing for a long time. So here we are. All right. That's more than enough of that. Let's come back, take a break and talk about how the states are responding to RFK Jr.'s vaccine bans.

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0:31:16 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:31:17 Matt: Because we live in hell, the health and human services has decided that we don't get to have vaccines and especially the COVID vaccine. And they're trying to stop it for most people. But I know that Massachusetts and a number of other states, including yours in New York, are fighting back. And I'd like to know how that works. If the federal government says you can't do it. How do the states do it?

0:31:20 Jenessa: I thought this was interesting because when I saw the executive order from Hochul and I just saw like the headlines at first I was like I don't really get normally supremacy clause if the Fed Ed says you can't do it. How on earth is my state governor like, yes, you can. So I read through it. So while the Department of Defense is trying to kill Antifa and focusing on immigrants, of course, people with disabilities also on the shit list as always. And RFK Jr. really cracking down on vaccines because he's convinced that it causes autism, which it doesn't. And that's bad because autistic people are a terrible blight on society, apparently. It's truly vile stuff he's been saying. It's only getting worse. And he recently fired CDC director Susan Monarez. I think I'm saying that right. She has testified now about how that all went down. And it was really ugly. She was refusing to fire certain people. She was refusing to accept the new vaccine recommendations that will be coming out from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. By will be, we don't know what it is. I think she doesn't even know what het is yet, and he was pressuring her to just say she's going to rubber stamp it. And when she said no he said resign she said no he fired her that he was ranting about how like everyone at the cdc is like trying to kill children and they're evil terrible people like it was really bad and really gross probably by the time you're hearing this uh the acip new vaccine recommendations will come out kennedy has recently replaced most of that committee with his favorite people who hate vaccines so what does that mean in general if they recommend a vaccine under the affordable care act your insurance has to cover it with no cost sharing so no deductible no copay no nothing you have to get it for

0:33:58 Matt: Socialism. Can you believe it?

0:33:58 Jenessa: Free um yeah god forbid socialism for measles. So Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, the Child Health Insurance Program, those still cover quite a few vaccines regardless of this. But a lot of us are on employer paid or some other kind of private insurance. And technically, without ACIP recommending the vaccine, our insurance wouldn't have to cover it anymore. And now what?

0:34:33 Matt: What would that cost? By the way, do you know what an uninsured COVID shot costs?

0:34:37 Jenessa: I saw, for example, there is talk they may stop recommending the hepatitis B vaccine, which is typically given to babies within the first couple of days. This has saved estimated, I remember the number being 20 ,000. I think it might have been like 20, 000 a year babies used to contract hepatitis P from their mother at birth. So this vaccine is like life -saving, huge. Now it's like 20 kids.

0:35:05 Matt: But what about the money you could save if you didn't have to pay for those vaccines? It's a lot of money. Have you considered that?

0:35:10 Jenessa: Imagine that, right? Well, and the thing that's going to make health insurance less likely to stop covering this is, yeah, but then when people get sick, you have to, instead of paying for the vaccine, you pay for all of their health care.

0:35:24 Matt: Long COVID is very expensive.

0:35:26 Jenessa: Yeah, all of this, right. I saw an estimate that if they stopped covering the hep B vaccine, seen, you would have to pay $150 for that. Like if it was totally out of pocket. More realistically, my concern is they'll say, oh, no, no. We'll still cover it. But you have a co -pay. And even just like $25, that's going to... We already have such a hard time getting people to get this goddamn flu shot.

0:35:51 Jenessa: Get your flu shot, people. Life -saving. The more people who get it, the more it becomes effective, those effectiveness rates are calculated because of the fact that not enough people get it. If more people get, it it's more effective because you don't get exposed to it. 25 bucks is definitely a barrier to a vaccine that people are just already not enthusiastic about getting. There's a lot of concern here. What can your state do? What are states doing? We're also seeing the FDA, which is also under HHS, the Health and Human Services, they are changing some of the approvals. So they're saying certain COVID vaccines are not going to be allowed for kids. They're saying that the old vaccines you can still get, but like the new ones for the new strains, which is what really matters for a booster. Oh, I don't know if we should approve that one. Or for a lot of them, that one you're gonna need to have a risk factor right

0:36:53 Matt: A severe Zero risk factor, right? Not just like asthma, but,

0:36:55 Jenessa: Something that makes you really at risk for severe complications or death from covid so essentially what that means is a lot of people would need a prescription you would need to show up having your doctor say that because the pharmacist is not going to evaluate whether you have arisk

0:37:10 Matt: Wow, wow. Five years later, and we need a prescription for the COVID vaccine, the thing we were all so desperate to get, the think that got us all back on track. Okay, all right,

0:37:19 Jenessa: Exactly like that yeah nonsense. What can we do here? One option, New York Governor Kathy Hochul just put out a 30 -day executive order, quote, while a long -term legislative solution is developed, we're going to allow doctors and nurse practitioners to issue both patient -specific and non -patient -specific orders to the pharmacy. So what does that mean?

0:37:48 Matt: Hmm.

0:37:49 Jenessa: Why have pharmacies just been able to give you a vaccine. That is kind of weird, right? They don't give you any other medicine without a prescription. They have what's called like a standing order from the CDC. These groups of people, you essentially have a prescription to give any of them the vaccine. So what Hochul is saying, doctors and nurse practitioners, go right ahead and write a script to the pharmacy for literally anybody who meets these criteria and now they can walk in and get it. So you still need a doctor.

0:38:18 Matt: Right. So it's a general order that, yeah, okay, all right, nice, right mm

0:38:25 Jenessa: She's not a doctor, she can't write it. I don't think she's a doctor she can write a script. It expanded the pharmacy authority to issue vaccines under the age of 18 so in case there's any concern about giving medication to a minor there you go. It authorizes pharmacists to prescribe for vaccines.

0:38:44 Matt: Hmm, on the spot, nice.

0:38:46 Jenessa: Patient-specific, so they can't give themselves this blanket order, but they can look at a specific individual and say, you do have the risk factor. Prior, they would have been very reluctant and worried about doing that. Critically, the FDA regulates approval of drugs. It does not regulate the practice of medicine. So doctors have have always been able to do off -label prescription, you know, within the code of ethics, within reason. So even if they say, well, this isn't approved unless you have, your doctor can be like, off -label, I approve.

0:39:22 Matt: An off-label use for the COVID vaccine?

0:39:24 Jenessa: Yeah, I understand that that sounds unintuitive, but we live in an unintuitive place, I suppose. Yeah. There you go. We're kind of running into this strange place, But basically, why can we do this? Because they're only going to not recommend it or have the FDA say this is who it's approved for. But doctors can still now under this executive order put out a standing order and pharmacists can prescribe. And the FDA is just saying who it's approved for not you can't ever write an off -label who it's not approved

0:39:28 Matt: Vaccine can we just tell people that it's actually Viagra, like permanent Viagra or something because that would get a lot of men vaccinated I

0:40:08 Jenessa: So you can kind of get around it that way

0:40:11 Matt: See and what about the money part though how do they make sure it's covered by

0:40:16 Jenessa: Medicaid, Medicare, and CHIP are still going to cover uh some vaccines by law we always have the option to go through and uh cover things with our own state law you know think about Massachusetts has its own form of a sort of universal health care. It's up to the states to determine whether schools can require vaccines, or rather to say that the schools require it. You have to get it if you are going into a public school. So that's going to really incentivize people. And if your doctor writes a script, than if you are on Medicare, Medicaid chip, it would probably have to at least partially cover it, but maybe, maybe not. I think the best bet is going to be for states to create a funding program if insurers back off of this and do create partial or complete cost sharing. If they're creating partial cost sharing or if they are not covering it, the states are going to have to help you out. We're also seeing a similar order in Pennsylvania. Governor Shapiro asked the Board of Pharmacy to look into this. They just changed their own regulations and said, hey, pharmacies, we used to say you had to follow the CDC guidelines. You can now follow vaccine guidelines from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and so on, they are all continuing to recommend vaccination. So you go right ahead and do it. CVS immediately announced, yes, we agree this changes. They were starting to pull away from offering certain vaccines and requiring scripts and everything. CVС immediately was like, yeah, you said it. We'll go right back to doing it because you are recommending that we follow ACOG. And there we go. We'll do it. They also have in Pennsylvania State Rep. Arvind Venkat. He's a Democrat and an ER physician himself. He introduced a bill that would require insurers to continue to cover any vaccine that was federally recommended recommended as of January 1st, 2025, and anything that is newly recommended by the Pennsylvania Department of Health

0:40:35 Matt: Insurance nice

0:42:51 Jenessa: Going forward. So there you go, your insurance would cover it that way. So we're getting those kind of state-specific things. I'm sure you've also seen, they're trying not to name it, which makes it hard for me to find it, but I saw like unofficially the Northeast public health collaboration the west coast is doing the same thing the west coast health alliance like california washington oregon are teaming up on the northeast we have all of new england except new hampshire because they just gotta do their own thing republican governor all of New England and New York New Jersey Delaware Pennsylvania Rhode Island Connecticut uh Maine Massachusetts we're all in on it together we're just like making our own CDC basically. I think this is important because one of the things you cannot do, no matter how much as a state you're protecting your own people, we can't regulate interstate travel. We can't stop somebody from coming in who's not vaccinated and then that gets our kids sick or our adults sick. But if as a block of states we start recommending things and working together to create laws that ensure our populations are vaccinated, we could protect each other really well. And it'll help with the problem.

0:42:54 Matt: That covers it I see yeah it makes

0:44:16 Jenessa: Lots of good things we could do. Technically, RFK Jr. could be impeached. Good luck.

0:44:22 Matt: Sense oh yeah that's not happening

0:44:22 Jenessa: It requires two-thirds of the House and Senate. And it requires treason, bribery, other high crimes and misdemeanors. That's going to be a tough sell. I don't see it happening anytime soon. He's also awarding a new grant to RPI to study the autism and vaccine link. And there was no competitive process. He gave it to a guy who claims he has a blood test that can detect autism with 97 % accuracy.

0:44:50 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, I haven't read all the way through the paper yet, but it's thrown off all my bullshit detectors in my quick skim. Do you think RFK Jr. gave money to somebody who has any realistic chance of not finding what he asked him to find?

0:44:47 Matt: No, huge if true

0:45:06 Jenessa: I sincerely doubt it. This is very concerning. There is no reason to study a link between autism and vaccines. We already know it's not there. It's been done to death. We're done. This is like studying whether women get mental illness from a wandering uterus. We'RE done. It'S not happening. ItS over. Over so like the fact that you would accept this grant is already deeply concerning to me this person is not a medical doctor like no no no they're not a psychologist no there's like a comment link I don't think it's a public comment link to the government but hey if you're an RPI alum you could sure as hell tell them how you feel about them accepting this grant because they're

0:45:05 Matt: Yeah of course yeah yeah

0:45:49 Jenessa: Just like we acknowledge that they are sending us money and we like that that's pretty much what they've said no

0:45:55 Matt: I guess we don't really need the definitive study but they could end up with the definitive story that I know that whatever Whatever. These people never accept it. I understand.

0:46:02 Jenessa: We have the definitive studies like but yeah I yeah in theory maybe this guy would be like congratulations there's nothing here and then then what

0:46:03 Matt: Yeah. No, I know. I know Yeah, but back to COVID real quick I just want to make sure I understand this because the FDA has only cleared the new shot for certain people. So how do the states get around that if the FDA is saying who gets to have it?

0:46:24 Jenessa: That's where that part about off -label comes in so if we say our doctors can issue to the pharmacy a standing order not specific to any one patient actually I think all these people can get it and because the FDA doesn't stop you from practicing medicine, it doesn't stop you from making off-label decisions. Essentially, I think what's happening is this executive order is going to help protect you from a malpractice suit.

0:46:55 Jenessa: Not perfectly, I don't know. You know, talk to your lawyer before you do any of this. But I think in a lot of ways it's trying to set up doctors to be less scared to break this rule because, yeah, they always had a right to look at their patient who doesn't technically qualify and say, yeah, you do. You know, there's like the pneumonia vaccines that are like, oh, you're supposed to be 60. And if you walk into CVS, they're not going to give it to you at 59. But your doctor could be like, you need this and write you the script.

0:47:25 Matt: That would be off-label

0:47:27 Jenessa: Yeah, it would be technically off -label, but your doctor's not going to like get in trouble for that unless, you know, if they start writing like off-label opioid prescriptions, they might get in trouble.

0:47:38 Matt: Now, I mean, I'm looking at the standing order in Massachusetts and it just authorizes all qualified pharmacy personnel pursuant to regulations to dispense and administer the vaccine to all eligible persons as described below. And the eligible persons they're describing do not match what the FDA is saying that are eligible persons for this. So it's just interesting to me. That's good.

0:47:55 Matt: It's good that we can have that kind of variety.

0:47:55 Jenessa: It feels very strange that it's like normally supremacy clause, you would just think the FDA said this, how can we possibly override it? But I think it's playing within that realm of like, well, technically, the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine. So well, technically, you can follow what ACOG says, You can follow what the American Academy of Pediatrics says. They say it's a good idea.

0:48:25 Matt: Not something I'd really considered before.

0:48:26 Jenessa: It's just off-label now.

0:48:28 Matt: Let's keep a watch on that. All right. We should come back and talk about these different Trump libel suits. We'll just do a quick thing on that, and then I'll talk about a really interesting historical libel suit involving a president. Be right back.

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0:50:07 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:50:07 Matt: So, as you may know, of course, Donald Trump is trying to get his tentacles around every part of mainstream media to make sure that he can have complete control over them. When a reporter asked about the comments we were talking about with Pam Bondi saying that anything about Charlie Kirk was hate speech, they asked him for comment on this. And he said, you know, people like you, you treat me unfairly, you have hate in your heart. CBS paid me $16 million for their hate speech. Paid me. That really is an interesting slip.

0:50:30 Jenessa: Yeah, is this a lawsuit we know about?

0:50:33 Matt: Oh yeah, this is the Trump v. CBS suit from, they reached a settlement in July. That's one of the ones I wanted to touch on real quick. They're paying a donation to his library. That is the settlement they reached.

0:50:43 Jenessa: Gross.

0:50:43 Matt: The president of the United States, just to make this very clear for younger listeners maybe, not usually in the habit of suing people. That's not usually something the sitting president does for a reason, because you're bringing a pretty big hammer into any given lawsuit when you are the actual sitting president. I mean, I understand the president's a person and he should be able to sue if he gets into a car accident or something, but generally speaking, I don't think we should be letting the president sue people. Just my opinion. Opinion but in the trump v cbs suit that was actually the one about the deceptively edited kamala harris interviews he was very mad at

0:51:12 Jenessa: I can't believe they paid that out.

0:51:16 Matt: The way yeah they he thought that I. It's so obnoxious they should have taken a trial but they were in the middle of some mergers

0:51:19 Jenessa: Did you just say $16 million?

0:51:22 Matt: Yep, he was looking for 10 billion dollars that's been the strategy and all these is these outlandish things where they're asking for billions of dollars for these stupid things yeah exactly right gajillion yeah what he was saying is you made me look bad on cbs you made her look good by deceptibly editing her and making her look smart, which turns out she might be smarter than him. That is very possible. That's just the CBS one I want to touch on real quick. We talked already about the Wall Street Journal one that involves the Epstein birthday book, which of course has now come out. His defense, I think, at this point is going to be that that was sort of put together for him and he didn't actually sign it or there wasn't a signature or whatever. Who knows?

0:51:31 Jenessa: Why not just say 20 trillion? Like, just whatever. Say whatever you want. Which they didn't. To be clear. Let's imagine that it is actually fake. The Wall Street Journal, as long as they did their due diligence and genuinely believed it was real, that's not going to help in the libel suit even if it was fake.

0:52:14 Matt: Yeah. Well, and remember, Trump's complaint, which we read from before, is that what he's going with is that it never existed and they completely made it up so you know good luck with that again though looking for 10 billion dollars and the whole deal is major media outlets are currently in litigation with the president while covering the president and I mean that's a really important part of their job right now and generally is covering what the president does and I just feel like we can see the way this is coming out and now we have the new york times lawsuit filed by a bunch of idiots this lawsuit this is this is kind of a funny read I almost did as the footnote I hate doing trump Trump-related footnotes these days, because it's just such a funny lawsuit. It goes on for pages, like 10 pages, about what a great business person he is. Anybody who would ever say he wasn't successful or hadn't always made money is lying. The false statements here in the New York Times case, I just want to mention very quickly. We've got Michael Schmidt, who I think is great, and Peter Baker. He's mad at them for their mean articles. And also the authors of a book published by Penguin, which I guess is associated with the New Yorke Times, called Lucky Loser, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. I can see from the title how that might have annoyed the president. He claims there's all kinds of false statements, which I'm sure are not false about. One of them is that Trump is hard to do business with.

0:53:32 Jenessa: That's an opinion.

0:53:34 Matt: Essentially, that's what it comes down to. But he's on the record as having, and he talks about not paying people for doing work for him. So that makes him pretty hard to do business with.

0:53:42 Jenessa: One might argue hard. Hard.

0:53:44 Matt: There's a bunch of different things. They're asking for $15 billion from the New York Times, $15 million for statements that are nothing new, that are things that we all know about Donald Trump about how he's not great at business all the time, about how he wouldn't be anybody today if Mark Burnett had not put him on TV. And that's one of the major contentions of this suit is that you're misrepresenting my apprentice career. I mean, he might've still had a shot at running for president, but by the time he ran for president everybody had seen him on The Apprentice and that means something to a lot of Americans.

0:54:14 Jenessa: Again, also, opinion. Speculation. Not a statement of fact.

0:54:18 Matt: It might be fun to go through this actual complaint at some point because it's pretty funny. I'm just skimming right now. I've gone through the very basics. And then we've got Trump v. ABC, where they just settled, well, actually that was last year, they settled for $25 million. Another donation to the library. I'll be very curious to see what is in the Trump library. It seems it'll just be a collection of tweets.

0:54:36 Matt: Public apology and legal fees were paid out. This was for the Stephanopoulos thing. Now, this one was a little more arguable because he said that Trump was held liable for rape when, technically speaking, it was sexual abuse and defamation that was legally the charge, the civil charge. And people want to be careful about this, it wasn't a criminal charge. So yes, he was not literally convicted of rape. He was not found civilly responsible for rape.

0:54:56 Jenessa: Technically, the way New York State defines it, yeah.

0:55:01 Matt: Sexual abuse was the actual thing, the civil finding. Again, he's using rape as shorthand for sexual assault, but he was still found. But of all of these, that's the one that's at least a case. It's

0:55:13 Jenessa: The closest, like even slightly plausible not 25 million plausible, Jesus

0:55:17 Matt: Anything, right? Exactly right. I think a lot about what Mussolini said when he was asked, because Mussolini was very, unlike Trump, he was very cagey about his program, about what he was going to do when he got elected. One of his most famous quotes when he was talking about El Mundo, which was a very well-known newspaper, a daily paper that shut down pretty quickly under Mussolini. He said, the Democrats of El Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the Democrats of El Mundo. The sooner, the better. Break the bones. Of the newspaper. That's how fascists talk.

0:55:51 Matt: And that's how he talks about journalists. And so this is a very effective way to break the bones to journalism. Even if you don't kill them, you're going to leave them very wounded and unable to fully respond to what's going on. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. I mean, there's a lot of talk about people not being able to meet the moment, but nowhere have we seen it like the media.

0:56:07 Jenessa: It's been really disappointing honestly how many things I'm like why is nobody talking about like it makes you feel like am I crazy like am I the one who's not getting it but eventually like associated press or politico will get on it and I'm like thank god somebody's saying it but you know it feels incredibly relevant that like half these people are owned by disney now like it kind of matters somebody needs to trust-bust this mm

0:56:33 Matt: Sure. Yeah, or they're either owned by somebody else or they have the process of a merger that he could interfere with. Yeah okay, we've got the idea. Let's talk about a more fun libel trial involving a president. I'm going to give you a quick footnote here. This I just found out about today and I got kind of obsessed. So the only other president to sue for libel was Theodore Roosevelt in 1913. He sued a small-town paper, a guy named George Newitt, and he had actually sworn that he was going to sue the first person who actually said this in public, but the first person who said it in public was actually broke, so he didn't sue him.

0:57:09 Matt: The iron ore in Michigan, and I will read you a bit of the libel here so you can see how scandalous and scurrilous this was. Roosevelt is the only man that can call others liars, rascals, and thieves, terms he applies to Republicans generally. There's like a civil war going on between the Republicans at the time. That's why he ended up running independently as a bull moose. You might know about the independent party he ran on.

0:57:28 Matt: If anyone calls Roosevelt a liar, he raves and roars and takes on an awful way. And yet Roosevelt is a pretty good liar himself. This is all pretty normal so far, just calling him a liar. Here's the part that really made him, I'll skip ahead, made him very angry. Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way. He gets drunk too, and not that infrequently, and all his intimates know it. He acts like a madman if anyone dares criticize him. So of all of these things, think about the time we're in when the temperance movement is getting a lot of attraction, right? And you have to take a side in this era about whether you're a wet person or a dry person about your position on alcohol. And Roosevelt was not a drinker, actually.

0:58:04 Matt: And he was very angry that somebody would suggest that he was a drunk. And in this Republican factional war I was telling you about, there was this rumor that had been spread that he wasn't not, that he was a drunk, that he had a problem with this. He acted pretty weird sometimes and he got worked up, but he wasn't actually, there's extensive testimony about this at trial from people all around him that he drank very lightly, if ever, and Roosevelt testified that he had never been drunk in his life, which maybe that's true. Apparently his brother, much like Trump's brother, actually, his brother was an alcoholic. That's actually, you know, that's Trump's kind of origin story about alcohol is he won't have a drink because of that and died young. Newit, the publisher in this libel trial, which went on for days in front of a full 12-person jury, Newit ended up having to testify that nobody who told him the anecdote about Roosevelt being a drunk, was willing to testify. And he actually said on the stand that publishing the article was a mistake.

0:58:54 Matt: So that's pretty much the end of your libel trial. Now, this would not work under today's libel law, because this is well before New York Times v. Sullivan. Obviously, Roosevelt is an extreme public figure. And under New York Times v. Sullivan, this could be dismissed immediately, because you have to show actual malice. You have to say you're talking about something that you know is absolutely false, and that you're doing it just to mess with somebody.

0:59:13 Jenessa: I guess it would have to be absolutely false or like with like total disregard.

0:59:19 Matt: Yes, requisite regard for the truth. That's the standard.

0:59:21 Jenessa: So I guess that could count if you were like, I haven't even remotely investigated this, but I guess the idea would be, I don't know, that he's allowed to speculate based on his behavior.

0:59:34 Matt: Well, he also had people telling him this, right? So he had sources, but none of them would testify, but they were out there. So, you know, he had some good faith basis, allegedly, for this.

0:59:36 Jenessa: Oh, I see. I see, okay. Of course. Sure, all right.

0:59:43 Matt: But again, we're not talking about the New York Times v. Sullivan standard. In this situation in 1912, the president's just a guy. And also, this is a small-town paper. This is not the Newark Times. This is like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or something, right, where nobody lives. I don't know. This would not survive as a libel trial today. But Roosevelt won.

1:00:01 Matt: He was looking for $10,000 in damages, but he said to the court, he only wanted to clear his name. He didn't need much money. So the jury took him up on the joke and gave him $0.06. The president of the United States won $0.06. Now, he was not the sitting president, unlike Trump at the time. I couldn't find any instances of a sitting president suing, but he had just been the president. And this was testimony about his conduct as president.

1:00:21 Jenessa: Is this a sitting president suing for anything or suing for libel specifically? Wow.

1:00:25 Matt: I couldn't find anything about a sitting president suing anybody. Presidents have been sued. You remember the Paula Jones litigation, right?

1:00:31 Jenessa: Sure.

1:00:32 Matt: And George Washington was sued, the very first president, several times for some kind of property thing. But no, I couldn't find him as a plaintiff. I don't think that has ever happened other than this Roosevelt thing, but never a sitting president. And I think it's pretty rare for a former president to sue people. Six cents, I'm sure, was a down payment on a log cabin in 1912.

1:00:47 Jenessa: I love the idea that he got on the stand and was like, no, no no, you don't understand. I'm not drunk all the time. That's just my personality. Incredible. Legend.

1:00:54 Matt: Yeah, right. I'm Teddy Roosevelt. Yep, yep. There you go. So I think he had some reason to sue, at least, especially at that time. Nobody wanted to be called drunk. Yeah. But much better than the Trump seats all around, probably. So this is a fun little historical footnote. So that's what's going on in the world of criminalizing dissent. I just want to point out that we are independent media that can tell you that Charlie Kirk sucks and that Antifa actually is not an organization. We can tell your that full -throated because we are here working for ourselves. And if you'd like to support what Opening Arguments is doing, you can always go to patreon .com slash law because that money actually really does matter. It goes to real people who are making their livelihoods. And it's going to my retirement for what it's worth. So much appreciated.

1:01:45 Matt: Exactly. Oh, you already know me too well. But it's a nice thought. There's money going somewhere someday. Maybe somebody else can have it. But as it is, we are proud to be able to bring you this stuff independently. And I am very concerned, honestly. I mean, we've been making some jokes today, but we're in a scary place and there's no reason not to acknowledge that with the state of the media and the state of free speech in this country. But we'll keep doing it as long as we can. So we'll be back next week to talk about a really important Fourth Amendment case, actually, which I think is getting more and more relevant as well. And then we'll be back to talk some more about some bad takes in the news and return to talking about the news next Friday. So we'll see you then.

1:02:57 Matt: Even when you're in the Gulf of America.

1:02:58 Jenessa: Defend not. You can't, free speech, you can't make me call it that. I will not.

1:03:03 Matt: I have so many duds.