Trump Says DOJ Should Pay Him $230 Million Because Why the F*** Not at This Point

Transcript

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

0:00:00 Matt: The second and third in command of the Department of Justice are Todd Blanch and Stan Woodward, both Trump defense attorneys. By the code of legal ethics that we are all bound under, they shouldn't be touching this.

0:00:18 Jenessa: They litigated the opposing side of this. They obviously, they can't touch us with a 10 -foot pole.

0:00:30 Matt: Welcome to Opening Arguments. It is Friday and we're here to run down the news. And here with me, of course, is Jenessa Seymour, who has just returned from taking an entire bar exam just for fun. How are you feeling?

0:00:41 Jenessa: Oh boy, I'm exhausted. My brain is toast. Intellectual labor is labor, and I am all labored out.

0:00:53 Matt: Did you have fun at least?

0:00:55 Jenessa: Um, well, depends on your definition of fun. I definitely learned some things. I have many complaints about standardized testing that I could go on and on and on about, but yeah, the material I find very interesting. The testing experience is always not a fun one for me.

0:01:15 Matt: I'm the kind of pervert who enjoys standardized tests. So I think we'll talk about it a little later. I want to hear about it. But for today's show, I have got, because I didn't expect you to do any work today, and that's totally fine. I'm giving you the day off and you can just come in and be Thomas today with absolutely no prep, coming in cold, but that's okay because we've got some subjects that I think you're gonna be familiar with, but these are all going to be along the lines of, can they do that? Which has been a pretty popular question in 2025.

0:01:29 Jenessa: I am so blind today. Hmm.

0:01:43 Matt: And of course, I'm going to give my standard disclaimer, which is that they're doing it. But we're here to talk about the law, and that is what the show is for. We're going to explain law in the news. So I always want to be sure, and I've taken this position from January 20th onward, that we're here to tell you what the law is and how it should work, and that's what we're going try to do. So we've got three very different subjects today from this week's news that I want to talk abou. Can they do that? And then we'll check back with you, Jenessa, and find out a little bit more about the patent bar, because I'm really curious about the whole going to be a fun, I think we got some great subjects and kind of excited about just you not knowing anything. Let's see how it goes. We'll come back and learn something.

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0:02:27 Matt: I want to start off today with a story that justified immediately to me putting down in the Slack chat WTF with at least 20 Fs. You may have seen.

0:02:37 Jenessa: I did see that. I saw

0:02:39 Matt: We have got to talk about the fact that Donald Trump is trying to get the Department of Justice to pay him $230 million for having tried to prosecute him for things that he did, things we all know that he did.

0:02:51 Jenessa: This headline and I had no bandwidth to process what that could even mean what are you what what happened

0:02:55 Matt: Well, you know I had to look into it because, honestly, the New York Times story which broke this is a little deceptive in a few ways and didn't really get into the meat of what this actually is. I had do some digging to figure out even what the procedural thing was that they're talking about. I feel like the Times could do better in their legal reporting, honestly. And maybe this is just as a legal reporter myself, but I want to know the mechanism, the vehicle, the procedural aspects of what you're trying to do here. So the short story, of course, what everybody probably saw as the headline line that you saw, is that Trump, and this is not news, by the way, this has been known for a little while, it's just sort of mentioned recently, so it became news, but he's filed two different claims seeking damages from the Department of Justice for two different investigations they did with him. One of them had to do with Russia in 2023, with Russian investigation, and the other one in 2024 had to deal with the Mar -a -Lago search warrant and what they were calling a raid, although it was a pretty straightforward search warrant.

0:03:30 Jenessa: Huh when you say filed do you mean like he's filing a lawsuit

0:03:54 Matt: Not quite. What he's filled is two, what's called Form 95, So this is an interesting procedural issue. You're probably a little bit familiar with the Federal Tort Claims Act. We've talked about it. It's come up before. And to proceed with the federal tort claims claims act case, you have to file with the agency first and you haveと basically present your claim and you Have to say, this is what I think it is, right? It's a good way to keep the courts from getting clogged up with pro se litigants trying to sue over everything that's ever happened to them.

0:04:17 Jenessa: I actually didn't know this so like normally if I want to sue you for a tort like we're just two random citizens, I do have to put forward a complaint that, you know, credibly alleges something.

0:04:20 Matt: I didn't either. Right, right.

0:04:30 Jenessa: But you're saying for the, if I was to sue the federal government in their official capacity with a tort, it's a little more than that, my burden to, before I can go forward.

0:04:41 Matt: Which makes sense because as I said, there's so many different reasons that people think they should be able to sue the government and most of them they can't actually sue for. It is good to actually be able to narrow this down. It's kind of like with medical malpractice where you have to start with a, I don't know if you know anything about that, but at least in Massachusetts, it's a pretty complicated process. You get it cleared basically before you can proceed with the suit because there are all kinds of frivolous reasons that people might want to do that. I just learned about this myself because of course I had to find out why it is that the president thinks he can collect $230 million against the Department of Justice and how this works. So it turns out to get things going under the federal tort claims act, you file a form 95. and I'm looking right now at the Form 95 that he filed in this particular case, in the Mar -a -Lago case. I couldn't find the Russian one. It might be out there. I wasn't looking, but it doesn't seem to be publicly available. The New York Times does have the 2024 one. They don't really talk about it in the story and I wish they did because it's so frivolous. So this form requires you to detail the nature and extent of the damages you think you suffered. Now remember, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, you can, in some cases, not very many, but in some places you can get collections protections for federal torts, like actual intentional torts. So if an agent actually assaults and injures you, and I think we talked about this before, but defamation is not one of the things you can get, but property damage, personal injury, there is a possibility. If you're sexually assaulted in custody or something like that, there's all kinds of different things that make a lot of sense that the government will allow you to sue them for. Trump in this case is really, really stretching it. We're going to link to this thing so people can see it for themselves. Again, this was filed, the Mar-a-Lago one filed in 2024. And I think people might remember that the Mar a Lago raid, quote unquote, was purposely done when he was not there to make it as simple as possible. It was done after quite a lot of deliberation. Now they're trying to say in this that there are several violations of Florida law. One of them is what they call intrusion upon seclusion, which is an invasion of privacy, basically, which is a ridiculous thing to say when you're serving a criminal search warrant that you've invaded your reasonable Well, right. Yeah. Yes.

0:04:55 Jenessa: A little bit. Oh, right. That's the definition of a warrant is, it is an intrusion on your privacy. So I got a warrant that made it legal to otherwise violate your Fourth Amendment right to privacy. That's what it is.

0:06:54 Matt: Yep. If that weren't, we're based on lies, which is one of the things they're trying. They're not even really saying it's based on lies. They just think it was improper. The incredible amount of privilege in this, just dripping with privilege, this claim, because the way this is written, they're basically, so they're drawing from the testimony of a former FBI agent, Stephen D'Antonio, who testified before Congress. And he was brought brought in by Jim Jordan to try to give the answers they wanted about how this was all a ridiculous, unjust raid. I read the transcript. I can link to the transcript, honestly, he doesn't say anything that inflammatory. He doesn't seem to think it was that much of a problem. There's basically just a difference of opinion between FBI and DOJ about how to proceed in this. DOJ, obviously, this is your national security lawyers that were doing the Mar -a -Lago case, because we're talking about classified documents. And they were very concerned that if they tried to get Trump's lawyer involved, that the documents might disappear, which we know, they tried to do. They tried to move them around. They did at one point come and look around the premises and Trump gave them consent to look around. And they actually looked into one of these rooms, full of boxes. And D 'Antonio actually testified, I'm not sure why the agents didn't actually go peek into these boxes. He said there's a lot of them, maybe they didn't have time or whatever, but they should have taken a look because Trump was consenting allegedly at that time to at least looking into the room. They saw that there were all these boxes there and there was probable cause because they knew that he had taken a lot documents with him. He wasn't supposed to have. National Archives had already requested these documents back. There had already been a a lot of back and forth as a lawyer saying, you know, you're not supposed to have these, this is not a surprise.

0:08:20 Jenessa: They got his consent to peek in one of those, they would arguably have had like plain sight at that point to just take it. You let me look at it and now I see it and it's illegal for you to have this and I'm taking it.

0:08:34 Matt: But yeah, they didn't go that far, unfortunately. And those boxes could have had anything, but they knew that they were looking for boxes. Like they knew that he had transported these things in boxes. So there's at least probable cause to know he's got massive rooms full of boxes. And we've all seen the pictures of the ballroom and the bathroom.

0:08:48 Matt: Right. So just to get a basic search warrant. And again, we're not kicking your door down. You know, this is a very orderly thing. This is not even a raid. They just like, here's our warrant, let us in, look around, grab some boxes. You know? They didn't break break things up. There's no even allegation of property damage.

0:08:46 Jenessa: Certainly for the warrant it's a relatively common thing and maybe you know we can argue about whether maybe that's not okay but you will often hear as an excuse for doing a bust down your door no knock warrant oh we were afraid they were gonna flush the drugs they were gonna run away there is already an amount of privilege to we were worried he was gonna take take away these incredibly important documents but you know we showed up when you weren't there and we were slow and deliberate about it like if it was anybody else they'd bang down your door in the middle of the night

0:09:38 Matt: I was trying to imagine someone who's accused of being a drug dealer who gets his case dismissed on what people would call a technicality, which I certainly would call Judge Cannon's ultimate dismissal of the Mar -a -Lago case based on the appointment of Jack Smith is a ridiculous technicality. I don't usually use that word. I think that's kind of a bad word in the law, but it certainly is. And she was wrong, of course, so that doesn't help either. But a sentence like this, this is from this administrative complaint. This is talking about the FBI agent in his testimony, who again, he was just sort of providing a summary of the kind of discussion that was happening between DOJ and FBI. It wasn't even really like a sharp dispute. Mr. D 'Antonio believed the FBI should have worked with the president's attorney to get consent to search the residence before seeking a warrant for the search. They're trying to say this is all inconsistent with the way they do things. And he was saying, in some cases we do, in other cases we don't. They just thought this was a national security issue. He's got classified documents. Let's just go in and get the documents, which makes a lot of sense.

0:10:35 Matt: Oh, before seeking a warrant, you should have just, now they already had consent to look. Yeah.

0:10:29 Jenessa: Wait did that say they should have gotten consent before executing a warrant before oh wait but still consent of the resident once again the definition of not how a warrant works

0:10:43 Matt: Not usually, but it can, it can. And especially these white collar cases, I think of like, you know, just so you know you're under investigation, we're going to get a warrant. If you want to let us in, we can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way, right?

0:10:54 Jenessa: All right okay yeah not in this yeah if

0:10:58 Matt: Very much like not in this situation where you've got classified documents, it can easily be moved around. And again, this happened in the middle of the case where they were told not to move anything and we've got them on video moving documents around. And that's how his body guy ended up being charged in all of this. The other thing they're alleging here is malicious prosecution, which is ridiculous. This is an indictment that got through a grand jury. So just as a starting point, that's pretty hard to do. And what they're really relying on for the malicious prosecution piece of this is just to say that they should have foreseen that he was going to have immunity from prosecution and they shouldn't have prosecuted him. Yes, the audacity of that.

0:11:33 Matt: And then, and then also the fact that this was dismissed because of the special counsel's appointment. They should have seen that coming. This whole thing is malicious just because she found that there never should have been a special counsel set up the way that it was, that Ken had found that. So this is just, I mean, and then they include some emails from, there's an FBI guy who didn't like the way it went down, and there's, you know, there's an email that's in the record. There's abusive process. It goes on. Anyway, you get the idea.

0:11:58 Jenessa: Could have foreseen those wild terrible unforeseeable things it that still wouldn't matter like literally malicious prosecution is not available just because you should have predicted even if you were like Like, oh, you should have predicted that any reasonable jury would have found me innocent. Like, I won a motion for summary judgment or whatever. Like, I know that's not the thing for a criminal, but forgive me.

0:12:31 Jenessa: Still, malicious prosecution is, it's not enough to be like, I was obviously innocent. It's so much more than that. The standard is through the roof. Like, we were taught that you will almost never win that.

0:12:45 Matt: Yeah, it has to be malice. Like, they have to actually really have it in for you, which, of course, is Trump's argument the whole time. Right. But that's what what he's been saying you know and if you if you just start to take that argument for what it is if you're saying that biden's doj had it out for the former president and it was actually a political prosecution that would be malicious prosecution if that were the case but the fact is he knew that he had documents he wasn't supposed to have and he held on to them and who knows what he was trying to do with them

0:12:50 Jenessa: You personally. Yeah right the other thing is like a huge part of malicious prosecution has almost got to be that you didn't do it like they went after you for a thing you didn'T do in order to harm you if you did it it kind of almost doesn't matter what their motivation was to get you convicted of a crime you you did commit.

0:13:32 Matt: To a point like if there's like 10 people that did the same thing at the same time and they're only going after you right you know that kind of thing like there's ways

0:13:35 Jenessa: Sure. Yes. Okay. If we have a crime that's almost never prosecuted and they prosecuted you and we can show they came after you personally for personal reasons, that is also extremely rare.

0:13:49 Matt: I can tell you from my own practice that there are plenty of people who definitely did it who think that they should be, yeah.

0:13:52 Jenessa: Oh, well, yeah. I mean, you're, you, you live in a world of some extremely vulnerable and abused clients where I'm not shocked to hear that that would happen.

0:14:04 Matt: Oh yeah. Well, there's also people though that believe that they shouldn't have been prosecuted who were rightfully prosecuted, who just want to sue anyway. And I don't help them do that. Yeah. It goes both ways.

0:14:09 Jenessa: Also that. God, what a mess.

0:14:14 Matt: Yeah, no, this whole thing, I should kind of explain why this is all being done the way it is and how it came up this time. They're seeking damages of 15 million for legal fees, for compensation of their legal fees and a hundred million dollars in punitive damages because this was just such an egregious thing to do.

0:14:28 Jenessa: Are you allowed to get punitive damages under that? I'm almost certain, I'm remembering correctly, that you can't get punative damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Is that, do you have a citation for that? Almost certain.

0:14:40 Matt: You are remembering correctly. You cannot, but you know, a boy can dream. He can ask questions. Right. I mean, this whole thing, I wish I had time to actually pick this one apart because it is one of the more ridiculous legal filings I've seen in a while. But I think they know that.

0:14:46 Jenessa: Why not? The whole thing's a mess anyway wait

0:14:57 Matt: I have a feeling I think I know why all this was filed, but I'll get to that in a minute. So what happens from here is, the New York Times brought this to everybody's attention because apparently this was out there. I did see people have been talking about it before, but not everybody realized these two things were pending. The one I just told you about was for 115 million total. The other one, apparently it all adds up to 230. Conveniently, I guess they're each $115 million. I guess that just works out. The way it works is that it is up to the DOJ to decide whether to settle, to deny the claim, or to just ignore it. And the Biden administration ignored these claims. Typically, and there's no regulatory requirement for this apparently, but they typically resolve these things within six months, and they let it go. 23 and 24. Yeah.

0:15:40 Jenessa: I gotta back you up are you telling me this was filed that long ago it was filed under the biden administration what

0:15:41 Matt: Yeah, and now, yeah. I've been thinking about this all day. I know.

0:15:41 Jenessa: The okay so this it's just been sitting

0:15:47 Matt: I wonder if maybe they ignored it because they just didn't want it to go to litigation, but they could have just denied it. They could have said, obviously, none of this is legitimate. Him. And maybe they just didn't want to get any more political. Maybe they didn't want to have a court look at it. But I mean, this would have been great to have on Discovery, like to actually, before he was president, to have this all litigated and to have it court slap it down. I don't know. I don't why they ignored it, but it does seem like a strange choice. So now, because they ignored it, you file it with the agency that you think wronged you, which is Department of Justice. And as it happens, the second and third in command of the Department of Justice are Todd Blanch and Stan Woodward, both Trump defense attorneys. Stan Woodward actually worked on the Mar -a -Lago case. Well, Blanche did a bit too. By the code of legal ethics that we are all bound under, they shouldn't be touching this.

0:15:58 Jenessa: Around oh my god what the fuck okay they litigated the opposing side of this they obviously they can't touch this with a 10 -foot pole.

0:16:38 Matt: They didn't file the administrative complaint, but they were his defense attorneys during the time when this warrant was being served. So obviously they can't have anything to do with it. And if they do, if there's any provable thing that shows that they had anything to do avec it, they should be disbarred. That's just such an obvious conflict of interest. And the official statement from the Justice Department when asked about this was, was in any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice followed the guidance of career ethics officials, except we fired most of them.

0:17:05 Jenessa: Law School 101, you can't have ever been on both sides of a lawsuit, and that doesn't just mean within the one lawsuit. If that ever progresses to any other stage of litigation, any other semi -related lawsuit in the future, you Can Only Ever Have Been on One Side of the V forever.

0:17:29 Matt: But yeah, it's so bad.

0:17:30 Jenessa: So blatant.

0:17:30 Matt: We covered this before, but Ed Martin, formerly the DC US attorney, was on both sides. He actually represented some January 6th defendants that he ended up dismissing cases of in his own name as the US attorney. Absolutely. That resulted, of course, in a 65 Project Bar complaint, as this should as well. $230 million. And Trump's entire deal, the way that he uses the legal system is these these outrageous things, like the Wall Street Journal thing of whatever billions of dollars he's trying to get from the Wall street Journal for publishing something that was absolutely true about the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book. And he seeks this ridiculous amount of money and then settles, like he's been doing the media companies. And I think that's what he's trying to do here. I think he's actually trying to force the Department of Justice to settle when they could just deny this claim and litigate it. And they should just deny it on the ground. And honestly, ethically, no attorney should have anything to do with this at all because he's the sitting president and it's his Department of Justice. I mean, it's under him. He thinks it's his Department Of Justice, but it's, you know, under this administration. They should not be paying out the sitting President no matter what. And as a matter of basic policy, it should be denied. It's already frivolous. I looked into the mechanics of this and the associate attorney general, who is now Stan Woodward, that's the third in command, is the person who has to sign off on a settlement. And then the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, has to authorize any amount of money paid out over $4 million. So they would both be intimately involved with this decision decision and they should not be. But of course, does it make much of a difference if they just turn this over to a deputy? I don't know. Probably not. You know, everybody knows what's supposed to happen.

0:17:40 Jenessa: Unbelievable. Your reward for all of this is you ended up being president.

0:18:59 Matt: Yeah, I know. I know you want it to pay for your ballroom.

0:18:59 Jenessa: What more do you want? Like, come on. It's, oh my God. Wait, who is paying for that?

0:19:08 Matt: That is a whole other. Can they do this? It's private donors.

0:19:11 Jenessa: What?

0:19:12 Matt: Another way to give money to the president directly.

0:19:14 Jenessa: You gotta be fucking Jesus.

0:19:14 Matt: Yes, definitely can't do that either. I don'T think. But I didn't have time to look into that. I'm pretty sure you can't.

0:19:21 Jenessa: Come back to that some other day.

0:19:23 Matt: Oh, no, I'm going to have to. Just for perspective, an actual federal tort claims act involving a search warrant gone bad. Wrong house, injury, property damage, trauma. This is a Supreme Court case. It was actually, you know, I meant to do this earlier and I still want to cover some of these. There were some good Supreme Court cases last year. It did happen last term. This one was actually decided on my birthday in June of this year. And a unanimous Supreme Court agreed that this could go forward. And this was some sort of reliance on a personal GPS device and the team's failure to notice the street signs. And they ended up with the completely wrong address, did a bunch damage and traumatize these poor people that lived in this house. This is Martin v. U .S., and we'll link to it. It's a great case, actually. It has a Gorsuch opinion and very solid Sotomayor concurrence as well. That is the kind of thing that you should actually be able to file a Form 95 over because they traumatized your children, assaulted you, and busted your door down, and who knows what else, right? It happens all the time with bad search warrant. The answer to can they do this is they absolutely should not ever pay this out. You can make the claim. You you can make whatever claim you want. But the fact that lawyers, I mean, even just for trying to get punitive damages in an FTCCA case, that seems to me like a bar complaint. Like that's completely frivolous.

0:20:32 Jenessa: Lawyer, like we double double checked that in two seconds. Any lawyer could double check that in two seconds if you are a lawyer who signed your name on the piece of paper asking for the thing that you know you cannot ask for. Once again 101 it's not just about you can't do that legally it's also as an ethics responsibility you that's frivolous you can't file something that you know will be unsuccessful which

0:20:40 Matt: Oh, they know. Yeah, I just looked at the complaint again. And the footnote on the punitive damage is thing is just talking about all the money that he ended up having to spend on legal costs.

0:21:08 Jenessa: Would be compensatory compensate me for what I lost not punish you for being so I almost wonder sometimes if they just write things in to appease him like he's just having a little toddler hissy fit and they have to write something that will make him stop

0:21:19 Matt: Yep. Worst client, worst client you could have somebody like that. So that's what's going on there. This is this is another one. This of just how bad things are getting if this is paid out. The other thing is too, there's no transparency on these. These actually, they don't have to release about if they reach a settlement on these now, I assume that there'll be a FOIA and immediately, if there's any indication that something might've happened, people will find out eventually this will come out and Todd Blanchard, Stan Woodward's involvement will come up, but it's not something you'll necessarily see immediately because it's something they have to put out.

0:21:55 Jenessa: If it was a private citizen I wouldn't necessarily want that to be immediate public record there should be a record but yeah that that makes sense.

0:22:04 Matt: And they'll probably say there's some FOIA exception. I really don't know if there is, but anyway. All right. Well, we'll come back and I want to talk about another can they do that from the other side of things, the refusal of Mike Johnson to swear in Adelaida Grijalva from Arizona and the lawsuit that has followed. We'll be right back.

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0:23:57 Matt: So now we're going to talk About something where I don't really care if they can do that or not, because the courts absolutely should. It's just so obviously the right thing to do that I don'T actually care if the court has jurisdiction to do it. And I'll just tell you that honestly, that's where I'm at with it. We're gonna talk about Adelaide Grijelva, who I think everybody probably knows by now was elected to replace her father, who passed while he was in office, Rahava, a very popular representative from Arizona. So this young woman was elected in his stead on September 25, 2025. That wasn't that long ago.

0:24:03 Jenessa: I think I was watching C-SPAN because I'm a dork. And I was watching when the SAVE Act debate was happening and people stood up to talk about his passing. And even Mike Johnson said something nice about him. Like my understanding is he had a bipartisan love for this representative.

0:24:49 Matt: Oh, yeah. No, he was an office a long time and he did great stuff with immigration from what I remember. So she got 68 % and Mike Johnson just refused to swear her in. Now, there are a couple of reasons for that. There's the obvious, the fact that Republicans are in charge. They just don't want to. Johnson is citing the fact, that it's during a government shutdown. He just doesn't want to do it, because he thinks the Republicans shouldn't have to do anything. The government shutdown doesn't mean that Congress is shut down. The lights aren't off in Congress. What Congress is doing right now, they're working less than they ever work. Johnson has kept them out of session to record amounts, because they don't wanna deal with the Epstein stuff. They just don' t want to have to touch it, for obvious reasons. What they've been doing is these pro pro forma sessions where they show up, they do the prayer, they do the little intro, they appoint somebody speaker pro tem, they give five minutes and they leave, right? So the pro forma session, otherwise, constitutionally, if they just tried to adjourn for more than four days, it's not allowed under the Constitution, they actually have to have permission from the other house if they want to adjourn for four days. So they don't technically adjourn, they're in session, it is just not regular session. It's this weird pro forma thing. But because they are technically in session. Mike Johnson, any given day could just swear. There's no question that this is something that he has an obligation to do. She's asked multiple times. He's made excuses about how there's some sort of Pelosi precedent, because Nancy Pelosi once allowed it to take 25 days or something. But it turns out that was actually the date the person had picked so that her friends and family could be there.

0:26:09 Jenessa: Oh, come on.

0:26:11 Matt: Yeah, I think that was somebody who's actually replacing her husband. So I think she probably needs a little time. Come on. And again, he's not saying the Pelosi rule, even. He just saying there's this precedent. And they're just grasping because they just don't want to put her in there. Because once she's in office, she has made it very clear that she will sign the discharge petition, which will get the Epstein bill, the Thomas Massey, the amendment rather, that Thomas Massey put in that will require the U .S. government to release all of the Epstein records. And the discharge petition is a way to get something out of committee when the committee doesn't want to release it.

0:26:41 Matt: So it's pretty rare. It doesn't happen very often, but it takes a majority of the House and we would have a majority at that point. That's the other reason they don't want it. Do it, obviously. So she'd be the 218th signature on that petition and the Epsteine files would come out.

0:26:52 Jenessa: You mean just a majority in support of that amendment?

0:26:55 Matt: Yeah.

0:26:55 Jenessa: The Democrats would still be down a couple of seats, right?

0:26:57 Matt: Yeah, I think so. Again, I don't ever get numbers, but they have just enough to an absolute majority.

0:27:01 Jenessa: Just enough because there's enough Republicans who are also not happy about this. Yeah.

0:27:07 Matt: That's right. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. But certainly it makes the numbers a little better. That'S not even really a conspiracy theory. She said it herself. I don't think it's unfair at all to say that. I mean, obviously it's just the Republicans being Republicans and just trying to claim absolute power. But I think that really is what it is with the discharge petition.

0:27:21 Jenessa: Well, I mean, he's practically openly, right, said that that's why he keeps them out of session. He was doing that earlier in the year with when they tried to pass pass the very bipartisan bill about remote voting for parents who just had a baby, that would have passed. And he kept them out of session until people agreed not to put it on the floor. So like he's been really using this in a way that it's confusing because you normally think, well, the Senate has this filibuster that locks them up all the time, but the House doesn't. So if you've you've got 50 % of the votes plus one, things just go through the House. And all of a sudden, the House is procedurally locked up in a way. I mean, somebody will have better historical knowledge than me about whether anything like this has ever happened before.

0:28:12 Matt: This particular thing of refusing to seat somebody has not happened in this way. I'm going to talk about a time when it did happen for much better reasons. We are now in the second longest shutdown in federal history, and they're just trying to use that as an excuse. And of course, just to remind everybody, we're in a shutdown because the Republicans could not produce a budget. We're in shutdown because Democrats are insisting, rightfully, that we maintain Medicaid protections. And because people's insurance in many cases will double or triple, including Fox News viewers and Republicans and people who otherwise think that Mike Johnson's doing a great job or going to have tremendous healthcare costs. I think this is worth the fight. But Mike Johnson, of course. And Steve Scalise, we read a piece earlier this week from Scalize talking about how this is Democrats' fault. And And of course, we would love to give you all these socialist benefits if it weren't for these radical socialists that don't want to have let you have them. The thing that caught my eye here, though, was that this week, the attorney general of Arizona, Chris Mays, filed a lawsuit demanding in federal court that Mike Johnson either be forced to swear Grijalva in or that somebody else be appointed, or basically anybody who's able to administer oaths, to swear her in. And the question arises, can they do that? But it's more from our side now because this is a wild swing.

0:29:23 Jenessa: This is really smart because, you know, I was thinking if she sued, obviously, you might feel she won the election, right? She's entitled to the seat. But really the people who are entitled to to the seat are the citizens of arizona who elected her they're not being represented they probably have better standing than her to demand this so

0:29:45 Matt: That's right. That's right, and that's what they say in the suit is that we're doing this on the behalf of the constituents because, and she represents a majority Latino district. I heard her interview talking about how her father was very big on constituent services, and he said, she is really heartbroken right now that she can't even provide constituent services. She can't do the basic stuff that your representatives do where they help you out with federal agencies or help you find resources because she has no resources. She doesn't doesn't have a government email account. She doesn't have an office she can fund. She didn't have a budget. She's just hanging around waiting for somebody to swear in because her job doesn't exist until the speaker actually does that by law under 2 U.S.C. 25, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute.

0:30:20 Jenessa: Is the issue that it just doesn't have a time like he has to swear her in but there's just somebody neglected to put a time limit on that

0:30:25 Matt: Yeah, nobody thought they needed to do that because it's just so obvious, you know, it's one of those things that why would you have to? Because obviously we're gonna do that. All the things he's talking about as exceptions are not exceptions. He's sworn in Republicans already who were elected in special elections. He swore them in out of regular session. He just insisting that somehow he just doesn't to do this because Nancy Pelosi unless he let it go 25 days once or something. I don't know. Honestly, Mike Johnson is just such a slime. The way that he talks and the way that he just delivers these lies so coolly when you hear him talk, it's really something.

0:31:00 Matt: Oh, yeah. So this complaint, I was wondering, because you're talking about the judicial branch forcing the legislature to do something. It's in that way, right?

0:30:58 Jenessa: Very McConnell-esque oh

0:31:08 Matt: Not just saying that there's an unconstitutional thing they've done, but saying you have to actually take an affirmative action to do Something right now. And I was thinking about the equivalent would be like, what if the the legislature, what if Congress, and a better Congress, passed something saying that Clarence Thomas had to recuse himself perhaps from certain cases that he maybe had financial ties to, which might be quite a lot of cases, just to name one example, right? I think that would be unconstitutional for the legislature to step in and say that a Supreme Court justice can't sit on certain kinds of cases. That's up to the court to determine.

0:31:07 Jenessa: Hmm as opposed to like creating an ethics thing if they named a specific individual and named specific cases

0:31:45 Matt: Or I think even maybe if they tried to set the court's recusal rules, because Roberts has been pretty clear that he believes that it's completely up to the Supreme Court to determine who is recused and who's not. Nobody else can tell them. It's an interesting question for another day. I can't imagine this legislature would ever do it, but no.

0:31:58 Jenessa: Well oh no they're not going to create ethics rules no no

0:32:01 Matt: Or try to do anything with recusal. But again, you can't. We have to have these kinds of separations. Obviously, this is basic civics here. But I do think that there's an interesting precedent here with Powell v. McCormick in 1966, the only time the Supreme Court has considered this. And I've seen different opinions. Because to me, when I read Powell v., McCormick. Now this is a very different situation. Adam Powell was very controversial and he actually was in contempt for refusing to pay out $150 ,000 in fines for a defamation suit in which for some reason, there must be some backstory to this, but he'd called a Puerto Rican domestic worker, a bag woman for organized crime on TV, just like picked on some 60 year old household worker. So she sues, she gets $150 thousand. He refuses to pay it. He's held in contempt. He also, it turns out, was lying about travel expenses. He was illegally directing public funds to a a salary for his wife. He was being investigated by Congress. So essentially, Congress refused to seat him. They just said, you know, you can't be one of us. You could see this happening maybe with like a George Santos type, which, you Know, congratulations, I guess, Mr. Santos. But they expelled George Santos, right? He was already sworn in. Sure.

0:33:04 Jenessa: Right which they are entitled to do that's totally within the rules, the voters voted him in and Congress can vote him back out, basically, which on the basis of his conduct, I think was obviously appropriate.

0:33:08 Matt: Oh, absolutely. They should. Right. You know, this is actually coming up for the first time, but we might want to do Powell v. McCormick to go deeper on it because it is a Warren Court case.

0:33:26 Jenessa: Oh, hey, yeah.

0:33:27 Matt: The finding was essentially that Congress has its own ability to expel people, but it has no ability to exclude elected people. So you can swear him in. You could still expel him after you swear him in, but you got to swear him. You can walk him out.

0:33:38 Jenessa: Okay. So it'd be kind of like the equivalent of taking a judge and making them a judge, and then immediately impeaching them.

0:33:46 Matt: Yeah, right, right. But he's still appointed by, you know, through the process. So, you got a swear him an interesting case with Powell v. McCormick because essentially it was moot. By the time it got there, he had been reelected and had actually already been sworn in by the next Congress. They actually let it go. Yeah.

0:33:59 Jenessa: He got reelected after all that?

0:34:02 Matt: He got reelected. He was popular, I guess. And so the Warren court went a little further than they probably should have. And they decided this was actually a justiciable question. You can see how this might be a non -justiciable political question about how Congress conducts its business. And there's been a lot of criticism of this case. There's an election lawyer named Andy Craig, who seems to have a pretty solid handle on this stuff. And he's saying he doesn't think that Powell v. McCormick applies here, that it's actually pretty clear that it doesn't, in that there was a very specific, very distinguishable case in which Congress was openly saying, we know we're not supposed to do this and we're doing it.

0:34:33 Matt: Right now, he's at least pretending there's some reason or whatever, that they basically admitted fault in that case. But if they'd just gone through the motions and just done the kind of stuff that that Johnson is doing, where he's just out there pretending that he has some ability to do this. And Andy Craig was saying that Powell v. McCormick probably should have gone differently. As it is, and I read an interesting comment even from a law review article in 1969 at the time of Powell v. McCormick, just a few years later, saying that they dramatically overstepped the whole thing. Either way, this case is based on Powell v. McCormick because that's all there is for precedent.

0:35:02 Matt: And Craig says that it has happened, I guess, in other circumstances. And generally speaking, the Supreme Court has said that this is the one time they're going to do this. But the real problem that I see here, no matter how you interpret Powell, is that there's a very short list of people under 2 U .S .C. 25, and he doesn't really get into this, but I just got thinking about it, that can actually swear somebody in. And under federal law, it's only the Speaker of the House, the Speaker pro tem, or someone designated by an active Congress to swear in a House member.

0:35:30 Matt: And the weakest part, unfortunately, of this complaint that May has filed, because there's nothing else she can do about this, they're saying that because there There is a process by which any member of the House swears in the Speaker, and then the Speaker swears in everybody else, that she's saying, well, look, there is a provision that allows anybody to swear in a Speaker. So by extension, anybody else could constitutionally administer the oath. They're trying to get the court to order, essentially, that anybody who can administer an oath can administer an oath. I don't care. She should be sworn in, and there should be declaratory judgment from a D .C. court saying that she should be sworn in. And Mike Johnson should have to spend taxpayer money to explain why not, if he wants to fight it.

0:36:06 Jenessa: Heard Sotomayor make arguments along this line frequently of like, this, I know if you read the literal text and like turn your brain off, it would seem like, well, they didn't put a time limit, so he's not forced to ever do it. That obviously can't be what it means. Because if that's what it mean, he could refuse to see every single Democrat who wins in 2026.

0:36:34 Jenessa: The entire House turns over every two years and re-wins their seat so that cannot be what the law means no matter what the words look like they say in isolation when you look at context because we live on planet earth that's obviously not what it means I feel like I'm taking crazy pills else.

0:36:58 Matt: This is what it's like in 2025 to do legal commentary because, again, as I said at the beginning, we understand that there's no way that anybody who wrote the law, certainly in the Constitution, and I don't think the founders would appreciate that you're just refusing to swear on somebody who's been elected, but, you know, we're playing Calvin ball and we're at this point where we're getting beyond the norms. We're not quite totally beyond the norm. Arms. I think people are exaggerating a little bit how far beyond their arms we are, but we are really on the edge and pushing all of our norms, and many of them have been broken. And a lot of this stuff really is what they used to call a gentleman's agreement, right? I guess ladies can be involved in gentleman's agreements now too, but just a handshake kind of thing that, yeah, of course you'll swear our guy in when he gets elected. That's how it works. This is an interesting one though, because I do generally, as a matter of principle, like to follow the law and generally like to have the law followed, but I just don't care. I swear her in.

0:37:48 Matt: It's Johnson who's breaking breaking the law here. So like, tell him to swear him in.

0:37:47 Jenessa: Once somebody else is just skipping all of the obvious laws, it doesn't make any sense that you have to keep following all of The Law that they are using to trap you by breaking it. Like, that's not how anything works.

0:38:11 Matt: And politically, this is the best move. This is absolutely the way to go, is to go to court and force the hand, right? And make them stand up and say why they're not doing it. And have the people of Arizona get behind you and say, this isn't who we elected. So, you know, best of luck to Adelita Grijalva. I hope this has resolved shorter court order. It'd be very interesting to see if it requires one, and we'll certainly follow that.

0:38:30 Jenessa: Yeah, I want to hear Gorsuch explain the textualism on this one.

0:38:35 Matt: So in short, release the Epstein files. All right, what's What's next? I'm going to talk about a little less fun. Can they do that? We've got the first round of Antifa terrorism charges based on the stuff that we've been talking about. We knew this was coming. This is bad. I'm not going to tell you it's not. We've been taking a lot over the last few weeks for very good reason about the Trump administration's intentions to turn capital A Antifa into a terror group. There's no such thing as domestic terror group We've talked about it on our Vapid Response shows. We're talking about it here on Fridays. Is, I think it's one of the most important things in the American law right now to focus on. Because as I've said before, if everybody's Antifa, nobody's Antifia. If nobody's antifa, everybody's antifia, you know what I mean?

0:38:39 Jenessa: Great sounds like a song just

0:39:18 Matt: A made up organization, capital Antifa as we know, and the DOJ just did something to really underscore where this is all going. They took a case that people have already been arrested and charged in. Yeah, this is the situation in Alvarado, Texas, where there was a group of people and they're described here as a cell of people. They do seem to be pretty well organized and armed. 18 people have been arrested in connection with this action. We've talked about it on this show before. I think this is the kind of thing that's just not helping. It's counterproductive. And I think as everyone listening knows by now, we are absolutely opposed to any kind of violence against ICE or against government officials in any way. This really goes to show because what happened in this case was that there was a regular sort of protest outside an ICE thing. And somebody opened fire and hit not an ICE officer, but a police officer had showed up because ICE is too cowardly. They just stayed inside, but a police officer showed up to deal with this disturbance. And again, this was a pretty routine protest until somebody started shooting fireworks into the facility, which required the police to come out. Apparently there was some vandalization.

0:40:18 Jenessa: Fireworks not a not a gun oh

0:40:20 Matt: No, there was a gun. Then it escalated. But in this case, 18 people have already been arrested and charges were already filed in July for the attempted murder for the people who actually did the shooting. These charges I'm going to talk about today are against two other people that were there. As it's very clear from this indictment, these people did not pick up a gun, they didn't do anything, They were just present. They were there. That's why I'm talking about it, because this is very bad. They're being charged essentially as materially supporting terrorists. And this is the kind of thing that I'm very concerned that I have been concerned about. This is where things are going. We have to sit down and parse this stuff out and understand you can't just let the government tell you who the terrorists are. You can't just let the government put these labels on people because this indictment is a joke. It starts out with, late in the night of 4th of July, 2025, a North Texas, capital A, Antifa, capital C cell, and then in parentheses, Antifacel, which is very funny because usually you don't put something in parentheses when it's, you know, anyway, whatever, of at least 11 operatives, clad in black and donning masks, some of whom were wearing body armor and carrying firearms, attacked a Prairie Land detention center. But in this first paragraph, they're talking about how Now, one, capital A, Antifa member, co -conspirator one, who's not one of the people in this indictment, yelled, get to the rifles. Seconds later, opened fire, striking the officer in the neck. He did survive. All that I'm saying is that Autumn Hill, who is dead named in this complaint, because that's not the name that is in the birth certificate, apparently, and Zachary Evitz were there. That's what they're saying. That should concern everybody who attends protests, who are concerned about resisting what's going on right now. And they're accusing him of being a part of an Antifa cell, again, an organization that doesn't exist. This complaint is very different in its style and its formatting and the way it's written than the original complaint in July, which I also have up here, which has a lot of pictures and is also kind of a speaking indictment. But it's very specifically oriented to this Antifa thing. There's no mention of Antifa in the first complaint, first indictment?

0:42:08 Jenessa: Wait isn't there also that issue of okay so normally if you make something a crime somebody who did the thing before that cannot be convicted of it I forget the name for that this terrorism does it let's humor this idea that you could be part of the antifa group they designated it as a terrorist group like recently how can they convict you of being a member of a terrorist organization and doing a terrorism before the designation that's

0:42:45 Matt: That's a great question. It does sound like it would be ex post facto. But the fact is that, yeah, it's the same way that they could charge Luigi Mangione with, because it's the same charge. It's the same kind of enhancement.

0:42:50 Jenessa: The word so it's still the same enhancement it's just they created this group it still feels fishy to me that the group label didn't well because this is the problem right is if the group really existed it would make sense that you could be an ex well still I would just assume you would have to be an accessory to the crime if you were an accessory of the crime you really did help out intentionally then fine but you wouldn't need this This, God, this is really weird and confusing. Oh, I don't think it's confusing from you. I think the government isn't just out of their minds right now.

0:43:32 Matt: Yeah, let me try to make it a little more clear. No, it is confusing because there's no such thing as a designation of a terrorist organization as we talked about, domestic terrorist organization, right? So they're just saying that these people are doing terror, essentially.

0:43:42 Jenessa: Yeah, so how can this be? Cool.

0:43:49 Matt: But as you said, they weren't talking about Capitol Antifa in the same way in July that they are now. And they really want to make a point. This is an extremely political indictment in the same way the federal indictment of Luigi Mangione was strictly pretty much a political prosecution when the state attorney charged him with murder and with the same kind of terrorism charges, which have been dismissed since. This though, I have just all kinds of concerns about this. The charges come down to that they're conspiring with and aiding and abetting the person who actually did the shooting.

0:44:16 Jenessa: And if they did actually do that, if they had actually aided and abetted, they could, that would be normal to get accused of and to be indicted for the crime, right? That's not totally wild.

0:44:31 Matt: If they drove them there, or if they provided them with money, or handed them a gun, or did anything.

0:44:33 Jenessa: Sure bought the weapons or yeah

0:44:38 Matt: But there's no allegation like that. And there's a picture of some documents that were found, I guess, like a box of documents that another member of the group was trying to get rid of that involved the phrase insurrectionary anarchy or something. I don't know. But again, this is not an organized group. They're just just doing their own thing and apparently intent on committing violence against an ICE officer, at least prepared to. This, again, I just want to say is very concerning because this could be any of us. If you're at a protest, you're anywhere near something where something like this happens, they are really intent on making these points about how Antifa exists and how as a matter of sort of political expediency, it's very good for them to be able to say that anybody who's at an ICE protest is an Antifa member because then they can do whatever they want, including these very very extreme criminal indictments. So we will see.

0:45:27 Jenessa: I mean that's really I go to a lot of protests I go with friends I don't imagine any of my friends would do something like that but if god forbid one of them surprised me I wouldn't want our mere association to mean all of a sudden I'm aiding and abetting a crime like that's the whole definition is you would have to have known and with intent help like that's an intent crime it's always intent to assist somebody this is shocking

0:45:58 Matt: This is guilt by association straight up. And, you know, partners and roommates have been arrested, people that were never anywhere near the scene. You know, and again, maybe there's some connection to the weapons that were purchased. Maybe there's more stuff that's going to come out. But clearly, these proceedings have been extreme. And this is exactly what I was expecting, you now, been expecting for a long time, that anything that has to do with any kind of opposition to ICE and to the many overreaches is of authoritarianism in this country right now, are going to be slapped down this way. And this is already being used as an example of dangerous antifa, this one indictment, right? Which is, again, about something that happened in July and that has already been charged very thoroughly with charges that are a lot harder to argue with in many of the cases, although I do think that some of these people were overcharged as well. Most of these defendants are trans also, and I think that's extremely relevant, unfortunately, and I have to mention it. To close out my round of, can they do that? Yes, absolutely. They can try to bring an indictment. Apparently, they were able to secure and get this through a grand jury. That they were able to show a grand jury. They thought these people were capital Antifa. I think it's going to be a little harder to actually show this at trial, depending on what kind of jury you end up with. We're going to have to keep a watch on these because I'm afraid it's not going to the last of these guilt by association Antifa prosecutions. I think it's gonna be the first of many. And I can't say I'm not afraid myself about this.

0:47:12 Jenessa: I mean that's the design right is to scare people out of going to protests to scare people out associating with other people because if god forbid somebody else gets in trouble for actually doing something that now you're in trouble too that's The Whole Point is the fear tactic.

0:47:32 Matt: So yeah. So this is a scary time. No question. And there's more coming. AndI'm not going to say there's not. Andi will say that within the last few months, we've had had three very well -respected scholars of fascism leave the United States on purpose, saying that they don't feel safe in the United State anymore, took cheating jobs in Toronto, and made Mark Bray the author of the Antifa handbook, which is not a violent radical handbook that is just a history book, essentially, has relocated to Spain and is essentially now seeking asylum from the United Stated within the last couple of weeks because of what he suffered from members of Turning Point USA. So we'll see. Keep the faith. And the answer, once again, to can they do that is in the end, the law should not allow them to, but maybe they will.

0:48:11 Jenessa: Can't arrest all of us.

0:48:13 Matt: That's right. They absolutely can't. And especially if we're wearing awesome costumes. So keep it up. All right. We'll be right back with a quick footnote.

0:48:23 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:48:23 Matt: Jenessa Seymour, patent bar taker. How are you feeling as of this moment about your experience?

0:48:29 Jenessa: I'm so tired. I think I probably pulled it off. We'll see.

0:48:37 Matt: All What does it actually involve? What is the series of things you had to do today? The gauntlet?

0:48:41 Jenessa: It's all multiple choice. Honestly, I would have felt way better with an essay. My patents class was all essays and I nailed it. I got an A plus in that class. I would have no problem explaining to you these topics, but good lord. So it's open book -ish. Here's the problem. Real life, what does open book mean as a lawyer? First of all, you take your time to be really thorough and make sure that you know what you're saying before you say it. This is time pressured, which is just, why is every standardized test time pressured? There's no need for this. Until you can justify why in real life there will be a time pressure, I know we got to go home eventually, so set a cap, but making it so that you know people are going to be sweating and rushing, there's no logic to it. There's no purpose.

0:49:37 Matt: Yeah. I mean, legal filings have deadlines, but they're not usually five minutes.

0:49:42 Jenessa: Yeah, they're like two weeks to write on a single topic. There might be a couple of legal issues within the single case, not five minutes to address multiple topics within one question. Question the other thing is like you would be searching stuff and you know if I wanted to figure something out I might put into google like mpep which is the manual and I would put in like um maintenance fees grace period who can apply and that is definitely not word for word in that order what would appear in the manual but I would still get almost exactly what I'm looking for if I put put the right words in, right? This open book is a really old PDF reader where you have to go into the correct chapter first. This is a 3 ,000 -page manual. You go into the correct chapter. The find feature has to be word -for -word, and it doesn't pick up things like apostrophes and commas and stuff. So if you're looking for, like, examiner's apostrophe s, you don't include that word. That's never going to work. It is just rough. You only have a couple of minutes to read a giant paragraph. Look up all kinds of nitty gritty stuff on like, oh, who can pay this? And there's not a chapter called fees. You get the fees for this thing or in this chapter and the fees forthis other thing orin this other chapter. And it's just hell, man. I was so tired. Stuff came up that I wasso not expecting at such a frequency. Halfway through, I was like a truly a part of me went, is this a prank? Like someone is messing with me. I did not prepare for this. Oh boy, it was rough. So I continue to find the topic area very interesting. I continue to not want to be a patent lawyer in the current political climate. I am enjoying helping people in our great time of need. I hope I passed. The problem is because it's open book, somebody Somebody got the idea that it would be okay to ask you questions that you have to look up word for word in the 3 ,000 page manual. Nobody could possibly have memorized all this, but then you got to be real good at doing that. And I have ADD and I just go

0:52:06 Jenessa: Off into la -la land and read other paragraphs and then, oh no, I got to come back. It was very chaotic today and I'm very glad it's over. True.

0:52:17 Matt: You know, that's interesting though. That is a lot more realistic than the actual bar exam where you don't get to have any of your materials with you, which it would be malpractice in actual life to try to write out in a legal opinion without looking anything up. So at least you get something in front of you that's a little more realistic.

0:52:20 Jenessa: Very true. True. True. And it's a single topic area, whereas the bar exam is like 10 topic areas. Don't look anything up.

0:52:36 Matt: Right, and you don't know what proportion, like with the bar, you don' t know what the proportion of the topic is you're going to end up with, right? And like you might have more questions on commercial paper than you expected or whatever. How long did this thing take?

0:52:46 Jenessa: So I had accommodations. Thank God. I have always had the issue with my ADD is the exact brand that's like terrible for test taking because I just, I space so bad and people are like, oh, the room's going to be so quiet. There's no such thing as quiet enough for me. I hear you you flip a paper clear your throat or whatever and I'm just like thinking about your anything I it makes me think about you and your life story and the birds outside and I just I can't right I get distracted so easily so I I did not have too much of a challenge I had a huge challenge getting accommodations for the bar exam getting it for the patent exam asking the federal government and not a private corporation I had no trouble they were like yeah you have a diagnosis it's here and all of your documentation makes sense for why you should have accommodations. So I did it over two days and it was, I just had one and a half times. So, I had two hours and 15 minutes, a half hour break, two hours in 15 minutes and then I did that again the next day.

0:53:09 Matt: Drinking water. Yep. Yep, yeah sure right sure

0:53:52 Jenessa: Normally, the test is three hours, half hour, break, three hours. So it is grueling. It is exhausting. With with or without accommodations, it is just, holy crap, I was so tired.

0:54:07 Jenessa: It's 100 questions. Why you got to ask me 100 questions? You can't figure out in 50 questions if I know enough. You need another 50 to figure it out. Like, ridiculous. The whole, all standardized testing. I hate it. It goes both

0:54:06 Matt: And it's all technical it's funny you know I have the kind of add where I'm actually really good at standardized testing and I don't know why but I I can slip into hyper focus for that there's so many things I can't get into hyperfocus for that I really wish I could but you sit me down in a room like that and you put something like that in front of me and I will

0:54:29 Jenessa: Ways. Oh, I'll hyper focus on how dumb and ridiculous the test is. I'm hyper focusing on the essay I'm going to write about why I shouldn't have to do this. Like that's what's happening in my brain. But yeah, I hear this both ways. Some people with ADHD, it's like very much that.

0:54:40 Matt: Drill right right

0:54:55 Jenessa: And then for me, I'm on the opposite end of that spectrum. And it is interesting.

0:54:54 Matt: Yeah no yeah no I've got got the kind where I can't keep my house clean, but I can read a bunch of books.

0:55:05 Jenessa: Listener, you can't see the fact that I'm very upset Zen Kester won't let me blur my background. So also also a mess over here

0:55:08 Matt: Honestly, your house looks very organized compared to mine. I'm embarrassed to say so. All right. Well, let's leave it at that. We've had a fun time with Can They Do That? So I think we can get out of here and come back next week for more Law on the News. And you can go take a nap or whatever you're going to do. Go celebrate, have a drink, enjoy yourself. All Right. Well very good. Thank you you listeners. And please support the show at patreon .com slash law and support all independent media in this time when we can actually talk about what's going on with the reality of Antifa and everything else. We'll be back on Monday with a great interview with Aaron Reikland -Melnick from the American Immigration Council, somebody I've been wanting to have on for a long time. Had a lot of fun talking to him. And of course, back on Wednesday with some more Vapid Response and Friday with more Law in the News with Genesis Seymour. So we'll see you then.

0:55:31 Jenessa: My god pass out bye nope

0:56:38 Matt: Welcome to Opening Arguments it is friday october 20th I don't know what day it is welcome to opening arguments it is friday october 22nd 2025 and this is matt cameron 24th today that was literally stating today's date that doesn't help anybody

0:56:47 Jenessa: It's gonna be friday the 24th we are recording on wednesday the 22nd 24th

0:56:54 Matt: Welcome to Opening Arguments it is october 25th no it's not wow this calcula strikes again

0:56:59 Jenessa: You might want to just skip that

0:57:03 Matt: You're the one whose brain is supposed to be scrambled I'm gonna try really hard not to use so okay or all right oh

0:57:11 Jenessa: Yeah you sounded pretty normal to

0:57:13 Matt: Good okay all right so oh no I just did it again. All right. So, oh, I just did it again. Wow. Throw that in the supercut.

0:57:15 Jenessa: Me you'll see me on a street corner anyway oh that sounded terrible um with With other people with signs and not, you know what? Fine, leave it in. It's fine.

0:57:40 Matt: Antifa Patrol.