SCOTUS Made Gerrymandering So Easy, You'd Have to Be a Texas Republican to F It Up

Transcript

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

0:00:03 Matt: This woman, Noelle Turnage, she released a number of emails from Glenn Maxwell. She was illegally fired because she is a whistleblower.

0:00:18 Jenessa: It is, in fact, important to find an internal logical consistency for your legal arguments and your legal behavior because it is going to come back and bite them in the ass.

0:00:34 Matt: Welcome to Opening Arguments. It is Friday, and we're here to talk about the news as we so often do, and there is a lot of it, as there so often is. With me once again is Jenessa Seymour, voting rights and civil rights attorney, and I think this is yet another Friday where we've got pretty much good news, pretty solid.

0:00:51 Jenessa: Yeah. We got a really solid voting case coming in and the Texas redistricting one that's going to be, I think, really excellent news.

0:01:00 Matt: Yeah, well, I think that the theme here, if anything, is the DOJ just taking L's. Yeah. Formerly one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the world is really falling on its face in several different directions right now. So we'll be talking about the Comey indictment and what a complete disaster that has become and what A Joke, Lindsay Halligan, and that indictment have become. And we're going to talk, of course, once again about Jeffrey Epstein because we can't get away from the Epstein files right now, I'm going to bookend it. We're going to talk about what might be good news with the president signing off, but maybe not. And then we'll have a footnote at the end where I'm going to honor a hero of the Epstein story. There are heroes left in America, and you could be one too after you hear this story, perhaps. Plenty to talk about. I won't spoil it all right now, but let's come on back and get started with a round of news. Excited to hear what you've got to say.

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0:01:52 Matt: So we dedicated Monday and Wednesday this week to the Epsteins emails because we think this is an important story. And we certainly learned quite a lot about Jeffrey Epstein's general rate of literacy, his commitment to typographic excellence. You know, if you can measure good moral character through prose, it certainly is. I know it's not the worst thing about him, but it's still after having trying to read those emails, I'm still holding it against him.

0:02:19 Jenessa: Frustrating, it seems. Yeah.

0:02:20 Matt: Very frustrating. Plus a lot of missing context. But I got to say, you know, I don't plan to live a life which will require Congress to release my emails. But if I did, I'd be very proud. No matter how embarrassing some of those emails would be, they're brilliantly written. And I'm very proud out of my prose. Nothing against people who just can't write, but honestly, it's so jarring to see all these people describing him as brilliant and articulate and insightful, and he writes like he's smelling burning toast all day.

0:02:48 Jenessa: I had a professor for electronic discovery who always said the E in email stands for evidence. You do not put something in writing that you don't want read on the stand in a courtroom. It's evidence. Clearly coming back to bite. Well, he's dead.

0:03:08 Matt: But his memory, certainly his shining legacy Casey is now in tatters. Yeah, I once had a mentor say that you shouldn't ever put anything in writing you don't want on the front page of the New York Times. And this is certainly literal in his case, because it is New York times making material. So we had been talking about the Epstein Transparency Act. There was some question at the time, but it turns out that Congress was very happy to pass the Epstein transparency act 427 to one with Clay Higgins being the one Check out that speech. That is quite a dissent that Clay Higgins is giving. I hope that his voters recognize the absurdity of his position. I just wanted to read very quickly from the Epstein Transparency Act, the one that finally did pass the House and was immediately passed by the Senate pretty much as soon as it got there. A couple things here that are of interest. Pretty much everything having to do with Jeffrey Epstein has to be released. Very long list of different materials. But one interesting thing, prohibited grounds for withholding. No record shall be be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary. Already supposed to be how it works. The AG may withhold or redactor segregable portions of the records that contain, again, personally identifiable information about victims. We're all on board for this. Anything that depicts or contains actual child sex abuse materials, obviously we don't want that released if it actually involves sex with children or any kind of depiction of children or people underage, anything that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or on -going prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.

0:03:12 Jenessa: So yeah now yeah yeah

0:04:45 Matt: Because this has been my concern, is that they could just hold it open for the next three years. Now, it wouldn't stop the next DOJ from actually releasing everything, but it could hold this up for quite a while. So narrowly -tailored and temporary at least allows a court to get involved if DOJ is really dragging its feet about that. So that's promising, right?

0:05:01 Jenessa: Yeah because you can litigate whether it was narrowly tailored and how long is temporary that can be

0:05:03 Matt: Right. If you have reason to believe that not everything's been released. That's right. There is one other concern from this, though, I don't like. To the extent that any covered information would otherwise be redacted or withheld as classified information, the Attorney General should declassify that classified information to the maximum extent possible. If the AG makes a determination that covered information may not be declassified and made available in a manner that protects the national security, they can release an unclassified summary of the redact or with held classified information. And the question has to be raised, what does Jeffrey Epstein's prosecution have to do with national security? There have been speculations, certainly, about who Epstein was working for. Alex Acosta famously said that he was working für intelligence, he was above his pay grade. This, of course, national security is the ultimate way to withhold anything.

0:05:53 Matt: It's the thing you can always fall back on if you don't want the public to see something. So I'm a little concerned that they left that in there. It is something that Mike Johnson has already made a point of saying that he thinks is important. So we will see. I am concerned about all the possible loopholes and cracks here that will keep things from coming out. Apparently, you know, the word is already coming down that they're intending to try to scrub Republicans as much as possible and make this a Democrat problem. It's an everybody problem, of course. It is child sex abuse. And it really doesn't matter that Jeffrey Epstein is a registered Democrat. He was pretty friendly with Ken Starr, among other people, as we learned.

0:06:16 Jenessa: Of course take them all down I don't care like Like, yeah, if you're involved with a pedophile, goodbye. Good.

0:06:35 Matt: As previously discussed, this is not a nation that is in love with Larry Summers. I think we can let him go.

0:06:41 Matt: Just saw his extremely cringe introduction to his Harvard class the other day where he had to be like, yep, I'm that Larry Summers. And with your permission, we're going to move forward with this class. And I'm like, your permission? You paid for a Harvard class and it's November. Of course, you're still in the class. My sympathies to anybody who's still excited to take a class with Larry Summers.

0:06:52 Jenessa: Now. Oh, God, terrible.

0:07:02 Matt: We will see what comes out because I can't believe that anything that Congress would be this excited about passing and the president would sign this quickly is actually going to result in anything that we can actually get our teeth into. We'll see. I will add, though, that no later than 15 days after the publication, DOJ must report to Congress. One, all categories of information released and withheld. Two, a summary of any redactions made. And three, a list of all government officials and politically exposed individuals named or referenced in the published materials. Politically exposed individuals. It's pretty broad.

0:07:32 Jenessa: Is that saying a summary of what was redacted? Would that include if you redactED something because it's like part of a federal investigation, you still have to tell me that you did that?

0:07:45 Matt: Yeah, I guess. And you'd have to say why, but I mean, he's pretty explicitly said who he wants investigated. And as we'll talk about in an upcoming story here, the president announcing to DOJ that he wants somebody prosecuted isn't necessarily going to end well for the president. That's not how it's supposed to work. Judges do notice this sort of thing.

0:08:01 Jenessa: Well, and also, if he's not having himself prosecuted, then in theory, he's the one person whose information should come out. Right. One hopes. Sure.

0:08:12 Matt: It should be clear because they know they're not supposed to brownskin him. We will see. I mean, I have some hope that we'll get some information, but yeah, we can't trust DOJ at this point and there's really no oversight. So we will see, but it is another milestone. It's another piece of progress.

0:08:29 Jenessa: The pressure worked.

0:08:32 Matt: Yeah, for sure. And the public is watching. This is a story that people care about and it continues to play. We'll watch it ourselves. Got a few more things to talk about here, but let's start in New York, however where you are. This is an issue I care about that I think everybody should care about, and I've brought it up before, but the fact that ICE goes to state courthouses. Now, this is not to be confused with federal immigration court arrests. So just to be clear, you're hearing about people being arrested in federal immigration code. That is also, I believe, being challenged in Newark. That has its own problem, arresting people when they try to show up for the immigration court hearings. This is just state court that we're talking about. And the state has a right to regulate its own trial courts. Obviously, it should. Rhode Island passed a bill like this. I was proud to testify in support of it. There was a little misunderstanding about it, but it was quoted pretty quickly. New York passed the Protect Our Courts Act, which I'll be calling the POCA in late 2020. And it prevents all civil arrests. Now, it does not mention ICE specifically, but prevents all Civil Arrests in New York courts. And the idea here is, of course, that ICE, there was a hiatus during the Biden administration, But generally speaking, throughout the existence of ICE, they've been happy to go to state courts and pick people up when they're just showing up for court dates. So if you've been arrested for a minor drug offense or for drunk driving or something, even if it's not a deportable offense, if they run a check on you and they realize that you're almost certainly not here with permission, they can come to court and arrest you. Now, the most convincing, and again, I want to make sure that I try to include both sides in these things. I have a very specific side, obviously. I'm an immigration defense attorney. This is where I'm coming from. But I do appreciate the argument, which is that if ICE can't arrest people in courts where they've already gone through a metal detector and they're known to be in a safe place where they're not going to be taking shots at people, then they're going to have to go to their houses and drag them out at six in the morning in front of their families. ISIS point is we can go to a safe place. We can know that we can take these people in safely. And yeah, sure, they're going to miss their state court date. Potentially, they'RE going to have an open case for the rest of their lives because they're gonna get detained and deported. And that's gonna be very bad for their immigration futures, and also very inconvenient for the state that they can't finish prosecuting them. But this is our job. This is what we're gonna do. And this is the safest place for us to do it. But now, of course, undocumented people are statistically some of the least likely people in the United States to own guns. And of course the average American is pretty likely to own a gun, just statistically. I don't buy that entirely and it is extremely rare,

0:10:58 Jenessa: A huge problem because if you are worried about that, if you have a crime that you are being accused of, you're not even necessarily guilty of it. That is not a deportable offense but you're so scared of what's gonna happen with ICE that you don't show up at court skipping your court date could that become a deportable offense because you're just skipping court you're running away yeah

0:11:26 Matt: But you're going to get a warrant. And so the immigration judge, when he's reviewing bond, for example, when He's reviewing whether you have the right to be released on order of bond to return to immigration court, they can use a missed court date against you. They can say, you know, you have a history of not showing up to court. They can also presume, now again, this doesn't work this way in pretty much any other situation legally. But there's no presumption of innocence in immigration court. And they can read a police report, and they can decide that maybe that happened, maybe it didn't. And they can use an open case against you in immigration court. And they can say, well, look, here's an allegation. A police officer wrote it down. Witnesses reported that this happened. This could not be used against you in most other contexts, but immigration court is Wild West. Anything goes.

0:12:03 Matt: And in the future, after all of this, if you do get deported and you have a family member who can file to bring you back, you're going to go to the consulate to get your visa interview to be brought back on an immigrant visa. And And you're going to have a serious case that's open, right? And if it's something like a drug case or something else that has permanent immigration consequences, it's a real problem. If they want to give you a visa and you're gonna come back here and face that charge and then end up with a conviction, right. So it is easier now in the age of Zoom to allow people to show up remotely and we've been able to do it and to resolve open cases. State courts around here are pretty good about it. Not every state allows that. But especially if it is another case, we can just get it dismissed or we can get a fine or something if we can resolve it in a way that allows you to close it out. It's not usually advantageous to have an open case. There are all kinds of arguments against state court arrests by immigration. It is not safe for the community. It degrades the court's abilities to help, to do anything. It discourages people from coming in to get restraining orders or to do basic civil suits because they just think that ICE is hanging around the courthouse. Even though when ICE does come to the state courthhouse, they are typically looking down a list. They are looking for people who are charged with certain offenses that they already know about. This POCA, the Protect Our Courts Act, is something that I I think every state should pass to protect their own trial courts to make sure that they're immune from this kind of ICE activity so that people can go about their business in state court and go home so that state prosecutors and state police can know that their cases are going through for what that's worth. This has been challenged, obviously, by the Trump administration. It was challenged almost immediately by the AG's office. The United States filed suit against New York saying essentially this is a supremacy clause issue and that the federal government has the the exclusive right to enforce immigration law, that New York is blocking them in enforcing immigration law. That they shouldn't have to get criminal arrest warrants, that civil administrative arrest warrents are enough. And remember that this law does not say that ICE can't come into courthouses. It says you can't make civil arrests. There are other contexts potentially where you could have civil arrests, not criminal arrests, but they can't be carried out in state courts.

0:14:00 Jenessa: Awesome.

0:14:01 Matt: Big progress on the POCA and on the general protection of state courts generally. On November 17th, this case was dismissed by a federal judge. And the finding, I think, makes a lot of sense. And again, I would say this, this is something I really believe in, but I do think it makes sense because they're actually going back, there's an originalist kind of aspect to this, and they're looking at the original intent of how common law handled arrests in court, going back to Blackstone and all that, right? And the idea that it's not targeting the federal government, they're just saying you can't make any civil arrests. And as As a general rule, this is something that was cited several times, both by the defendants, the state of New York, and by Judge D 'Agostino in this case. I really like the Latin here. As a General Rule, every person who has any relation to a suit, whether his presence is compulsory or not, is exempt from arrest, a iundo morando et rediundo. That sounds like a Harry Potter spell, but a iunda morando at rediando, going, staying, and returning, that you should be protected at all stages of proceedings as you're trying who enter and leave the courthouse. And this goes back to common law, that you can't have some other sovereign trying to arrest you when you're just trying to go to court. You should be in a sort of protected zone. The federal government was trying to say that they're getting discriminated against, essentially, as law enforcement, that they are being specifically blocked by New York. But it still applies to state and local officials. They still can't arrest people on civil warrants, and it doesn't mention ICE. The general finding is that it only discriminates against the federal government if it treats comparable classes of federal and state employees differently. And it doesn't. It just doesn't allow anybody to make civil arrests. So I think this bill is a model. There's no comparison here between state, local, and federal. They're just saying it's all the same. They're not even trying to really say that they're being treated differently. I think the right way to go, and I think every state should pass something like the Protect Our Courts Act, because we have to allow people to go to court. It's just a really important part of the process. And I can tell you just in the immigrant communities I work with, I go to Chelsea District Court here in Massachusetts all the time, and probably our per capita, our biggest immigrant community, and ICE is there often. And I can watch any given morning in Chelsea District Courts, you can watch cases going into default because people aren't there, often because they've already been detained or deported, but often because They just won't come in. And it's really a problem. So I'm glad to see this from New York. This is the right direction. Let's keep it going.

0:16:27 Matt: So what do you have for us today?

0:16:27 Jenessa: Just to refresh everybody's memory, Texas legislature mid -decade redistricting, which is unusual but not technically illegal, wrote a bill, drew up new districts, Abbott signs it into law. And basically, depending on how things go in 2026, it probably got five more Republican seats in the House. I am still, you know, in my little fantasy land. They did, in order to try to remove some Democratic districts, they had to weaken some Republican districts by moving Republicans into those districts. So it's always possible that they have actually hurt their chances that they could lose some seats that way. But it was challenged as a racial gerrymander, which you would think nobody's winning those anymore, right? That's so hard to win. And they just won in the Fifth Circuit. It is a three -judge panel. I'm sure this will immediately be appealed either for an en banc review or honestly likely to just try to go straight to the Supreme Court. What happened was not so much that Texas Republicans just spontaneously got the itch to redistrict their own districts that they so comfortably drew for themselves for the greater good of the Republican Party. No, there was a lot of pressure coming from the White House to do this. In particular, Harmeet Dhillon, who is in charge of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, who has said she wants to move voting out of the civil rights division and into the criminal division. So she just has no interest in protecting your voting as a civil right. We're just going to prosecute the fraud that isn't happening.

0:18:33 Matt: The only thing the Civil Rights Division exists for anymore is to prosecute people for doing any kind of DEI and anti -white discrimination, right? So it must be pretty busy with all the anti -white discrimination in this country.

0:18:44 Jenessa: Yeah, clearly. It's a wonder the things they managed to find here. If there's a lesson you can take away from all of this, it is that it is in fact important to find an internal logical consistency for your legal arguments and your legal behavior, because it is going to come back and bite them in the ass the way they have been arguing exactly what you're talking about this like invented anti -white discrimination and you need to redistrict against certain minorities here that is how we are going to end up with a trump appointee writing this decision that says hey everybody believe it or not this is a clear case of a racial gerrymander as an annoying procedural note that for the life of me, I can't solve this. I'm losing my mind. If anybody has an answer, let me know. This is the Fifth Circuit. I am so sure this is the Fifth Circuit, and yet the header says we are in the Western District of Texas. This was written by a judge who is a district court judge for the Southern District of TX. This three -judge panel is someone from the Western District, the Southern district and someone who is just on the Fifth Circuit, not a district court judge. So how the Fifth Circuit panel system works, apparently I have no idea. I don't know. It's allegedly a Fifth Circuit panel decision, but according to the header, we're in the Western District of Texas and the decision was written by a Southern district judge. I do not know what is going going on with these people?

0:20:30 Matt: Somebody in Texas has just beat their head against a desk very, very hard because this is just so incredibly obvious. I don't understand it myself, but sure.

0:20:39 Jenessa: Some Texas lawyer is sitting there right now like, obviously. But yeah, if this is a common practice in my state, I don't know about it. And I haven't noticed. Granted, the New York State court system is such a chaotic disaster that I don't know if I would have noticed if people were in a different district the other day. I would have been like, like, oh, whatever, I guess you're here today. So wherever it is we happen to be, we have a Trump appointee from 2019, Republican, writing this decision, and they are enjoining the district, this new district, and saying this preliminary injunction says for the 2026 election, collection, you're going to have to stick with your current maps, not this one you just created. And of course, as the case goes on, we may get either a reversal of that or a permanent injunction that says never use this map, right? Of course, this will get appealed and we'll see if that preliminary injunction sticks. What they said is, okay, like we've talked about before, you can can partisan gerrymander all you want that's rucho v common cause you are of course swearing up and down that that's what you did there is a clear written record that that is not in fact what you did and here's why hermit dylan was putting all this pressure you have to redistrict how am I the fed going to tell texas how to redistruct like you have absolutely no right as the Fed, unless what you do is you threaten to sue them for racial gerrymandering, which is what they did. Dillon suggested that what they had done that was inappropriate was they had created majority -minority districts that were not, this is a Black district, this this is a Hispanic district, but a sort of coalition district of, well, if we put Black and Hispanic and Asian voters together, it's a majority minority district. She's pulling that from a relatively recent case, Petaway v. Galveston County. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. What they said in that case was, if somebody tries to argue, you could create a majority -minority district by creating this kind of coalition, do you have to do that? No. So in the same way that right now we would say, hey, with the VRA the way it currently is, the Voting Rights Act, if you could create a black majority - minority district easily, easily and you don't that is evidence towards the idea that you may have intentionally gerrymandered against black voters and it is appropriate to in order to remedy that purposely create a black district if you're in trouble for racial gerryandering and they say hey one way to fix it create majority minority districts no under pettaway you cannot be be required to do that by just lumping all minority groups together which kind of makes sense right like it is actually kind of racist to be like ah black people hispanic people they're all the same right like no the point is some people have united interests and united cultural interests and like Like, just lumping all non -white people together is not that. Petaway is saying you don't have to do that as a solution to you have been proven to have racially gerrymandered, fix it. You don't HAVE to create a coalition district to fix it." What they didn't say is you're not allowed to have districts that are majority -minority group of people, that that's somehow illegal if the district was 40 % Black and 20 % Hispanic. That's, like, a problem? Why would that be a problem that's a natural consequence of geography and segregation sometimes? Or just life? Like, what are you talking about?

0:25:17 Matt: Wow.

0:25:17 Jenessa: Dylan literally wrote to them and said hello we the federal DOJ we're gonna sue you if you don't redistrict because we think your districts are an illegal racial gerrymander in violation of Petaway because you have some of these like coalition type of districts and they just sunk their own argument it's so beautiful yeah

0:25:43 Matt: Yeah. That seems like such an obvious mistake.

0:25:46 Jenessa: Because the judge is like hey so here's the thing I looked at the map you drew, and if you were trying to partisan gerrymander, presumably we would look at any, like, lean Democrat district, and I would see you try to redraw it to make it competitive or to make it lean Republican. And it's funny how the lean Democrat white majority districts did not get touched. But these majority minority districts are the ones that you touched. If you were just partisan gerrymandering, which is legal, you would do it to the white districts too.

0:26:32 Jenessa: And now I have this letter where somebody is threatening you and saying you have to get rid of your majority minority districts. It's almost like you wrote down that you were intentionally racially gerrymandering. And what has made these racial gerrymandering cases so difficult for so long is the effects test. When you're saying, I know I can't prove they did this on purpose, but I can show you that it had a racially discriminatory effect. And that's so difficult. The judge is saying here, like, I mean, you just said you did it. You just told me that you did It on purpose. So like, I don't have to. I'm making him sound way more dramatic in Valley Girl than he probably was in my own voice. I mean, it was sassy. The opening of the introduction is a quote from Chief Justice John Roberts, the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating. You may recall that from a decision where he was saying, oh, all of this you know, anti -white, anti DEI, the way to stop anti -minority discrimination is not to do affirmative action because that's also discriminating. This is like designed to go to Roberts and be like, my guy, this is your thing.

0:28:03 Jenessa: This is the example of the thing you said you can't do. When we just talked about Louisiana v. Calais, where we are very concerned that the VRA could get weakened even further, really, really hard to enforce because the effects test may become nearly impossible to meet because purposely drawing a majority minority district to fix it could become illegal. What do we do? Even there, the conservative team arguing to to kill it, said, well, obviously you couldn't purposely use race. And Alito says, yes, yes. Of course, everybody is in agreement here. And we have a Trump appointee going, guys, I mean, you said you did it and you did it. And then you didn't do it to the white districts. I just I don't know what to say. Yikes is how this decision goes. So they might have really bit themselves in the ass here

0:28:51 Matt: When we're talking about Calais, you were telling me, because I still can't get my head around this, and you've said it several times now, but they're allowed to partisan gerrymander. So all they had to do was come up with a plan that favored Republicans and that would have cleared it, but they had to go and just be racist about it. And this is an ongoing theme in the Trump administration is they just can't help themselves legally.

0:29:26 Matt: They just go an extra mile and they just have to be who they are and actually discriminate on the basis of race. And it's incredible to me that it's perfectly legal to just say, to favor the incumbent, to help somebody keep their position, to favor the ruling political party, you can gerrymander, but you can't come out and say the thing they came out and said out loud.

0:29:42 Jenessa: I now yeah a big thing that's also going to be part of it here is they kind of intentionally favored certain Hispanic neighborhoods in the belief that they have been swinging slightly more towards republicans now still not majority majority so I don't quite know how that math was supposed to work out but like compared to other non -white groups yeah hispanic population is like more winnable um and they are a more sizable part of the Texas population obviously whereas they clearly were disadvantaging black residents for example so the judge points that out again and says hey same problem you can't benefit a racial group to benefit you if the point was focusing on the racial group.

0:30:39 Jenessa: You have to focus on you. It still feels weird to say that, but you can be focused on you, except for that whole part where you still didn't do it to the white district. You did it to the Hispanic district. You pulled them and the Black community apart so that they couldn't coalesce on anything. Thing. It's very weird. To contrast this, think about California. They just passed Prop 50, which is going to redistrict them to probably create five more Democratic seats. How could you do that? Well, it definitely changed where different ethnic neighborhoods and different different racial groups ended up. That was inevitable if you were going to draw these lines differently and end up with a different partisan split, right? Why is that, I think, not going to get struck down as a partisan gerrymander? Which, of course, the Trump administration immediately sued that it's a partisan jerryminder. How they are arguing Louisiana v. Calais and then suing California for a partisan jurymander, I don't know. But why is California going to survive? Their marketing was clear. We are doing this as a partisan gerrymander.

0:32:00 Matt: We want more power in Congress.

0:32:01 Jenessa: Yeah, Texas made five Republicans extra. We're going to make five Democrats extra. This is a political fairness thing. They specifically put a time limit on it. We will go back to our nonpartisan committee map drawing instead of this obviously political map drawing that we did. We will go to our old ways in 2030 when the next census happens because Texas will also have to redistrict in 2030 and it'll all be fair again, right? You can't see me putting air quotes around that. Fair. It was so clearly marketed as partisan, political, but it's all about fairness and countering Texas. At no point did they say in either direction, either in the dang Hispanic neighborhoods causing us problems or and we want to benefit the Hispanic residents of California. They've been treated unfair. They never said that either. It was all about Democrats and Republicans. So compare that to here where Texas Republicans are trying to say, Abbott's our defendant here, trying to saying, oh, no, no. to know I was gonna I was going to do this all along I just wanted to benefit Texas Republicans and the judge is saying that's funny because you weren't going to doing it until Harmeet Dhillon sent you this letter that was clearly racially motivated so I don't I don' t quite know what to do with this so yeah um they are trying to have it both ways over and over again the federal DOJ and it's not working. You have to be logically consistent about your position. They're not like the problems we are identifying at the federal Supreme Court, where it feels like many of the Supreme Court judges are just going to do conservative things because

0:34:04 Jenessa: They want conservative outcomes, really, it continues to be true. At the district court level in particular, judges are doing what makes sense, even when they are Trump appointees, we are seeing that. This one's just solid, man, and it is delicious to read how Trump's DOJ just sunk themselves.

0:34:27 Matt: Yeah, yeah. As I said previously, one of the world's premier law enforcement agencies, and they can't get people to work there right now, which is incredible to think of as law graduates, to think of people not wanting to go to work at the Department of Justice.

0:34:42 Jenessa: I know. Tragic.

0:34:42 Matt: One of the spots people wanted. You know, never going to be my jam, but there's plenty of good you can do at DOJ. And certainly in the Civil Rights Division, there used to be.

0:34:49 Jenessa: Oh, yeah. Right. That used to be the projected career path for like people in my area where like I'm working on civil rights at like the state level. That was an ambition for a lot of people in my office, in, you know, related agencies is like, oh, you know, if you really want to keep, you know, I'm perfectly happy where I am. But like if your grand ambitions or whatever like the DOJ was like oh my god if you got a job in the DOJ civil rights division incredible I would be sprinting out of there right now I mean this is a mess

0:35:29 Matt: No, well, it can get messier, and we're going to see that in the next story. Come back and talk about the adventures of newly minted Eastern District of Virginia U .S. attorney Lindsay Halligan and her hilarious attempts to indict James Comey. We'll be right back.

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0:35:48 Matt: I have to admit, I was avoiding the Comey story because it's so stupid. That's not a reason to avoid it on this show. Certainly, we can lean into the stupid. This is the kind of thing where, as the court has recently noted, and as the courts often to note these days, Donald Trump has pages of public statements, both in writing and out there in the public talking about how James Comey is one of the worst people on earth and has to be indicted for dot, dot, whatever you can come up with, basically. And so we've already had the U .S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was forced to resign already because he would not not indict Letitia James, AGA of New York, and James Comey, formerly of the FBI, of course, most famous for his involvement in, at least most recently, most famous for his involvements as director of the F .B .I., both in not giving in to Trump and in potentially not helping the election very much by coming out shortly before it and talking about Hillary Clinton's emails.

0:36:49 Jenessa: Boy, oh, I'm never gonna get over that

0:36:52 Matt: Yeah, a lot of us won't. Siebert, you know, was like a decent middle -of -the -road kind of actual U .S. attorney who resigned because he just wasn't going to do that. Like there was no reason to indict James Comey. They were trying to find something that they could say that he lied to Congress about. So they brought in a runner -up from one of Trump's beauty pageants, I believe from Colorado at the time. Now, I guess he wasn't actually running the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant at the time that she won.

0:37:17 Jenessa: I thought you were gonna I thought you were making a joke about like his favorite attorneys you mean literally a competitor in Miss Teen USA

0:37:23 Matt: No, literally. Well, I'll give her a little more credit. She wasn't a teenager. She was an adult. She was a runner up for Miss Colorado, third runner up actually, then went on to practice insurance law, which is perfectly fine, but not typically the prerequisite to becoming the U .S. attorney in one of the most important districts.

0:37:43 Jenessa: Oh wait the U .S. attorney like criminal she went from insurance law to okay sure

0:37:50 Matt: Insurance defense, which gives you a lot of litigation experience, but is not a criminal thing. And her lack of criminal chops is certainly coming out in this case. As with so many of these things, she is the person who would take the job. She wasn't the best person for the job, she was the one who would take it.

0:38:05 Matt: Halligan's only real experience with this is defending Donald Trump as a defense attorney, as many of his defense attorneys have become prosecutors under this administration. Also worked on defamation suit at some point against CNN, but really nothing. Like she has no actual experience in any of this. So the indictment that was brought against Comey was pretty vague. There are different ways to write indictments, and we've been seeing a lot of speaking indictments as they call them, where they go through all the facts of the case and really show you the evidence they intend to present. This could have used a lot more detail because the original indictment filed September 25th, 2025, says that Comey did willfully and knowingly make a material false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement in a matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch by falsely stating to a U .S. senator during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he had not authorized someone else of the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning person one, who is Trump. So they're saying it's false because he knew that he'd actually authorized someone to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation. So this is so vague that he was actually saying, I don't even know what you're talking about, right? You have to have some specifics. You have to know to some degree what you did,

0:39:11 Jenessa: Yeah like a day who he said it to

0:39:15 Matt: Right. So this is about false statements to Congress, which is a pretty good way to hang somebody if you can prove they're actually false. But this is, actually, I want to read from Lawfare here. They wrote a very good write -up of this, and I just think this deserves to be read properly. The case is unspeakably breathtakingly devoid of merit. To see it laid out in all its patchwork threadbareness is to gasp with embarrassment for the prosecutors who presented this to an American court. It is to understand why no career prosecutor in the Eastern District would work this case and why interim U .S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan had to import two sacrificial lambs from North Carolina to litigate the matter. To read it is to spend 48 pages understanding the depth of corruption in the Justice Department in the second Trump administration. The defendants obviously brought a motion to dismiss based on vindictive and selective prosecution, which, as we've talked about before, doesn't usually work. But when the president of the United States comes out and says, hey, you should get this guy for something. That's pretty selective.

0:40:07 Jenessa: When he accidentally shares on social media his message to Pam Bondi about how badly he needs him prosecuted

0:40:18 Matt: Yeah, again, for whatever you can find. Again, I don't want to get too much into the details, but they did file a 48 -page follow -up explaining exactly how they believe that he was trying to get Daniel Richman, who's a personal friend, to come out about some of this stuff and release things that were not supposed to be released. Again. There's no merit to any of this. It's intentionally obviously supposed to just take Comey down. That's all they're trying to do and to harass him and make his life more difficult.

0:40:46 Jenessa: Interesting too because like he's not in the FBI he's in the D .O .J. He's working at all like is he working at an Arby's like he's this is just going after the guy for nothing like it it'd be one thing if he was still a current political actor who was a thorn in your side and getting in your way I'm not saying that would be okay but at least I would understand why you felt like you wanted to get him out of your way he's just a freaking guy now why this

0:41:22 Matt: I'm sure he's doing some kind of consultation, private sector stuff the way they all do, but yeah.

0:41:27 Jenessa: Is so obviously just petty vindictiveness

0:41:32 Matt: Yeah, and it was the last possible minute before the statute of limitations ran out on September 30th when he testified. They filed it September 25th, so they had to come up with something. Obviously, any honest prosecutor to look at this, just, you know, these are ambiguous questions that Ted Cruz was asking, everything he said was literally true. There's no false statements. And you have to know that he was intentionally making materially false statements, that he Was trying to mislead Congress. It's so hard to prove these things.

0:42:00 Jenessa: When you have an intent crime that is about a state of mind this is why perjury is so rarely prosecuted because it's so hard to

0:42:10 Matt: That's right. But it gets worse because the indictment itself is bad enough. But Lindsey Halligan, and I'm hoping we're going to guess on sometimes so that we can really talk this through. This is not somebody who has any the experience of the grand jury. Grand juries, of course, have very specific rules. And the reason you know this case really went off the rails is that the judge actually allowed grand jury transcripts to come in while they're getting this motion dismissed. That's incredible. That never happens. But because they concluded that the way that Halligan had handled this was so bad, she actually gave the grand jury two different indictments, which, again, it's insane. They they no-billed one of the counts. And she came back without convening a new grand jury, without presenting it again, and essentially ran it by them again and got two more. And this all came out in the transcripts of the grand jury did this.

0:42:53 Jenessa: Prove okay so what that means is the grand jury heard the beginnings of like her first crack at it and then when she decided no no I'm gonna prosecute it a different way the same grand jury heard her like second

0:43:18 Matt: Yes. My understanding is that actually they drafted the new two-count indictment. There's a three-count indictment, count one was no -build, and the entire document was marked as though the grand juror declined to return the indictment, so this is a little weird. And Halligan's office drafts the new indictment and then somehow the The foreperson at Halligan's signed the new indictment. It was handed up in open court. And the active indictment in the Comey case was never actually voted on by the grand jury. It was never finally pushed through. It's very confusing. I don't even understand exactly how this happened. The judge doesn't seem to either, obviously.

0:43:58 Matt: They penciled in an amendment. It's easy to say this is incompetent. I think this is cheating, but I think it's also incompetent, it's hard to say.

0:43:53 Jenessa: Try oh god it

0:44:07 Matt: It's really a mess. Again, I'd like to get a guest on so we can talk this out.

0:44:06 Jenessa: Can be both yeah I've never dealt with a grand jury so it's kind of beyond me just exactly how wild that is it feels yeah yeah

0:44:15 Matt: No, I mean, you just know everything I just said is completely unorthodox. And the fact that a judge would release grand jury materials in the course of litigating a motion to dismiss is so rare. Like, that tells you a lot, ever. You never see anything about the internal workings of a grand jury. And he wrote up a very specific decision about exactly why he was allowing this and just how bad it was. More citations and extensive quotes, of course, of Trump's public statements, too. I mean, again, that's another bad sign.

0:44:31 Jenessa: You normally never release it period

0:44:51 Matt: I don't want to hear about how the rule of law is collapsing because, you know, we do have a lot of threats to the rule law. We have a Department of Justice that is determined to degrade it, but we still have federal courts and we're still in a place where the federal courts can do something about it. And when they see bad prosecution, that they can call it for what it is. And that's what's happening. So many other problems with this case. I don't even have time to talk about it.

0:44:48 Jenessa: Right mm -hmm yeah

0:45:10 Matt: We got to talk about other things. I want to come back and do a whole episode on the Comey disaster because that's really what it is. I really hope that this goes quickly because this should just fall apart. It should have already fallen apart.

0:45:10 Jenessa: Yeah yeah

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0:45:27 Matt: I wanted to give a quick update on something we talked about back in 08-1061 about the 9-11 lawsuit. We talked about this just before September 11th, 2024, and about the complicity of the Saudi government in 9-11. This is something I didn't know a lot about until I started reading about this suit, which has been going on since about 2004. And it's a long, interesting history. We're not going to get into too much, but it's especially relevant because as you might know, Mohammed bin Salman from Saudi Arabia was at the White House just this week. And Donald Trump, of course, was doing what every American president pretty much has done and bowing and scraping to the Saudis because we need their oil.

0:46:04 Matt: But most disgustingly, Trump had a lot to say about how he thought that actually the Saudies and MBS in in particular, had nothing to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who was, of course, a journalist who was absolutely murdered at the order of Mohammed bin Salman. Our intelligence services, who Trump routinely ignores, of course, but we know for sure that's what happened. The last known interaction between Jamal Khashoggi and the brother of Mohammed bin Salman was actually just the day before he met with an investigator on this case, the 9 -11 case I'm about to talk about. So you can make of that what you will. But Khashoggi was really upset because he was afraid the regime was after him, among other things, because he was cooperating in this litigation. This is a really important lawsuit. We spent an entire episode talking about it. I think it deserves more sunshine. But it's especially noteworthy because just at the end of August, I didn't have a chance to talk about this earlier, but it survived a motion to dismiss from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And of course, generally speaking, just to say this clearly, under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act 28 U.S.C. 1602, which is is actually the first of its kind in the world. The U .S. passed this, I think, in 76. Private parties can't sue foreign governments from the United States in most cases, but exceptions have been made. There was one made, for example, in the Flitow Amendment, allowing Stephen Flitaw to sue over a suicide bombing that killed his daughter in 1995. And exceptions have been added for torture, murder, sabotage, and hostage taking. And while this litigation was pending, because initially it was almost dismissed, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which removed the requirement that a sponsor of terrorism has to be listed as a sponsor of terrorism to be liable. If a court could find that a foreign state had something to do with the Terrorist Act and that it was a tortious act that could be tied to an actual foreign government that you can collect. So this is really important. This kept this lawsuit alive, kept it going. We talked about it at some length, what the suit is about. It really is interesting. Essentially, what it comes down to is a couple of Saudi nationals, one named Omar al -Bayomi and the other was Sheikh al-Fahd al-Thimari. Baomi was absolutely on the payroll of the Saudis. He was known to work for the Saudis. The plaintiffs claim he was an intelligence officer, and that seems very likely. But he was absolutely working for the Saudi's. And the other one was a sheikh who was actually a cleric in a mosque in LA. They were both working with hijackers, people that ended up being involved in 9-11. Baomi famously took an hour and seven minutes of video in DC where he was sending back basically video of possible targets. This, again, is somebody on the Saudi payroll. The judge goes through this because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia filed a pretty expansive motion to dismiss saying that this shouldn't survive and that there wasn't enough factual basis to be able to connect them with 9 -11. And the court found that this is only about subject matter jurisdiction. We're not getting to the merits, but we're just saying, is there enough here to say that we can potentially get to the place where we can say that Saudi Arabia was a state sponsor of 9 -1 -1 and where there's a legally cognizable claim of some kind of tort that's happened here? It doesn't mean the plaintiffs are going to win, just is there enough? And there's also questions, real questions, of the classic legal concept of responde ad superior, which is when you're acting within the scope of your appointment or not. I think this is very good news because this court, in a very, I think, very well -reasoned and thorough decision, found that there are dueling narratives, there's a lot of open questions, but there's enough here that we have to proceed to trial, that it can't be dismissed, and that there's reason to believe that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a state sponsor of 9-11, to the degree that it actually was involved in tortious acts that resulted in mass death. So I think that's something that people should know the week that Donald Trump is praising Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi government. And as the Saudi government continues to try to rehabilitate itself with the Riyadh Comedy Festival and golf tours and UFC and everything else they're doing,

0:49:52 Matt: Don't take Saudi money. You know, this is just, it's gross. It's really bad. And the truth still needs to come out. And And it will. This litigation has been going on forever. It's an extremely complicated, multi -district, multi -plaintiff, multi defending case. But obviously the most important part is keeping the Saudis in the game here. And that's what's happened.

0:50:11 Matt: So in all of this, we've been trying to find the heroes. We've been trying to found the people who are worth admiring in our current times. There are plenty of them out there, plenty of people just doing their jobs and doing the things they're supposed to do. And one thing that we can all do when we see injustice and we see something cross our desks that we concede is corrupt or just wrong is we can say something. Thing. And that's what Noel Turnage did very recently. Very cool person. I learned a little bit about Noel Turnages from the recent coverage. She's a nurse at the prison camp where Glenn Maxwell was sent, the federal prison camp, Brian. She worked there since 2019 until last week when she was fired for the things that she did. Now, she was illegally fired because she is a whistleblower.

0:50:46 Jenessa: Awesome

0:50:47 Matt: She released a number of emails from Glenn Maxwell, which again, under normal circumstances, that would be pretty bad. But this is something that people need to know about. And she sent these on. She didn't actually release them in full, but she sent them on to Jamie Raskin, the representative from Maryland, and said this is something that people should know about. Now, of course, remember, just to remind everybody, Ghislaine Maxwell, of course the main conspirator, the only surviving mastermind of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, was doing a hard time in a federal women's prison, was very unhappy about it, I expect he would be. And Trump's former defense attorney, Todd Blanch, goes down, interviews her on the record in extremely unusual circumstances, as we've discussed at length with Liz Skeen, about just how out of line this supposed proffer session was. But the entire purpose of the conversation with Todd Blanch was that he could release recordings of her saying that Donald Trump didn't know anything about Epstein's crimes and that generally she thought he was a great guy. The thinking is, of course, that she's trying to angle for a pardon, and she still might be.

0:51:42 Matt: And Trump has not ruled a pardon out as recently as a few days ago.

0:51:41 Jenessa: Wait did somebody ask and he like still god gross

0:51:46 Matt: Yeah, he still won't rule it out. Yeah. He was asked just recently. This woman, Noella Turnage, who seems like a straight shooter, she was actually put on desk duty. She was put in what they call prison jail because she was previously speaking out about bad medical conditions for inmates and she'd found some complaints. And so here she is sitting on the desk and she sees these emails coming through from Glenn Maxwell talking about how great life is for her now. She's working with the warden to get special treatment and to get special coordination with her lawyers to make sure that she can get her Supreme Court appeal, which was recently, fortunately, denied. Supreme Court is not accepting her arguments about how the Jeffrey Epstein sweetheart deal applies to her, which I really do appreciate.

0:52:27 Jenessa: Wait so she already she was in the prison she should have been in and then managed to get Get herself into a way, like, lower security. Listen, I don't want anybody to be, like... I don't want our prisons to be an abusive, miserable place. But she got herself into A WAY nicer place. Already, like WAY better treatment than anyone else would have gotten.

0:52:54 Jenessa: But the president is trying to schmooze her. Whatever word I'm looking for.

0:52:59 Matt: And this is not a place where they send sex offenders. She's not supposed to be there.

0:53:04 Jenessa: And you're telling me she's now trying to coordinate even better treatment for herself this woman is the most master manipulator of all time she just is so good at getting people into her web

0:53:10 Matt: Oh, yeah, no, she's got a special deal with the warden. Yeah? Yeah.

0:53:18 Matt: Yeah no. And any inmate who said anything about this, two inmates have already been transferred out just for talking to the media about Maxwell. Yeah Yeah. Noelle Eternich was fired. And one of the things that she exposed was that the prison was giving accommodations to visitors, that the person was sending meals to her dorm room, that she was getting her own workout sessions and she could shower after everybody else was in bed, like actual VIP treatment in an already VIP prison camp, the lowest possible security, a place where sex offenders don't usually go.

0:53:41 Jenessa: My god so she's just getting what we all want which is like I just sit around and read read books and go to the gym and have snacks. I don't go to work.

0:53:58 Matt: I don't want to make light of any of this because, as you said, I generally think that our prisons are so bad, and I've certainly been to plenty of them.

0:54:04 Jenessa: She's having friends over for tea. That's what you're making it sound like. Yeah.

0:54:08 Matt: Yeah, right. Basically. And somebody had to say something. And I think that's really the thing. You know, I think about the estimated 1,000 FBI agents who were put on the Epstein case already to scour the records, to clear Trump's name from the records to do the best they could, right? Around the clock in March, of those 1,000 FBI agents, there have got to be a couple who didn't get into the FBI to do that, to protect the president from his association with his ex -trafficker. And there have to be several people who didn' t get into a couple of those who are close enough to retirement that maybe they can just come out and say something about you know and I'm hoping as we get into this stage where records are going to be released and more is going to be supposedly coming out after this bill has been signed I do hope that we have the opportunity to hear from somebody to tell us what actually happened yeah

0:54:48 Jenessa: Right now, procedurally, those individuals like, you know, shouldn't be telling us what's in those files. They work for the FBI. They're investigating, blah, blah. But we will be getting closer and closer to whistleblower territory territory, if now they're supposed to release things and something doesn't get released and those individuals combed through those files and they know for a fact something didn't get released, now we're in whistleblower land where they can and should speak about something that was otherwise, as part of their job, it was confidential. Am I understanding that correctly?

0:55:24 Matt: I think that's that's right position here from the house democrats at least in trying to protect her is that noel turnage is also a whistleblower and that she falls within that protection she was fired and she shouldn't be fired for exposing something that is just wrong it's corrupt and it's clearly

0:55:36 Jenessa: Yeah. The things that, like, my agency has had to do to try to protect people in jails and and prisons from some of the worst conditions you know having medical treatments not provided like the most basic things you would think even basic human dignity that should be granted to people to hear that somebody who is like one of the most notorious sex traffickers is like getting the specialist of special treatment and now somebody who tried to tell everybody that's happening is fired I mean that's just unbelievable

0:55:45 Matt: Corrupt yeah yeah well I mean that's that's where we're at but that's the thing is that you know I think she was fully prepared for the consequences even though they're illegal anybody who does something like that should be prepared it's not a frictionless exercise uh to put yourself out there like that but that's all the more reason that she's a hero and I hope that she has already got a new job I'm sure she's already got a new and better job from from this and I if not somebody should hire her right away she seems like a great nurse who really cares about the people in front of her I just want to encourage everybody because you know when you see something it's really okay to say something obviously assess your risks don't get yourself prosecuted maybe you have to lose your job but people need to know about this stuff there are so many people right now who are just quietly letting this stuff past their desks that could be saying something and I again it's easy for me to say I'm self -employed but you know if you can be a Noel a turnage in the world

0:56:39 Jenessa: Yeah clearly

0:57:04 Matt: Then now's the time now is the

0:57:04 Jenessa: Yeah you want to come out the other end of this with your integrity as something you can put on your resume

0:57:11 Matt: Time that's right that's fine and there are plenty of employers who respect that so great work very happy to see that and uh you know again just things that people need to know and fascism authoritarianism totalitarianism can't survive this kind of sunshine as long as people are able to come out uh this is where we're at so more good news good stuff we will be back well at some point I don't know we're getting into thanksgiving here so happy thanksgiving to everybody. We will figure out next week when we get there. All right. See you then.

0:57:38 Jenessa: Yeah sounds good bye

0:58:16 Matt: Ayunda Marando at Rudiendo.