Is Trump Playing "Pardon, Marry, Kill" With Narcotraffickers?

Transcript

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

0:00:00 Clip: Thank you.

0:00:03 Thomas: Maybe they would what get back to the boat that's nothing so they're dangerous you

0:00:17 Matt: Were known double taps. This is something that we have done before as a military, and I think we have to say that out loud. There's no reason to protect the people who did it.

0:00:32 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1213, I think. I don't know. I haven't been on these in a minute, so hopefully I have the count

0:00:40 Matt: Thomas Smith, is that you?

0:00:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:00:42 Matt: What are you doing here? It's Friday.

0:00:42 Thomas: How are you doing? What are you doing here?

0:00:44 Matt: Why did you show up to work on a Friday? What's going on?

0:00:47 Thomas: Unfortunately, Jenessa is ill, we wish Jenessa the best, and hopefully she gets better soon.

0:00:53 Matt: Sounds like a rough one.

0:00:54 Thomas: The meantime, I'm happy to be here. We've got so much to talk about. Not the greatest of news, but hey, that's our getting answers is always good. Are some of the questions we're getting some answers to? Is it okay to murder people if they're in a boat? That's one of my questions.

0:01:08 Matt: I'm just going to straight up say that it's still not okay to murder people on a boat or to do it twice. But sorry, yeah, we're not even going to talk about that much, Simon.

0:01:12 Thomas: Spoilers! Wait till the for the segment to get the valuable insight that you shouldn't be able to just kill people because they're on a boat in a place giving

0:01:18 Matt: Legal stuff, yeah. That's supposed to be inside the show sandwich, not on the bread. But they get the opinions for free.

0:01:25 Thomas: Away why why would they buy the cow give them the milk for free man and then what else are we going to be talking about today I

0:01:34 Matt: Need to talk about the new safe third country removals because I don't hear anybody talking about this. It's a dramatic overhaul to the asylum system. Probably not the first time I've said that on this show. But I just saw it in action on Monday, so I want to tell you about it.

0:01:45 Thomas: Don't know what that even term means what does that term mean exactly all

0:01:48 Matt: Us to deport people who have never been to a country to that country just because we don't want them to do their asylum claims here. Then we've got a story about Steve Bannon, who's almost completely vanished from the news other than being a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's, but we do have a legal issue to talk about Steve Bannon.

0:01:53 Thomas: Right hey disappeared from the news but not from evil planning lairs you always active that one you have a real problem with our focus and I think really it is a la Steve Bannon because the world is so flooded with shit but for example I was just um to another podcast and uh the same way that we don't know steve bannon now that he's like not you know front and center now that uh musk left we just don't care about doge anymore but it still exists it's still doing shit and but nobody it doesn't get it covered.

0:02:07 Matt: In the shadows. Basically gone now, but yeah,

0:02:31 Thomas: It's not. It's still doing stuff. They based on what I just listened to, it sort of did it as a way to draw, reduce focus on it, but it's still Doing Bullshit. I don't know if they did it in name only, but well, we'll put a pin in that. Point is, things are still evil when we're not looking at them.

0:02:31 Matt: It still isn't. Thought it shut down. Yeah. Absolutely.

0:02:47 Thomas: And that's a tough Tough one. That's a tough one.

0:02:48 Matt: All over the place. Yeah, it's really hard to know. We're going to try to stay on some of the most evil today. And then in a quick footnote, I'm just going to tell you another story from my day about the It directly ties into what is going on with Afghani refugees in this country right now. And a story. Is This a real Kafka joint I've got for you. So, yeah, plenty to get through today. To have you.

0:03:05 Thomas: So happy to be back for the foot. I've missed them. I missed the footnotes. I still hear them cause I, I edit them, but, you know, I miss being a part of the foot notes.

0:03:13 Matt: You never know what they're going to be. So it just makes it more fun.

0:03:14 Thomas: You never know. All that to get to, uh, a, it'S an action packed show. So why don't we take our first break? Course you can avoid the breaks patreon.com/law.com/law. Get the goodies, get the interaction, all that stuff. We are long overdue on a lamb that we need to get to you. Wait to get that to you, so patreon , and most importantly, keep the show going, because every day it feels like the mainstream media and the media is less and less reliable on very important issues. Makes me sick sometimes. I decided, you know, to watch this New York Times event they did, did the, but it has this really self -important sounding name. Oh, Dealbook Summit, you know, that like Dealbook summit.

0:03:31 Matt: That's a fun one. That's right. Yeah.

0:03:51 Thomas: Having some weird people. And I was just like, I got to see what's happening. It's a bunch of interviews. Interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu. And this guy, this it's Andrew Ross Sorkin, I want to say, he's just like of helping him along with his propaganda efforts. Pretty cool. Mispronounced Mamdami's name, you know, said Mamdani or something. And then also that Mamdali said questioned whether Israel has a right to exist, which is not what he did at all. And it's just stuff like that where you're like, hey, maybe we need more independent media that's not fucking bought and paid for. Oh, wait, we can't curse on this one. Sorry. It's your ears with apologies. I'll bleep that. Um, point is support media. That's not in the tank for, um, you certain bad actors is all I'm saying.

0:04:30 Matt: We're trying here. We're really trying.

0:04:32 Thomas: Trying to get in the team. Someone wants to offer a lot of money, but like they haven't yet. So you can trust us because we're poor.

0:04:38 Matt: You're gonna need a bigger tank let's

0:04:40 Thomas: All right. After this, we'll get to it.

0:04:46 Thomas: Right, matt where do you want to begin just

0:04:48 Matt: Start in Honduras, a country that I've only been to briefly but really enjoyed. I've worked with a lot of Hondurans in my life, and right now, as we're talking right now, this is relevant to everything else we're going to talk about. Elections in Honduras are down to the wire. It is really close, and Trump is alleging voter fraud. He's actually threatened to cut off all foreign aid into Honduras, which is a really big deal, we send them a lot, if the national party's Nasry Asfura doesn't win um that's just kind of all happening right now, just

0:05:10 Thomas: Putting the thumb on the scale just

0:05:12 Matt: Yep, just have a long history of destroying democracy in Honduras. Why stop now? We've been doing it a long time. Is relevant because you might've heard a few years ago, I want to start here, that Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez. And this, I knew something about him because I've worked with a lot of Hondurans and I've done a lot of Honduran asylum claims. Honduras was at some point, and I can't really say it is now, but it was a narco state to the degree that the government was very wrapped up with the cartels. It's a major place, obviously, you have to go through to get this stuff up to the US. So had a big role in this. We had both the former president, who was just pardoned, and his brother, very famous for being open drug traffickers, basically. I mean, the brother was helping to fund the entire party, and everybody knew that. That. I don't know who Juan Orlando Hernandez's lawyer is or if he even has one, but I do know that we just got the letter that he wrote to Trump that got him pardoned. And it's pretty much what you would expect.

0:05:16 Thomas: That's fair dear

0:06:04 Matt: I mean,

0:06:05 Thomas: Awesome amazing good looking man and I did have a like a lipstick kiss on the envelope or whatever yeah

0:06:12 Matt: It's just got everything else that he wants besides that. Maybe that too. Like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change, i.e. I took $500 million or something from cartels.

0:06:17 Thomas: Don't know yeah

0:06:26 Matt: There's a poll quote from Trump, of his speeches in which he praised the president of Honduras and talking about how he's shutting down the border and reminding him about how great it was he shut down the border. Light of these ongoing injustices and the clear case of lawfare by the Biden -Harris administration. This just absolute music.

0:06:42 Matt: He's playing Trump's song right now. This is it.

0:06:42 Thomas: We what do you end up over here was he like political asylum type thing or what what did how did that happen

0:06:49 Matt: He was extradited. Charged him with a whole bunch of crimes against the United States, and and he was convicted of those crimes along with his brother. I don't think his brother's been pardoned or there's any talk of that, but it seems like from what people can tell that within hours of getting this letter, basically his lawyer just gets a call and says, and this is a surprise. Nobody's really expecting it like this. Usually you have to work pretty hard to go through the right channels to get a pardon from Trump. But apparently if you just write him a letter as a former president saying, I was prosecuted by the radical left, then he it. It's all telling you all of this because obviously this has been raised a lot in contradiction to the horrific news last week about how the military is conducting boat strikes in the Caribbean. We know we've already talked about the boat strike situation. I'm not going to waste time. I think the New York Times and Daily, our favorite podcast, their title of this show today was, does the US boat strike amount to a war crime? Amount to a work crime?

0:06:58 Thomas: Man us radical leftists shouldn't have put all those people in jail that was a mistake amount

0:07:44 Matt: Can you add it up to a crime? I'm just going to tell you it's not a warcrime because we're not at war with Venezuela. So let's just start there. It's just murder. You're just doing murder in the high seas. We're going to analyze that. That's not what I'm here to talk about.

0:07:54 Thomas: And they're not even doing it in a swashbuckling way you know like I would forgive a little I would think of them better if there was more swash buckling no swat zero zero buckles have been swashed or swashes have been buckled I actually don't know what's which one's the the and the object there but point is no swash buckling bad news wow

0:08:06 Matt: It's very true. I don't think swashbucklers are bound by Article 3 of of the Geneva Convention, but we sure are. Supposed to be. Does not allow you to fire on people who are just not in combat, what they call hors de combat or out of combat, like once you've been injured or on the sidelines as these people were clinging to the remains of the ship that had just been struck. It's what's called a double tap. And as we'll talk about, that's not unusual, unfortunately, in mean, it's really bad. You shouldn't do it. Only U -boat commander who has ever tried and executed for a war crime in World War II was actually for doing exactly this to a merchant ship. Were known to have done things like this too, it got covered up, but he, you know, victors justice. You know this is considered to be an extremely serious war crime. You know, I looked and saw that like the classic example given of a naval crime is firing on a shipwreck. Like that's just, everybody knows.

0:08:54 Thomas: It's funny to even talk about that relative to this because maybe even in in the midst of war I could even see an argument for like well Maybe they could get back back uh be lethal like maybe there's weapons nearby maybe they could reconstitute this is like oh maybe they would what get back to the boat that's nothing so they're dangerous you know know what I mean? Like it's, it's one thing when you're in war and maybe it's a combatant who literally is trying to kill you and might be armed. Like I, even then it sounds like it's obviously a war crime, but it's at least fathomable that someone could be like scared enough to do it. But here, this is just cold blooded murder.

0:09:12 Matt: Worse than that. It's so much worse than.

0:09:27 Matt: And you you seen the justification, the OLC memo?

0:09:30 Thomas: Were asking for it based on the way they were dressed. I don't know.

0:09:32 Matt: Don't get to see the memo. OLC memo is sacred, but it's been reported on by The Guardian and others. And the new justification, which Trump had not tried out before, is that, you see, we're not killing anybody. We're striking boats. Are going after the cargo of the boats. And as long as you destroy the cargo of boats, which is going to be destined for sales, they're going to support cartels that are fighting our allies. So that somehow makes it something like a war. As long as we're just hitting the boats, and that's what Hegseth said that they were doing, which just going back and hitting the boat. Maybe there's somebody clinging to the boat, I don't know, but we got to destroy the boat." That's what the U -boat commander said too.

0:09:59 Thomas: I'll give him points for innovation. Well, we're not war criming the people. We're just war criming, the boats, you know, we'll just, and what you Can can't I be convicted of murder of boat? No. I mean, I know definitely I won't. We'll on air. No. Yeah.

0:10:10 Matt: You're going to cry for all that $40 million worth of cocaine? Don't think so. But that's it. That's what they're doing. Again, that's a memo you can't see. That is an OLC, Office of Legal Counsel memo. I all of the jags in February. The judge etiquette generals are supposed to advise on the ethics at the top levels. And there was a lot of concern at the time that it was going to result major ethics violations by the military. And it looks like we're here because, the senior ones.

0:10:36 Thomas: Just fired all of them. Like not how not. Okay.

0:10:40 Matt: Yeah. Leadership purge and his justification at the time, which it seems like we should have noticed, but there's so many things to notice as he said, as the zone is so flooded. He said that he fired the Jags because he didn't want any roadblocks to orders that are given by the commander in chief.

0:10:54 Thomas: Like, You understand, I don't want them to stop me from doing illegal stuff. Oh, okay. That's the reason.

0:10:59 Matt: Roadblocks, that's it. We just accept that when the secretary of defense says that in public. That's just a thing that just went without notice, really. Yeah.

0:11:08 Thomas: How did we get our hands on this memo? You said we can't see it, but we know what it is. Was it just a leaker whistleblower?

0:11:13 Matt: The Guardian has it, but they can't release it, apparently. Or they've seen some private, they've talked to trusted sources. It seems like there's multiple sources now.

0:11:19 Thomas: I'm sure it's just like that Trump letter to Epstein that definitely did not exist. Totally did not exists. It was described with specificity uh but it didn't oh there it existed okay now yeah

0:11:23 Matt: And we saw it. Yeah yeah. But that meant it's usually they will release these things because they want people to understand. But we're removing the fig leaf. But I want to talk a little bit about the figleaf and how we got here. Because you know, Mike Johnson came out and said, well you know of of course, Obama committed all kinds of war crimes too. And look at the 542 people or whatever that were drowned to death.

0:11:47 Matt: And yes, we've talked about it multiple times on this program. But I do want to make the point, and I don't think we should, I think just out of honesty and intellectual rigor here, we should make sure that we are talking about that and how we got to the point. Now, this is a departure. I'm not justifying at all how this went, but you can see how the trickle down here, the evolution or devolution from we absolutely don't kill civilians to we can kill some civilians. And then maybe anybody who's within a certain range of a terrorist isn't a civilian anymore. And that's where LLC landed during the war on terror. People, including a few US citizens who were intentionally targeted and killed in drone warfare illegally, almost certainly. There's a great law review article that I'll link to here in the show notes, which makes the compelling case that Barack Obama should be at least considered for war crimes. Now, we didn't sign on to the Rome Statute, so a lot of these people can't go to the Hague. Do think it's worth noting that there were known double taps. This is something that we have done before as a military, and I think we have to say that out loud. There's no reason to protect the people who did it. Something that Israel has obviously been rightfully criticized for all the way through what they were doing to Gaza. There were a lot those happening where they'd go back and it's not just sort of like, like, let's hit the people who are still on the ground. It's let's wait 20 minutes and hit the hospital staff,

0:12:59 Matt: Right? The healthcare workers. Responders, it's really bad. And we've done things like that. It has happened.

0:12:59 Thomas: Awful yeah always I'll make you a deal let's get rid of all the people who were uh with epstein and all the People have done war crimes regardless right or left don't care we at least the kind of thing where it's like if there was some sort of proceedings or trial or anything where people could explain themselves and we could decide what what was going on that would be good I

0:13:11 Matt: Works for me. Yeah, I want to be very careful about how I'm saying this, because Mike Johnson, of course, was being Mike Johnson when he said that. He's not totally wrong to point it out, but there was at least some pretense that we were actually at war under the authorization of use of military force that, as you know, just a very short paragraph gave really broad authority for the military to do whatever it thought was necessary to fight Al -Qaeda. Drug strikes were all carried under Title 50, as we'll talk about with national intelligence. So that's what I want to get to here actually next is talk a little bit about what happened with the DC shooter this week and the response to that because I everybody should know the full story and should know also what's happening to a lot of innocent people right now because of that. Seen the story that there was a shooting in DC just before Thanksgiving, a terrible thing. There.

0:14:03 Thomas: Fortunately it was only one who was killed but uh but yeah they're

0:14:07 Matt: He, as you might have seen, was an Afghan refugee who drove across the country to do this, and it sounds like he was pretty well known to be disturbed, having a lot of problems for the year leading up to this, and people were very concerned about him.

0:14:19 Matt: In a sense, this is a typical story about a soldier with PTSD, but when you dig deeper on what he was asked to do for this country, what he was paid to do for this country, and the reason that he's here, it just becomes so much worse. And I do want to make sure that we talk about this for a second, because there's a very good ProPublica story about it, and it has a lot to do with everything else we're about to talk about here. But this man was part of a CIA unit called the Zero Units. And these CIA units would pair up with special forces, but they would be doing the bulk of the work, the actual people from Afghanistan in these units. But because they're working for the CIA, they're operating under Title 50, which does not require them to operate under the normal laws of war. And these people were allowed to do horrific things and to participate in terrible crimes against their own people. The ProPublica story, which everybody has to read this story, it is such a good piece of journalism. I just love ProPubblica, but good, especially their long form. When they go long

0:15:08 Thomas: Among the best that are around yeah they

0:15:12 Matt: On something, they really spend the money on it and take the time. This officer said, you go on night raids, make more enemies, then you got to go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill. It's pretty bleak.

0:15:14 Thomas: Incredible you you now have to kill yeah

0:15:23 Matt: Yeah, after you've made the enemies after the night raids right, you've just created a whole new set of enemies. So he's talking about the zero units like going out again and again and they would always try to sit down and figure out how many civilians might die and they always underestimated it. About 452 civilians have been killed by these units. So think about the state of mind this man is coming from, not just that he did all of these things or was in any way witness to these things, but then he comes here as a refugee because everybody in Afghanistan wants to kill him. I mean, at this point, if you're known to have been part of these things and you did that for us with our money, and so you and your family have to come here. That's how it works. You're a refugee now, but you also have this PTSD that's been inflicted.

0:15:57 Thomas: Well and keep in mind it's even worse because like Like, all right, it's one thing this this person might not necessarily be super sympathetic, but there were all kinds of stories of really sympathetic characters of people who risked their lives to try to do good and knew they were going to be targeted, ended up targeted. But then we just like didn't didn't help him escape, you know, and God knows what happened to him. So this was one we did, I guess, at least help.

0:16:11 Matt: Yeah, of course. Over and over again. Yeah. Not the typical one. I think the typical story you hear about the people who get the visas, because there was a special military visa. I don't think he got that one. I think he just came as a refugee. Military visas for interpreters and support staff, and of course, the people going out with us that risked everything, that's a little different. I mean, they were operating the rules of war. But yeah, this though, I thought it was relevant because I've been thinking a lot about the fallout from, and I've seen it, and I have clients now directly affected by the fall out from this one thing, which of course it had nothing to do with who it was. They were just waiting for the first thing they could pin on in Afghanistan so they could get this rolling. We'd already suspended Afghani refugees, and I think there was this memo that basically shut down asylum, shut down all their benefits for Afghanis, no matter who they are. That's just the beginning of it. We've seen so much come out of this. There was a previous presidential proclamation, kind of a new travel ban that was inflicted on 19 countries that hadn't been enacted yet. So they decided on Thursday, day, Thanksgiving, to put out the official enactment of this thing after Trump had promised we're no longer going to have refugees from third world countries. I think he made that promise on Thanksgiving.

0:17:28 Matt: Yeah, just haven't appreciated that. He's been on a tear about third world countries since this. And let's play a quick clip of him on Air Force One. The audio is going to be awful, but this is Trump talking about Somalis.

0:17:29 Thomas: Tis the season or something. I don't know.

0:18:00 Matt: Had to play that because it's direct hate speech about one nationality, about Somalis particularly.

0:18:05 Thomas: I wonder why.

0:18:08 Matt: Trump stuff, but it had become so typical. And I just want to remind everybody, this is not normal for the president to specifically... I mean, it's not normal for the President to say any of those things, but to specifically identify a country and say, say, these are terrible, dirty people. We don't want them. He said a bunch of other things about them too. ISIS just started massive raids and crackdowns specifically on Somalis in Minnesota. And I hope that somebody has already filed the injunction because you've got it from the mouth of the president himself that he wants to deport these people because they're dirty and poor, essentially. And the overwhelming majority of Minnesota's Somali population has either become residents or naturalized. You're not going to find undocumented people. You aren't going to find deportable people, but they're just going to terrorize the community because the president came out and said something like that. And I just didn't want to let that moment pass. I know it's hard, but I mean, this is really happening that we have the president directly ordering not just the usual racist immigration rates, but the supercharged specific kind of thing. Thing. So

0:19:02 Thomas: It's important. Any kids listening, anyone under the age of, gosh, at this point, 25, didn't used to be this way.

0:19:11 Matt: Promise.

0:19:12 Thomas: You didn't used to have a president just saying outright racist things about other people.

0:19:15 Matt: It was bad in different ways, but it it wasn't like this.

0:19:17 Thomas: Yeah. It can always get worse. I think it's important to keep in mind different levels of bad. I think that, you know, so much of the discourse on if I were to complain about our particular side, a lot of the discourse flattens that to where all things are equally bad.

0:19:31 Matt: It's true. Yeah, it does.

0:19:32 Thomas: That doesn't doesn't mean that less bad things are still good. But I think people were not creative enough in imagining how bad things could be.

0:19:40 Matt: Yeah. Or assuming that we're already at the worst it could be. And that's a dangerous thing to do too. We're nowhere near that, unfortunately. But I also want to note that the fallout from the shooting, because again, this was a whole wave of things. There were just a bunch of policies that all came out right after Thanksgiving as an excuse because of the shooting. Things they were going to do or probably were ready to do anyway, but they just want to put them out as a package so they could have as much political capital, I guess, going in as possible. But I want to point out that the fallout includes Sylvie, who you heard last week in our Thanksgiving episode, and her father, who now will not be able to go to a naturalization ceremony because they've passed their exam. It's terrible.

0:20:15 Matt: Yeah, they're completely suspending them even they passed the exam. And it'd be bad enough if it was pending. I know.

0:20:20 Thomas: That is heartbreaking.

0:20:24 Matt: Okay. We had to tell her today. There's nothing to worry about. She and her Father are fine. But she was worried, and everybody's worried about this stuff. But it's just going to be a pause. They've done this before, and they're just going come up with something that they call extreme vetting. And I just want to know that the countries include not just just Haiti Haiti and Somalia, but Sudan and Yemen. And he's not wrong about some of these countries not really having governments and not being able to produce passports or authenticate people. Valid grounds under INA 212F, which is what they're using for these things to suspend immigration from certain countries if you do have these kinds of security problems. You know, if they're completely a civil war and there's nobody running the country, right, you can't really let people in until you can figure out who they are. Announced they're going to be reconsidering the parole admissions of every single Afghani who came in, for example, under the Biden program, which,

0:21:07 Thomas: Just can't do that, can they?

0:21:09 Matt: Well, Well, they can. I mean, they certainly can. It's all conditional. But can reconsider, yeah. They can revoke. I think they're

0:21:16 Thomas: Can? Wow. All of them. So, oh, but they're still they're doing it on like a case by case. Or can they just declare like none of these are valid kind of thing?

0:21:23 Matt: Have to say it's case by case or else it's totally arbitrary. But that would get struck down pretty quickly under the Administrative Procedures Act. Just to be clear that we're talking about parole. So this is the special form of entry that they had for people to try to get out after Afghanistan fell, or after we left, I guess. I'm not trying to be dramatic. But of course, the terms under which we left were completely negotiated by Donald Trump. I don't think he wants to remember that. He made a deal with the Taliban that wasn't all that popular. Biden had to carry it out because it was in place by the time he got there.

0:21:53 Thomas: Were? Even I didn't remember it that way. Wow.

0:21:55 Matt: Yeah. And he really has escaped a lot of the blame for the way that Afghanistan went down because Biden felt a commitment to finish it, to just get out, which wasn't the wrong instinct, but you know there's no good way to do that at this point with the deal that he made so there's so much about afghanistan that we've already forgotten and I want to we'll get to a footnote where actually I'll be talking about some mystery that people might not even know about that my client was wrapped up in but tragic pattern of doing things to people's countries that make them have to come here and then treating them terribly when they get here and dann finding excuses to deport them after a few years.

0:21:58 Thomas: Kidding. I'm gonna have to brush up on that.

0:22:27 Matt: I mean, it's just something we've done again and again, and just don't want to see happen. But happening right now is temporary, and that's still the good news. This can all be reversed, this is all executive policy, none of it is going to be binding on future generations. Biden changed almost all of the Trump programs when he came in, Trump did the same thing to Biden, that's just how it works. So as bad as it can get, it is at least going to temporary.

0:22:27 Thomas: Yeah all right is important I mean one benefit of Congress not working is we should be able to reverse a lot of stuff but uh you know it keeps getting worse each time don't want to don't want to keep doing things that way um right well we'll take a break and then we'll get to our next segment huh

0:23:05 Matt: So let's talk real quick about Steve Bannen because it's a lot less serious than anything else we're going to talk about today. Obviously not a serious person.

0:23:11 Thomas: His skin finally eat him oh

0:23:14 Matt: Did you know he did four months in prison last year? I kind of went unnoticed.

0:23:17 Thomas: No I remember that yeah boy

0:23:18 Matt: Yeah. He got away with his first federal criminal conviction for the fraud thing around the build the wall project, that he went down for contempt of Congress. He ended up having to do his four months. And I want to talk about why, because I hadn't really looked at the basis for his appeal. It's kind of interesting. He's just filed a cert petition with the Supreme Court, which I just read. And it's kind of an interesting question. I It is hard for me to say because I want him to be wrong, but I got to be fair. So let's take a fair analysis here.

0:23:39 Thomas: I in the same I thought it was interesting to look at glaine maxwell's thing where it has nothing to do with glaine maxwell it has everything to do with the corrupt ass deal that that they gave epstein and by the letter of that deal I really felt like she had a real case but was one time where I guess it's fortunate that the supreme court doesn't give a shit anymore and they're just like oh no this sucks we don't want that right I mean they just denied it well I guess they didn't explain it right they just said nah

0:23:45 Matt: Sure. Sure. Got to consider it. Sure, yeah. Did. Yeah. Yeah, they did. No, they didn't explain it. And actually, there is a circuit split they need to actually decide because there is one set of circuits that has said that all agreements made by any one US attorney are binding on the whole office, and there's another circuit that said the opposite, and that's the argument she was bringing.

0:24:17 Thomas: It a very legitimate case.

0:24:21 Matt: Yeah I think so. So in that sense, he's got got something to this.

0:24:22 Thomas: And, and, and she really illustrates the Supreme court just being like, no, we don't, we Don't like it. No pass.

0:24:26 Matt: Pass. Right.

0:24:29 Thomas: Is that what you said? Uh, pass. No, thanks.

0:24:31 Matt: Yeah, this is a buy round. It's fine. Congressional contempt statute at 2 U.S.C. 192 requires that someone willfully defy a subpoena, right? Did in this case. He was subpoened by the January 6th committee. I went back and remembered why. It was because on January 5th, 2021. Steve Bennett had a bunch of stuff on his podcast about how we're facing a constitutional crisis that is about to go up five orders of magnitude tomorrow. He also stated that all hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It's not going to happen like you think it's going to happen. It is going be quite extraordinarily different. He said that all in public on January 5th. So the committee, rightfully, was like, you want to come in and tell us some more about that?

0:25:14 Thomas: At least, at least make him talk about it. It's not like he should be maybe like convicted just for those statements, but like at least talk, you know, how did you you know that? Yeah.

0:25:22 Matt: Explain yourself. Right, right. And so they also, along with his presence on October 14th, 2021, they demanded that he turn over a long list of documents by October 7th, 2021, including the whole archive of his podcast. And I'm sorry for whoever in Congress would have had to listen to that.

0:25:37 Thomas: Why do you have... I like that subpoena. We don't want to download it ourselves. Congress, it's going to mess up Congress's algorithm.

0:25:43 Matt: Just send us a zip file.

0:25:49 Thomas: Can you just do that for us?

0:25:51 Matt: That would be awful. Nothing but right -wing podcast for years.

0:25:53 Thomas: Yeah, it is already what their algorithm is, let us be honest.

0:25:57 Matt: Probably. Decided not to do any of that. He did not turn over his documents and he didn't show up. And you don't just default on Congress. You don't no -show. Yeah. That is a crime.

0:26:03 Thomas: Question, is that cool? You just decide no okay yeah

0:26:11 Matt: You will be held in contempt of Congress, which there are worse institutions to be held on contempt of, but it's still a crime." His lawyer was told by one of Trump's lawyers that Trump was going to be invoking executive privilege and Bannon rested on this idea that, well, I'm just going to wait and see how this executive privilege thing works out.

0:26:26 Matt: But as the committee pointed out, he is not protected by executive privilege. I

0:26:29 Thomas: How would that work I have executive privilege over Steve Bannon's podcast yeah

0:26:33 Matt: He wasn't even working for the president at the time. Nothing to that. The problem is actually in the statute itself and how it's been interpreted. He clearly defaulted. There's no question he didn't show up, and there's no questions he didn' turn over any documents. So his one defense when he was taking this trial in the district court in front of Carl Nichols, who actually recently heard the DC Sandwich case, which I hope we'll be getting into sometime soon, the ICE Sandwich Assault, Nichol's had to agree that he is not allowed to use an advice of counsel defense because of the the way this statute has been interpreted. Again, willfully would usually mean both that you have to intend to do it and that you know that it's wrong, right? It's not just intentional where you do something knowing that you're doing it. You have to know that's wrong because there's an extra element of willfully. And in this statute before, now there's interesting sort of dark history here because the one Supreme Court case about this statute, the one famous one, is in the case of Helen Bryan, who's an Antifa hero. She was the chairperson of the Anti -Fascist Refugee Committee, which was supporting freedom of fighters in Spain against Franco. Refused to turn over her records to HUAC in 1945, obviously the McCarthy outfit. She was told by her lawyer though, that there was something wrong with the subpoena. So she didn't turn over her documents, but she showed up. I mean, like you have to show up

0:27:46 Matt: When they tell you to show up and answer your questions, right? And his position was because this executive privilege thing. And this is flimsy. He says it was good faith, advice of counsel. I don't know. Sure, you can say that, but

0:27:52 Thomas: Yeah if find uh Saul Goodman to give you some legal advice or something yeah

0:28:01 Matt: Doesn't have to be good counsel, I guess. In that case, just to be clear, in Bryan and then in this follow -up case, the DC Circuit, Coplicavoli, they found that advice of counsel is not a defense to contempt of Congress, which is unusual because it usually isn't something like this. Saying that that evil motive is not a necessary ingredient of willfulness under this cause of the statute. And they're talking about this deliberate action you have to take. Criminal law, basically, as Dave Bannon points out in his brief, we have not interpreted the world willfully to include conduct is not faith, basically. You know you're not supposed to be doing it. And he's saying he didn't know he wasn't supposed to being doing it, and I thought it was fine to skip out on Congress. Was denied that defense. And so, of course, as his lawyer told the judge, well, we don't have a defense now, so that's the end of the case. He was convicted, got his four months. But his only defense would have been that he was not willfully violating it. He wasn't intentionally violating the terms of the subpoena.

0:28:51 Thomas: Well so it was like kind of a motion eliminate type thing where, where it was like, well, since that wouldn't even work, if you said it, we're not even going to let you make the defense.

0:28:58 Matt: It was a jury instruction. So the jury was actually told specifically they could not consider advice of counsel.

0:29:02 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:29:03 Matt: They're trying to get that in there, and they got some very strict language about that.

0:29:07 Thomas: Okay, so now maybe I see what you're alluding to. Cause I was going to say, well I wouldn't want it to be that you can never be excused because of advice of counsel. I would just want it be in this case, them being like, okay but this was bad faith bullshit. You didn't really believe that you You didn't have to even appear, you know? And so it sounds like you're saying that there wasn't even an opportunity for that. Really Okay.

0:29:31 Matt: Understand that argument. Now, the majority I think makes a very good point. And I'll just read here, as much.

0:29:36 Thomas: It says, let me read this. Fuck Steve Bannon.

0:29:41 Matt: They really hung up, as am I, on the idea that he didn't show up. And that is the real disrespect, right? Because you could could just show up and sit there and take the fifth and just refuse to answer anything for an hour and maybe you could charge the contempt anyway, but

0:29:51 Thomas: I'm surprised he didn't. Cause he wouldn't, I'm surprised he didn't want the showmanship of that, you know,

0:29:55 Matt: Yeah, get on camera. As Bannon sees it then, a conviction for failing to appear at all would require a showing of bad faith, but a conviction for appearing and refusing to answer relevant questions would not. I'm skeptical that Congress intended to enact such a scheme. Imagine a witness who genuinely believed his lawyer's advice that a privilege justified refusing to testify on subjects listed in a subpoena. On Bannon's reading, that witness could not be convicted if he declined to appear before for a congressional committee altogether, yet he could be convicted if he appeared but declined to answer specific questions based on the advice. That construction makes little sense. So I always appreciate that when a court has to break it down and say, play it out here, take the joke as far as you can, see what happens. I do understand the legal argument, and they do basically acknowledge the Supreme Court needs to fix this because it does seem to be kind of an issue in the law. I don't know, maybe they will. I don't think it'd be the worst thing if they they modified the Bryan precedent a little bit because,

0:30:44 Thomas: At that point, would it be like a retrial type thing possibly?

0:30:47 Matt: Potentially, he could...

0:30:48 Thomas: He's already done the time, right?

0:30:50 Matt: Yeah. He's just saying he should have been able to use that defense.

0:30:52 Thomas: And so he's like, would he get like, potentially he could do retrial and get his record expunged or something.

0:30:58 Matt: Or he'd be able to get retried and have a defense of counsel defense and maybe a D.C. jury would buy it, maybe not.

0:31:01 Thomas: Assuming he was convicted or something, yeah. OK. Interesting.

0:31:04 Matt: I thought so. I want to come back to Honduras for a minute, actually. We're going to talk about the safe third country agreements that we've reached

0:31:11 Thomas: Didn't you tell me when I was already there, Matt? I came all the way back.

0:31:13 Matt: The way back. Well, at least there's no jet lag. It's a pretty easy flight there. Country, worth a visit. But a concept in asylum law of a safe third countries. So you can sign an agreement between nations that says that if you came through this county or had an opportunity to stop through the country to apply for asylum on your way to the US, that we can send you to that country to do it if we have that kind of agreement. So this is something we have really done. We signed this with Canada in 2002. That makes sense mutually, that basically if you have a chance to apply for asylum in Canada and you didn't, we're going to send you back to do it there.

0:31:43 Thomas: Kind of makes sense, right? I mean, I mean, I guess I could, maybe there's problems with it, but I do kind of see, yeah, the countryside. It's like, at the same time, I'm also sympathetic to if people wanted to skip right past America and go to Canada, which I'm sure we'd be fine with, you know, the Trump administration would be fine With, but, uh, I don't know if Canada would be, if it's mutual, then they'd have to send them back, huh?

0:31:45 Matt: Country shopping, right? Yeah. It's been happening a lot. Yeah. Right, right. So the problem is that to be a safe third country, you have to guarantee that the immigrant's life or freedom wouldn't be threatened on account of something you can get asylum for, which is a problem for some of these countries, and that they would have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum. So it has to be like an actual asylum system. And I think Honduras, at the time when we signed one of these safe third country agreements, was 2019. I think it had, I don't know, a couple dozen people, maybe in its asylum department or something. And they're talking about basically sending everybody back. Now, in 2019, Trump signed safe third country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the Northern Triangle. And none of them were ever ended up being implemented. They didn't get that far. And Biden canceled them as soon as he came in, fortunately.

0:32:47 Thomas: Interesting.

0:32:47 Matt: The idea would have been to send everybody who was coming from Central America back to Central America, but to different countries than the ones that came from, if possible.

0:32:55 Thomas: Mean that part, honestly, if they're fleeing their country, then yeah, like that's better Better than if they were fleeing their country and we sent them back to their country, right?

0:33:04 Matt: Right, no, it is. And I mean, they're not going to get a very good chance to seek asylum in a neighboring country, but they'll at least be better off than having been sent there. But it is kind of frying pan to fire when you're talking about Honduras being right next door to El Salvador where there are gangs everywhere. There were. Certainly, it's a lot better now in El Salvador at least.

0:33:19 Thomas: Guess what I'm saying is I could imagine this making sense if there were actual rules about what constitutes a country that, you could ask for asylum in. And if it's like, well, this one wouldn't work because they're in danger there, then that shouldn't count, right.

0:33:30 Matt: That's how it works. It's codified in 8 U.S.C. 1158. You Turns out maybe 1158 doesn't say what we all thought it did because once again, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which I've complained about many times on this show, on Halloween, actually this year, issued a case called Matter of C and L.V.S. — gee, these are initials, obviously, of asylum seekers. We don't use their names. And this decision affirmed the Safe Third Country Agreement and radically reinterpreted how we're supposed to have immigration judges decide when somebody, for example, my client on Monday from Colombia, is going to be deported to Honduras, a country that she has never been to. She's never passed through Honduras. She doesn't know anything about it. And the judge has to decide whether it would be okay for somebody from Colombia to have to live in Honduras to seek asylum versus staying here to pursue the case. And the only way you can overcome that is if you can show that you're going to be persecuted for reasons that asylum could protect in that country as well, not just your home country. And you don't have any way to know that. You've never been to Honduras. Don't know any problems there. And that's part of the point. Is also a public interest exception in which the judge is supposed to be able to find that despite the ACA, that there is a public interested in you remaining in the the United States to seek your claim. And my client on Monday had a number of things that were very sympathetic in her case that made it much more likely that she needed to be here with her U.S. citizen family. Judge was momentarily sympathetic to this, but agreed with the Board of Immigration Appeals that the regulatory statement is more important than the statutory statement. And just for everybody to remind people, regulations are passed by the Attorney General, their executive branch. Statutes are passed by Congress. And board decided that the regulations won over the statute somehow, because the statute says the judge has the authority to do that. And the board decided that no, only DHS has the ability to do it. So

0:33:34 Thomas: There you go. I'm old enough to remember when Chevron deference got overturned. Right. So it's like, on one hand, it's like, well, we can't, these agencies shouldn't be deciding jack shit. They shouldn't do, if we judges disagree. And then I know this is not yet, or no, is this, this is the, the, well what is the board that you're talking about? Is that judges or is that?

0:35:35 Matt: Is something that they would have had to defer to. And you might remember my quiet glee when Chevron went down, because this is the one place where I can authoritatively say that they should not be deferring to them because they've become so politicized.

0:35:48 Thomas: So but then they decided, uh, no, heads I win, tails you lose. Oh.

0:35:53 Matt: Got this decision now. The circuits don't necessarily have to defer to you. So it'll be interesting to see how it works out. I think the First Circuit might have different opinions than the Fifth Circuit, but that's how it always goes. Board of Immigration Appeals right now, this is what rules that nothing has challenged them yet. And it says that the immigration judge can't find that exception and that it's actually retroactive, even though that deal was terminated in 2021. And this new one was signed, I think, back in March. They're imposing it on everybody back to 2019. They are saying, if you've been here as of 2019, that that original deal stands, even though it makes no sense. It shouldn't be retroactive. There's all kinds of problems with this.

0:36:25 Matt: And I'm just giving you a few of them. I mean, I tried to run them down just to preserve them for the record on Monday's hearing. People should know that we're doing this now. It's starting. Now, my client's going to appeal, and she'll have quite a while to appeal.

0:36:35 Matt: And some kind of class action or potentially some first circuit precedent that's going to help on this. Right now it's a scary situation. And Now I have to explain why all these claims might get pre-terminated and just canceled in the middle before they get a full hearing. Remember, they're not getting an asylum hearing. They're just getting kind of a preview. The judge gets to hear what they might say at an asylum hiring if they had to go to the other country. -minute hearing instead of the full couple of hours you're supposed to get an asylum pairing. Being deported to a place they've literally never been. We use that expression a law, an immigration law, that my client's going to have to be deported to a place he's never been. We don't mean never. We mean he was a baby when he came here, right? But this is literally true. These are places these people have never been, so just something that people should know that we're doing.

0:37:10 Thomas: Is So the takeaway here is, um, reason that you were kind of more okay with Chevron being overturned than other people is, well, at least we don't have to listen to this board of Nazis, and then they're like, no, we still want to just do the bad stuff but none of the good stuff. Is I understand that correct? Okay.

0:37:28 Matt: Is completely filled with Trump appointees at this point because it's an administrative body, and that's

0:37:32 Thomas: And so it's, we're, you're gonna hope that, you know, a higher court or whatever, a circuit court can, can, can stop it, but there's... there's no guarantees, and then there's timing, and you know who knows what lives will be affected in the meantime, right? I

0:37:41 Matt: I will say it's Exactly what happened though with the the Yohuri Hurtado case, having one I keep coming back to from recently, where they said that people just can't get bond, they just can't be released. No circuit court has respected that. All of the district court judges have laughed at this. Class action that was just certified, they cited Loper Bright, which is the case over Rowan Chevron, and said, well, we don't have to listen to you, this is what we think. And they're right. But this is good news at the end of the day, that it's going there, like you said. But for the moment, this is scary stuff, and they are trying to carry something out that we've known has been coming since 2019. They've been trying to do it for a while, but

0:38:16 Thomas: Guess what I'm worried about is in the long term, what on the Chevron difference — and I'm glad if there can be some benefit to it being overturned — but I was always thinking the key problem is going to be when something's important, the Supreme Court will be like, well, in this case, they made a great decision. So we totally should just defer to the agency and they get to have whatever, yeah, whatever, have it whichever way they want, whenever they want.

0:38:36 Matt: The law was clear. They were right. Yeah. No, there's still plenty of room for that in the Looper Bright analysis.

0:38:42 Thomas: Okay. But it's just a, again, a number, a question of time and if it gets up that high and all that.

0:38:48 Matt: Is probably going to have to go to the Supreme Court.

0:38:51 Matt: The agreements themselves are allowed under the law, but I don't think they should be allowed at these countries. That's my problem with it.

0:38:57 Thomas: Right. Our last break here, and then we can get to, uh, footnote. I always love the footnote. So excited to, uh, get to, get to experience a footnote. All

0:39:05 Matt: Quite a story for you.

0:39:09 Thomas: Right Matt, what do you have? Oh.

0:39:11 Matt: I want to tell you, I haven't been doing this enough. I'm going to tell a little bit about one of my cases, and I'm gonna be vague about the most important parts of it, obviously. We're not outing anybody here, but I'm just going to give you a very broad history of something and a letter that I just got from the government about this case. This is directly related to what we were talking about with the DC shooter and the way we'd be treating Afghanis. This was an Afghani man who worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan at the time when they were fighting the Russians. And as you may know, that was the time we liked the Mijahideen. We were giving

0:39:39 Thomas: Yeah, we were we're big fans for a second huh

0:39:41 Matt: Of money and weapons. And so my client was running a restaurant, but he was also doing some work for the Mujahideen to get the Russians out of Afghanistan. And we're paying them, as I said, plenty of money to do this. Is a material support bar to terrorism in the Immigration Act, which there's still an active debate about whether Congress meant to pass something this bad or if they actually were hoping there would just be some kind of exception made later. But it says that if you've ever provided material support for terrorism, getting somebody a glass of water counts, that no exception, even if they had a gun to your head to go get the water, even if there was a doctor that was was being forced to do surgery or whatever.

0:40:04 Thomas: What

0:40:15 Matt: Literally under duress, there's no exception. So what you had to do to get a duress exception was take a removal order, a deportation order, and then seek a duess exemption with the State Department. I got it done a few times for people in these kinds of circumstances where it was clearly duress. And the judge said on the record it's duress and I have to deny your claim because this is the way the law is written. This is a classic thing where he was providing material support to terrorists, but they were our terrorists.

0:40:12 Thomas: That's ridiculous, those Are our terrorists, we like those terrorists.

0:40:39 Matt: We fund those terrorists, even Al -Qaeda. We don't know that yet. Now my client came here with asylum decades ago, and he's seeking residency now, which you're allowed to do anytime after you get asylum. You don't have to do it immediately. And Residency is a big deal because it's on your way to citizenship. It's the step you have to get through. But when you apply for residency after having been in asylee, they get to reconsider your entire life, your entire case, and decide if you're worthy of residency or if you just have to stay in asylie status or if they want to try to deport you instead. He's had multiple interviews now, and the last one was about three hours in which they grilled him about his work. And there was a memo, which is still actually binding now under Obama. There was a memo that said basically, members of these groups, people that supported certain listed groups, including the one that my client worked with, are going to be exempt from the material support bar because we were paying for these people. There's no other way to say it, right?

0:41:32 Thomas: Otherwise we have to convict ourselves of being terrorists. Right and

0:41:36 Matt: We'd have to recognize ourselves as a terrorist group.

0:41:37 Thomas: And get ourselves out of here, let's just totally deport us

0:41:41 Matt: Right? Declare war on us. Yeah. My client applies for residency after this memo comes down, and it becomes a possibility for him to do that. He'd already been denied on the material support grounds before. We put this together. I get a pretty good understanding of what's going on. And after a couple of years, it took a while, we finally have this interview. Client is being as truthful as he possibly can. It's hard to remember everything because this all happened in the late 80s and early 90s. So he's giving as much detail as he can, they keep asking about construction projects. And I'm thinking, what do construction projects have to do with the Mejideen? It turns out that there may have been, and again, they didn't even establish at the interview that he was getting paid by them, but was operating a crew of 40 people doing construction projects. And the interviewer was hung up on the idea that he Was doing these construction projects on behalf of the same group that he also essentially helping provide intelligence so that they could go do strikes, which is a lot more important, like in terms of material support, right? Then it turns out the construction projects were schools, roads, and hospitals. So this group was paying for schools, routes, and hotels.

0:42:41 Matt: And I don't know if you're seeing the problem yet, because you're not a member of the Trump administration, because there's no problem. There's no problems with any of this that I'm saying. You know, you can work by day to build schools, roofs, and households, and by night providing intelligence to our terrorist allies against the Russians. No, it turns out we get a letter today saying, among many other things, they want to deny the case because he failed to disclose that he was doing work on behalf of them doing construction when he was listing out the things he wasdoing for them. He didn't really think about it because it was like, I guess he wasn't getting the money from them, right? It was just like a contract.

0:43:09 Thomas: Is that yeah is that aid for how I think I'm not even understanding how that's anything. Was one of their terrorist aims to build schools? What

0:43:17 Matt: Is so broad though. Here's the real problem. It's because they weren't doing terrorist activities that he's going to be denied. Because he was supporting them in something that wasn't a terrorist activity directed against the DRA, the Soviet Army, the Taliban, its affiliated organizations, or other insurgent groups. It was just helping his own community. That's the joke. Yes. I want to just say that again, just to be as clear as possible, that they would have found that there was an exemption and it would be okay if he was helping to get people killed. But because he didn't disclose that he was helping his community and because he was doing construction that may or may not have been, they didn't even establish that funded by people that we were also funding to help his own community, that's going to get his residency denied. Just try with me to understand.

0:43:49 Thomas: My gosh wow that's It, that's — that is the most Kafka-esque thing That's incredible, I think Kafka would

0:44:07 Matt: That's why I had to talk about it.

0:44:08 Thomas: Be like oh boy what a great one I never would have thought of that so

0:44:12 Matt: Come on, guys. We all enjoyed Kafka.

0:44:14 Thomas: I — so I think I'm getting it, just to make, to make sure, but again, it's, it's humorous in a, like, can you effing believe this, sort of way, so it's like okay normally we're like hey don't help terrorists all right fine but then the problem is in that like how broad that's you know how broad That's construed as helping being all these things. That's really problematic. And you're saying, OK, this is somebody who helped people. And then you're seeing, well, there's an exception because we were fans of these particular terrorists, which Could — that sounds good. I mean, I would think that if the U.S. government was like fans of a particular group of terrorists, they should be fans of people who are helping those terrorists, I guess. Right. And so that's kind of like how that goes. But you're staying because of the way or they're saying because of of the way this exemption is like, I don't know, worded or something or written, it

0:44:20 Matt: But no other way. Right. Yep,

0:45:02 Thomas: Only counts if he was helping them with the terrorist -y stuff, but because he was helping them potentially, potentially, it's not even, I guess, proven or, you know, demonstrated fully, but potentially because he was helping him with like normal stuff, then

0:45:16 Matt: Community building, better for the community than getting people killed.

0:45:19 Thomas: Means he gets the exception. So he was helping terrorists.

0:45:22 Matt: Yep I'm gonna read you from the letter just because I can't believe it myself.

0:45:26 Thomas: How Do these people even — how do these assholes think of these things? I wouldn't even occur to me to be that shitty, like to spend the brainpower to try to solve that Sudoku puzzle of how to even get there.

0:45:41 Matt: Had to grab Nicole like who's also been tracking this case and just show her this and just say can you imagine somebody sending this out just like reading this and thinking this is a normal thing to send out to the public. Me just read just one piece here. This exemption may be applied if it is determined that the applicant's activities were, and this is boldened and underlined, were at all times directed, boldened underlined.

0:46:01 Thomas: At all times.

0:46:02 Matt: Directed against the DRA, the Soviet Army, the Taliban, its affiliated organizations, and or insurgent groups actively involved, et cetera, et cetera. Your support in the form of construction work, overseeing said construction work was not directed against any of the above groups and thus is not exempt under this memo. Oh,

0:46:14 Thomas: Okay. Hold on. I was building schools to learn how to more effectively fight the Russians. Education, the power of learning. Concerning, yeah, you need roads to fight Russians. I've always said that.

0:46:22 Matt: And roads maybe help you get there. But no, yeah, they're calling that the terrorist activity, not the stuff that got people killed. They literally are saying the next sentence is because you have engaged in terrorist activity or inadmissible.

0:46:34 Thomas: That's incredible. That's incredible, Matt.

0:46:40 Matt: I had to share it. And this is not unusual government logic, but it is to an extreme I haven't really seen before. It's only one out of, it's one paragraph out of a seven page letter. It is the most absurd paragraph, but there's plenty of others too.

0:46:53 Thomas: To come right back to how the F would you even think to do that? Know, like it'd be one thing where if it was like, okay, in service of something good, someone's like, wait a minute, I've got it. We can construe, yeah. And it would be like, okay, well, if it's in service, it's like saving someone's life or something good, you know, know, be like, wow, you've done it. You've cracked it. But I can't imagine trying to even spend the innovation power, the brain power to even like go down this road. Why, why would you do that? Kind of asshole?

0:47:05 Matt: At all times, at all times. Sure. Of other stuff in this letter that they could get him on. I think we have defenses to all of it, but there's stuff that's way more serious than this that they're saying. And again, they're not saying he's a bad guy. I can't get into what they're seeing, but it's a really complicated case, which is my favorite kind. And this is not the strongest argument. You could have left it out. That's what I was saying to Nicole. I was like, like, did the thing with the Disney... What Disney lawsuit?

0:47:45 Thomas: Yeah. I think where it was like the fact that you even, yeah, the girl, the lady, the food allergy, the restaurant.

0:47:52 Matt: So the Disney thing where, as we remember, because they'd signed a waiver for Disney +, they'd signed a waver for allergies.

0:47:54 Thomas: Yeah, to just be killed by. Yeah,

0:47:59 Matt: Yeah, yeah. So that's that kind of thing where did you actually read this back.

0:48:02 Thomas: It was like, why even bother? This is so much worse for you than just not arguing that.

0:48:07 Matt: Somebody's going to end up talking about this on a podcast, is what's going to happen. So here we are.

0:48:11 Thomas: And damn it, you need to support that podcast so more people hear it. Share it.

0:48:16 Thomas: Embarrass these assholes. Oh, I guess we can't by name or anything. But like this is this is the kind of fascism that's going on. Wow. Wow.

0:48:22 Matt: It's true. I genuinely don't want to quit my day job, but it'd be great if I could.

0:48:27 Thomas: Well, so it's not like a super happy footnote. It was there any like I mean, are you optimistic about how that's going to go? I mean or

0:48:36 Matt: The end, I do feel good in the end that we can overcome all of this. But it was hard to get. It was hard to see. And of course, it's all due by December 26th, just to make my life that much more fun this month so yeah good times yeah

0:48:45 Thomas: Awesome. Great. Well, that's Matt's out there doing the real work and we really appreciate you. And thanks for sharing that stupid argument. That's that's that'S that's incredible. Incredible that's I wish we could get these people in real life to be able to just have the reaction of like really dude are you really like trying to get this is like a trying to give someone on the worst technicality and something that really matters you know it'd be one thing if it was something stupid but like this this is gonna actually affect someone all

0:49:13 Matt: The look on my face if they said that in court which they should try to say it in court and see how that goes been great having you back for friday I had a lot of fun today

0:49:20 Thomas: It's been really fun um I guess that's our show, Matt.

0:49:23 Matt: Okay you got it I

0:49:25 Thomas: I don't know. Who calls it? Are you done?

0:49:30 Matt: Still your show please take us out yeah

0:49:32 Thomas: Well, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. I might see you possibly on Monday again. We'll see how it goes. Hoping Jenessa gets well soon. But this was fun. And thanks for listening. Everybody, please support and share the show. We'll see you next time.

0:49:41 Matt: Best wishes all

0:49:51 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments, produced by Thomas and Lydia Smith, with editing help from Peter Baird. The intro is by Thomas Smith. This outro is by Matt Cameron. Support the show at patreon.com/law. Contact us through Patreon or openarguments@gmail.com. Make sure to follow our Blue Sky at OpenArgs. But most of all, please share the show. Thanks for listening.

0:50:22 Thomas: Do you have some water, man? You're real clicky, your mouth's all clicky. That's making me feel clicky Can I be convicted of murder of boat? No. I hear you over the fucking airplane.

0:50:24 Matt: You're right. Hold on. Yeah.

0:50:37 Thomas: Sorry. What? Need roads to fight Russians. I've always said that. At least we don't have to listen to this board of nazis and