The More We Learn About the Ilhan Omar Raid, the Worse It Looks

Transcript

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

0:00:00 Clip: Thank you.

0:00:03 Matt: Now, because one of the things they took was her personal cell phone, so that's a problem because you're obviously gonna have work stuff on your cell phone.

0:00:17 Matt: So the Disaster Relief Act in 1974 creates sort of this backbone idea which, like, a 75-25 federal-state cost sharing. Project 2025 is essentially saying we need to all this and make the states pay more and do more, very simple, they just want to flip it, so 25 federal, 75 state, um.

0:00:38 Thomas: And welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1307. I'm Thomas. That over there is Matt Cameron, real-life immigration attorney. How are you doing?

0:00:46 Matt: Right, I'm here to make the case against Ilhan Omar. Let's do this.

0:00:48 Thomas: Oh wow, finally.

0:00:50 Matt: Changing teams, changing teams, flipping sides.

0:00:52 Thomas: We gotta find out if she really married her brother today.

0:00:56 Matt: No, that's not even in the picture. We'll talk about that too, but yeah, I just thought maybe we just put this all together and see what we got. And it is something.

0:01:04 Thomas: Well, we talked about this last week, so I take it big updates?

0:01:08 Matt: Yeah, we got some big updates including a completely illegal search warrant it turns out. What, not who?

0:01:13 Thomas: Really? Really?

0:01:14 Matt: Knew, well, a very badly served search warrant, I think, to the degree that this really might be a problem. Know, we didn't know a lot when we talked about this last week, we still don't know a lot, obviously, but We're getting much better idea now from what the Washington Post has reported on what the government has been telling the media and what her lawyers have revealed so far. And I just kind of wanted to put it together because there are so many different pieces in this. It's also a great time to talk about denaturalization again, because but it's a perennial topic and it is, it keeps coming up in the headlines. I want to make sure we really know what we're talking about here, but I've seen so many misstatements and mistakes and, like, honestly, immigration lawyers even don't really understand this. And I have to say, I did have to do some research because nobody really does denaturalization cases. There's like a dozen a year, usually.

0:01:58 Thomas: Yeah. It's not a great business model for a lawyer.

0:02:01 Matt: In You have to be pretty superstar, top of the game. And also this series of things, just as usual with Trump administration, is just before, so just all kinds of law school exams for years to come coming out of the Trump administration. Thank him for that.

0:02:15 Thomas: Yeah. I was so curious. We had so many open questions after last Wednesday, I think it was, right?

0:02:20 Matt: We still will, but we're going to have many more of them answered today, I think. And also just, the me I'm going to give you what I think is the closest thing to what I think the government's case is against her, and we can see how it develops from here.

0:02:31 Thomas: I'm really curious about that. Well, what else are we going to be talking about today?

0:02:35 Matt: We got to talk about the disaster that FEMA is going going to become if Donald Trump has His way, ironically enough. Project 2025 had a very specific vision for FEMA, which was that it should stop doing its job.

0:02:45 Thomas: It's vision for most government things was just nothing. No, that no, it, here's by vision, gone, oh.

0:02:51 Matt: You know, obviously, that was catastrophic for USCID, as we'll talk about in Book Club on Sunday. Everybody please join for 4.30pm on Eastern Time. On Sunday, the 25th, we'll be talking about Into the Wood Chipper, just to plug that real quick. Nicholas Enrich's book about his time time in leadership at USAID at a time when obviously we're taking the chainsaw to it under Elon Musk. But this is FEMA, which is supposed to responding to domestic disasters. And I want to talk a little bit about the history. We actually covered this a couple of years ago when we talked about the way Congress is interfering, but this is getting to a new level. And there's a whole bunch of new questions coming up. And I think people should know about this you know, I don't mean to be a doomer about this, but there's going to be another disaster in America. I'm going to predict this right now.

0:03:28 Thomas: Doubt it, I think it'll be fine.

0:03:30 Matt: Well, we could take a bet, but

0:03:31 Thomas: Here's the good thing, we've gotten all the one-in-a-thousand-year storms out of the way and disaster events out of the way because we've had like 70 of them in the past couple years, so we got them all out of the way, so we shouldn't have another one for thousands of years, I think.

0:03:45 Matt: Good. 995 years at least. Yeah. We'll be fine.

0:03:47 Thomas: That's good. It's like, you know, getting your work done ahead of time so that you can party on the weekend, end.

0:03:53 Matt: Yeah. And future generations will be just fine. So yeah, we really do need FEMA. It is actually one of the more successful agencies. And I'm actually going to talk about when it has been most successful. You're going to be blown away about the times in which it has been most successful. Yeah, right. High point there is actually one of few things where you can directly say that it has always worked under Democratic administrations and has never worked under Republican administrations.

0:04:13 Matt: It is actually that clean. I'm going to break that case and I will prove it to you. And then we've got, a, well, I was going say a fun footnote. It's It's a Supreme Court, it's never that fun. But I wanted to do this as a footnote today because we have a situation in which the music industry has just kind of done itself in, in a very weird way. I think they just didn't play enough chess moves ahead. But this is the sequence of events in which the Supreme Court justices having a bunch of book deals actually, a major loss for the music industry and

0:04:44 Thomas: Music

0:04:44 Matt: A win for songwriters. I know. Yeah. Yeah.

0:04:44 Thomas: Industry wow that is I'm

0:04:48 Matt: It weird one.

0:04:48 Thomas: Really curious about this. What an episode, man.

0:04:51 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. We got some weird, weird copyright footnotes stuff. Well, plenty to talk about and we'll have to get to it.

0:04:57 Thomas: Well, shoot, yeah, we better take, uh, that break. Patreon.com/law, that's where you can join the book club discussion, you can get a Law'd Awful Movies at that two dollar level. We just recorded a delightful Law'd Awful Movies that was, it's actually going to get referred out, you know, like we're the Justice Department, we're going to refer that out to somewhere else, Godawful Movies, because we accidentally reviewed a Godawful movie. But it was also a Lotawful movie. It's a perfect crossover.

0:05:23 Matt: Glod awful, I guess. Is that a new category?

0:05:24 Thomas: Godawful. No, we're going to think of a better name than that. But, you know, no wrong answers in a brainstorm, you know, know, it is, oh, actually we should say what the movie is, because some people like to watch it ahead of time, I always forget that. You shouldn't but it's really, it's really bad, the movie is called Alleged, and I'll just leave it at that, Alleged and if it's from like, what, 2012, just to make sure you have the right one

0:05:38 Matt: Although you shouldn't really, I promise. If you enjoy pain. Yes. Yes. 2010. Yes. The one with Miles O'Brien in it from all the Star Trek's. Yeah. But again, not worth watching. So you were warned.

0:05:58 Thomas: It is, it is so bad. So, but if you want to, you, a part of the, be a part of the crew, watch that, be out pretty soon. All right, we'll take a break and then we'll get to what sounds like an action-packed episode.

0:06:03 Matt: I can tell you it is worth listening to us talk about it because we had a lot of fun.

0:06:15 Thomas: Matt, so you're taking an anti-Ilhan stance on this one.

0:06:21 Matt: Going to steel man this all the way. We're just Going to see what we can do here to try to understand how a search warrant could have possibly issued. Because the Trump administration has suggested to the Washington Post that they are pursuing criminal denaturalization. That's something they want to try to do. And let me just try to untangle this mess because citizenship law is a mess. It's like some of the most constantly changing law in U.S. history. There have been so many different ways that you can acquire citizenship or apply for it or the different criteria that are required to qualify. It's just changing like every 15 years or something throughout American history. Well, since the time we had immigration law, of course, which was not that long ago that we started doing that. I just want to start though before anything else with the issues with the warrant that have come out because I did not realize, you know, we We're talking about, we just started saying, obviously as a matter of course, last week that she's going to get a copy of the search warrant because that's how it works. It's your property.

0:07:08 Thomas: And to the point where I was a little worried that we hadn't seen it because maybe that would mean there is something there and she didn't want to show it to us.

0:07:17 Matt: They are saying publicly Publicly, they don't have it, and the government's not disputing that.

0:07:21 Matt: So yeah, in federal criminal procedure, Rule 41,

0:07:22 Thomas: The... you have to... Matt, isn't that one of the most basic tenets of like our freedoms?

0:07:31 Matt: Copy the warrant, receipt for the property taken. That's something you have to have. To begin with is that the judge put pretty strict guardrails on this warrant because this is a member of Congress. It's Her house in D.C., right? Right. Speech and debate clause protects anybody in Congress from having any kind of criminal proceeding against anything that has anything to do with their service. So you don't want to be taking things out that might actually be congressional materials or anything else. He's saying very strictly, whatever it is that you're looking for, you know, you can't have anything to do with with anything she's ever done in Congress. Obviously, what they're talking about would go back to when she was a minor. So her lawyers have put out a seven-page letter. It's actually the full text doesn't seem to be available, but it's been reported on several outlets here, and they're saying that the judge's instructions were not followed in a number of ways, including not getting a copy of the search warrant ahead of time, which is something that she was ordered, uh, to be given.

0:07:40 Thomas: Wait. Ahead of time? Okay, so that's interesting.

0:08:19 Matt: Yeah. Under federal rules, you're supposed to get one, but, uh, the judge had said specifically, just given how delicate this is and the fact that there's going to be potentially a lot of speech and debate issues because she's a sitting member of Congress, and you can't just take things. Now, because one of the things they took was her personal cell phone. Yeah.

0:08:34 Matt: I- So that's a problem because you're obviously gonna have work stuff on your cell phone, and her work stuff is not supposed to be something they're looking at at all, and they can't use it as evidence against her at all, like we talked about with Susan Collins, remember, with with the deals, like the the bills that she's actually putting, can't be used as criminal evidence against her, even though they're corruptly made.

0:08:35 Thomas: This- is nuts, yeah. Yeah, I didn't realize how extensive that was.

0:08:56 Matt: Like, you know, texts, emails, calls, recalls, records, everything. Obviously, this is a fishing expedition of some kind. They trying, and we know it's fishing expedition on top of everything else, besides the fact that this is, of course, the first African refugee, I believe, in Congress. It's certainly the first Somali-American in Congress. She was the first Somali-American in any state legislator, actually, before that. Was tied with Rashida Tlaib as the second Muslim woman in Congress that came in the same year. So she's been, of course, a Trump target for a very long time. And in 2019, the Trump administration, Washington Post revealed, did all of this before. They didn't do a search warrant, but they ordered a complete review of her records, which of course they have because they're the government. The family immigrated from Somalia when she was allegedly 12, maybe 13, depending on who you believe. So at the time, there was a super sensitive memo that was prepared that said that they could not proceed with any of this. And that in fact, there was not going to be any way to prove what year she was born, because it's very common, as we were discussing with refugees and especially people from Somalia, given the state of the country, that birth records aren't available.

0:09:49 Matt: And she may not honestly know her own birth year, like for sure. Her mother died when she was three or four. You know, again, she's just working with other people who have told her she wasn't present for her birth legally. Even if it gets this far, you have to prove that she knew what her birthday was and gave something else, right? So that's, oh, so many different kinds of a possibility happening happening at the same time here. But I just want to point out that Trump administration has been through this before. This is breaking their own rule about the 60-day criminal investigation before an election, 22 days or something before the midterms, all kinds of issues with the warrant. The judge tried to put these guardrails on. It looks like they might have some legitimate reasons to challenge that. But let's just step back and pretend everything was fine with the warrant. What are they actually doing? How did this get signed off on? And there's a bunch of different theories here. So criminal denaturalization and civil denaturalization are very different things. They both require that you go in front of a federal judge, which is really important because a lot of this stuff can be done administratively through immigration courts or through USCIS. And obviously, you're talking about a DC federal judge that would have to find a jury, potentially, you'd have a right to a jury trial and a criminal denaturalization. And of course, you'd have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt out that you knowingly procured or attempt to procure naturalization or citizenship unlawfully.

0:10:00 Thomas: Just sounds impossible there's no way

0:10:55 Matt: Now, naturalization or citizenship, this is important because she technically did not naturalize. And I want to really stress this. We tried to talk about this a little bit last week, but I didn't get into the details about how this is and the weird limbo that they're trying to put her in. The So whole thing turns on the fact, and we'll come back to the brother thing in a minute, but the main thing that they seem to be pursuing is the idea that in 2000, her father filled out an application potentially for her. Now, we don't know if this is a passport application or if it was for a certificate of citizenship. She could have done either to obtain a passport. It is often, if it's clear-cut and you can easily prove it, the Department of State will often just give you a passport without having to get a certificate of citizenship. They'll just say, look, it appears you meet the qualifications. You were living with a parent. You're a lawful permanent resident. You were under the age of 18. That parent had custody of you. That's enough. At the time, given when she was born, it would have had to have been two parents, but of course, one of her parents was deceased.

0:11:41 Matt: So one U.S. citizen parent, she's a permanent resident. That's it. And just to be clear, she came in as a refugee, became a permanent resident, and then would have been eligible to become a citizen automatically by operation of law. And that's very important in what we're talking about here, because it gives the government many more options, potentially. It's much harder to denaturalize somebody,

0:11:56 Thomas: It gives them more options?

0:11:57 Matt: Right. And we'll talk about that in a minute.

0:11:59 Thomas: What? Okay.

0:12:00 Matt: She didn't actually naturalize. She could have. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. She did what plenty of people do, where she just said, recognize me, I'm an automatic citizen by operation of law, give me a passport. And if the State Department has any questions about this, they will say, you have to file to get a certificate of citizenship before we're going give you a passport. And I've done plenty of those. And often it becomes very necessary to do that. Either way, whether she applied for a passport or applied for a certificate of citizenship, she would have had to include documentation as much as was available. And whatever they showed when she came in as refugee, presumably they showed to show her birth and her existence and the fact that she lived with her father before she was 18. So she got a U.S. passport one way or another in 2000. And that's also one of the things that's been taken, which I think is very relevant. They actually took her passport during the search warrant, and I'm sure it was on the list. Now to naturalize, which is when you actually apply for citizenship to go through the process, you have to have been a resident for five years and you meet the qualifications.

0:12:50 Matt: And she certainly would have unless she has and she doesn't have a criminal record as far as we know. I assume we would know that. And so she could have after five years, and she certainly was at that point in 2000, she could have just applied. But her father obviously saw the opportunity to just have her naturalized automatically, and there's nothing wrong with that. She would have had to sign either thing. So she's potentially on the hook if she knew that her birthday was wrong. But again, does she know her own birthday? And that sounds like a stupid question, but it's possible. But you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal denaturalization. And the real problem, of course, is that there is a 10-year statute of limitations. Now, here's something that Casey pointed out that I can't get out of my head, statute of limitations doesn't mean you can't get a search warrant. Think about that for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. So now, of course, Casey would never do this because she's an ethical prosecutor. But if you might be the Department Justice under Donald Trump, you might just go to judge the and say, look, there is probable cause for a crime here. And the judge may believe the statute of limitations applies, but that is the defendant's burden to prove it. So you could just harass somebody.

0:13:47 Thomas: Interesting.

0:13:48 Matt: Yeah, and I think she's right about that.

0:13:51 Thomas: What?

0:13:52 Matt: That is a possibility. Because if they're pursuing criminal denaturalization, the only way you can do that is if it is attached to the original naturalization application. There are a couple of other criminal theories potentially where I work here, but if they're specifically saying criminal denaturalization, that has to be at the time that you procured it.

0:14:07 Thomas: Do these assholes think of next, holy shit.

0:14:09 Matt: Yeah, right, right. Right. And civil denaturalization, as I think we might've already talked about, clear convincing and unequivocal, not beyond a reasonable doubt. And that doesn't have a statute of limitations, but you couldn't get a search warrant necessarily. I don't think you could for a civil denaturalization. So yeah. So they had go for something that would get her phone and get her passport, right? To harass her as much as possible. There's also the fact that the illegal false statement under this case, Maslancic from 2017, it has to have played some role in your actual acquisition. So if it's like a minor thing, now, obviously that is, if she'd said that she was 18 at the time, she wouldn't have been able to get it because you have to have been under 18 at the time that your father naturalized, which it looks like she was, if you believe her original birthday. The thing is that it's not really material to her ability to get citizenship because she still could have gotten it through another means and

0:14:49 Thomas: We talked about that out a little bit

0:14:51 Matt: Of yeah, the Supreme Court, right, basically said that that's fine. I just want to remind everybody, this this is, I think, the most important story of the month. It's it's just so important because this, nothing like this ever, ever happened.

0:14:58 Thomas: Yeah, the harassment, I didn't

0:14:59 Matt: Awful.

0:14:59 Thomas: Think about the fact that they took so much of her private stuff. I mean, it's obvious, but like I guess it's such a joke to me that this would even happen that I forgot about how disruptive this is just to anybody.

0:15:11 Matt: Yeah. No, it didn't really like your phone, just taking your phone. That's just something they can just do here. So that's the denaturalization portion. Potentially they could also try to charge her with something like false voting or false application for a passport renewal, right? Within the last five or 10 years, depending on the timing of that false registration for candidacy, right? Saying she's a citizen and she's able to run for office. That maybe they could try to do that, but they would still have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she knew that she wasn't supposed to be a citizen and she had a passport or certificate of citizenship and she had acquired it and she was a citizen. So I think that'd be really hard to do. Those are hard to prove. They're supposed to be hard to prove. And it can't just be something that you get a letter in the mail one day saying you're not a citizen anymore, except for this one thing that I'm concerned about, which is that they can send her a letter in the mail and say she's not a citizen anymore because she didn't naturalize. The statute allows when you receive a certificate of citizenship or a passport, there are two different statutes that allow them to revoke your passport or your certificate of citizenship if you believe, if USS believes, and they can prove without going to court that you unlawfully required it.

0:16:08 Matt: That's the thing I want to talk about for a minute, because that's something else I think they're going to try to pursue, um, and again, maybe, like like, kludging together what they can from what they get from the search warrant, they have to somehow get more than they have in their current records to do this, or they're going to revisit that investigation, I guess. They were to, let's just play out this wild thing, because I've never thought about any of this before. I've never had to think about any of this. If the government just decided one day to say, your passport's been revoked because we think that you lied on your certificate of citizenship or your passport application, you would technically, technically, maybe, revert to lawful permanent resident status, the status you had before. She'd still be a Somali citizen, presumably.

0:16:44 Thomas: Man, it's just so hard to understand already.

0:16:47 Matt: Because you have to go from permanent residency to citizenship, right? So if you lost your citizenship, you're just back to that. But my understanding, and I'm researching this, is that technically, you would still be a citizen, you just can't prove it. They're taking away your ability to prove it. So you're just now in a weird limbo where you can't say you're a resident because technically you might still to go to a federal court, or the government could do this too, but you can go to a federal court and get a declaratory order to get a court to declare whether or not you're a citizen at that point. And that would be the point at which, if you lose that, they can put you in removal proceedings, potentially, deportation proceedings, which is the real goal. That's what they really want to do here is denaturalize and deport her. That's what they've been talking about. And the grounds for deportation, potentially, now I don't think this is possible just on my understanding of the law, that it would get passed to federal court. They could try to say that she'd made a false claim to citizenship by registering to vote, by renewing her passport, by applying for a passport.

0:17:37 Matt: I'm not sure that would hold up under my understanding of how that works, but they could certainly make a run at it. Mahmoud Khalil strategy that they've used to say that she's a threat to foreign policy because of her statements about Israel, which is the real thing they're mad about. I'm just playing this out.

0:17:50 Thomas: But that that only applies if you're not a citizen, right? Yeah.

0:17:54 Matt: So if you get a court to declare that she, without denaturalizing her, I know this is really weird because let's just say I told you it was a mess. Because citizenship law is about as complicated as it can get.

0:17:59 Thomas: What are you talking about? I don't, I'm sorry, this is Yeah. They

0:18:08 Matt: And I'm trying to make sure we can untangle this, but it we've already done away with criminal denaturalization and civil denaturalization. Now we're talking about what happens if, because she did not naturalize, and those provisions can apply to people who get citizenship through what I'm talking about, the derivation of citizenship. But if they were to just determine administratively, because that's the most dangerous thing in this administration, is that they can do anything administratively without a court involved, without having to get any kind of judge to review it, they think they can. And that's the thing when you see doomers online saying, well, he's just going to do whatever he's going to do. That's the kind of stuff they mean. Of course, that's a lot of my business every day, is dealing with administrative immigration nonsense. Things that are not going in front of a real court, that are going in front of immigration court or immigration services, and they have a lot of power. And of course, just to make the point, that is how every dictatorship, including, of course, the Third Reich, did everything, was through administrative courts and administrative processes away from judges. If they can do this in a parallel kind of way, and this isn't some kind of conspiracy theory on my part, this is the law, this is how it could work. And I haven't really seen anybody sort of spelling this out, so I just wanted to say it as directly as possible. Because they did tell the Washington Post they're considering this as well. They could just cancel her certificate of citizenship, leave her in limbo, force her to go to a federal court and say, hey, I'm citizen or not. Have to do that. And that would be a civil case, right, in federal court.

0:18:33 Thomas: Think they can anyway.

0:19:20 Matt: And potentially, if you get a declaration from a federal judge that says, actually, Ellen Armour was never a citizen and was not supposed to be a citizen, then they could put her in deportation proceedings because she's now a permanent resident who could be subject to deportation if they have a reason to put her in deportation proceedings. And this administration would be happy to come up with reasons to put her in deportation proceedings.

0:19:39 Thomas: Is insane.

0:19:40 Matt: Is it? Absolutely is. And that's why I want to talk about it, because we didn't have time to really spell out the legal part of this. Now, just, just to tie this in very quickly, the thing with her brother, and we talked about it last week, I don't want to get too much deeper into it, but the allegation that she married her brother and brought him here rather than having him wait out the very long sibling process, and I don't know if he's a half sibling or what, that he wasn't able to get derivation of citizenship originally, but he was living in the UK, he's a UK citizen, that whole thing, actually, even if she were just a permanent resident, and she wasn't supposed to have married him and given him status as a citizen, and he never became a citizen, but she was a citizen, he became a permanent resident through this application.

0:20:10 Thomas: So then why does it matter if he never became a citizen, then? What, what are we even talking about? Okay.

0:20:15 Matt: So he did get a benefit, but the thing is, for their purposes, it was actually, it wouldn't be deportable under this particular set of circumstances, because she did it so long after she became a resident, so they couldn't actually, as I read it, they couldn't actually try to deport her necessarily for marriage fraud, it's not necessarily a deportable offense, potentially, it's, it's something that keeps you from getting residency in the future, potentially, but is.

0:20:36 Thomas: Your job is really hard, I don't

0:20:38 Matt: Just a little taste.

0:20:39 Thomas: Understand.

0:20:39 Matt: And this isn't even the part I usually have, have, do you, someday I'd love to just like go on for four hours about the stuff I actually have to do all day, um, yeah, this is just a taste, but this is the kind of fun crossword puzzle analysis that we get to do with people's lives every day as immigration lawyers, uh, while we're trying to deal with, um, you know, basically being social workers. So the other piece of this is that Marquand Mullen, DHS secretary, has been out there saying that there's a RICO issue here, and he's not really being very clear about what he means. A conspiracy charge, potentially, because they love RICO, right?

0:21:04 Thomas: Well, Just because there's a bunch of Somalis in that State, God.

0:21:08 Matt: So they've got to be in conspiracy, exactly. And all of this, of course, just to be clear, I want to say this as clearly as possible, again, this is Nazi stuff. This is what the Nazis did.

0:21:15 Thomas: It's just racism, yeah.

0:21:16 Matt: Straight up, but this is actually literally why the Holocaust was possible. You had the first move was an Ehrenberg code to take away the citizenship of Jews in Germany so they would become wards of the state, essentially, like protected under the state, but nothing else, they weren't actually citizens, you could do whatever they wanted, and they could start revoking every single right they ever had, including the right to life. Know, again, this is just how these things happen. And just to say this very clearly, I've been talking about this crossword puzzle, I've been talking about the interesting legal stuff here, but it is not interesting legal stuff. At the end of the day, this is Nazi shit. This is what this is. So I want to be very clear about that. As much as it is interesting to me as a lawyer, as much as it's kind of interesting to game out what kind of evil plans they might have here, this is unacceptable. And we have to say this as loudly as possible. The conspiracy thing, from what I can tell, is saying basically that their immigration was a conspiracy, because there is this ongoing belief that maybe he lied, the father lied about the basis for his refugee status, which would mean that his naturalization was improperly procured when she was 13, or his refugee status, rather, when she was 13, when they came in, and then he naturalized a bit later.

0:22:10 Matt: Maybe, but I don't think so from what I've understood, and there's no way to know at this point. He was in the Somali military in 1978, and it doesn't seem like there's any reason that he would have been a war criminal the way they keep saying he was. They're conflating Somali history, as far as I can tell, with different eras. But let's just say that he was. Then you can't denaturalize a dead person, and she could only be denaturalized if he were denaturalized. And she would be automatically denaturalized if he were alive and they could denaturalize him because she derived citizenship. She could still go and apply for citizenship after that happened. But this conspiracy thing might be about that from the way Mullen was talking, but it also might be about something to do with the marriage if there's many family members involved. They'd still have to prove that the last thing that happened in the conspiracy was within five years for the statute. But once again, if you're just trying to get a search warrant, maybe you don't care about the statute of limitations because you're an evil lawyer.

0:22:54 Thomas: Yeah, I guess my question would be, with this crazy theory that honestly might not be so crazy, really, but it is crazy, you know what I mean?

0:23:02 Matt: Yeah.

0:23:02 Thomas: What, how, what does the search warrant do, just to be able to fish for stuff, because, like, if they could do this administrative declaration that you're talking about, what stopped them from just doing that?

0:23:06 Matt: Well, of all, the administrative process would not allow them to mess with her the same way. It would be much less dramatic. And of course, I think a lot of what they want right now is the image of people raiding her house and taking boxes out. And then forever after, people remember her as some kind of criminal. It's really powerful to mess with people that way, to put her through the process of having to have lawyers deal with all this.

0:23:29 Thomas: Okay, so the administrative thing you're talking about, it doesn't really have to do with the search. It's just something they also could have done.

0:23:35 Matt: Could just do. Yeah. That would have required the previous investigation within the government to come up with something they could definitively say she unlawfully got her citizenship, right? But if they hook it to this criminal thing, so they get a bunch of other evidence, and maybe they think they can get something else that they can definitively prove the thing, I don't think they're going to, from everything I understand. Maybe they think that she's hiding her real birth certificate somewhere. I don't think she has one. Most Somalis don't from that time.

0:23:59 Thomas: Sure. It's not on her phone.

0:24:00 Matt: Yeah, right. She keeps a picture of it in her wallet. I mean, who knows? But and my continuing weakness remains as the legal host of this program, my continuing weakness remains that I can't think as evil as I need to.

0:24:12 Thomas: Boy, this sounds like a good try though. Cause I, you're so out there.

0:24:16 Matt: I'm trying. I've had a week to think about it.

0:24:17 Thomas: I don't even know what's happening.

0:24:20 Matt: There's a lot of different branches that are possible here. And so I just I was really just thinking about it for days here. I'm trying to write about it right now to like understand how a federal judge got there. And, you know, Benny Johnson says that he has ties to the administration. Of course, he meets Stephen Miller and they're telling him that it's actually super dark. There's something dark happening.

0:24:37 Thomas: Oh, there is something dark happening.

0:24:38 Matt: Yeah, that's all. This whole thing is very dark.

0:24:39 Thomas: I agree with that.

0:24:40 Matt: It's hard to say that this is going to be one of the major stains of the Trump administration because we've got years left here. This is a new low to an extent that I think people really need to stop and appreciate. It's so baseless. It's so bad. And even the last 20 minutes I've spent trying to explain the law to you, I can't say that I've fully given you a picture of the possibilities of what they're trying to do here. But I got to say, this is one time I agree with Judicial Watch. I'm going to give them this. They're trying to get get a copy of the warrant right now. They just sued to get it. And I hope they do.

0:25:05 Thomas: Is, uh, that is some dark stuff. Yeah, I, I'm just so sick of the, the psychopathy at work here The, the either indifference or the ironic, like, know, laughter about it, or the, yes, I don't know, it's fully masked off. I think they got to the point we had kind of the ironic Nazi stuff in 2016, and we got to the point where obviously it's just Nazi stuff, but also the, the zone got so flooded with shit nobody cares anymore, they can't keep track of it, so I like, it really has just distilled down to, well, there's a whole bunch of Nazis, but I don't know, what's the price of eggs, and then, then maybe that's the thing, or what's the price of diesel, and then maybe that's the thing that people can actually pay attention to. It's a really, really depressing time, but this is some, this is some Nazi shit, I can't even believe it.

0:25:49 Matt: It really is. And I try to sound the alarm on the stuff that really needs to be the loudest and most out front. I think this is up there. And it's just another reason we've got to take take Congress back and at least create a record for history?

0:25:59 Thomas: Does she get her crap back? I'm asking, when does She get Her Crap back. What's the normal

0:26:01 Matt: Yeah. Great question. I until the investigation is done, I don't know. I mean, they're holding her U.S. passport and presumably they wouldn't issue another one until they figure this out. I don't know. I mean, you can't really apply for a passport and say the government stole it. I mean, I don't know. You have to give them police report.

0:26:17 Thomas: Well, We gotta move on to other stuff, but that is, that is nuts, Matt. All right, let's, uh, take a break. Right, Matt, let's talk about FEMA.

0:26:29 Matt: Yes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is 47 years old, which is something I didn't really appreciate because I think of it as being such a DHS thing. It was folded into DHS after 9-11, like everything else. But this is a Carter thing. And I was kind of going back and looking at the history because we talked about this a couple of years ago, and I think it was 08-1072, Congress and Unnatural Disaster. Project 2025 is essentially trying to create another unnatural disaster out of FEMA because they're not trying to abolish it entirely. They're just trying to gut it like everything else, as we said. Right, the purpose of a Federal Emergency Management Agency is to deal with things that are too big for the states, that's why it exists, right, there are plenty of emergencies that states can handle.

0:27:05 Thomas: Only that there can be emergencies that affect multiple states or on the Border Of states, and where

0:27:09 Matt: They Need to be coordinated by A bunch Of

0:27:11 Thomas: Do you bury The Survivors Kind of thing, yeah, getting

0:27:12 Matt: Yeah, horrible. Um, so the Disaster Relief Act in 1974 creates sort of this backbone idea which is still with us, that it's like a 75 25 federal state cost sharing, right, that we expect that obviously the federal government isn't always going to pick up the tab for everything, but FEMA is going to come in in these kinds of situations. 1979, Jimmy Carter creates FEMA by executive order, and then it kind of gets picked up from there. Project 2025 points to the Strafford Act in 1988 as kind of the, the real issue with FEMA, which is, you know, it codifies this thing with the 75-25 with FEMA. And then it allows the president to declare emergencies, which is pretty important. Obviously, he's the head of the executive. It makes sense that you're going to have him declare the emergencies. The number, believe it or not, the number of declared emergencies went way up at this point. That's what happens. Had from 2004 to 2011, I saw the declarations of emergency climb from 65 a year to 98 a year in 2011.

0:28:00 Matt: 11, governor has to request the disaster declaration, of the president grants it. It's a very political thing because obviously the president will gain a lot of favor in that state when he declares a disaster and FEMA gets to come in. Project 2025 is essentially saying we need to re-evaluate all this and make the states pay more and do more.

0:28:16 Matt: Discretion. Yeah, I know, uh, Very simple, they just want to flip it, so 25 federal, 75 state, um, so states would carry most of the costs.

0:28:16 Thomas: I Still Don't get why, like, it's not like disasters only hit blue states, you know, Texas has had a ton of them, Florida, you, hurricane, like the hurricane alley essentially is pretty much red states, right? I mean, The most part

0:28:39 Matt: Yeah, Florida's really going to pay for this literally, I mean, that's, it's going to be a real problem, and

0:28:43 Thomas: Would they want to do this? There's just shrinking the budget and then taxes or something, yeah.

0:28:47 Matt: Just the usual shrinking the government, I mean, FEMA, when it is run the right way, is very effective. When it's not run the right way, we've seen it's disaster, but one thing they do want to do which I think I might support, I'm not sure, I have an opinion about this right now, replacing the National Flood Insurance Program with private insurance, because for a bunch of people living in places that deny climate change who keep building in the same places where the waters are rising, we are incentivizing them to continue to rebuild homes in places that are going to be flooded. Is something we're doing if we're underwriting their flood insurance. So maybe making them do it privately might actually help people acknowledge the reality of climate change. I can get behind that, maybe. And I'm open to hearing a counterproposal about that policy. That's not something I know about, but it makes sense. State governments could be doing more to prevent disasters, to be ready for disasters, to build their buildings in ways that are more disaster proof. But leaving the states with three quarters of cost, and the ones least able to pay are going to be the most exposed, like you're saying, the ones in the south with limited fiscal, I mean, the red states are doing worse than the blue states across the board.

0:29:42 Matt: Also cutting a bunch of mitigation prep, which is really important, like they, they say FEMA claims that every dollar spent on mitigation, disaster mitigation, saves about two in recovery, the usual kind of thing that the Republicans always do where they make the government worse and then they point at the government, they say, hey, it's worse, we can't have this. Excuse me, Congress would actually have to amend the Stafford Act to do the thing that they're proposing. So this is potentially a take care clause violation of, you know, the president's supposed to take care to actually follow the law. Yes, potentially an impoundment issue as well, you know, because he's just refusing to spend the money the way they're supposed to spend the money.

0:30:11 Matt: The fact that there is a law, like a literal law that they passed after the Katrina stuff, U.S.C. 316, which is literally preserving the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the, I think they're anticipating this, this kind of thing, the secretary of FEMA basically can't wind down his own agency, that

0:30:25 Thomas: I Mean There's also the Department of Education, right, the same thing.

0:30:29 Matt: Right. But they're just gutting it and they're making it useless. But it's bad enough when we're talking about kids reading, but now we're talking about people dying. And there's no real private right of action that I could find. That I don't know who would have standing to say FEMA's winding itself down, but it seems like something they're not supposed to do. It does seem like kind of take care of clause issue.

0:30:43 Thomas: The states would have standing.

0:30:46 Matt: Yeah, I guess. Yeah. If if they aren't getting the money they're supposed to get. And, you know, that certainly makes sense. Know, the reason this is all coming up now is because of testimony before Congress this week suggesting this is what they intend to do. I thought it was worth talking about. And I'm very concerned that this is what they intend to do. I wanted to note that, as I promised, it's really a direct line. Like you can see the difference in FEMA when I was looking through the timeline and just kind of reading about the history of FEMA FEMA, under the first beginning of FEMA, the first few administrations, when you've got Reagan and the first Bush, it was a disaster because they had people that didn't have experience that were just political appointees. And as long as you put somebody in charge who actually knows how to run disaster management, James Lee Witt under Clinton was Arkansas's emergency disaster person. Had inherited an agency that was considered to be a joke. Know, like on the floor of Congress, somebody called them bureaucratic jackasses. There was a famous, maybe possibly apocryphal story. It's in the Washington Monthly. I really want to believe this is true, that in 1990, Puerto Rico's request for significant funding after Hurricane was actually denied because of a paperwork issue and returned by mail when they really desperately needed the money, right? I mean, that's like to that degree of bureaucracy. You actually put the people that Trump and George W. Bush and Reagan and the first Bush put in as political appointees, if you put in people who know what they're doing and you put in an experienced staff of people who know what they're doing, FEMA can be incredibly effective and it has been. Under Clinton, it was actually a very effective agency. And everything that we remember from Katrina was because, of course, we all remember Brownie doing a heck of a job, Michael Brown and his experience being the International Arabian Horse Association, that was his background, right? And before that, uh, it was Bush's campaign manager, Joe Albaugh. Like, this is not how you're supposed to do it. This is not a political give give me job. Like, this should never be. It should never be a make work job.

0:32:27 Matt: With Katrina, it wasn't just FEMA, it was federal government across the board was being very badly run in, had been folded into DHS, as I said, after 2001. And so Congress actually specifically passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, which required, I guess nobody thought we'd do this before, but it required that the administrator be qualified.

0:32:47 Thomas: Be qualified.

0:32:48 Matt: Executive. Yeah, amazing, right?

0:32:49 Thomas: How do they define, find that?

0:32:50 Matt: There were no statutory qualifications, but they defined it as knowledge of emergency management and at least five years of executive leadership. That's something. It's having some experience. And since then, we've had better ones. And statutory mission, again, is much bigger than anything that's the States as we talked about. That 316 that I read you before was part of that effort to make sure that they couldn't wind it down. But it's unusual to have statutory qualifications for an executive job. That's how seriously they wanted to take this. They wanted to be sure that we didn't just put anybody in it. I don't know of many other executive level jobs that require that, under Obama, it was considered to be the high point of FEMA. You had Craig Fugate, who was very experienced.

0:33:21 Thomas: It. Was the high point of a lot of things, Matt. It was the high point of a lot of the, not that Obama was the greatest or anything, but you know, that was the last time things were good.

0:33:28 Matt: It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Craig Fugate ran Florida's emergency management. And of course, if you've been through a few years of running Florida's emergency management, you can probably manage anywhere. Anywhere. But, you know, FEMA did an excellent job during Hurricane Sandy. Chris Christie, of course, a Republican, said it was an outstanding response. He's very happy with the way things went. And then, of course, you get Barack Wong under Trump. He had some qualifications. I mean, he had run Alabama's emergency management, but we all remember Hurricane Maria and the absolute disaster that came out of that. And, you know, the fact that they had no preparations, almost 3,000 people died, pretty much abandoned. So, I mean, all of this is going toward devolution. That's the idea, is just to reduce this thing down to nothing. Just don't understand. I don't understand why.

0:34:13 Thomas: It's a weird thing to pick on now. There are these conspiracy theories about FEMA, and it's this stupid conspiracy theory about FEMA camps, uh, they're gonna just suspend, suspend the U.S. Constitution, declare martial law, and then mass imprison citizens in secret concentration camps, which is ultimately, you know, once again, they just do that now, but for different people, you know, like, but for not the people that had this theory. I, it's not as big anymore, but Alex Jones was obviously, you know, a big part of it. And it may be part of the reason, you know, these people are so nuts, it could be part of the just the reason for hating this agency. And because otherwise, like you say, it just doesn't make any sense. There's just no reason to do this.

0:35:00 Matt: It's also notable that Cameron Hamilton, the head of FEMA, because I'm trying to understand the logic myself, right? He was actually fired last year after his congressional testimony, the day after his congressional testimony, when he said that we need FEMA and we can't dismantle it. He was fired for that. They got ahead of it, right? And now he's the confirmed, as of August, he's the confirmed head of FEMA. They brought him back. But he's the one who gave the testimony that I'm talking about this week. And this is in this conference. Sorry, I said it was before Congress, before, it was in a conference. He was confirming that they are trying to shift this back to the states, that they don't think that FEMA should be the first responder and that they should be just coming in when they absolutely have to and the states should be doing everything. And the FEMA released a report on Friday that supports all of this, last Friday, that it's time to bolster state disaster agencies. I'm sure that's true. There are probably state disaster agencies that are more dependent on federal funding than they should be.

0:35:46 Matt: But they're talking about significantly downsizing FEMA in a way that everybody should be concerned about. Apparently Cameron Hamilton got his job back by changing his tune on this. And I think that's concerning, too.

0:35:56 Thomas: So just to review, what's the thing that's actually happening right now that they're, they're doing, are they, you can't, they can't just do this, can they? Are they, are they changing that funding structure, or was that just a long-term goal?

0:36:06 Matt: Yeah, they're promising a number of different things along the lines of what Project 2025 was suggesting, of course, because, you know, just coincidentally. But they're talking about something called national mutual aid, where the states will help each other out. But that's that's not what FEMA is supposed to be doing. They're talking about making sure the president doesn't have as many federal disaster declarations, which is up the president, and waiving all kinds of environmental things, me, not not being quick bring to in funding basically doing everything possible to shift the cost back. And again, the official statutory 75-25 thing would require an amendment of the Stratford Act.

0:36:33 Matt: But the fact that FEMA is announcing that they do not want to do their jobs anymore, that they want to be less involved in disaster management, it's just very strange to me. I just can't imagine any other federal agency getting that excited about not doing its job anymore. And this is all in following an October 15th memo in which we don't have the full text, but the internal memo apparently said that they're going to do everything possible to what they call reduce federal dependency on FEMA. And they're going to try to encourage the states to do everything possible and build up their own capacities because basically you can't count on us to answer when, when you call. You

0:37:04 Thomas: Like if, like 9-11 was like, our new job is to help you not need us because we're useless now.

0:37:11 Matt: Have you considered buying a gun?

0:37:13 Thomas: It's like, like that shouldn't be your job. Your job should be to be 911. That's what we want.

0:37:19 Matt: So buy a defibrillator and a gun and you'll be fine. And a hose. A future Democratic administration is gonna have to come up and clean this up like they have every single time. I mean, literally, it's just like, and I, you know, again, I'm not giving Democrats all the credit for being perfect, they but do know how to run stuff like this.

0:37:32 Matt: I mean, it can be done. And it is one of the more important functions of the federal government. I don't know. There we are.

0:37:38 Thomas: Ridiculous. All right. Well, let's take the last break and then we've got a really interesting footnote to get to at least to, uh, I don't know if it's like a cheerful one, but it's definitely interesting. I don't know yet.

0:37:51 Thomas: All right, Matt, how is this weird book publishing thing you talked about going to do something to the music industry? I don't don't understand this at all

0:37:59 Matt: It will. Let me start with this very fun song I'm to send you. This is Double Shot of My Baby's Love by the Swinging Medallions. This is the song at the issue of the Supreme Court case. Let's just give it little taste.

0:38:15 Thomas: Yeah, I know this. Yeah, number 17 hit in 1966. Okay, I remember this. You I love this song.

0:38:46 Matt: You get the idea.

0:38:49 Thomas: Wouldn't believe the whiteness of the picture of the cover album of the album cover, it's uh yeah, it's like they're, they're at like a golf country club almost of just this whitest people you've ever seen

0:38:54 Matt: Those Swinging Medallions, there's so many of them, I don't even know what they're all doing

0:39:02 Thomas: I don't, what are they all doing, I guess they, they had had full-time hooting and hollers you know

0:39:04 Matt: Like I guess it's like four of them playing the organ at the same time, right? I don't know

0:39:09 Thomas: Just you need them all hooting and hollering for the beginning, you know you can't just if one guy was in charge of hooting and hollering, that sounds terrible, it's ridiculous, yeah at least two, two minimum yeah

0:39:13 Matt: That's true, that was the you got gotta have your hooters and your hollers, right I was thinking 202 yeah Sure, uh, so yeah, that Farfisa organ, I love that 60s sound, um, what a fun to play. So this song and Vetter v. Resnick is the center of the song of the case. It is Double Shot of My Baby's Love, written by Cyril Vetter.

0:39:35 Thomas: It's Vetter v. Resnick, and it's not Eddie Vedder or Trent Resnick or whatever

0:39:38 Matt: Vedder, no, it's Vetter with a T, not with a D, so yeah, slightly different. So this is interesting because we're talking about a song from 1962 that he wrote, 1962, then it was been transferred around several times, passed on to, so here's interesting question, this is more of Jenessa question, I'm not going to get too much into it, but Vedder served a termination notice on Resnick saying that he was getting the U.S. rights back, and he did, and they accepted that, but Resnick was claiming they still had the worldwide distribution rights to this song that I've never heard before so much, I actually haven't

0:39:41 Thomas: Dang huh haven't heard this before Oh, yeah, I've heard this on the oldies station. Yeah, I grew up on oldies.

0:40:10 Matt: Feels like I've heard it before, but obviously it's not so much the massive profits coming out of this song as it is just the the principle of the thing, that the question becomes, and this is actually pretty important question of the music industry, me, about when you get your U.S. rights back, if you, if that implicates the rest of the worldwide rights him when you terminate a grant. So it's grant that he made to the publisher the bundle of rights, in the contract, you have U.S. rights and worldwide rights, and he's saying that he's terminating this deal that he made, and they're saying they still have the worldwide rights.

0:40:27 Thomas: What? Yeah. Who is saying which and why? What? The publisher?

0:40:37 Matt: The publisher so the industry is saying that they have that. And this was an important enough question that basically after the Fifth Circuit reached a pretty reasonable rule, I think. And they found for the songwriter, which I'm always going to find for the songwriter. That's where it should be. The guy who actually created the thing. His termination, when he said, I'm taking this back and I'm taking my rights back, it involved the contract, which was made under U.S. law and would have included the foreign exploitation rights, what they call it. The And industry had assumed for all this time that it would only reach the U.S. rights, but it never been settled. Sorry. Sorry. So they're trying to push to say that they could keep their worldwide rights. That's the whole thing. And the reason all this matters is because this was going up on cert to the U.S. Supreme Court. And the reason it really matters is because the industry didn't really think ahead. And a company stepped in to do this because Resnick basically gave up. Publishers, including BMG, which is where it gets relevant, bought out Resnick's interest and took over. So they wanted to bring this to the Supreme Court on purpose because they wanted to say that that they could do this.

0:41:35 Matt: They bought up the losing side so they could appeal. And the problem is that BMG is owned by Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House. And now we get to the Supreme Court justices who all like to publish books. And in fact, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson have all published books through this imprint. And I don't have a problem with Supreme Court justices publishing books, but this is the second straight year in which we've had a publishing related case that the Supreme Court can't take because they're publishing too many books.

0:42:02 Thomas: Wow. Why can't they take it?

0:42:04 Matt: So they've all published books under this imprint, and because now Bertelsmann owns BMG, which owns Penguin Random House, so they're conflicted out.

0:42:12 Thomas: Conflicted out so they're, they're actually following the, the, are they recusing?

0:42:16 Matt: Yeah, they're recusing. So they've announced why. Usually Sotomayor and Jackson have been pretty good about telling us why, but none of them really statements as to why. But it's obvious that that Bertelsmann is the issue here. That's the only reason they'd be doing it. And they did the same thing last year in Baker v. Coates, which involved Ta-Nehisi Coates. And there was a ridiculous allegation that he had plagiarized one of his books. And that doesn't seem like that would have gone anywhere. They probably would have denied cert anyway, but they couldn't take it because you have to have a six justice quorum. So you lose four justices and there you go.

0:42:41 Thomas: So? This one weird trick to be Supreme Court proof.

0:42:44 Matt: Yes. So potentially like major copyright issues involving anything to do with a major publisher, because of course there aren't that many left that the Supreme Court justices might have been involved with. Alito published his book with Hachette, I believe, which is more conservative. And Alito actually had a really interesting recusal issue last month that I want to probably cover another time, but he actually got himself out of a climate change case that has major implications potentially for the entire industry.

0:43:07 Thomas: You say got himself out?

0:43:09 Matt: Well, he recused himself, I think, under pressure, pressure because he... held some, obviously he holds energy stocks, has come up before, you know, it just does kind of go to like, maybe there's another way to do this. And I don't, again, I have no problem with justices publishing books while they're sitting, but maybe they could like keep the money in escrow or something, or have some way that, because it just seems like enough of an issue, I don't even understand. I mean, apparently only Alito and Roberts actually own stocks. I don't think they should really even own stocks, or they should keep those in a trust or something while they're justices. I don't know, they should not have their hands in this stuff because it just, I was thinking about. I never considered the possibility that you could have any number of subjects that have enough of justices are invested in something. They just can't hear that subject and it could be a real problem. But this is just one of those weird butterfly effect things where the song from 1962 is up in front of the court and they publish enough books that they can't hear about it.

0:43:49 Thomas: It's nuts So then I guess the key would be whatever the lower court, whatever the circuit court said or something.

0:43:59 Matt: Right. And the Fifth Circuit actually, I think, had the reasonable rule here for once

0:44:02 Thomas: Wow, I was gonna say right when he said Fifth Circuit, I was was like, oh God, no. That's

0:44:06 Matt: Me. There was also a pretty active fight when I was looking through the briefing about whether there was even a circuit split about this. It wasn't totally clear. And obviously they're not going to take it if they don't think there's split, but it does seem like there's enough of a question that they're saying the Fifth Circuit basically was departing from practice. I don't know, is where it's at and it's not going to be reconsidered because as long as these people keep publishing books and these publishers are involved, it seems like that's enough.

0:44:26 Thomas: That's nuts.

0:44:28 Matt: Yeah, just and another failure of the court, right? Because you just shouldn't have situations like this where they can't hear certain things.

0:44:35 Thomas: Because the company bought part, where they like bought into the case somehow?

0:44:39 Matt: Yeah, BMG is a music publisher

0:44:41 Thomas: What's to stop a company from doing that with like anything just?

0:44:45 Matt: Yeah, right.

0:44:46 Thomas: Buy into any case that's coming up, that's, that's bizarre.

0:44:49 Matt: Yeah, take over and find your way to recusal if you know that enough justices have some kind of conflict.

0:44:54 Thomas: Weird, so that's the, the end of it is just, well, we can't, we can't do it. So it's like not even like we're denying cert, it's just like, sorry, no one's home. Wow.

0:45:04 Matt: Too much recusal and no quorum and we can't take it. That's it. It...

0:45:07 Thomas: What's so, but you said the Fifth Circuit, like it's, it's not gonna be like a bad result because the, the Fifth Circuit decision stands, or?

0:45:13 Matt: Yeah, it's a pretty clean win for the songwriter and it's, it's actually even better than assert denial because it's just the Fifth Circuit stands, that's it, there's no question.

0:45:16 Thomas: All right There you go, but that is very interesting, something to keep an eye on.

0:45:23 Matt: He gets his worldwide rights.

0:45:24 Thomas: Right, well, that's our show. Thanks so much for the breakdowns, Matt, of the weird, trying, trying to attempt to, know, think evil for a sec. I still don't totally get it, but we'll see. I got to keep an eye on that and what's going on with Ilhan Omar for sure. But thanks everyone for listening. Hey, see you at book club on Sunday, although it's Lydia's birthday. So we're going to be out celebrating. Not going to see you there, but so have fun there and everybody. And thanks so much for listening.

0:45:48 Matt: Right, see you soon.

0:45:52 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 at gmail.com. Make sure to follow our blue sky, at OpenArgs. But most of all, please share the show. Thanks for listening.

0:46:24 Thomas: Where do you bury the survivors, kind? I love this song.

0:46:32 Matt: You get the idea.

0:46:34 Thomas: Oh wait, it decided to play on both of them, that what

0:46:36 Matt: I'm bopping. That was a double shot of Double Shot of Baby's Love. Wow.

0:46:41 Thomas: Double double shot, what the hell, I went to YouTube usually just stops the other one, I don't know if I got a clean. Let me, I might just start that over, just in case.

0:46:43 Matt: That's a lot of shots. Wow. Sure. I'll hear it again.

0:46:52 Thomas: I want to hear it anyway.