The Intersection with Michael Popok Full Episode 6/3/2025
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I am done. I'm done with Popak Live. No more Popak Live. It's now The Intersection with Michael Popak. Yes, we're launching a brand new podcast on the back of Popak Live. I'm back, ladies and gentlemen. I'm dedicating the new podcast to my beloved mom who passed away a couple of weeks ago. We had this in the works for a while. She knew about it.

And I think she'd be oh so proud of what we've built here together on Legal AF and on the Midas Touch Network. Popak, the intersection. Guess what I'll be talking about at the intersection of law and politics. You're here for the inaugural podcast. It's on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. only on the Midas Touch Network. We do a little bit of rebroadcasting or simulcasting on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Let's kick it off. Glad to have you here with us all tonight. Well, the new Trump portrait is out.

And when you compare it to 2016, boy, time has not been kind to Donald Trump. When I first saw the new Trump portrait, I thought he had actually used one of his mugshots from one of his arrests. Then I got confused and I thought it was Senator Palpatine from Star Wars in the various episodes until the very end. But no, no, this is the portrait that Donald Trump has gone with. We're going to put it up here in a moment.

And look at the difference. I know that presidents age while in office, but what is this dark, ominous Sith Lord thing going on with Donald Trump? You know, like, try me, or you're talking to me, or I'm not sure what he's trying to do there.

That facial expression probably matches his reaction to Elon Musk, now freed of being a special government worker and having gone back to screw up all of his companies. He had this to say about the new, big, beautiful bill that's languishing right now in the in the Senate.

The House having already passed it, he said that the bill, the budget bill, which adds three trillion dollars to the national debt, despite the fact that it cuts one trillion dollars from food programs for the poor and impoverished and and money from Medicare and Medicaid. Despite that.

Elon Musk said it's an abomination because of how much it increases the deficit and ultimately the national debt. That pissed off Donald Trump. Carolyn LeVette, the press secretary, said, well, we all know Elon Musk. And Donald Trump was well aware of his opinion, but he supports the big, beautiful bill.

There's a big debate going on about that big, beautiful bill I'm going to talk about here at the intersection, which is about a passage that's buried on pages, I think, 556 and 557, somewhere like that, where they've tried to give Donald Trump complete protection from being held in contempt, along with the rest of his administration, for violating injunctions. They don't like nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges. You keep hearing the...

Trump administration lackeys coming out and saying an unelected federal judge today who's a liberal Marxist radicalist just decided to oppose Donald Trump's policies. I got another way of putting it. A federal court whose Article 3 powers are properly put to the test by an out of control and rogue president has been trying hard to do some sort of checks and balance and protect

preserve the separation of powers that is part of our Constitution. Of course, they're unelected. That's our federal court system. To continue to call that out shows you have a complete misunderstanding of our checks and balance system. So I'm going to talk about the bill, what's happening in the Senate, and that as well. Then...

I want to talk about this crypto scandal. Yes, yet another one. It's crypto scandal du jour with Donald Trump. We know that he's using it along with his family to line his pockets with hundreds of billions of dollars before this whole thing is over.

And I'm not talking about planet Earth. I'm talking about his administration. And he just, we thought he had just launched a new meme wallet, an electronic wallet to hold all of that cryptocurrency and meme coins that he is using to peddle influence and sell off parts of the presidency and turn the White House into a personal money printing press. And we said, oh, he's launched a wallet. Well, that's legitimate. I mean, that's can par for the course, I should say. Right.

And then right on cue, the two Fredos of the Trump crime family, I think there's three of them, Don Jr. and Eric Trump said, no, no, we don't know anything about that. I love that he added, and Eric Trump particularly, we'll put it up when I get to that point, in his social media posts, had to start with, I run the Trump organization, but I don't know anything about this. Just to remind people what he does for a living, in case you didn't know and you thought Daddy Trump was really running everything.

He had actually put that in a social media post. And then Don Jr. right on cue said, this is not approved by the Trump. This is unauthorized. We're working on our own meme coin wallet. So you mean some other fraudsters within the cryptocurrency world are ripping off the Trump family? Shocking. We'll talk more about that as well. And Trump, speaking of attacks, we've got Trump attacking women all over again.

Just today, as I was about to hit the air, Trump has unraveled and issued new guidance to hospitals that take federal funds under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. We call it EMTALA.

That was the way that the Biden administration, when they were scrambling after the Dobbs decision in 2023, which ripped away a woman's right to choose, ripped it out of the Constitution. First time a constitutionally protected right once granted by the Supreme Court found in the Constitution was taken away.

reversing Roe versus Wade. That led the Biden administration and Kamala Harris to start scrambling and look at all different federal agencies and statutes and guidance to see what they could do. And one of the primary ways to give a woman any type of reproductive rights after the Dobbs decision was to use EMTALA to give guidance to doctors that said if women's health or life was at risk, you should consider abortion as an option.

Trump has now come out today and said that that is against federal law, that doctors will be effectively prosecuted, and that it will be against constitutional principles of the way the Trump administration interprets law, scaring the crap out of doctors, making them think twice or not do it at all to give a woman an abortion, even when her life and the health of her and her life is at risk.

And so it was a coordinated attack. I'll cover it later because at the very same time, a kind of a phony right wing group decided to dismiss a lawsuit that they had started to attack Intala because they knew they got the gift from the Trump administration. It smells to high heaven. And we're going to talk about it here on Popak, The Intersection. I almost said Popak Live. I got to get used to my own new podcast name. The Intersection with Popak.

Then we got a pardon scandal. I just had on the, we just interviewed Liz Oyer, Oyer lawyer, lawyer Oyer, as she likes to call herself on social media, who was the person in the office of the pardon attorney who independently, nonpartisan, guided various administrations on a pardons. And she got fired by the Trump administration because she wouldn't recommend that Mel Gibson get his gun rights back.

And now she's out in social media and she's detailed that not only is Trump's

abuse of the pardon power need to be addressed by constitutional amendment or by the Supreme Court to the extent that it can, but that he's wiped out over $1 billion worth of restitution, money owed to the American taxpayer, that Donald Trump, along with the pardons of these various people, just in the case of about six or seven entities, has also wiped out a billion dollars at a time when he's trying to find a way to balance his budget.

Just got rid of with a magic wand, $1 billion that was over. We're going to cover that as well. Great interview with Liz Oyer that you should follow. Speaking of interviews coming up, this week I'm going to be interviewing Representative Richie Torres out of the 15th of New York.

And he's one of the sponsors of a bill to try to rein in Donald Trump and future presidents and their abuse of cryptocurrency and crypto schemes and scandals. And we'll be having Representative Torres on later in the week on Legal AF. Then I want to touch on Elon Musk.

I'm sorry, I want to touch on federal courts and something that's buried in that big, beautiful bill that Elon Musk is calling an abomination that they're debating right now, led by a number of former lawyers that are in the House and in the Senate, because that's where Donald Trump is trying to.

force people to pay to play in the court system. That in order to get an injunction under Donald Trump, even if it's a constitutional violation, even if it's going after an abuse of power by the president, this aspect of the bill buried in there because he's such a coward.

would take away a federal judge's ability to find the Trump administration effectively in contempt of court for violating an order, violating an injunction, if that injunction isn't supported by a bond. Now, most people that bring and most entities that bring cases like this one, you know, to challenge the Trump administration don't have the money to put up a major bond.

But to this new bill, a federal judge can't use federal funds, which means operating his courtroom, to find a president, in this case Donald Trump, in an administration in contempt unless there's a bond that's been posted to support the injunction. I'll talk about why that's a violation of the separation of powers of the Article III powers of the federal judiciary.

And then lastly, as I was coming on the air, we also know that in addition to the pardon attorney who got fired, we just had a resignation of the chief prosecutor concerning Jan 6th. I was surprised he was still around, but he was.

And he's now decided, Greg Rosen, that he can no longer work in the Department of Justice. He was in charge of the capital siege section of the Department of Justice. And he's now left and going into private practice in a noisy way. He's also criticizing the Trump administration. We've got a lot to talk about here. I'm so pleased that you're here on BOPOC, The Intersection. Let's dive in and talk about the crypto scandal.

There are so many ways that Donald Trump is using crypto, cryptocurrency, various forms, including meme currency, in order to line his pockets and those of his family. Let me count the ways. One, his family owns a leading Bitcoin mining company, right? Cryptocurrency has to be created. It's created through algorithms, complicated math formulas that unlock at the end a cryptocurrency or a meme coin, right?

They use a tremendous amount of computing power. Picture server farms that are the size of a small city and the power that's required for that and the water to cool and the rest. That's how you make cryptocurrency. It doesn't have any intrinsic value other than the value that the marketplace is on it on the buy and the sell. So you have to have a mine. You have to make cryptocurrency. And so they've bought, the Trump family, a crypto miner.

American BTC. That's one aspect, one of the part of the ecosystem of how you make money in cryptocurrency when you're at the Trump level and how he's made billions of dollars since January doing it.

He also can do it by creating meme coins, which have no intrinsic value. A fart coin, I'm not making it up, is actually out there. Shibu Inu is out there. Dogecoin, which is where Elon Musk got the name for his entity. It's a play on his cryptocurrency.

These are the worst kind of, they're the lowest form of cryptocurrency. They're sort of non-fungible tokens like those trading cards that Donald Trump loved to cosplay when he dressed up as an astronaut and a cowboy and a fireman. It was like a bizarre village people for Donald Trump. Really weird. But they sold

because they have value because somebody else wants to buy it. It's like little pieces of art. They had digital signatures. And that was, so a lot of the NFT people got into cryptocurrency because it's very, very similar. So it's a sucker's bet. So Trump created a meme coin. Then he created the trading platform for the meme coin. He provided the liquidity pool for the meme coin. And then he pushed the volume of it sort of as a pump and dump scheme, except he never really has to dump. He just needs to pump. It's a pump and pump scheme, scheme.

Because he owns the platform, he makes money regardless of the price of the meme coin on the buy and the sell. So he wants volume. He wants trading. So he promotes it by having, with your and my taxpayer dollars, hosting dinners that he attends with the great seal of the President of the United States in front of it, in which he brings together 250 of the leading holders of his meme coin in a meme coin wallet,

And he pats him on the back. And half of those people, as we know, are foreign investors because they want to buy a piece of the president. They can't do it without violating federal campaign regulations. So they do it by buying his meme coins. And he promotes it because he makes a lot of money on the meme coin, the value of the meme coin, on the buy and sell of the meme coin. And then as we came on the air, we all saw this morning this announcement, dollar sign Trump.

meme coin wallet for sale. Join the waiting list now with a picture of him at Butler, Pennsylvania with his fist up. And I thought, well, that's legit. I had heard there was something in the works at World Liberty Financial, which Donald Trump owns with his sons, but apparently not his daughters. And along with Steve Witkoff, who's the de facto Secretary of State, he's the guy that runs around to Iran and cuts the nuclear deal. He's the one that dealt with Putin and got his lunch eaten in front of him.

He's not Secretary of State, it's Steve Witkoff, golf buddy developer of a friend of Donald Trump. And Witkoff got the Trump family into cryptocurrency heavy, including introducing them to a couple of crypto bros, one of which went to jail. And that's what our president of the United States, that's who he's in business with. So I knew that this World Liberty Financial, owned in part by Witkoff and the Sons and Donald Trump,

was about to launch a wallet. That's an electronic holder for your electronic money, for lack of a better term. You have to hold it in an account. The account is called a wallet. So they were going to launch some branded wallet. And I said, well, here it is. It's got a dollar sign Trump in it. Otherwise, kind of an evasion of privacy and a copyright violation.

And I looked at the who sponsored it. And it was something called Magic Eden, which is a company that was in business with Donald Trump for his NFTs. Well, that sounds legit. Until Eric Jr. posted a social media post followed on the heels by Don Jr., which said, we don't know anything about us. This is not sanctions. I run the Trump organization. I don't know anything about this. And Don Jr. said the same thing. It's not sanctioned. We're working on our own. We're working feverishly on it. It's not launched yet.

This is an example, apparently, of one of three things happened-ish. Magic Eden had a business deal, at least a handshake, with somebody in Trump world and felt like they could use the likeness and the dollar sign Trump. That's just the way I like my American presidents, who spell their name with a dollar sign. Yeah? Like Kash Patel, also, who puts an S dollar sign in all of his, when he was selling all his crap before he became FBI director. So,

I think Magic Eden had a deal in principle. And they mocked up this wallet announcement. They put the Butler, Pennsylvania photo there and with the Trump name and the waiting list. And they launched. Except either the Trump person, including Donald Trump, that gave him the green light, didn't clear it with Don Jr. and Eric, who were about to launch their own wallet.

Because you can have more than one wallet. And that led them to have to scramble. So that's one example. Second is they just ripped off the Trump family. That could happen. This is the wild, wild, unregulated west of cryptocurrency. It is possible that the Trump family just got ripped off, which is cosmic justice that that would happen.

that you got ripped off in this unregulated world that's unregulated because Donald Trump doesn't want to regulate it. He's removed all the Department of Justice protections. He's got rid of all the laws. He got the Securities and Exchange Commission out of the business of regulating cryptocurrency. He never stood up a cryptocurrency regulator because he doesn't want one. He packed his cabinet, including his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, with cryptocurrency acolytes. I mean, a

Cantor Fitzgerald, the company owned by the Commerce Secretary, now by his two sons, who are like under 30 and never...

worked a hard day in their life. But in any event, they're heavy into cryptocurrency in every way, shape or form. Tether, ether, platforms, they're cutting new deals, they're mining, they're holding, whatever they're doing. So when you surround yourself with a bunch of cryptocurrency acolytes who themselves go together with JD Vance to a Las Vegas convention this week or last week,

in order to promote cryptocurrency. Who go to Abu Dhabi could do the same thing. Who say this is going to be the golden era of Bitcoin. And none of it's regulated. It's all gas, no brakes. What do you think is going to happen?

Many of the people that are in this business are unscrupulous. I know that's shocking to people. I know a lot of people that are heavily invested in cryptocurrency. I know a lot of people who want to believe that it's going to be their ticket out and they'll make billions of dollars. I know people that went to the New York cryptocurrency convention around the same time as the Vegas one, where they were rubbing elbows with Eric Adams, the mayor that should be in jail in New York.

and all of that, except he got the Trump administration to dismiss with prejudice his indictment. So I get it, okay? I invested a couple of shekels in cryptocurrency early on. I have family members that worked in cryptocurrency until their company went completely belly up and got defrauded a couple of times and put out of business. And I know the types of people that are involved in this industry. So it's no shock to me that either Trump screwed the Suns

and didn't tell him he cut a deal with Magic Garden, which is my first thought, or Magic Garden is ripping off the Trump family. Either way, we'll continue to follow it. You know where. There's a number of places you can follow what I do and things related to the intersection of law and politics. First of all, Legal AF, the YouTube channel.

is up and running for over eight months. We've got 12 amazing, amazing contributors there. I just added Renato and Asha and their show. It's complicated. They make it so not complicated. It's a great podcast, former FBI agents, former federal prosecutors, amazing legal commentators and national security experts. It's complicated. Before that I added, uh,

onto the channel. Sean Wilentz and Sidney Blumenthal, sorry, Sidney, in a podcast, in a playlist they call The Court of History, the highest court in the land, where they as historians and journalists and researchers put into historical context all that we're watching with the Trump administration. And it's important. Court accountability action

And their leaders, Alex Aronson, Mike Sachs, and Lisa Graves, looking at corruption, the federal court system, and influence there all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. We've got Dina Dahl, a regular contributor, who joins me every week for a show called Unprecedented about the United States Supreme Court. Melba Pearson, former prosecutor and an ACLU lawyer, does regular podcasting.

Hot takes, as does the former prosecutor and state attorney Dave Arenberg. And then we got Shan Wu, who was formerly a general counsel to the attorney general of the United States and a federal prosecutor contributing there as well. Joining me, I do about four or five hot takes every day.

We do every two hours a video at the intersection of law and politics that matters. Legal AF, the YouTube channel in collaboration with the Midas Touch Network. Legal AF, the Substack. One of the things I want to tell you about Popak, the intersection, and how we're sort of supporting this. We may have an ad or two. We'll have some ads with us today. But on the full complete launch, and once we have the RSS feed, the audio feed of the intersection up and running,

It's really going to be user supported, sort of like public broadcasting, PBS. And Substack is one way to support what we do here. So I'm going to encourage you to go over to the Legal AF Substack website.

It's free for now. We've got some amazing things we do every day, six, seven postings a day, including all the filings that I talk about and that our contributors talk about at the Supreme Court under SCOTUS AF, filings and orders coming out of courts under Filings AF, a morning roundup called, wait for it, Morning AF that I do every day, and then all the other contributors like Leah Littman, Karen Freeman-Ignifilo, and the whole group that we have over on Legal AF, the YouTube channel as well.

The other ways, of course, to support what we do is through the Legal AF, the podcast, every Wednesday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, only on the Midas Touch Network. We are the number one law and politics podcast on YouTube's podcast rankings week after week. That's a testament to the fervent support of our audience, including you.

So we're a little bit late on the audio, though. I'd like a little more audio downloads. It helps us in the rankings, the ratings, keeps us on the air for Legal AF, the podcast that I do with Ben Mycelis on Saturdays and Karen Friedman Ignifilo. And then we've got, at least for now, our pro-democracy sponsors that we handpick through Jordi Mycelis over on the brothers side and all come together to support my new launch of the Intersection Podcast.

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with Michael Popock. I appreciate you being here as we build our audience for this new podcast here on the Midas Touch Network. Trump attacks. Let's dive into Trump attacks. Earlier in the week, or late last week, we get word that there's been a falling out with Trump and Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society.

which is shocking because the Federalist Society and all of its tentacles, and there's dozens of shadowy organizations run by Leonard Leo, who was one of the co-founders of the Federalist Society and runs it with a couple of billion dollars at stake, is the reason that we have such a right-wing federal judiciary up to the United States Supreme Court. He worked hand in glove with Donald Trump, who basically outsourced federal judges to him. And along with Mitch McConnell,

got all these people involved, got all these people nominated and confirmed. Now, on the flip side of that, the real conservatives are at odds with MAGA. And there's a falling out that's broken out in public. And real conservatives have attacked Donald Trump and his latest decision, for instance, to put Emil or Emil Bove, his former criminal defense lawyer,

into a plum appellate court position on the Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And they're not shy about it. They said he's unqualified, he's a political hack, and he has no place being on the court. That pissed off Donald Trump, who went after Leonard Leo and the rest, and it broke out into the open. What does that mean? It means that MAGA is not monolithic, and there are ways to defeat it, you know, to continue the Star Wars theme.

There's a way to destroy the Death Star. And using this division and this split, this schism between MAGA and the Federalist Society is one way we can do it and exploit that. So now it looks like for the 45 or so judges that Biden couldn't fill, that Trump is going to be filling over the next several months, plus another couple of hundred before the Trump administration is over with senior status judges opening up new spots for Donald Trump to appoint federal judges.

It looks like this is going to be handled by Stephen Miller, who's not a lawyer but plays one in the White House. He's the leading manipulator and consultant and advisor for Donald Trump in the White House. He came up with all of the immigration plan first time around, putting kids in cages. Came up with using the Alien Enemies Act, the deportation, the putting people in gulags, foreign gulags. That's all out of the fevered mind and the weird stew of Stephen Miller.

So he's going to be the one, I'm sure, with some other MAGA MAGA who are going to be providing advice, if that's the right word to Donald Trump, about federal court appointees. They're going to be more extreme. There's going to be litmus tests because Donald Trump has complained. We have new reporting internally that he's very disappointed with the Supreme Court because the ones that he put on are not adequately protecting his policies. That's his view.

So we have that attack. And the second attack is we have the attack on women by Donald Trump once again. It wasn't enough that he takes complete credit for getting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett onto the court, finally getting the numbers in order to defeat Roe versus Wade and rip away a constitutional right of a woman to choose. That wasn't enough. He and his groups want to make sure that even in the states where he said, well, we'll just leave it to the states, but they don't want to leave it to the states.

They want to manipulate that playing field as well. They want to go after state court justices, Supreme Court justices at the state level. They want to try to monkey around with the election process for those judges. You already had Elon Musk spend $20 million to try to buy a Supreme Court justice seat in Wisconsin. They tried to interfere in North Carolina with the North Carolina Supreme Court seat.

And so that's the fight is going on at the state level and the state constitution level. But that's not all. He's now Trump today announced that he's reversing the policy of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris that interpreted EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which is the major bulwark that Biden used to protect women after the Dobbs decision in 2023.

That EMTALA, according to Trump, in giving guidance to hospitals that take in federal funds, that they will not be able and they should not consider using an abortion even if the life of the mother is at risk. Let me let that land on the table. Donald Trump is paying off his debts.

to the Christian right and other anti-abortion groups by now reversing the guidance for EMTALA, putting doctors under the gun and under the sword of Damocles if they decide under their Hippocratic oath that they have to do no harm and they have to support women and make sure they don't die by giving them an abortion, they could be facing prosecution. They could be facing cutoff of federal funding. And this is because at the Supreme Court a year ago, almost today,

They sent back to lower courts in Iowa and other places rather than make a decision about EMTALA and whether it is proper statutory guidance or not by the then president. That's still making its way up back to the United States Supreme Court about whether a woman has a right to expect that a doctor to save her life is going to give her abortion or not.

And this was an orchestrated attack because Trump also knew that there was a phony Catholic group. I don't mean phony Catholics. I mean, a group that's phony that was created just to bring a lawsuit. Catholic doctors bring a suit in the Middle District of Tennessee challenging the intolerant guidance of Biden. And as soon as the guidance changed under Trump and as soon as the American Civil Liberties Union intervened in the case, right?

Then they got what they wanted. They dismissed the case because they didn't want to risk making bad law, a bad law for them. I mean, and so it's it's unceasing. It's unending. So if you're a woman or a person like me who supports women and you can get right with the MAGA Republican continued assault on women to make them second class citizens in 22 states in this country.

OK, well, then you have to justify that at the time that you go and vote at the polls. But if you can't abide that, then you know what to do with the midterm elections. We're talking about action here. What can you do? That's what you can do. Work on your mail in registration now. So in states, including red states, that you can make sure that your vote, you can vote the way you want to vote. Do it now. So you're not under the gun at the at the time of the election.

work on voter registration in your state so that we don't sit out the midterms. Midterms are usually low turnout affairs. Only the super voters vote. If we're not motivated

to win back the House and the Senate when it's up for grabs in the midterms and do a referendum of a down thumb on Trump at this midterm, I don't know what will ever motivate us. And of course, that also sets up not only the return of checks and ballots by giving the Democrats the Senate and the House, which is looking good at looking at the polling because independents that got Donald Trump elected are abandoning him with abandon, with reckless abandon.

if that's the right phrase, that's going to help. If we can't win this midterm, we should put ourselves out of business as a party and as an American Constitutional Republic. So we got that attack on women and the attack on the Federalist Society that's broken out in plain sight. Then we got the pardon scandal. We had Liz Oyer on, lawyer, Oyer, Oyer, lawyer, in her social media, who I told her only half-jokingly during our

A recent hot take that's up now on Legal AF, the YouTube channel. I could have gone my whole life without knowing who the pardoned attorney was. It's an independent bipartisan position. It's not supposed to be political. And it wasn't, especially when Liz was in that office. But she got canned for doing her job by the Trump administration. And she's now gone public, not in a political way, but to call out the corruption of the pardon process by Donald Trump.

The problem is that one of the lessons that Donald Trump learned from the immunity decision in the summer of 2023 is that he can do anything when it relates to pardons. He can sell pardons. There's no limit in the Constitution at all. There's an unfettered right to clemency and pardon by a president, even if he literally sold them at an auction or took a bag of money in return. And he's not going to be prosecuted for that either.

based on the immunity decision. And that's the lesson that Donald Trump learned. They can do whatever he wants. He's Superman when it comes to pardons. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't cover it. And that shouldn't mean we shouldn't be calling for a constitutional amendment to limit that power because you see what happens when a felon in chief gets control of that superpower. Here's just a tiny list.

compiled by Liz Oyer and others about not the pardons per se, although I'll talk about them, just in the recently, in the last two months, three months, but in the amount of money owed to the American people that Donald Trump also wiped out. It's over $1 billion worth of it. Isn't that crazy? $1 billion owed to the American people

or the taxpayers was just wiped away by Donald Trump by giving these people pardons. Starts with Trevor Milton, who owned a company called Nikola. $695 million was owed back to the American people pursuant to a restitution order of a federal judge for fraud, securities fraud, and the like related to that company. And now because he was absolved by Donald Trump and given a pardon, the restitution goes away too. That's $700 million right there.

Then you got a company called Bitnex, which ran a cryptocurrency platform, trading platform called Bitnex Crypto. And there they were ordered to pay a $100 million fine under violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Nobody knew who was trading. They didn't know their customer. They didn't comply with any money laundering in the Patriot Act to make sure that foreign bad guys weren't using the cryptocurrency platform. And they were sanctioned as a result.

Donald Trump wiped away that $100 million sanction. That would have went to the American taxpayer and to the general treasury. How about Michelle Fiore, an elected official in Las Vegas, Nevada, who stole $70,000 from a charity that was supposed to go for a police memorial, and she used it for cosmetic surgery, among other things. She got a get-out-of-jail-free card, and so did the $70,000 that she owed in restitution related to that. Paul Walzak...

His mother, who was a healthcare executive who defrauded the company and his own employees to the tune of $4 million.

His own mother went to Mar-a-Lago, paid a million dollars to get in the door that went to Donald Trump and his organizations and walked out with a pardon for her son and the wipe out of the four million dollars that she owed. That's pretty good. Paid a million dollars, wiped out four million dollars worth of debt and got her son out of jail. Same thing with Nicola. Trevor Milton donated to Donald Trump in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and turned that into a 700 million dollar savings.

I haven't even gotten to the Chrisleys yet. Remember them growing up? Chrisley, Chrisley Knows Best, all that other BS. Well, before they became reality TV stars and all of the trappings of being super rich and super wealthy was all a sham, was all a fraud, was all a Potemkin village. They stole $30 million from banks in a bank swindle, in mortgage and loan fraud. Not anymore.

Because Savannah Chrisley gave a speech, and she's pretty, I guess, at the Republican National Convention. Donald Trump waved the magic wand, gave her parents a pardon, and then wiped out the money they owed to the banks, the $30 million. Then you've got the Jan 6th insurrectionists. If you add up all the fines there, they owed a million and a half to the American Treasury.

Do the math. It's over a billion dollars. So we talk a lot about corruption and pardons, but talk about the money that Donald Trump just made disappear. Remember that while you're voting because his big, beautiful budget is trying to cut a couple of trillion dollars out of Medicare, Medicaid, and food programs for the impoverished. That's why even Elon Musk was like, this is an abomination. I'm sure he had another word in mind. So that's the pardon scandal.

You're here in case you just wandered in to

Popak, The Intersection, a new podcast here on the Midas Touch Network. I appreciate you being here as part of our audience. This is just another contribution, but it's one that I can do sort of solo to cover all the topics that I want. I love doing my work with my co-anchors. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Ben Mysalis on Saturdays on Legal AF, Karen Friedman Agnifilo on Wednesdays, and other work collaboratively that I do on the Legal AF YouTube channel.

But I do like to kind of like no holds barred, not blowing smoke or sunshine, Michael Popak version here on the intersection as well. Let's talk about federal courts and injunctions as we round out the intersection for this Tuesday.

And there, as I reported a couple of days ago, buried on the 500th page of a thousand page bill was this attempt, and it got past the House already, to benefit Donald Trump and all of his problems he's having with courts, federal courts, trying to hold his feet to the fire and try to stop his abuse of power.

At the recording here, as of this live recording, Donald Trump has over 200 lawsuits against him, the Trump administration, I mean, with more than almost 70 injunctions, preliminary injunctions, temporary restraining orders and the like. And of course, Supreme Court rulings against him, there's about a half a dozen of those.

Donald Trump also has been found in contempt or probable cause to find the Trump administration in criminal contempt by Judge Boasberg. That was put on ice by an appellate court. And then you've got right now, as we speak, Judge Zinnes in Maryland in the Abrego Garcia case.

Getting pretty close to finding the Trump administration in contempt for failing to either both advise her, as ordered by the United States Supreme Court, about what they're doing, which is nothing, to facilitate the return of Ebrego Garcia from the jails of El Salvador.

and in violation of that order. Now, what this bill that's been passed in the House and gone off to the Senate, and is the subject of these cross-examination hearings by the Democrats in the Senate and the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the bill sits for now, is whether MAGA can benefit Donald Trump by making it harder for federal judges to find the Trump administration in contempt of

because they violate an injunction if the injunction is not supported by a bond. Let me break that down for you. In order to get an injunction, temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction, in normal situations, when constitutional rights and presidential power is not at issue, if I was just a civil litigant trying to get an injunction against another commercial entity, I would likely have to post the bond. What's the bond for? It's supposed to be the amount. It is supposed to be the amount.

of calculated potential damages. If it turns out at the end of the case that the judge was wrong about issuing the injunction, what we call an improvidently issued injunction, to compensate that party for the damage they incurred for the year or more that the injunction was against them. And it could be a dollar. It could be $100 million or more. It depends on the injunction and how much money is at risk. That's in a normal civil case.

But judges have generally interpreted that when a party comes in, and it may be a party that doesn't have a lot of money, but has a very good argument about a constitutional violation by a branch of government, in this case, the president, they don't need to post a bond. And that's consistent with state court practice, which I practice as well, where you don't need to get a bond against a government. That is sort of standard play here in America.

Donald Trump doesn't like that. So they figured out since Congress has a lot of intersection, to use the podcast title for today, with the federal courts in their Article I position intersecting with the Article III powers of federal judges, how? They fund it, right? Because they're the purse, Congress. So Congress funds the federal courts. That's one. Congress can change laws. Federal courts, by and large, besides the Constitution, interpret the laws made by Congress.

That's the second way they intersect. The third way they intersect is that the Congress can pass with with guidance from judges rules of civil procedure and criminal procedure. They can also react to Supreme Court decisions and pass laws to limit federal judges in certain areas. They create laws about class actions. The Congress does about collective actions, about other things.

They can set statute of limitations that courts have to apply for when you can, the timing to bring a case, a federal case. They can do all that. What I don't believe that they can do is limit the ability of an Article III judge to issue an injunction

And then if that injunction doesn't have a bond, this new bill would say, well, no bond? Well, then a violation of it doesn't matter and you can't get us in contempt. If a judge can't find a party in contempt for violating a contempt, sorry, for violating an injunction, then it's completely toothless. Then you might as well get rid of injunctions.

Now, it doesn't try to set the amount of the bond, but the fact that they're even interfering with a judge's ability to set a bond or not set a bond in order to support an injunction, which would be the basis for a violation in a contempt order, is a violation, in my view, of the Article III powers of a judge and the separation of powers.

There are limits to what a Congress can do to tell a judge how to rule and how to set up his or her toolbox of remedies. Judges have inherent authority, even if there wasn't. And that's the other thing that they're missing. Judges have inherent authority under other statutes.

To issue orders of contempt, we call it either, I call it contumacious conduct. Sometimes you hear it as contemptuous conduct, but in law, it's usually contumacious. Judges have inherent authority to regulate and administer their own courtrooms, even if there isn't a statute that says that or a law that says that. And so I think they still have that power because you can't have, well, let's play this out in a thought experiment. You can't have like a,

Pam Bondi or somebody from the Department of Justice like Todd Blanche sit in the back of the room and start heckling the judge, you know. Oh, I don't like that ruling. Rule this way. You can't force their hand. They have to be independent. You can't undermine the independence of the federal judiciary. And that's what I believe this does. And this has been hotly debated in the Senate, hotly debated in the Senate right through the time of this recording.

Where I think it comes out is I think it gets struck for the bill in order for the Senate to approve it and then reconcile it with the House bill and then send it to Donald Trump, the big, beautiful bill that he's waiting on. I don't think he's going if he gets resistance, which he's getting already and headwinds in the Senate. I don't think Donald Trump is going to walk away from any other aspect of his big, beautiful budget bill.

just because of this. He's not going to let the tail wag that dog, I don't think. But we'll cover it all right here. Look, you've come to the right place. I'm glad you're here for really the first episode of this re-skinned podcast we're now calling The Intersection Podcast.

Many ways to support what we do, as you already know. Follow us on Legal AF, the YouTube channel, a dozen or so hot takes every day with 12 different contributors. I do a lot of the work, but I curate the rest at the intersection of law and politics, along with the Midas Touch Network. Legal AF, the YouTube channel. Legal AF MTN. Come on over there. Hit the subscribe button. Legal AF, the sub stack. Yep.

You like all of our things we talk about at the intersection of law and politics? Come over there. We've got written work. We've got videos. We've got ad-free versions of things. We've got the morning briefing by me called Morning AF. We've got court filings. Because we want to be the clearinghouse. We want to be one-stop shopping for all things law and politics. And Legal AF Substack helps us do that. And then, of course, we've got Legal AF Podcast.

the podcast at the intersection of law and politics, Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time, right here on the Midas Touch Network. So those are the ways to support us. I appreciate you being here. And until my next hot take, until my next Legal AF midweek on Wednesday and Saturday with Ben Micellis and all the work we do on Legal AF for YouTube, I'm Michael Popak and I'm reporting. I'm Michael Popak and I got some big news for our audience.

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