Latest / Serious Trouble / Because I Got Highly Likely to Lose an Anti-SLAPP Motion
Transcript
- 0:00[music]
- 0:08SPEAKER_00: Hi, it's Ken White.
- 0:10SPEAKER_00: And it's Josh Barrow, and this is Serious Trouble.
- 0:13SPEAKER_00: Ken, Serious Trouble for the Tate Brothers, as we've discussed.
- 0:17SPEAKER_00: They got picked up in Miami, where they were, of course, for a bare-knuckle boxing fight.
- 0:24SPEAKER_00: And they are to be extradited to the United Kingdom.
- 0:26SPEAKER_00: One of the things we discussed when we last talked about this is that
- 0:29SPEAKER_00: if you're being held for extradition,
- 0:30SPEAKER_00: it's significantly harder to get pretrial release than if you're being held before
- 0:35SPEAKER_00: a trial in the United States.
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: And that's for a number of reasons.
- 0:37SPEAKER_00: It's embarrassing if we're trying to extradite someone and they run away.
- 0:41SPEAKER_00: But the Tate brothers are giving it an effort and they're trying
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: to get release pending their proceedings about whether they can be extradited to
- 0:48SPEAKER_00: the United Kingdom.
- 0:49SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't look like it's going so well for them.
- 0:51SPEAKER_01: It does not, in large part because they are the Tate brothers.
- 0:55SPEAKER_01: This is very much a character is destiny type of thing.
- 0:58SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
- 0:58SPEAKER_01: in extradition cases,
- 1:00SPEAKER_01: even though it's in federal court,
- 1:02SPEAKER_01: the Bail Reform Act, the rules that apply everywhere else do not apply.
- 1:07SPEAKER_01: And there is this presumption against bail and So basically the way the kind
- 1:16SPEAKER_01: of mishmash of case law has worked out is that there's a presumption against it.
- 1:21SPEAKER_01: You have to show special circumstances.
- 1:24SPEAKER_01: You have the burden of proving,
- 1:25SPEAKER_01: unlike the government normally having to prove things,
- 1:28SPEAKER_01: you have the burden of proving you're not a flight risk.
- 1:30SPEAKER_01: You're not a danger.
- 1:32SPEAKER_01: And there are some sort of extreme special circumstances justifying bail.
- 1:36SPEAKER_01: And that's the only reason we'll let you out and potentially have
- 1:38SPEAKER_01: a diplomatic incident when you flee.
- 1:40SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 1:41SPEAKER_01: So the challenge here,
- 1:44SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 1:44SPEAKER_01: the Tate brothers have filed a motion for bail in which they say, hey,
- 1:47SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 1:48SPEAKER_01: that stuff in Romania was bullshit and they eventually let us out on bail
- 1:52SPEAKER_01: and we're famous all over the world.
- 1:54SPEAKER_01: So how could we flee?
- 1:56SPEAKER_01: And all this type of thing.
- 1:57SPEAKER_01: The problem is they have basically branded themselves as, hey,
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: we're the Tate brothers and we fuck hoes, we hide money and we flee jurisdictions.
- 2:07SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 2:08SPEAKER_01: It's kind of their entire online branding.
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: And in fact,
- 2:11SPEAKER_01: their online presence is full of stuff about how they are unstoppable,
- 2:19SPEAKER_01: uncatchable, and have multiple identities.
- 2:23SPEAKER_01: And you've picked out some of your favorites, Josh.
- 2:25SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the government has a field day here with their social media posting,
- 2:30SPEAKER_00: things that they're saying about how it would be difficult to keep them in one place
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: if you let them out.
- 2:37SPEAKER_00: One of the Tate brothers posted saying, you can't ban me from driving.
- 2:39SPEAKER_00: I have nine licenses.
- 2:41SPEAKER_00: You can't freeze my passport.
- 2:42SPEAKER_00: I have four.
- 2:43SPEAKER_00: You can't take my money.
- 2:44SPEAKER_00: It's everywhere.
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: Different circumstance, he claimed to have had five passports.
- 2:50SPEAKER_00: He posted a Mexican passport online showing Tristan Tate's photograph and date
- 2:55SPEAKER_00: of birth, but it's Mexican.
- 2:56SPEAKER_00: It has the name Vladimir Scorpius,
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: which is that of the Guadalajara Scorpiuses?
- 3:06SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound very Mexican to me.
- 3:08SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty sure that's a Bond villain, Josh.
- 3:12SPEAKER_01: You missed the part where he says it takes international cooperation to slow me down.
- 3:17SPEAKER_01: And DOJ is like, oh, don't mind if we do.
- 3:21SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 3:21SPEAKER_00: So they're probably not going to get bail, you think?
- 3:25SPEAKER_01: I think almost certainly not.
- 3:26SPEAKER_01: And in fact, after getting this Government opposition.
- 3:30SPEAKER_01: They filed a motion asking to continue the hearing on this
- 3:33SPEAKER_01: so they could more carefully respond to the government opposition.
- 3:36SPEAKER_01: Part of what's going on here is they have a lawyer who is very much in their style
- 3:41SPEAKER_01: of, you know, blustery, loud and bald.
- 3:47SPEAKER_01: And he's, you know, talking shit and all this type of thing.
- 3:49SPEAKER_01: And so he went in with a motion that did that.
- 3:52SPEAKER_01: He really,
- 3:52SPEAKER_01: I do not think,
- 3:53SPEAKER_01: expected the government to have such unmitigated glee with I think
- 4:01SPEAKER_01: the technical term is clients here,
- 4:08SPEAKER_01: just saying stuff that's absolutely in their worst interest if they ever get charged
- 4:13SPEAKER_01: or caught or anything.
- 4:15SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
- 4:16SPEAKER_01: this is a classic story of,
- 4:18SPEAKER_01: I think of our entire show, Josh,
- 4:20SPEAKER_01: about how your public persona and your media
- 4:23SPEAKER_01: and social media persona can wind up reaping bad things if you're ever in court
- 4:29SPEAKER_01: and are very antithetical to your legal interests that boring people like me try
- 4:33SPEAKER_01: to get you not to do.
- 4:34SPEAKER_00: I mean, the funny thing here is that clearly what animates the Tates is they believe
- 4:39SPEAKER_00: that they are above the law because they are connected to Trump and
- 4:44SPEAKER_00: that they would just get away with whatever they did.
- 4:46SPEAKER_00: And a key part of what was their downfall was that they reached a point
- 4:51SPEAKER_00: where it appears that Donald Trump and his associates are no longer interested
- 4:54SPEAKER_00: in expending any political capital on their behalf.
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: So if it's,
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: you know,
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: for my friends, everything for my enemies, the law, they're not friends anymore.
- 5:00SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 5:01SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 5:03SPEAKER_00: And their passports from Vanuatu,
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: which the UK government believes they hold, are not going to help them now.
- 5:08SPEAKER_01: Well, it does seem as if their messaging,
- 5:10SPEAKER_01: their lawyers' messaging,
- 5:11SPEAKER_01: and like the messages from them that are being posted on social media from jail,
- 5:17SPEAKER_01: continue to have an audience of basically Donald Trump,
- 5:19SPEAKER_01: Marco Rubio,
- 5:21SPEAKER_01: and the people around them that they hope will weigh on them to make a decision
- 5:26SPEAKER_01: to spare them from all this.
- 5:27SPEAKER_01: But as you said,
- 5:28SPEAKER_01: it doesn't seem as if At least the higher level people,
- 5:32SPEAKER_01: the Trumps and the Rubios are still interested in all of that.
- 5:35SPEAKER_01: There's not a lot of reaction from the government,
- 5:37SPEAKER_01: but they're hitting all the notes they
- 5:39SPEAKER_01: hope will work about,
- 5:40SPEAKER_01: you know, being oppressed by evil European governments.
- 5:45SPEAKER_01: And they're kind of repeating the January 6th people's complaints about how bad
- 5:50SPEAKER_01: the jail is if you're someone like Andrew Tate and all this stuff.
- 5:53SPEAKER_01: But it does not seem to be working.
- 5:56SPEAKER_01: Rubio is absent.
- 5:57SPEAKER_01: Trump hasn't said anything about it.
- 5:59SPEAKER_01: They haven't, I guess, yet.
- 6:00SPEAKER_01: Couched it in the right language to attract J.D.
- 6:02SPEAKER_01: Vance's attention.
- 6:04SPEAKER_00: And Caroline Leavitt,
- 6:07SPEAKER_00: until recently,
- 6:08SPEAKER_00: the White House press secretary said from the podium in the White House
- 6:10SPEAKER_00: that they weren't going to intervene.
- 6:11SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously,
- 6:12SPEAKER_00: it wouldn't be the first time the Trump administration changed its mind
- 6:14SPEAKER_00: about something, but they are on the record.
- 6:16SPEAKER_00: They're saying they're not going to.
- 6:17SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 6:18SPEAKER_01: But the government's opposition,
- 6:22SPEAKER_01: you can tell when a government lawyer really, really enjoyed writing something.
- 6:27SPEAKER_01: And this is one of those times.
- 6:28SPEAKER_01: This made that person's day and I'm happy for them.
- 6:31SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 6:32SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile,
- 6:33SPEAKER_00: Jeanine Pirro in Washington, D.C.,
- 6:36SPEAKER_00: recently on the outs with the president,
- 6:38SPEAKER_00: who was quite upset with her failure to identify and prosecute the people
- 6:42SPEAKER_00: who destroyed the president's beautiful reflecting pool.
- 6:45SPEAKER_00: She's now convened a special grand jury and And the lieutenant who will be doing
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: the operations before this grand jury is Stefan van der Velden.
- 6:54SPEAKER_00: You listeners may remember him as the ex dance photographer who used to work
- 6:58SPEAKER_00: under her in the Westchester District Attorney's office and has come on to do some
- 7:02SPEAKER_00: of her most special projects.
- 7:07SPEAKER_00: So anyway, we know this grand jury exists.
- 7:09SPEAKER_00: We don't know what it's for.
- 7:11SPEAKER_00: Is it weird to convene a special grand jury?
- 7:14SPEAKER_01: Well, it is now.
- 7:16SPEAKER_01: It's not necessarily weird, just like in the abstract.
- 7:20SPEAKER_01: So normal grand juries,
- 7:21SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 7:21SPEAKER_01: get appointed for a particular term, usually 18 months for federal grand juries.
- 7:25SPEAKER_01: But there's a statute that allows the Department of Justice to certify that there's
- 7:30SPEAKER_01: a need and have a special grand jury that's usually convened to look
- 7:36SPEAKER_01: at organized crime in a particular jurisdiction or maybe political corruption.
- 7:41SPEAKER_01: And it's a little – I mean it can still indict.
- 7:43SPEAKER_01: It can still investigate.
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: The sort of thing that makes it different is it's convened for a special reason
- 7:48SPEAKER_01: and it has the ability to issue these reports as opposed to just indictments.
- 7:52SPEAKER_01: It can –
- 7:55SPEAKER_01: Issue a report about what it thinks is going on or what it thinks is wrong
- 7:58SPEAKER_01: or what reforms it thinks are necessary.
- 8:01SPEAKER_01: So we don't know why this is being convened.
- 8:04SPEAKER_01: Given that Stephen Vanderveld and maybe the organized crime is the Sharks and
- 8:08SPEAKER_01: the Jets, but we'd be speculating at this point.
- 8:13SPEAKER_01: But now,
- 8:14SPEAKER_01: given that it's Pirro,
- 8:15SPEAKER_01: given that Pirro is trying to recover Her reputation with Trump and given this DOJ,
- 8:20SPEAKER_01: you kind of have to wonder whether it's some further sort of going
- 8:24SPEAKER_01: after Trump's enemies type of thing.
- 8:26SPEAKER_00: But the interesting thing with that is that it's a grand jury in the District of Columbia.
- 8:30SPEAKER_00: Now, I assume that's the only place that Jeanine Pirro could call a grand jury
- 8:34SPEAKER_00: because she's the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
- 8:38SPEAKER_00: But they've had trouble in the past with these grand juries in D.C.
- 8:43SPEAKER_00: being full of people who tend to be Sure.
- 8:46SPEAKER_00: I guess the idea would be it might be a little easier to control
- 8:48SPEAKER_00: a special grand jury because regular grand juries mean they just have to hear
- 8:51SPEAKER_00: a bunch of cases.
- 8:52SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you know, otherwise they're useless and you run out of grand jury time.
- 8:55SPEAKER_00: So-
- 9:15SPEAKER_01: You can't just feed them one case or else you won't have enough grand juries.
- 9:21SPEAKER_01: Here,
- 9:21SPEAKER_01: you could really choose only to bring this one particular investigation or case
- 9:26SPEAKER_01: or issue before them, and that could kind of shape the way they see things.
- 9:29SPEAKER_01: If they don't see a wide array of cases,
- 9:32SPEAKER_01: grand juries are going to be less likely to say, wait, why is this one so different?
- 9:36SPEAKER_01: Why is the evidence so lacking compared to what we're used to seeing?
- 9:40SPEAKER_01: So that could be a factor.
- 9:41SPEAKER_01: But you're right.
- 9:42SPEAKER_01: You're still dealing with D.C.
- 9:43SPEAKER_01: people who – I don't think are going to be super amenable to
- 9:48SPEAKER_01: a completely bullshit case.
- 9:50SPEAKER_00: Well, and also I would think would notice that they're being used
- 9:53SPEAKER_00: as Jeanine Pirro's political tool.
- 9:55SPEAKER_00: At least some of them, they would talk amongst themselves.
- 9:57SPEAKER_00: You would hope.
- 9:58SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 9:59SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 9:59SPEAKER_01: And so far that seems to be the case.
- 10:01SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 10:02SPEAKER_00: We also have a little correction about that reflecting pool case with David Hearn.
- 10:06SPEAKER_01: I erroneously said that when Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the Hearn case— This is
- 10:14SPEAKER_01: the former Olympic canoeist.
- 10:16SPEAKER_01: Yes, who wantonly and savagely destroyed the lining of the reflecting pool, allegedly.
- 10:23SPEAKER_01: I said she had moved to do it with prejudice, meaning permanently.
- 10:27SPEAKER_01: She actually did it— It moved without prejudice, meaning in theory she could bring it again.
- 10:33SPEAKER_01: Hearn has since filed a brief basically arguing it should be with prejudice
- 10:38SPEAKER_01: because it was so abusive and ridiculous.
- 10:40SPEAKER_01: And what the judge did is dismissed it immediately and then set a briefing schedule
- 10:47SPEAKER_01: for why or why not it should be done with prejudice.
- 10:51SPEAKER_01: In a way that suggests to me the judge is probably inclined towards with prejudice.
- 10:55SPEAKER_01: So we'll see what Jeanine Pirro's office has to say in opposition to that motion
- 11:00SPEAKER_01: by Hearn saying it should be with prejudice and how they defend themselves.
- 11:04SPEAKER_01: And then the judge will ultimately make the call.
- 11:07SPEAKER_01: And given how ridiculous the case is,
- 11:08SPEAKER_01: I think even though usually without prejudice would be the norm,
- 11:12SPEAKER_01: I suspect it'll be with prejudice.
- 11:14SPEAKER_00: One case we haven't talked about yet.
- 11:16SPEAKER_00: Because we haven't had the right sort of court proceeding until this week is
- 11:20SPEAKER_00: the case of Max Miller,
- 11:21SPEAKER_00: this Ohio congressman who has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife
- 11:28SPEAKER_00: and also, by the way, by a prior ex-girlfriend.
- 11:31SPEAKER_00: In a book that was released several years ago.
- 11:34SPEAKER_00: And this has become a political scandal in Ohio.
- 11:36SPEAKER_00: His ex-wife happens to be the daughter of the Republican senator from Ohio,
- 11:41SPEAKER_00: Bernie Moreno,
- 11:43SPEAKER_00: who's made some public statements about how Max Miller is not fit to be a member
- 11:47SPEAKER_00: of Congress.
- 11:48SPEAKER_00: And Max Miller has been fighting for his political life
- 11:50SPEAKER_00: and made this rather odd video appearance defending himself and talking about how
- 11:57SPEAKER_00: the accusations against him are made up.
- 11:59SPEAKER_00: And in conjunction with that,
- 12:00SPEAKER_00: he put out a dossier of documents that have to deal with his divorce and
- 12:05SPEAKER_00: the disputes that they have had in family court and such things.
- 12:09SPEAKER_00: And in the video where he's talking about how he's not abusive,
- 12:11SPEAKER_00: he basically says, go look at this dossier.
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: It has all of this evidence that backs me up.
- 12:16SPEAKER_00: Now, a lawsuit has been filed against him by his ex-wife,
- 12:19SPEAKER_00: Emily Moreno,
- 12:19SPEAKER_00: saying that amid that dossier was a naked photo of their young daughter,
- 12:25SPEAKER_00: I believe it's of their two-year-old daughter.
- 12:28SPEAKER_00: Apparently posted in error,
- 12:30SPEAKER_00: but she sues Max Miller and also Max Miller's lawyer
- 12:33SPEAKER_00: for having recklessly disclosed this.
- 12:36SPEAKER_00: The first thing I thought when I look at this is that's,
- 12:38SPEAKER_00: you know, I mean, this is a civil lawsuit, but that's a crime, isn't it?
- 12:41SPEAKER_01: Potentially.
- 12:42SPEAKER_01: So the lawsuit is,
- 12:45SPEAKER_01: first of all,
- 12:45SPEAKER_01: it's horrible,
- 12:46SPEAKER_01: but the lawsuit claims that it's a photo of the child that depicts genitalia and
- 12:55SPEAKER_01: The significance of that is that can take it into the realm of child pornography
- 13:00SPEAKER_01: and things like that.
- 13:01SPEAKER_01: Now, not every naked picture of a kid in the tub is child pornography.
- 13:06SPEAKER_01: Generally, there are factors you would have to show, like it's for a...
- 13:09SPEAKER_01: lascivious purpose or things like that.
- 13:12SPEAKER_01: But I mean, it's dramatically escalating the seriousness of the situation.
- 13:17SPEAKER_01: And so Emily Moreno filed this on behalf of the kid.
- 13:22SPEAKER_01: So it's actually the kid named only as, you know, RM by her mother filing the suit.
- 13:29SPEAKER_01: And it's claiming under a federal sort of revenge porn law and intimate image law,
- 13:34SPEAKER_01: as well as under Ohio law for Wrongful invasion of privacy,
- 13:39SPEAKER_01: negligence and civil conspiracy.
- 13:41SPEAKER_01: And this is kind of what happens if you've got unhinged conduct
- 13:46SPEAKER_01: by someone like Max Miller,
- 13:49SPEAKER_01: who after he did this,
- 13:50SPEAKER_01: he went on CNN and did an interview that was just breathtakingly bad judgment
- 13:55SPEAKER_01: and completely out of control.
- 13:57SPEAKER_01: And also against the lawyer who,
- 13:59SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 14:00SPEAKER_01: whose involvement in this seems to be Getting all the docs from Max Miller,
- 14:05SPEAKER_01: organizing them and putting them into a Dropbox and giving him the link.
- 14:09SPEAKER_01: And then it's Max Miller who decides to publicize it, but still.
- 14:12SPEAKER_01: That's not something you do with an unhinged client.
- 14:16SPEAKER_01: You know, hand them a Dropbox like that they're likely to do something like that for.
- 14:19SPEAKER_01: So I think there is definitely a political element here.
- 14:23SPEAKER_01: I think there's also definitely,
- 14:24SPEAKER_01: you know,
- 14:25SPEAKER_01: an ex-wife who has been mistreated fighting for her life and the kid's life.
- 14:29SPEAKER_01: But it's serious.
- 14:30SPEAKER_01: I mean,
- 14:32SPEAKER_01: this is – you would probably get into an analysis ultimately of is this just,
- 14:37SPEAKER_01: you know, a kid in the bathtub family picture type thing.
- 14:41SPEAKER_01: Right.
- 14:46SPEAKER_00: One of the things that has stuck out at me following this case and
- 14:51SPEAKER_00: the serious abuse allegations against Max Miller is how he still has joint custody.
- 14:58SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things he points to in his arguments.
- 15:00SPEAKER_00: You know, if I was such a bad father, why has the family court given me joint custody?
- 15:05SPEAKER_00: I know you're not a family lawyer, but I was wondering what you make of the fact that
- 15:11SPEAKER_00: Apparently,
- 15:12SPEAKER_00: whatever we've seen in public and Stephanie Grisham,
- 15:15SPEAKER_00: his ex-girlfriend,
- 15:16SPEAKER_00: having previously accused him of physical abuse,
- 15:19SPEAKER_00: that the family court doesn't seem to have acted here,
- 15:22SPEAKER_00: which is part of what has paralyzed Bernie Moreno, the senator from Ohio.
- 15:28SPEAKER_00: He's been under criticism about, well,
- 15:30SPEAKER_00: this man is mistreating your daughter and you don't want to say anything about it
- 15:34SPEAKER_00: because you're in the same political party.
- 15:36SPEAKER_00: What he has pointed to,
- 15:36SPEAKER_00: I think,
- 15:37SPEAKER_00: fairly is that they're still in a court situation where Miller still has custody
- 15:42SPEAKER_00: and they're still trying to manage through that.
- 15:44SPEAKER_00: But I think it's surprising,
- 15:45SPEAKER_00: at least to me from the outside, to see that he still has partial custody.
- 15:50SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean,
- 15:51SPEAKER_01: if we've seen anything in the years we've been working together, Josh,
- 15:54SPEAKER_01: is that the system doesn't always work well and that someone with resources
- 16:00SPEAKER_01: and good lawyers is can get results that other people might not.
- 16:04SPEAKER_01: Now,
- 16:04SPEAKER_01: there's this narrative out there that fathers constantly get screwed in family court
- 16:08SPEAKER_01: and that moms get full custody and dads don't get rights.
- 16:12SPEAKER_01: That's not really actually true.
- 16:14SPEAKER_01: And particularly when you have fathers with substantial resources and the ability
- 16:19SPEAKER_01: to bring good lawyers into the mix,
- 16:21SPEAKER_01: then the courts are supposed to maintain So it could be tricky to deprive somebody
- 16:33SPEAKER_01: of any custody,
- 16:34SPEAKER_01: especially when they have well-funded lawyers and they're articulate
- 16:39SPEAKER_01: and he's not like a drug dealer living on the street.
- 16:42SPEAKER_01: He's someone with a job.
- 16:43SPEAKER_01: Under those circumstances,
- 16:45SPEAKER_01: actually,
- 16:46SPEAKER_01: victims of abuse can face an uphill battle to extinguish somebody's custody
- 16:51SPEAKER_01: or limit it dramatically.
- 16:53SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 16:54SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about a couple of cases directly involving the administration.
- 16:59SPEAKER_00: We talked about the birthright citizenship decision that came down a couple
- 17:03SPEAKER_00: of months ago from the Supreme Court, fractured.
- 17:06SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was a majority of five justices who found that there was
- 17:10SPEAKER_00: a constitutional right to birthright citizenship.
- 17:12SPEAKER_00: But the four justices who disagreed with that each had their own view on what was going on here.
- 17:17SPEAKER_00: Brett Kavanaugh said, well,
- 17:19SPEAKER_00: there's not a constitutional right, but there's a statute that creates the right.
- 17:23SPEAKER_00: And you had three justices who thought that there was not an absolute right
- 17:27SPEAKER_00: to birthright citizenship,
- 17:28SPEAKER_00: but all of them seemed to have a view of it that was probably narrower than
- 17:31SPEAKER_00: the administration's in terms of exactly who you could exclude.
- 17:34SPEAKER_00: So now the administration is back with trying for another bite at the apple with
- 17:38SPEAKER_00: an executive order saying, OK,
- 17:40SPEAKER_00: there's birthright citizenship,
- 17:41SPEAKER_00: the Supreme Court says,
- 17:43SPEAKER_00: but we're not going to extend that to people in these categories.
- 17:46SPEAKER_00: And they say people born to foreign government employees.
- 17:49SPEAKER_00: Now, I know there's already a narrow carve out for children of diplomats
- 17:52SPEAKER_00: because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
- 17:56SPEAKER_00: But they want to say anyone who works for foreign government,
- 17:58SPEAKER_00: anyone who is an alien enemy,
- 18:01SPEAKER_00: You know,
- 18:02SPEAKER_00: in a way that the administration chooses or anyone who engaged in
- 18:05SPEAKER_00: a commercial transaction to access birthright citizenship.
- 18:08SPEAKER_00: This is so-called birth tourism.
- 18:10SPEAKER_00: Can they do this under the Supreme Court decision?
- 18:13SPEAKER_00: I thought that, you know, the I mean, you can have a policy argument about birth tourism.
- 18:17SPEAKER_00: I understand why people think that you shouldn't be able to fly here
- 18:20SPEAKER_00: when you're seven months pregnant and give birth to a U.S. citizen.
- 18:22SPEAKER_00: But it seemed like the court was pretty clear about,
- 18:25SPEAKER_00: you know,
- 18:25SPEAKER_00: if you're born here and you're not in a very narrow category of people not subject
- 18:29SPEAKER_00: to our government jurisdiction, your kid is a citizen.
- 18:32SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think they can under the Supreme Court decision.
- 18:35SPEAKER_01: And the litigants in the cases that went to the Supreme Court have already filed.
- 18:41SPEAKER_01: New motions in the trial court saying we want you to revisit
- 18:44SPEAKER_01: the preliminary injunction and we want you to reopen the case.
- 18:47SPEAKER_01: We want you to broaden the injunction to include these new categories because
- 18:51SPEAKER_01: the Supreme Court decision doesn't allow this.
- 18:53SPEAKER_01: Because the five people majority basically said that birthright citizenship is constitutional.
- 19:01SPEAKER_01: And if there are exceptions to it,
- 19:02SPEAKER_01: they are only established exceptions in law from a century of tradition,
- 19:10SPEAKER_01: which you and I would say is ultimately kind of made up.
- 19:13SPEAKER_01: But it's established made up, not recently made up is the point.
- 19:18SPEAKER_01: So this,
- 19:19SPEAKER_01: the administration saying that we're going to come up with some more categories
- 19:22SPEAKER_01: that should be added.
- 19:24SPEAKER_01: I think they are looking for courts to fight out and find the utmost boundaries
- 19:28SPEAKER_01: to what they can get away with.
- 19:47SPEAKER_01: This probably wouldn't work even with Kavanaugh because he said this was statutory
- 19:51SPEAKER_01: and not executive order based.
- 19:54SPEAKER_01: But, you know, there might be a hypothetical future justice to whom it makes a difference.
- 19:59SPEAKER_01: And they might get courts to sort of establish, well,
- 20:03SPEAKER_01: let's test those established traditional historical exceptions to the rule and see
- 20:09SPEAKER_01: whether or not these fit in and that type of thing.
- 20:11SPEAKER_01: But these are all exceptions.
- 20:13SPEAKER_01: You know, some of them are not...
- 20:14SPEAKER_01: Are not that big because as you pointed out to me,
- 20:16SPEAKER_01: I don't think a whole lot of people are running to Guam to give birth.
- 20:20SPEAKER_00: Well, it wouldn't even work.
- 20:22SPEAKER_00: This is a fourth exception they put in here is that a person is born in a territory
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: or territorial waters of the U.S.
- 20:27SPEAKER_00: where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute.
- 20:29SPEAKER_00: But federal statute confers citizenship on people born in all of the inhabited U.S.
- 20:34SPEAKER_00: territories except for American Samoa.
- 20:37SPEAKER_00: So I guess, you know, you could have someone born to non-citizens in American Samoa.
- 20:42SPEAKER_00: Although I think that person already wouldn't be a U.S. citizen.
- 20:44SPEAKER_00: They'd be a U.S. national like the American Samoans themselves.
- 20:47SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that seems like a weird edge case.
- 20:49SPEAKER_01: It is a weird edge case, but I think it's almost the point.
- 20:52SPEAKER_01: They're looking for all the weird edge cases that could provide an argument that
- 20:57SPEAKER_01: the executive can make decisions about this.
- 20:59SPEAKER_01: And they're looking to get the court to analyze it to see
- 21:02SPEAKER_01: if they can push those lines as far as they can.
- 21:05SPEAKER_01: And a lot
- 21:05SPEAKER_01: of these exceptions are ones you could totally see how they could be abused,
- 21:08SPEAKER_01: like any employee of a foreign government or You know,
- 21:12SPEAKER_01: the foreign enemy thing we've been seeing about how they're trying to push
- 21:15SPEAKER_01: that definition as far as they possibly can.
- 21:17SPEAKER_01: And really their rhetoric suggests that any person who is not here legally is
- 21:22SPEAKER_01: in effect a foreign enemy.
- 21:24SPEAKER_01: I don't think it goes anywhere.
- 21:26SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's a successful end run around the Supreme Court decision.
- 21:31SPEAKER_01: And I think that the administration loses on it, but it allows them to keep it in the news.
- 21:35SPEAKER_01: It allows them to continue to try to test the limits and fish for sympathetic judges.
- 21:42SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 21:43SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Trump did not get two sympathetic judges on the D.C.
- 21:47SPEAKER_00: Circuit for the appeal of Judge Richard Leon's exclamation mark
- 21:52SPEAKER_01: filled order stopping.
- 21:58SPEAKER_00: That's it for this week's free episode of Serious Trouble.
- 22:01SPEAKER_00: If you want more updates,
- 22:02SPEAKER_00: if you want to hear about the legal situation surrounding the White House ballroom,
- 22:06SPEAKER_00: D.C.
- 22:06SPEAKER_00: Circuit siding with trial judge Richard Leon,
- 22:09SPEAKER_00: the exclamation mark enthusiast, and saying that that has to be put on hold.
- 22:13SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
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