Sex Asteroids, Sleazebags, And Meme Police

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice joining you. I am from Above Law. I’m joined by my colleague Chris Williams.

Chris Williams:

Hello, Joe Patrice from Above Law.

Joe Patrice:

Excellent. We are here as usual to talk about some of the big stories in the legal week that was so that you can be up to date on what’s going on. Oh, we know what that sound means. That sound means that it’s time for a little bit of small talk. How are you?

Chris Williams:

Pretty good, and I have a strong need to know what you did with your weekend,

Joe Patrice:

So great question and it’s kind of a cheeky one. I think we were recording this a little early, so the weekend’s not over yet and he knows that you all the listeners didn’t necessarily,

And that’s why, but doing it now. Yeah. What am I doing with this weekend? Well, I’m continuing the long process of home repair. Little things that you just kind of forget all the time, like painting this and that. Power washing, the usual fun stuff. I hear that apparently Gen Z loves video. There’s a video game that they’re big into that’s like a power washing video game. They get satisfaction out of this video game simulation of power washing, and all I could think is if you wanted to get the real high of doing that experience for real, by all means, I have some projects that you can do.

Chris Williams:

My initial reaction was to say, oh, that’s dumb, but in my youth, I too played a power washing simulation game.

Joe Patrice:

There You go.

Chris Williams:

It was for the Game Cube and it was called Super Mario Sunshine. You had a backpack that basically it would suck up water and you had to spray down gunk that Bowser put on this island. I think it was called CIO or something. No other Dante references to my knowledge, but my goofy ass did the same shit, so I can’t talk shit

Joe Patrice:

Apparently. It’s like addictive and all I can think is it’s so easy to just go do it for real. You don’t need the simulation.

Chris Williams:

That’s an easy thing to say when you have a power washer.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I guess, but I’m just saying from my perspective in the video gaming world, I do things more like, I don’t know. I’m not probably going to go out and shoot a bunch of aliens, and so I do that in the video game. I can’t really do that in real life.

Chris Williams:

Well, you could join ice.

Joe Patrice:

No, that was the punchline. That was the right one. Anyway, so yeah, no, so whatever power washing, that’s kind of the deal. But

Chris Williams:

Also this is tacitly said, but I’m just going to, if something happens in between and the recording and the release and you’re like, why didn’t they talk about this? Remember we recorded beforehand? So just so you know,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on next week and so not all of us are around. Obviously Catherine’s not even here today, so this is going to be a difficult week, so that’s why we’re trying to get a little bit ahead. So if this episode comes out and you start wondering why didn’t they talk about the fact that Clarence Thomas died or something like that? That’s probably because it happened after we recorded, but theoretically he did not

Chris Williams:

Sense in that line though we will still be working. So we’ve written on it. So you can read the article in this hypothetical scenario where Clarence Thomas died because he ate too much of Harlan Crow’s money and no one was there to resuscitate him.

Joe Patrice:

Gerald Ford died today. Anyone who’s old enough remembers that classic satellite live sketch where they tried to predict the news so that Tom Broco could go on vacation. Gerald Ford was mauled senselessly by a circus line in a convenience store. All right, well enough about our small talking. Let’s get down to it. So I guess let’s start off this week. There’s some tweets going around social media posts going around. A lot of them on this theme. I know George Conway wrote one on this theme that’s like, don’t Google Solicitor General and asteroid thank me. There’s a lot of ones like that warning people not to try to look up what’s going on with that

Chris Williams:

Story, which means go do that.

Joe Patrice:

That is what I interpret that as, and if you do type that in, you’re likely to find an Above the Law story about this. We really had a lot of fun with,

Chris Williams:

I will say while I do like the title, you ended up with Jud Stone’s Space Rock Fantasies has a special place in my heart.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. My concern was that people wouldn’t know from the headline who Judd Stone was, but now you’re going to all hear, so Judd Stone used to be the solicitor general of Texas. That means he’s the go-to guy to go in front of the Supreme Court. He argued Texas’s defense of why they thought it was totally legal to have vigilantes prosecuting abortion doctors and stuff like that. His career had an interesting path, so he worked. He was a Scalia clerk and everything. He worked his way to being Ted Cruz’s chief counsel got let go from that one, allegedly over sexual harassment claims. This is going to be a bit of a foreshadowing. He then gets to be the solicitor general. As you may know, Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas has been indicted and stuff and he ultimately, his nonsense got so problematic that the Republicans in Texas tried to impeach him.

That did not ultimately work out and he’s probably going to be their next senator. But even the Republicans tried to get rid of Paxton when Paxton got impeached Stone and as well as another senior person within the Texas legal superstructure took leave from their jobs, formed a firm to help defend Paxton. Alright, so with that happening then he has a few months off doing that. They win that they go back to the solicitor general’s office at this point. Some of the employees who went over to the private firm started talking to the powers that be within the Attorney general’s office about what happened there, and a lot of it’s fairly disturbing the allegations. So obviously these are just allegations, but they informed the first Deputy Attorney General who then ran it by Paxton. Both of them agreed they had to fire these guys based on what happened. So it had to be pretty bad if they were doing that to the lawyers who just got them out of an impeachment problem. He ran his office. There’s some yelling, as you might imagine in this complaint, there’s saying that an office wide directive that you can use whatever slurs you want, not.

Chris Williams:

That has to be the story

Joe Patrice:

You would think, right? That seems like that would be the story, and yet that just doesn’t really even register before it’s all over. One of the stories that gets told to the deputy who they’re approaching with these issues is that Stone likes to tell a story about how he hopes that that particular deputy is anally raped with a cylindrical asteroid in front of his wife and kids, which is very specific.

Chris Williams:

Very specific. I do want to say sometimes you read a thing and you’re like, oh, people approach things differently. I feel like your immediate response was to say, Hey, it would’ve been in our atmosphere, so at this point it would’ve been a meteorite.

Joe Patrice:

Yes, that was my point. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

My immediate thought was do inanimate objects of their own volition have the capacity to violate consent?

Joe Patrice:

Well, yeah, that

Chris Williams:

Is, can you even be raped by immediate Right or asteroid depending on where you are in the solar system. I don’t know.

Joe Patrice:

It’s wild. And now if you think that’s the end of the story and listen, you probably do, because that would seem like the end of the story. It is not, as it turns out, apparently this is not a story that just kind of rolled off the tongue once. Apparently this is a story that he liked to describe in gruesome detail a lot and he, well, here, let me read this exactly. According to the employee, Judd publicly described this in excruciating detail over a long period of time to a group of a G employees office of the governor, employees, federal judges, and other non-governmental employees at the table. So there’s one incident of telling this story, but it goes on for quite some time and there are federal judges there hearing it. It would be very, very interesting if somebody could let us know which federal judges decided to indulge this story. I think we would all love to hear who they are and how much they are out of the other side of their mouth complaining about forum selection laws being a violent threat against their livelihood while they’re laughing it up about a story about space rate.

Chris Williams:

This has to be what it was like when Marquis Des was out workshopping chapters in 120 days of Sodom. How do you bring that up like, oh, this is good coffee, by the way. I had a thought. I wanted to run it by you.

Joe Patrice:

It’s okay to get irritated with people at work, but I feel like I’ve never gotten to the point where I am irritated enough that I think, why don’t I regale some federal judges with my weird torture fantasies about somebody?

Chris Williams:

Well, one that’s good and two, given nature of your job, usually talking about federal judges weird torture fantasies much like this.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean that’s a thing I actually would have access to talking to federal judges about it. I suppose if I were so inclined, and I will say, I mean this job, obviously that would never come up because in this job it’s, it’s all sunshine and roses. But as a practicing lawyer, tensions can get high, but you still, somewhere along there you draw the line at asteroid torture.

Chris Williams:

What happened to fighting in the parking lot? There are other levels of aggression that should discuss before space gets involved.

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, I guess we should close the loop on this story. What is allegedly then happened is after everybody agreed that these folks need to be confronted about this, the response was, yeah, according to the complaint, obviously this is out of court statement, but it’s certainly one that one would claim is against interest. Apparently they said, yeah, that all happened. So what we were working at our private firm at the time, which I don’t think is how discrimination laws work, I don’t think they stopped just because you weren’t working for the government, but he allegedly made this claim. They got a judge to hear it all and be kind of a third party arbitrator, and the judge, according to this, laid down the ultimatum, you either all have to resign or were going to fire you. At which point they resigned and went back to working at a private firm.

Anyway, this suit came out. It is somewhat wild as you might imagine, and we’ll be tracking how that plays out going forward. All right. Well, so we’re back. The big legal outcome of the week was the court of international trade, which I find here I’ve been confused just as an aside, a lot of people on social media are saying, I didn’t know the court of international trade existed, which I did, and I actually am a little shocked that people didn’t know that existed. It seems like you should have known that that was there. But anyway, the court of international trade heard the case about the tariffs that Trump has been laying down, as you might have known, while Trump has been laying tariffs all over the place, somewhat arbitrarily if you are savvy about the Constitution, you probably remembered vaguely that tariffs are a power reserved to Congress, not one that the president gets, which is why, how is this happening? And the reason is that Congress had passed a law delegating that to the administration, the power to levy tariffs under certain emergency circumstances, and Trump has been using that. Those emergency circumstances don’t really exist. There’s not really a good reason why he should still have that power. There’s a lingering non delegation problem, and so the court of the National Trade said he couldn’t do it.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, that was my first thought. I was like, the big thing in the Chevron case was that you can’t delegate things that the Constitution says are properly parameters of a particular branch,

Joe Patrice:

And that’s the Chevron discussion is jumping off of incredibly vague terms of what it means to be, to execute a thing. This is much more specific like words like taxes and tariffs are in the Constitution,

So levies I should say. Yeah. So anyway, it gets struck down. Trump goes on a bit of a wild bender on social media as he’s prone to do writing a massive attack post about how Maddy is about this decision in which he specifically targets the Federalist Society, who he blames for all of this. It is obviously the lead folks in the case, Ilio Soman is a longtime federalist society figure, so it is the Federalist Society trying to take this power away from him, I suppose, but also he bitches about how Leonard Leo is a sleazebag and all of this and none of that. All of this is wild to me because the International Court of trade only had one Trump appointee on it, so it’s not like the Federalist Society really screwed him here. They would’ve lost anyway, even if that judge had ruled the other way.

But what I think is obviously the most interesting part of this is the Federalist Society through the first Trump administration. It really started, we talked about when David Ser died a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how that was kind a turning point where the conservative legal movement moved on from just picking good Republican judges to farming out to the Federalist Society that they should vet people who are died in the wall, loyal soldiers from college on cultivate their careers, put them on grease tracks to the federal bench, and that process has been working basically since the Suitor nomination, but it really hit its stride in the first Trump administration. They used to be consulted about these decisions. The first Trump administration openly farmed it out to them and they were in charge of all of these picks. There were some tensions between the Federalist Society and Trump over the last couple weeks that we’ve noticed.

Obviously, I don’t think anybody thought the break would be nearly this dramatic, but we were talking about this because Emil, both his personal attorney is being nominated for the Third Circuit. That is not who the Federalist Society probably would’ve wanted in that seat. They have a number of kids who they’ve been nurturing at Jones Day or whatever that they plan to give that job to. So that marked some break there. I also think that also coming off of the BO thing, another story that’s not like one of our stories this week, but it is actually something that we should talk a little bit about, which is the DOJ fired, the American Bar Association from its role as a neutral evaluator of judicial nominees. Probably because this administration intends rack up what would’ve been a lot of a B, a not qualified ratings, and so rather than have those, they’re just going to not have the A BA there. Well, that

Chris Williams:

Was, I wonder which Fox and Friends News Star is going to be the next judge.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, right. It’s that kind of a process it seems, which while the A break was a dramatic headline to talk about, I also, when I wrote that one up, I made another allusion to, this was hours before the Sleazebag Truth social, but I in that one also said that this is getting rid of this neutral arbiter evaluator of judges, but it also kind of seems like the federalist societies on the outs from the inside vetting process. That was speculation based on just what we’d seen over the weeks leading up to that. I had no idea that I was going to be proven right in such traumatic fashion over the course of the evening because yeah, it seems as though the federal society is very much on the outs. The President is openly insulting its leader. Wild times we live in,

Chris Williams:

And this is far less legal, but I think still there’s a schism happening. Musk is no longer head of Sort.

It was like a, you’re only here for a certain amount of days sort of thing element to it where it doesn’t seem like it was because of something, but he was salty about it and we’re at a point where even if the things are the rules, just because you’re following the rules doesn’t mean that, oh, that’s what’s to be expected, broken all the time.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I wrote this up at the end of the week. I wrote up this turn of events and I put some images in the article. I have the over the top arm wrestling meme of me and Trump together on Leo Leonard. Leo sucks, but I also make an allusion to Star Wars, which I am not the world’s biggest Star Wars person, but for some reason this administration just keeps giving me opportunities to talk about it. We talked about with the big law deals, how they reminded me of Empire Strikes Back and Darth and Lando constantly altering agreement,

Chris Williams:

And there’s also the AI image of Donald Trump as a sth lord that the White House put out, so it’s not like

Joe Patrice:

A star. Yes, I guess. Yeah, they’re leaning into the imagery. That’s fair. It’s kind of happy coincidence that the character’s name is Leo, but I pointed to what’s going on in the most recent Star Wars show or that minor spoilers, but not really because you know what’s going to happen if you’ve seen the other movies. That’s the nature of a prequel. The people, including the character named Leo are all the most loyal of enablers for the regime, and they all meet with tragic end largely by backstabbing and recriminations amongst their own. Not any doing of the actual rebels, but just the empire itself eats its own basically happy coincidence that the character Leo was there. That was what I therefore first thought of when I watched this. This is your reward for being a loyal supporter of this regime is you get publicly dragged and tossed out because that’s what happens in a superstructure like this by their nature authoritarian structures, and while this is probably not, I think it’s safe to say this is not an authoritarian government yet, at least, but it is one that certainly indulges in. It likes the trappings of being an authoritarian regime and they, what’s the line? Here’s what happens. Well, I mean I think the line is whether or not we get to the point where we stop listening to the courts stopping him and stuff like that. He’s pushing for an authoritarian regime. We do have backstops that are marginally working, but obviously I think we’re seeing, and part of the course of the last few months has been lamenting how worryingly fragile those might be.

Chris Williams:

Let’s see how this big beautiful bill plans out.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, actually, let’s talk about that real quick too, because that’s another story that we weren’t going to talk about but is somewhat related. The big beautiful bill, which is the budget reconciliation bill that they’re doing, you may or may not know that it includes a whole section on the power of courts to find people in contempt. Does that sound like a budget bill to you? Not really, but it’s 57 words drenched in the middle of 1200 pages, and it just says that they are going to kind of tweak what rule 65 C for those who don’t remember rule 65 C. It’s been a while since the procedure six five C is what says that if there’s going to be a preliminary injunction, the court should try to figure out what the costs would be. If it turns out that the injunction is wrong and there should be a bond put up to cover those costs by its nature, that means that a bond is often not put up because if the judge finds that there’s not really a monetary problem here, then they just don’t need to do it.

This tweaks that if this were passed, it would say that you can do that, but if the preliminary injunction goes in without money to back it up, then that’s cool. It just means that the court can’t hold anyone in contempt for ignoring it. What this functionally would then mean is that you could win a preliminary junction against the government and the government will just ignore it because there is nothing to do that you can do to stop them. If there’s no contempt power, really a disturbing end run around that, obviously some institutions are going to be able to pay that. Right. Big law firms can put up the money. Harvard can put up the money.

Chris Williams:

I guess it would depend on the matter, but is there a set amount for how much the bond would be?

Joe Patrice:

Well, I mean it depends on the case, right? So the argument would be that we suffer some blah, blah, blah cost if we aren’t allowed to deport people for six months or whatever it is while this gets resolved, is there a monetary amount for that? The government will probably say it’s some huge amount that no one can pay. The court might say that’s ridiculous. No, it’s not. There’s no monetary problem there. To which the government just says, great, you can say that, and that means we just don’t have to follow it. It creates a real, real problem. It’s not very subtle, but it is something that a lot of folks weren’t really paying attention to. Actually, a tipster reached out to me was like, and I had seen it and I’d written something kind of in passing about it, but a tipster reached out to me and we read when Tipster reach out, and a lot of times it’s to give us tips, but sometimes it’s just to get general feedback and have a conversation, and one tipster reached out and was just like, this seems like such a big deal and it seems like it’s getting ignored because so much else going on, and I was like, that’s fair, and it forced me to reexamine it, but yeah, no, that’s going to be an issue.

Chris Williams:

I think at some point in the bill it had something to do with a $200 rebate on silencers or something. It’s just

Joe Patrice:

So much. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean there’s a lot, right? It’s

Chris Williams:

Everything. There’s so much shit in there, and that’s the point that there’s so much happening that, well, who’s going to read page 372?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, there’s some straight up jurisdiction s dripping in there about certain oil and gas lease situations. This is way oversimplifies it, but there’s a section that basically says under certain conditions, if we tell an oil company, they can strip mine your home. No court can hear that. That’s oversimplification, but that is one provision in there, a jurisdiction stripping over how much access to courts you get if you’re disputing some lease matters. Yeah, really disturbing stuff. Alright, we’re back. K Patel is the director of the FBI. He went on TV to make some remarks. That will struck me as ill-advised. Is that fair?

Chris Williams:

I mean, that’s a black tie version of saying dumb, but Sure.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so I want to be clear about this because to the extent there’s actual threats against government officials, that’s a serious issue.

Chris Williams:

Sure,

Joe Patrice:

But here’s the problem. I worked with FBI agents a lot while I was doing white collar defense work, and they’re on the other side technically, but professional folks doing hard jobs, but they do jobs in particular. There’s lots of them doing financial work and stuff like that because that’s what white collar crime is. A lot of what Patel does is goes on TV talking about Comey’s seashell adventure that we’ve already talked about, claiming there’s been a lot of copycats, which query what that means. Is it just more people said that because if so, then that’s just more not real threats. Maybe if there was somebody who did it for real and meant something about it, we certainly didn’t get any details about that, but he says there’s been copycats and then he says, do you know how many agents I’ve had to pull off of child sex predators or fentanyl traffickers or terrorist cases to deal with this? Which should be none. The answer better be zero. Yeah, no, for a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons.

Chris Williams:

One thing, and this feels weird because on one hand it feels so long ago, but then again, no, it’s not. I remember seeing effigies of Barack Obama being lynched and burned.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, they didn’t seem to worry about that as much as they did pca.

Chris Williams:

I remember seeing on the back of somebody’s pickup truck, they had a drawing of President Biden tog tied was his hands behind his back in the fetal position, what have you, so much political imagery either calling for the harm or death of people in authority, but seashells. That’s the category.

Joe Patrice:

Well, so the first most important issue here I think is this isn’t even the FBI’s job. It’s the secret services. The secret service exists, so if the FBI is pulling people, if the FBI is looking in it at all, it’s already an issue because they should not be doing that.

Chris Williams:

Isn’t there some foreign government that we should be destabilizing are the priorities here?

Joe Patrice:

Secondly, if you are going to have the FBI do it. There’s so many people who work on bribery and foreign corruption cases and accounting fraud. Those people could be chasing these down rather than the people chasing child sex predators and terrorists. I don’t think anybody needs to be pulled off of anything, but if they do, those folks exist.

Chris Williams:

I do think it is fair to make the economic argument that if the FBI was, even if they’re not supposed to be doing this, if the F fbi, I was out here hunting down sexual predators and terrorists who would be paying Trump for pardons?

Joe Patrice:

Well, yeah, maybe that is a lot of the issue, but yeah. The third aspect of this is why in the world would a law enforcement professional go on TV to say we operate in such a flimsy, zero sum universe that I just don’t have enough employees to actually chase down crime even if that were true. You know what? The FBI should do not say that if you’re in law enforcement, you act like you’ve got everything on lock all the time.

Chris Williams:

Yes. Two things that should be baselined for most teenagers in positions of public facing media training and you read the Art of War, there’s a line, there’s a line in the Art of War that says, when weak appear strong, when strong appear weak, if you’re in a position where you know that you need to be maintaining law and order and you are the law and order party, you don’t say, yo, we got personnel problems. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

I mean what

Chris Williams:

You’re touching kids. We can’t even find you right now, bro.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Why would you tell? I was like, why are you telling them that you have to turn everything over to Dateline NBC because you just can’t enforce it anymore? What the hell? It’s so dumb. It is so dumb. I mean, I think though, and this was kind of the crux of my conclusion in the article, unfortunately, I think the issue is this was he went on cable news for a reason and he was speaking to an audience of one, and from that perspective, he just wanted his boss to know, I think you are more important than chasing down terrorists, which

Chris Williams:

Is what I’d expect of a person that made a children’s book deifying him.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s some creepy stuff too. Anyway,

Chris Williams:

Well technically K him, which might be worse considering the format of our supposed government, but I do want to say he made him King Trump, not God.

Joe Patrice:

Trump. Yeah, so the Justice Department not in great shape right now and it’s really problematic to be hearing this out of an institution that obviously, as I said, I was on the defense side, so the FBI were not my friends per se, but people I really respected and worked with closely for a long time and so yeah, I feel bad for what’s happening to that agency right now. Anyway. Well, I think that’s everything. Again, we recorded a little bit early, so hopefully the world didn’t collapse while we were waiting to get this one pushed out,

Chris Williams:

And if it did, you should still follow us on social media.

Joe Patrice:

That’s true. That’s how you find out about all these things. We’ll keep the conversation moving there. You should be following us on social media. That’s above law.com. I’m at Joe Patrice, he’s at Rights for Rent over at Blue Sky. There’s some Twitter presence too where I’m Joseph Patrice, but I’m increasingly moving away. You should be listening to this show, which you obviously are, but you should be listening to it every week, which you can do by subscribing so you get it when new episodes drop. You should be leaving reviews and all of that. You should check out the Jabot Catherine’s other podcast. You can listen to me on the, if you’re so inclined to hear about Legal Tech on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Round Table. You can also listen to the other shows by the Legal Talk Network that we aren’t hosts of, but that are cover a lot of the legal world from a bunch of different angles. You should be reading Above the Law so you read these and other stories before they drop and yeah, that’s it.

Chris Williams:

Peace.

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