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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman digest what's happening to Federal Judge James Boasberg as he told the Trump administration to stop deporting people based on tattoos. The problem is: with Absolute Immunity bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court, why would Trump ever listen to anyone? They shift to the backlash against Elon Musk, who seems completely shocked that people would have a problem with what he's been doing with DOGE. They finish by discussing the latest document dump of the JFK files.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Buckrick Podcast.
I'm Jared Dave Sexton, here with my good friend, my co-host, Nick Housman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm doing well, doing well.
Looking forward to the festivities that are about to hit us this weekend and today.
The best thing of the year, the NCAA tournament is here.
Personally, I feel like I've been getting the shit kicked out of me for a long time now.
I've been looking forward to this.
I need this.
I need it badly.
There's nothing like, you know, the excitement of that ball being tossed up and never knowing where it's going to go or who's going to catch it.
For my mental health and emotional well-being, I need some buzzer beaters.
I need some drama.
I need some pageantry.
I need it terribly.
The exact opposite of the NCAA tournament and all of its beauty is what's going on in this country, and we have so much to get into today.
But before we do, a reminder, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast if you haven't already become a patron.
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Gain this full show.
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Book club, movie club in there, lots of amazing...
There's a tournament bracket thing going on right now, which unfortunately people will miss out on when they get this on Friday, but it's a good time.
Absolutely. All right, everybody, we continue to document the dissent of the United States of America.
This week, the big, large, looming story has been the conflict between the Trump administration and the judiciary.
Following Judge James Bosberg's ruling on the...
I almost said deportation, but it's not even deportation.
The shipping off of hundreds of Venezuelans, some of them accused of crime, some of them caught up in a dragnet that they shouldn't have been caught up in in the first place, being shipped to El Salvador to a hellish prison.
The Trump administration answered this rebuke by Bosberg by completely not listening to him, going against his judgment.
They were then summoned to answer for their lack of respect and breaking the law, and they refused to do so.
They have stonewalled it.
There is a possibility that they very well might meet with the judge.
They might not.
They are attempting to scuttle this entire thing.
They are calling for him to be impeached.
They are saying that he is interfering with foreign affairs.
The Department of Justice has even interfered trying to push the federal appeals court to replace Bozberg, citing, quote, Nick, we're rapidly approaching a place that you and I both knew that this was going the moment that Donald Trump took the oath of office,
which is a climactic battle between the administration and judicial restraint.
People are starting to understand that this is a constitutional crisis.
We've seen it coming.
We knew that it was going to happen, and yet looking at it in the face is another thing entirely.
What's even scarier for me is the notion they're going to call for impeachment on basically a stay order.
That's a very temporary thing.
That's supposed to just be a thing where they go judge and say, hey, hold on for a second.
I want to get all the information amassed here before anything else goes forward.
So, you know, don't send in those planes.
You know, they're supposed to turn it back, whatever.
So the process is certainly the kind of thing where this isn't the impeachment demand part of the process anyway, even if you were going to do that, which you're not supposed to do as a leader of the free world.
So I think that's a real issue here.
And I also I want to apologize because last.
I was a little bit flippant when I was saying, well, how are they going to figure out who's in a gang and who's not?
We look at tattoos.
And it turns out, yes, that's exactly what they did.
So, you know, we've already heard.
I don't know exactly how nailed the reporting is, but we've heard about reporting of people who are now scooped up in this thing, who are now in the worst prison in the world and who are completely innocent and who are just regular people.
Yeah, some of them, because they have tattoos, and this is something that I've been hearing, they have tattoos supporting soccer clubs.
Or there are pictures of them on social media, and it just struck the administration a certain way.
Undoubtedly, they're using AI, which, again, can't even tell you how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and it's pushing for hundreds of people to be drug up in this thing.
Not to mention that this shouldn't have happened to anybody, much less the people who have been caught up in it, who are innocent of any crimes or anything altogether.
Unless you think this is some sort of thing out of a sci-fi movie or a dystopian future.
You know, I saw some footage of a guy who was on his way.
I think they were on their way to court to do some other case, and they break the windows and they grab the guy with his pregnant wife in the car.
Well, how do they know how to find him on the street if he's driving down the street?
If you don't think that they're using cell phone trajectories or whatever and targeting people that way, then I don't know what to tell you.
It looks clear that they're also the AI you're referring to, I think, is they're doing image searches and they're trying to find any evidence of anything that they can find on any social media that they can use against you.
This is an oppressive authoritarian state.
It is there.
It's not even on the way.
We're seeing the evidence as it is every day.
Yeah, and what you brought up is something that I've been screaming about for years, which is when there's a partnership between the state and an oppressive tech surveillance group that has an interest in power and has, by the way, they've created these tools for other countries.
They were just ready to roll them out in the United States of America.
So it's everything from social media to cell phones to GPS, you name it.
And real quick, on the subject of Boesberg, I want to point out, like, we're hearing about this push for impeachment.
I mean, Elon Musk won't shut up about it.
Who is James Boesberg, Nick?
And maybe some people, you know, we have had a rotating cast of characters for years now.
One judge, one investigator after another.
If somebody heard this and they were like, I've heard that name before, Boesberg.
This judge that they are calling to impeach, and by the way, they've put the eye of Sauron on him.
He's getting incredible amounts of threats.
Any of the judges who have stood up, whether or not it's the ruling that the layoffs were unconstitutional, the dismantling of U.S. aid was unconstitutional, the trans ban in the military was unconstitutional, they're getting endless threats.
This is the judge that ordered Hillary Clinton to release her emails.
This is the judge that protected Trump's tax returns.
I mean, this guy is as conservative and as just...
As bedrock Republican as it can possibly be, this is a friend of Kavanaugh.
He was appointed by John Roberts, who, by the way, released a very rare public admonishment of this, saying that this is not how you do this, that this is going in the face of centuries of respect for the judiciary,
which we'll talk about in just a second.
This guy is just one of their own.
And has done them some solids.
And they are going after his career.
They're going after his safety.
And basically what is being said at this point is, we saw back during the first Trump administration, if a Republican said something critical of Donald Trump, they were persona non grata, right?
And their political careers were done.
Now it's being used on the judiciary, which is, I wouldn't call it a firewall, because quite frankly, they've been in communication.
And they've collaborated with each other.
But this is one of the last symbolic sort of boundaries on this.
And what we're watching at this point is an escalation of something that has been in the works for years.
Yeah. And they doxed his daughter as well, trying to fold her into this.
And we saw this playbook before with other judges.
And what they're hoping for, it's the intimidation factor that we're seeing across all of their methods here.
And they're hoping that judges will begin.
And by the way, it's not like they don't already have judges in their pocket.
Aileen Cannon is a great example of that, where she'll just do whatever they want her to do, and she threw out the best case that anybody had against him for the documents in Mar-a-Lago.
So the fear is that a lot of these judges are going to either retire or fall in line versus being the subject of threats.
And here's what's interesting, I think, also.
If you look at this from the point of view of Trump, and, you know, I've always tried to, like, sort of get my mind into that side, too, to figure out how this is all working and also predict stuff.
Because he's got absolute immunity, then there doesn't seem to be any reason why he'd need to follow any of these orders.
And so the reason why they're kind of doing it this quickly and figure they can just get there is because he figures we can violate any law we want.
I won't be prosecuted.
And you know this.
So let's just cut to the chase already.
Eventually, I will be exonerated for all these things, and we'll be able to get these things in place.
Before, you needed plausible deniability, right?
You needed to have a firewall between whoever was doing all the dirty stuff and the president so he wouldn't be connected to it.
Well, now, Musk and all these people needed to be connected to the president so they get the protection that he offers underneath them.
And this is, again, that's not how democracies work.
Well, and I want to add to that because you're exactly right.
There's a little bit of a weird thing that goes back and forth.
It would probably, and I'm going to talk more about this.
I'm going to do sort of an explainer this weekend over at Dispatches from a Collapsing State to talk more about this.
But Nick, we've seen this in the past.
We have seen moments in American history where the President of the United States of America defies the judiciary.
They see themselves as being above it and more or less what they do.
And this is something that you and I talked about back during the Biden administration.
We said, oh, he's being restricted by these judges, whether it's, you know, with student debt relief or whether it's this part of the agenda or it's the dismantling of regulations through the Supreme Court.
We had said, you know, all of this is imaginary.
All of this is literally a made up game where you have to respect the other side for them to have power.
We've seen presidents in the past look at the Supreme Court and the judiciary and say, hey, you've made your ruling.
Good luck enforcing it.
And Donald Trump instinctually understands that.
That's who he is.
But the fact is, we now have an apparatus around him that has figured this out, and they've weaponized it, and they have strategized it.
So now we have a situation, Nick.
And here's where the situation comes into full view.
We have a judicial system in this country.
The history and the legacy of it is, there's one priority in our legal system.
And it's not...
And it's not protections and it's not liberties.
If they can protect those, if they're interested in protecting those, they will.
The main purpose of the judicial system in the United States of America is the protection of private property.
It's making sure that you are able to keep what's yours and you're able to pursue your profit and your enrichment, you know, without anybody taking it from you.
Now we have a new situation.
We're that authoritarian impulse, that classist impulse that started the country, a bunch of very wealthy white men who wanted to create a country for their own benefit and under their own control.
We are now watching what you and I have talked about for years, which is this thing that happened in the Republican Party.
You had a bunch of libertarians who were trying to help their wealthy donors make more money and give them tax cuts and get rid of regulations.
We now have this new mutation that is strictly authoritarian.
They don't care about all the liberal trappings, that respect, that mask that you were talking about.
The question now is, will the judiciary be crushed underfoot and eventually start operating in concert with them?
And, you know, we've talked about the Supreme Court.
The fact is they stole the Supreme Court, probably for a generation, unless something changes.
We are now looking at John Roberts.
Who is an institutionalist.
He does not want to be a part of this.
We've talked about the fact that Amy Coney fucking Barrett is the swing vote now on the Supreme Court, and we have to hope that she wakes up on the right side of the bed with a good conscience.
The question now is whether or not this pressure and whether or not a disrespect of the judiciary will eventually bring the judiciary into concert with Donald Trump.
So we're watching a tug of war right now.
And what ends up happening from this will define much of the rest of our lives unless we do something about it.
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