Opening Arguments

OA1220 - What’s an FBI agent to do when a notorious low life reports a local cop is asking for a bribe? Turn him into a confidential information of course, and see how far you can get that dirty cop to go. A tale of two assholes, steadily making each others’ lives worse and worse, while one is wearing a wire. Now, why does the Supreme Court care about any of this? Half the conviction hinges on whe...

OA1219 - This year we are celebrating Boxing Day by not doing whatever people are supposed to do on Boxing Day and talking about weed instead. Did Donald Trump really just finish out 2025 by doing something good for US drug policy? We hotbox some Time Machine to revisit Matt’s analysis from last May of Joe “Grandaddy Purple” Biden’s announcement that he was initiating the long process to have the...

E18 - Congress required the Department of Justice to release (nearly) everything it had from the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell by December 19th, so of course they pretended to do that on time on Friday afternoon and then waited until everyone was just about to start heading home for the holidays before actually dumping 30,000 pages of anything resembling actual substanc...

OA1218 - What happens to your first amendment rights when you work for the government? Do you give it all up when you walk in the door? How do we balance the individual right of the worker to speak, against the government’s need to have a functioning work place? Pickering v Board of Education (1968) sets us up to understand how this all works… and why a teacher criticizing Charlie Kirk on their pe...

OA1217 - Well, we recorded a bit late to make sure we caught Trump's "announcement" thingy and it was... nothing. But that's good! Matt also takes us through more travel bans that are going into effect and have been way underreported on. But The Federalist has a piece saying not only is this all great, but Trump should proudly adopt 1920s immigration policy . There is no quiet part anymore. But fo...

We begin with a delightful amuse douche from the lawyer of Colorado election tamperer Tina Peters unconditionally demanding her release from state prison because Donald Trump said so before a deep dive into our main story: an absurdly bad take from the New York Times --in both a lengthy print story and an episode of The Daily podcast--on how Joe Biden’s unwillingness to be a border fascist got a b...

OA1216 - We welcome incarcerated journalist and advocate Christopher Blackwell, calling from his home at the Washington Corrections Center. Chris is the co-founder and Executive Director of Look2Justice, a non-profit which empowers and advocates currently and formerly incarcerated people through an “inside-out” organizing model. He is also a writer whose work has appeared in (among other places) T...

OA1215 - We examine why the potential merger of Warner Brothers Discovery with either Netflix or Paramount would almost be certainly illegal under better circumstances before mourning the imminent loss of the independence of the one government agency which is supposed to stop this kind of thing. What exactly is the Federal Trade Commission, and why was destroying it a top priority for Project 2025...

VR16 - This week on Vapid Response: it’s the Hat and the Hammer, with the return of both New York Times token religious conservative columnist Ross Doot-hat and Newsweek editor-at-large Josh Hammer. We begin with a savory amuse douche in which a Christian influencer preaches against making policy based on “toxic empathy” before reading  Josh Hammer taking her up on the joke by explaining why the U...

OA1214 - As the end of 2025 approaches, we are finding real cause for hope in how federal courts have been handling the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on the rule of law. In the first of what will be at least two parts, Matt and Thomas speedrun through just a few of the many wins--both big and small--that we have seen in a wide range of categories. Just Security ’s Litigation Tracker...

OA1213 - Thomas is back for an action-packed Rapid Response Friday! This week: we compare the letter that just earned the former President of Honduras a pardon of his conviction for definitely being involved with narcotrafficking against the Trump administration’s excuses for murder on the high seas of Venezuelans suspected to be involved with narcotrafficking--and if House Speaker Mike Johnson ac...

Today on Vapid Response Wednesday: weeks after designating “Antifa” a “domestic terror organization,” the White House hosted a panel of MAGA luminaries to update the President on the not-at-all-made-up threat to the nation posed by a thing which demonstrably does not exist. We begin with a short amuse douche , in which Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn is concerned about the extremely real Portla...

OA1212 - What’s a cop to do when he stumbles onto a crime, and the evidence points to someone he knows all too well? In today’s deep dive, friends become suspects, concerned parents become FBI agents, and laptops become lost jungle detritus. This criminal case out of the US District Court of the Northern Mariana Islands (a US territory in the Pacific) may not have reached the Supreme Court, or hav...

OA1211 - For this special Thanksgiving episode, we take a break from the news for Matt to share his gratitude in short interviews with just a few of the staff, attorneys, and partners who make his Boston immigration law firm's work possible. Stop in to meet everyone from George the office emotional support dog to Matt's long-time friend and law partner Nicole as we discuss the daily work of deport...

OA1210 - This week we welcome journalist and author John J. Lennon, who is calling in from New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility where he is serving 25 years to life for murder. Lennon’s extraordinary new book The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories that Define Us tells his own story alongside that of three other men whose crimes were sensationalized by the media--including...

OA1209 - Are you done with legal doomerism? Us too. Take some time away from doomscrolling and join Matt and Jenessa for Rapid Response Friday as we consider four stories of legal corruption and authoritarianism failing in the face of honest federal judges, and a footnote about how one brave prison nurse exposed even more corruption in Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s special treatment by th...

VR14 - Part 2 of the Epstein files We continue our first look at some highlights from last week's massive release of more than 20,000 pages of material from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee, including Steve Bannon and ASU professor Lawrence Krauss among others. We  also consider Megyn Kelly's appalling response before leaving the last word where it belongs: w...

OA1208 - We go beyond the Trump-related content in the latest round of Epstein disclosures by the House Oversight Committee to explore what we can learn from the many people in Jeffrey Epstein's orbit who flattered, patronized, and enabled him. Part 1 of 2. Searchable database of Epstein records released by Courier   Falling Upward: The Surprising Survival of Larry Summers , Robert Kuttner, The Am...

OA1207 - We record a late-breaking reaction to the recent massive round of documents released from Jeffrey Epstein's estate and discuss how Trump may have just reached his most impeachable moment so far. Matt then shares some incredible news about how the end of Chevron deference has allowed federal judges to frustrate the administration's detention and deportation policies, and Jenessa gets into...

Kat Abughazaleh spent years reporting on right-wing media and movements, and she is now running to represent Illinois's 9th District in Congress on an explicitly anti-authoritarian platform. Kat joins to talk about her uniquely candid platform and community-based campaign, the state of the Democratic Party, how ICE is terrorizing Chicago during the most intensive urban immigration enforcement oper...

In our continuing Still Good Law series, Jenessa explains how a dispute arising from a parking garage in Wilmington, Delaware became the foundation for one of the most important concepts in civil rights: determining that a private or quasi-public individual or entity is operating “under color of law.” How does this concept help to hold law enforcement and other governmental agencies accountable, a...

OA1205 - It’s another good news Friday! Voting rights expert Jenessa runs down some of the highlights of the off-year blue sweep in this week’s elections, as well as some recent unsung national victories for voting and disability rights. Matt then checks in on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments from the challenge to Trump’s unprecedented tariffs and why it is looking like he might actually lose hi...

VR12 - Yes, we absolutely thought this was coming out pre-Halloween. Halloween may be over, but NEVERTHELESS THE SPOOKTACULAR PERSISTED! In this Vapid Response double feature, Thomas, Matt, and Lydia are haunted by two ghoulish takes from the past:  FEATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON: Politico’ s insanely longform access journalism piece from August 2024 on how Project 2025 was so totally over, just ne...

OA1204 - As House Speaker Mike Johnson continues to pretend that he doesn’t have to seat Democrat Adelita Grijalva well over a month after she was elected to represent Arizona’s 7th Congressional district, we take a closer look at the last time that Congress refused to swear someone in and what the Warren Court had to say about it. Who was Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, why was the House...

OA1203 - Happy Halloween! We take shelter from a year of ghoulish legal news in the COURTHOUSE OF HORROR, a cabinet of macabre legal curiosities including: “SO I TRADEMARKED AN AXE MURDERER”: The historic Lizzie Borden House takes a whack at a nearby coffee shop “THE BONE DETECTOR”: Recent patent bar survivor Jenessa Seymour brings us the unbelievable story of the spookiest--and silliest!--lie det...