Afroman And Elon Had Very Different Trial Experiences

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of Think Like a Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law I’m joined by Chris Williams.

Chris Williams:

Hello, hello.

Joe Patrice:

We do not have Kathryn who is already departed on another trip, but we will carry on while she makes her way through the ice infested waters of security checks at airports. We’re all following that, right?

Chris Williams:

You

Joe Patrice:

Don’t have to … Yeah.

Chris Williams:

For a second, my brain did thing because you was like, Kathryn departed and I was like, oh no. And you were like, airplane.

Joe Patrice:

I was

Chris Williams:

Like, yay. And it was like

Joe Patrice:

Ice.

Chris Williams:

I was like, oh no. So I was going through an emotional rollercoaster.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, that sound means that we’re ready for some small talk because I think we already kind of fell into it. But yeah, no. So yeah, she’s off dealing with security lines at airports, which I gather must be really bad, but we’re moving on small talk wise. Well, no,

Chris Williams:

Still dealing with those security lines.

Joe Patrice:

So

Chris Williams:

You know that cute thing that’s been among, well, in my mind, it’s been among leftists, but at this point, given

Joe Patrice:

The

Chris Williams:

Nature of surveillance, it’s probably everybody. That thing where we’re like, “Oh, I hope our lines are touching on the government watch list.” Everybody who flies through the airports, all their names get sent to the government now.

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Chris Williams:

So if you’ve used a plane, we’ll use a plane in the last two some odd weeks or so. You will be on the government watch list. So maybe your name is touching your significant others, because I’m assuming it’s done in the order that the people go through TSA or whatever, but that is a thing. So just an FYI.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, why wouldn’t they have done that? Of course they have access to all that. That’s the whole purpose of it, right? Well,

Chris Williams:

Of course they do. And of course Ring cameras are surveillance that they tricked people into buying that they give that data to the government. But the thing is, oh, and of course Pokemon Go was a surveillance site that was being used to map things, but there was still the veil of ignorance. People didn’t know that that was the case, but now it is obvious that that is the case.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously the point of it was to know who’s going through and getting on airplanes, which we had records through the airlines anyway, but yeah, they do that. No, there are opt-outs of a lot of the stuff like the taking of pictures that they’ve now added you can technically opt out of, but it just adds a layer of inconvenience if you do. I actually need to add the touchless thing to mine. I haven’t done that yet.

Chris Williams:

And speaking of government conspiracies, last week on the podcast, I did clarify that this was suspicion on my part.

Joe Patrice:

Yes.

Chris Williams:

But I theorized that, to be clear, assistant utilities attorney Rudy Reffner, Renfer at the time, it was reported that he resigned rather than have the sanctions against him and his department. But that was due to faulty reporting based off of limited information. Someone at the DOJ called and confirmed that he was actually terminated. So I just wanted to clarify that in the spirit of good journalism.

Joe Patrice:

You did though more or less say that. You said that even though technically, I mean, it’s one of those things where people say they’ve resigned, but you even at the time were like, “But you know, that probably was not all their choice,” so we now have confirmation of that, which that is fair and good. But I do

Chris Williams:

Think the firing, deciding to terminate him is still good housekeeping, but since it was an explicit termination rather than like an asking him to fall on his word, which I probably wouldn’t have been, it is still better that the DOJ took that route. So flowers given when due, that was a good move to make.

Joe Patrice:

And now I assume, I guess I don’t know how government jobs work, but I assume this gives access to unemployment and stuff because he was fired. So that’s always useful too. So that was going on. I actually, since we were talking about airplanes beforehand, I actually just got back from a trip myself where I was dealing with the security of these airports. And yeah, I actually didn’t have any problems, but I saw problems everywhere. I was going through pre-check and also I was fine, but I did see 40, 50 minute lines everywhere I was going. And I gather it’s getting worse today. So it’s good luck out there, basically, if you’re flying anywhere.

Chris Williams:

Wait, that’s it? Where did you come from? Where did you go? Cotton Eye

Joe Patrice:

Joe, et cetera. Right. So I went to Vegas for the opening round of the tournament to watch those games. And yeah, no, it was a good little trip. It was like a hundred degrees every day, which is wild to fly to.

Chris Williams:

I had a conversation with my friend about, and this of course sounds like I’m making it up, actual friend. I have friends

About the nature of global warming. So what happened was, I think there was sometime last week there was like a records, the days don’t matter, but let’s say it was on Wednesday, there was a temperatures record that was set and that has been seen for like several decades. And then on say Thursday, that record was broken. And I was like, the thing that I find most interesting about global warming or weather pattern changes that are happening, it’s not that the world will be uniformly warmer, even though that is the case, there probably will be times where places will be colder than usual because of global warming, because of the nature of the thing. It’s not that the weather’s getting hotter, but that the things that, but that the-

Joe Patrice:

Right. It affects wind patterns.

Chris Williams:

Yes, the wind patterns, but the things that we take as a given, the nature of the climate itself is in flux and the norms that we associate with temperatures and flux. Because I think that people do think that because warming is in the name, so they’ll always think it’s getting hotter, but I do think climate change is the more accurate name, but it’s not as hot.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, I think a lot of people move toward that phrase climate change for that reason because it will make a lot of places colder too. But anyway, went there, did not gamble. The whole city really based around gambling as much anymore. Obviously it’s there, but they’ve spent a lot of their time and energy trying to make it be about a bunch of other stuff.

Chris Williams:

Oh wait,

Joe Patrice:

No Baby Kim? What?

Chris Williams:

No Baby Keim.

Joe Patrice:

I have no idea what that is.

Chris Williams:

Gotcha. He’s a rapper of, I think of one of Kendrick Lamar’s cousins. He recently dropped the album called Casino and it’s like Las Vegas themed music, but it’s like really no mentions of gambling. It’s like growing up in Las Vegas.

Joe Patrice:

Interesting.

Chris Williams:

Went to Las Vegas, didn’t gamble, baby

Joe Patrice:

Keep. Online sports betting in other states has taken a lot of the gambling centric punch out of that city, I feel. But anyway. All right, well let’s move on and start actually talking about legal stories and we can transition pretty seamlessly because we can transition to talking about rap since we’ve had that being discussed there. Let’s talk about the trial of the century that just concluded.

Chris Williams:

Afroman.

Joe Patrice:

Afroman.

Chris Williams:

It’s so ridiculous that because I got high guy had a really cool first amendment case like this. There are times where I’m like, okay, the writers for the whatever, 250th Samad season of America are just writing it in sometimes.

Joe Patrice:

But

Chris Williams:

This was a fun little arc that isn’t over yet, apparently. What happened for those who are in the loop years ago, I want to say around 2022, his home was raided by, I want to say, Ohio Police Department. They were there, they broke down his door, broke his window. He caught them on video stealing apparently like $4,000 from him. But the justification that they gave was that the raid was to find drugs and human trafficking victims. And they said that the money was taken under the auspices that he got this money unjustly through illegal activity. They find nothing. They rummage all through his belongings. They were searching his suit jackets, apparently for either massive amounts of drugs or trafficked victims. But he’s a pretty big guy, but I’ve seen the pockets on his blazers. He can’t fit much of either of those things in them.

Joe Patrice:

His tailoring is not … He probably, if the men’s wear guy on social media were talking about him, he’d probably say he needs to go a suit size up.

Chris Williams:

But yeah, so he’s like, “Can I have my money back?” And he’s like, “Can y’all repair my door?” And they’re like, “We took the money because of the nature of the surge.” And also one of the officers said they’re rather smuggly. He’s like, “We are not required to assist you in fixing your door.” So Afroman did the most Afroman thing possible, made songs about it, mocking them up and down. There was this one officer dude during the raid, gun in hand, notices a slice of pound cake on the kitchen table, like an island, and he takes a very pensive look at it. I don’t think he ate the cake. I ultimately don’t know if he ate the cake because while there is video footage of him looking at the cake, one of the officers cut the surveillance cameras that Afroman had in his house. So there’s a limited amount of information that we could see from the raid, but the amount that we could see, we did see because he released a music video showing these goofy officers doing a boxed raid.

They pulled guns out, he scared his kids, and then they sued him for intentional infliction of emotional distress because coming in guns a blazing is one thing. But if you say bad names, if you call them bad names, then

That’s

Joe Patrice:

The issue. He just clowned them to the world, which is really what he was doing. I think obviously one of the big takeaways from this that I don’t think a lot of people understand is the nature of forfeiture in this country has gotten so broken. Police, if they claim they have reason to look into your house and then turns out they say, “Yeah, there was nothing. I guess there’s no crime here.” They still steal all your money and they just get to keep it, more or less.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. It reminds me of those old things you read in philosophy and political science that stick out to you. It’s not that the law prevents crime, it’s that the first crime is the establishment of the law as such because that’s the thing that determines what counts as other crimes or lot. It’s not theft when the officers steal from you because they can’t steal from you from the nature of what the law is sort of thing. But yeah,

Joe Patrice:

That happened. Yeah. There’s a lot of work to push back on and to finally bring some justice. And it’s kind of a bipartisan situation that there are a lot of right-leaning libertarians who are just as angry about forfeiture and pushback on that. But yeah, it is a problem that hasn’t been fixed and they bust up your house and steal things. As it turns out, yeah, so Afroman prevails in this case.

Chris Williams:

Which is big because the lawyers for the cops wanting to pay $4 million over their hurt feelings.

Joe Patrice:

Aw.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. And the hurt feelings include saying that a man had a receding hairline when that man, when he was on the stand was bald. One officer saying that he didn’t know why he was being called lemon pound cake, but then they showed the video of him looking desirously at the lemon pound cake. It’s right on the 10, folks. There was one officer who blamed Afroman for his divorce, but it turns out that his wife divorced him, had a restraining order put on the guy. And then she came on the stand, said that it had nothing to do with Afroman. And quite frankly, this might be the same cop. There’s this one guy who was like … No, I think this is a different cop. He said that in part of the song, Randy Walters is a son of a bitch. He says that he, Afroman, says that to get back at Randy, he had sex with his wife.

And then the officer sued him from defamation. The attorney asked Randy, he’s like, “Well, did Afroman have sex with your wife?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. ” Which is a thing for a defamation claim. It has to be demonstrably

Joe Patrice:

False.

Chris Williams:

And then he’s like, “You don’t know if Afroman had sex with your wife?” And then he’s like, “Come on now. Are you really going to ask me that? ” Yes, he’s really going to ask you that. It’s a defamation case.

Joe Patrice:

You’re the one who sued.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. For one, because one, let’s not forget, one of my favorite defenses against defamation is the truth. If he was actually smashing on your wife, he can say that. And if you don’t know if he was smashing on your wife, then you don’t know it’s defamatory because it could be the case. So the whole thing was a joke.

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, it was a joke. Jurors got this one seemingly very, very right based on everything that came out during the case. And we will take a break and come back in a minute. Let’s face it, you didn’t become a lawyer to stress over summaries and analysis. You could hand it off, but you need an assistant you can trust. Co-counsel handles those important but tedious tasks that keep you from being a lawyer. And because it’s trained only on expert legal content from Thomson Reuters, it’s as precise as you are, which means less stress and more confidence to focus on what matters. Head to tr.com/co-counsel to discover AI that lawyers swear by. All right. Well, while we’re getting some degree of justice against small town law enforcement, we have a Department of Justice that’s in the midst of massive meltdowns. We’ve been talking about this, of course, for months now, all of the problems going on down at DOJ, but we had a whole week of little stories, and nothing like truly epic, but we have a bunch of small stories about the DOJ that we wanted to quickly run through.

So we have … Well, the biggest one, I think, not scandalous necessarily, but probably the one that has the most impact, definitely long-term, is that the DOJ announces that they’re going to be dropping their requirement that you need actual experience to work for them. They are now going to hire directly from law schools, which they have not done. There’ve been a few jurisdictions where they have special waivers where you don’t need a ton of experience, very isolated areas, it’s harder to find folks. But this is huge. They’re getting rid of that requirement. Now, historically, this is a job that is of such prestige and importance that they’re looking for people who have built an established resume to fill these jobs. We are now going to start picking the low hanging fruit, it seems, which I mean, it’s consequential in a few ways. One, it’s a sign of the declining importance of the DOJ.

I think it is a longer term sign that they are dealing with the fact that people who have actual careers and have built an understanding and professional judgment before joining the DOJ are all leaving the DOJ. This is an attempt to kind of fill the ranks with people who don’t know any better before they go lie to a court. And yeah, I think it’s going to lead to a bunch of more and more bad decisions, more and more contempt allegations. It’s just a real problem for the institution as a whole.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. And it makes it easier to throw people under the bus. Because if there was a person that had a career that had the moral fortitude, or as the French say, the balls to say no to when they’re being told to do something that they shouldn’t, their resign could signal something. It could be like, “Oh, snap, this person who’s been here since George Washington had enough, they

Joe Patrice:

Might

Chris Williams:

See something really wrong in Denmark.” But if some dude who has a poster of big balls in his dorm room, one, he won’t have the book, he might not know to resign. And two, if he’s like, “I’m stepping away.” There’s only so many Rachel Cohens that can be there where them breaking away means something, especially when they’re new to the game. And also, I’ll give you two weeks before they start hiring off a Craigslist.

Joe Patrice:

Well, I mean, they’re already … So that’s a great segue too. They already announced that they were hiring through people sliding into their DMs because that was a few weeks ago where the former chief of staff asked if anybody wants to be his attorney, just DM me. So that’s not great, and now they don’t even need to have any experience. Meanwhile, the problem over in New Jersey is that there are too many people who think they work at that office. We had a hearing, Kathryn wrote about a hearing that turned very testy as the judge got very agitated with the New Jersey representative of the US Attorney’s office in front of speaking because it couldn’t figure out who’s in charge over there. They’ve got a three-pronged committee supposedly running that office. There’s some question whether or not Alina Haba who’s supposed to not have anything to do with that office, and she was illegally appointed, whether or not she’s actually still running it from her weird new post.

And the judge is deeply concerned. And I think a lot of folks, including … I think a lot of folks don’t understand the significance of this and think it’s just, “Oh, judges are all mad at the Trump administration for illegally appointing these people. ” The issue in that particular case, as I understand it, was it was like a child sex exploitation case, and the judge is very concerned because if these idiots continue to not run the office in accordance with the federal law, then they have to let the perps go. And the deep concern is maybe we don’t want to let go people who we have evidence are hurting children. So the Trump DOJ at this point, it’s not just a matter of, “Oh, well, they just aren’t doing things according to by the book and blah, blah.” They are jeopardizing the safety of people by acting like this, by having this petulant refusal to appoint somebody correctly through the process and get them confirmed.

Chris Williams:

Hey, well, we can’t focus on small things like protecting children from aggressors when there are illegals out there.

Joe Patrice:

Well, and then we also have the deputy AG. When you say, talking about protecting the children, the deputy attorney general seems to have made it his mission to do the exact opposite. We had a letter from the Senator Ron Wyden was sent a letter to Todd Blanche going, “Hey, I’m kind of interested. We’re looking into this Epstein stuff. There are these redacted documents that talk about how there had been an investigation several years earlier into him and several of his friends who were allegedly involved in exploiting children. And their names are all redacted, which is not legal under the terms of the statute. And we were going to get an unredacted copy of that document. And then it appears as though you personally have prevented that from happening. So kind of interested to know why that’s happening. But yeah, the deputy attorney general, who is a job that should be management, seems to now, this is not even the first instance, as the senator’s letter points out, this is not even the first incident where the deputy AG has reached down and personally taken action to cover up and run more interference for Jeffrey Epstein’s buddies.

So the DOJ is moving along swimmingly these days. Well, we should probably take a break from that less than fun story and be right back. All right. So we are back. I don’t even know what to talk about for the last bit here. There have been a lot of little stories. I guess maybe one that’s always fun is the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, which was star crossed from jump. Those who’ve read Above the Law for a long time, listened to the show for a long time know that we had a lot of fun with that when it went down since his purchase of that company was marked by him-

Chris Williams:

Stupidity.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, absolutely. And openly ignoring the advice of lawyers, refusing to do due diligence, then turning around and claiming, “Oh, well, these things have turned up.” And it’s like, well, you waived due diligence, but also you said that the thing that you were complaining came up is that you didn’t know there were bots, except we have all these emails of you or all these social media posts you saying you needed to buy Twitter because you knew that you could get rid of the bots. So it seems like you did. No. Anyway, yada, yada, yada, he ultimately ends up taking over the company after Twitter itself sues him to say, “You need to take over because the deal is a deal.”

Chris Williams:

Also, fun point about him knowing and paying attention to the website. Remember, shortly after he took over, he ran a poll asking people if they wanted him to be CEO. Majority said no, he still could continue to be CEO.

Joe Patrice:

Well, no, he hired a CEO to replace him and that person just- Later. Yeah, exactly. That person just does what he says anyway. So in this case, a bunch of Twitter investors brought suit claiming that he intentionally was misleading the public in an attempt to influence the stock price, which he was saying he was going to buy it, then he wasn’t something that would potentially lower the strike price for buying it, which would mean that he would not have to pay as much and save himself some money, yada, yada, yada.

Chris Williams:

And I’m pretty sure the price was so high because he was trying to do a weed joke.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Wasn’t the

Chris Williams:

Stock price like

Joe Patrice:

69,420

Chris Williams:

Or something like that?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. But these investors went to court. The case kind of came down to whether or not the things he was saying were something that anyone would believe, whether or not he was just an idiot or whether he was intentionally misleading. You never are in a great place when your legal argument is, “But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, maybe I’m stupid.” But that was- Wait a minute. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

I think the proper New Jersey way to say it is the legal argument is, come on.

Joe Patrice:

Come on. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Come on.

Joe Patrice:

So he tried to make the argument that he was stupid. As it turns out, while the jury didn’t necessarily say that wasn’t true, they said that it was also possible that you could be stupid and misleading. And so he has lost his suit there that will require him to fork over some hefty amount of cash to Twitter investors who feel they were defrauded by the way in which he handled that.

Chris Williams:

The thing that gets me is, I’m not sure if you know this, but Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet. Why is any of this going to trial? He could just settle it.

Joe Patrice:

He could

Chris Williams:

Just pay the money. Whatever they’re asking of him is a rounding error.

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Chris Williams:

Why go through the bad publicity

Joe Patrice:

Of

Chris Williams:

Having to just pay people?

Joe Patrice:

Well, so he has a few problems with that front. So one is that the nature of this specific allegation, I think complicates … So he’s already been disciplined by the SEC and supposed to have a monitor, monitor all of his social media posts. That seems to have kind of fell off. But that was a concession he made to settle a government investigation of him using his social media to influence the market. So I think he had some extra dimension here that he needed to kind of protect himself from the idea that he’s back to using these. Not that I think this SEC would do anything about it, but a future SEC run in a different administration could dig in and say like, “You were under this consent decree and now you are doing this again.” So I think he wanted to push back against that to protect himself from broader issues.

And I also wonder, I think a big part of the Delaware case, which we’ve talked about, and I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on this show, but I certainly have written about it, where he’s trying to get a pay package of several, an obscene amount of billions of dollars for being the CEO of Tesla. He’s trying to get that in a way that usually doesn’t have … Most CEOs don’t want that. They want stock options and they’re willing to seem heroic for taking only a dollar of real compensation, but they’re getting millions of this other stuff.

He’s trying to get this multi-billion dollar pay package from a company that is only worth about a hundred billion dollars in real sense as far as his actual assets. He’s trying to convince them to do that and the Delaware courts don’t necessarily want to do it. But I think the reason he’s doing that is so much of his massive richest person ever is so on paper. A lot of it is just the stock is there. And if you’re like me, you think that stock is probably hyper-inflated over what it’s actually worth. And that becomes a problem. And so he also doesn’t own Twitter outright. That was part of it. There are people he has to pay out for that. So he’s part of a deal, like a consortium there. So he is the richest on paper, but I don’t think he has access to a lot of that money.

So there’s another reason why he has to continue fighting some of these cases. But yeah, Elon failing yet again to understand how law works is always fun. Okay. Well, so that’s it for us. You should be listening to the other shows, The Jabo as Kathryn’s other show. I’m a guest on the Legal Tech Week journalist round table sometimes, and there are also shows from the Legal Talk Network that you should be checking out. You should check out social media. I’m at Joe Patrice on BluSky. Chris is at Rights for Rent. You can check out Above Law itself, read these and other stories before they hit by going to AboveLaw.com. And I think with that, we will check in with you later. Peace.