Legal AF 10/8/2026

Karen Friedman Agnifilo (0:02)

Welcome to the midweek edition of Legal AF. I am your host, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, and standing in for Michael Popok this week is Lisa Graves, one of our favorite stand-ins who come in and pinch hit all the time. It's so great to see you, Lisa. Popok is under the weather this week. I'm just recovering from a cold, so but I'm going to hold down the fort for him today. We have a lot to cover today, and so much so that we were just as we were coming on the air trying to decide, are we going to cover topics that are breaking as we are on the air? So we'll see how it goes, but we know we're going to start with the Epstein files, where the Justice Department is now fighting an order from Judge Sullivan, requiring it to identify and produce the administrative record behind its handling of the files. This is the Katie Fang lawsuit. DOJ says there are no material facts in dispute and essentially nothing in that record that isn't already public. So the question is, if that's true, why fight so hard to keep this record from being produced? That's what I don't understand. Just release the records already. So we're going to talk about that. And what else could it tell us about how many millions of pages that they reviewed? How did they categorize them? How did they redact them? And why were they withheld? So we're going to then, after we talk about those Epstein files, we're going to talk about former Special Counsel Jack Smith. Senator Marsha Blackburn has sued Smith over his office's seizure of her phone records during the Arctic Frost investigation, raising what she claims are serious speech and debate clause and separation of powers questions. So all of the active federal district judges in the Middle District of Tennessee, which is where she filed her lawsuit, have recused themselves from the case. So there's four judges there and they all recuse themselves. And we're going to talk about why that is. And some of it we're just going to have to speculate.

And another wrinkle at talking about Jack Smith is he was photographed this weekend wearing a No Kings t-shirt, something his critics are already pointing to in challenging his claims of political neutrality. We're also going to preview a big hearing in Washington tomorrow where CNN, MSNOW and Politico are asking Judge Kelly to convert his temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction that prevents the Trump administration and the White House from excluding them from the White House. And Judge Kelly has already found that the news organizations are likely to succeed in their due process claim, but tomorrow we'll see whether he goes further and turns this temporary restraining order into an injunction which is permanent. So there's also the question of the First Amendment and is he going to address that or is he just going to address sort of the procedural due process?

They weren't given any sort of process in making that decision. Then I would be remiss if we didn't talk about the Supreme Court with Lisa Graves who is a Supreme Court expert, so I love talking to her about the Supreme Court. A new term has just begun, first Monday in October, and there's some major new cases involving executive power, immigration, guns, voting rights, religion, and of course there's the shadow docket or the emergency docket that plays a huge role in this administration's litigation. We're going to talk about the growing speculation about is Judge Alito, is Justice Alito going to retire? He's now acknowledged that he's been considering retiring and what that will mean.

Finally, we're going to look at the Kennedy Center and all that's going on there. A federal judge has ordered that the Trump appointed board has to make public with security redactions because of course Trump always says national security, national security, and I guess there's something national security about the Kennedy Center.

But with appropriate redactions, if there is something that truly has security concerns, that they're going to have to turn that over. This renovation plan uses about a quarter of a billion of federally funded taxpayer dollars, and the board decided to close it for two years. Now, this litigation is becoming more than about construction, and it really is raising questions about how the money is being spent, whether a complete shutdown was actually necessary, whether the board independently evaluated the evidence before approving the decision that Trump had made, had already announced before, and then they sort of justified it after the fact. So a lot going on, as I said, stuff breaking hot off the press. Maybe we'll read up about it during the commercial breaks. Here's one, the DNC, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of unlawfully using government money to pay for video advertisements. This is those advertisements that he's putting out, and they were essentially campaign ads that he used for his campaign, is now using taxpayer dollars for airtime. And so they are suing the Trump administration for that. He did later, after all the backlash, say, Oh, I'll pay for it going forward with private money. But it was already paid for, and that's what they're getting sued for. Those are the money they've already used. So we got a lot going on, and let's jump in. Lisa, how are you doing today?