'They can't hide the ball': Judge cracks the whip on Trump lawyers in deportation case
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Thanks to you at home for joining us here this hour. Really happy to have you here. So Harvard is standing up and fighting against Trump's threats and attacks against universities. They are fighting instead of making concessions and giving in. Today, yet another law firm that Trump targeted has won against him in court. This time, it was the firm Sussman Godfrey. The judge called what Trump is doing in threatening this firm, quote, a shocking abuse of power. The judge blocked Trump from essentially continuing to go after the firm. Not to state the obvious or anything, but that firm won that ruling because they chose to fight him instead of making concessions to him and giving in. In fact, every law firm that has fought Trump's attacks in court thus far has won. And that makes it really embarrassing to be one of the law firms that chose not to fight him, right? I mean, you didn't have to give in. You would have won in court if you'd fought it, but you gave in anyway. Bad call, right? Why would anyone hire you to fight for them on anything ever? Save yourself.
Save your firm. Get out of your so-called deal with Trump and fight back. Because, hey, look, everybody who's fighting back is winning. Whereas in the meantime, you've destroyed your law firm's reputation for eternity. Again, until you change your mind. Today, also, the federal judge, hearing the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, told the Trump administration that they do not have the option to disobey the court's order to return Mr. Abrego-Garcia to the United States. We will have more on that in a moment. It was a very dramatic confrontation in court today. Tonight, we've got tens of thousands of people turning out right now on a Tuesday. to see Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in two back-to-back anti-Trump rallies they are holding in Bakersfield and then in Folsom, California today. Tens of thousands of people turning up for these two events. Again, these guys turned out 56,000 people over two nights in L.A. and Salt Lake City just this weekend.
Now they are tearing up basically Central California as we speak. I mean, all this stuff happening on one day. It's on. It is absolutely on. And we're going to have more on all of those stories over the course of the hour tonight. So like I said, I'm very, very happy that you're here. It's a big show, especially for Tuesday. It feels like a big show. It feels like a Friday already. But we're going to start tonight with something that is quite different. We're starting tonight with a whistleblower story and a whistleblower who is here tonight live along with his attorney. And let me tell you a little bit why we are starting with this story. So we've been focusing a lot on the way that people are standing up to try to block what Trump is doing, to try to show that they disagree with Trump, to show their resistance to what he's trying to do. And I think that's the real story in the country. But because we've been really focusing on that, we sometimes don't get into the nitty gritty of the sort of strategy of what Trump is doing.
And tonight's one of those nights that we're going to look at a little bit. Because it turns out, when you are in the middle of an attempted authoritarian takeover of your country, One of the things that happens is that the actions of the government get very opaque. It gets harder to figure out what they're doing. In contrast with a normal small-D democratic administration, when you're in the midst of a would-be authoritarian takeover, official pronouncements from the government, like from White House spokespeople, they just become bombastic propaganda with no factual content that you can't rely on for the truth of what's being asserted. They ignore public records requests wholesale. They, for example, have fired all the people who are responsible for handling public communications in a professional way. They've even fired the people who are responsible for handling FOIA requests. And of course, it is a hallmark of authoritarian governance that you can't allow a free press, right?
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