The second and third in command of the Department of Justice are Todd Blanche and Stan Woodward, both Trump defense attorneys.

By the code of legal ethics that we are all bound under, they shouldn't be touching this.

They litigated the opposing side of this.

They obviously, they can't touch us with a 10-foot pole.

Welcome to opening arguments.

It is Friday, and we're here to run down the news.

And I'm here with me, of course, Matt Cameron is Janessa Seymour, who has just returned from taking an entire bar exam just for fun. How you feeling? Oh, boy, I'm exhausted. My brain is toast. Intellectual labor is labor, and I am all labored out. Did you have fun, at least?

Well, it depends on your definition of fun.

I definitely learned some things.

I have many complaints about standardized testing that I could go on and on and on about.

But, yeah, the material I find very interesting, the testing experience is always not a fun one for me. I'm the kind of pervert who enjoys standardized tests. So I think we'll talk about it a little later. I want to hear about it. Sure, sure. But for today's show, I have got, because I didn't expect you to do any work today. And that's totally fine. I've given you the day off, and you can just come in and be Thomas today with absolutely no prep. Coming in cold. I am so blind today. But that's okay, because we've got some subjects that I think you're going to be familiar with, but these are all going to be along the lines of, can they do that? Which has been a pretty popular question in 2025. And of course, I'm going to

give my standard disclaimer, which is that they're doing it. But we're here to talk about the law, and that is what the show is for. We're going to explain law in the news. So I always want to be sure, and I've taken this position from January 20th onward, that we're here to tell you what the law is and how it should work, and that's what we're going to try to do. So we've got three very

different subjects today from this week's news that I want to talk about. Can they do that? And then we'll check back with you, Janessa, and find out a little bit more about the patent bar, because I'm really curious about the whole thing. So this is going to be a good one. This is going to be a fun. I think we get some great subjects and I'm kind of excited about just you not knowing anything.

Let's see how it goes. Come back and learn something.

I want to start off today with a story that justified immediately to me putting down in the Slack

chat, WTF with at least 20 Fs.

You may have seen.

I did see that.

We have got to talk about the fact that Donald Trump is trying to get the Department of Justice to pay him $230 million for having tried to prosecute him for things that he did, things we all know that he did.

I saw this headline and I had no bandwidth to. for having tried to prosecute him for things that he did, things we all know that he did.

I saw this headline, and I had no bandwidth to process what that could even mean.

What happened?

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