Neomi Rao

They just seem like they come up like bad pennies over and over again.

Neomi Rao, Justin, uh, Walker, and Katzas.

And, and if it's, uh, you know, we tell our audience, I mean, I never had to do this before, but I tell my audience if it's gonna be two Trumpers, uh, on a three-judge panel, if they're gonna side with Donald Trump about 99.9% of the time, and I'm always right- I don't wanna be right, but I am right.

And if it's one, they're gonna be in dissent.

That's not your role.

That's a prosecutor's role." So one question was just, can he do the fact-finding that he's doing before making a referral if he decides to make a criminal referral, or is he going beyond what he's allowed to do there? And then the second question was, was the order clear? And so I would say, if we're trying to do gossip from the courtroom, that Judge Neomi Rao was very much with the Department of Justice at almost every step of these questions, and then Judges Walker and Katzas, and all three of these conservative justices had been on earlier panels that had ruled before we got to this stage that had gone in the government's favor, and they'd kind of ruled and at different stages on different bases.

But I think that Judge Katzas was fairly clear that he thinks the order orally was clear, but, you know, there would be sort of a distinction about the oral order versus the written order, which makes sense.

That's basically where we knew that he was...

Uh, that case was the one where Trump tried to block the Associated Press from the White House because it would not change its style guide to say Gulf of America, and it got before a terrible panel at the D.C.

Circuit, two Trump appointees, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas.

They invented this distinction between the spaces accessible to the media generally and the more private spaces of the White House, and they said it was fine for Trump to exclude the AP from those private spaces as retribution, even on the basis of viewpoint discrimination.

Mm-hmm.

It's written by a Trumper.

It's written by Neomi Rao, who is trying out for the United States Supreme Court over what you can and can't do on the Capitol steps.

Correct.

And the argument made by the government was, "It's a limited, non-public space.

We should be able to ban and bar whoever we want for whatever reason." And she, in her language, reminded everybody, you can't do it for viewpoint based discrimination.

You, you, you, you got to do it for the right and wholesome reasons, or you're gonna be found to have violated the First Amendment.

When you've got even Neomi Rao writing like that, that's got to be a sign, and I'm sure Judge Kelly's chambers knows well about that.

And as we said at, at the top of the, of this particular segment of our Legal AF, uh, podcast today, Judge Kelly knows his way around the First Amendment.