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The Trump-Epstein Legal Breakdown You Didn't Know You Needed

Opening Arguments

Release Date: 07/25/2025

The Dumbroe Doctrine show art The Dumbroe Doctrine

Opening Arguments

OA1222 - Actual sane coverage of Trump's kidnapping of a foreign leader PART 1 OA NYC correspondent Liz Skeen joins Thomas and Matt for this emergency episode recorded the day after the US bombed Caracas in a truly unprecedented military operation to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and transport them to Brooklyn to stand trial on federal narco-terrorism charges. We field dozens of patron questions as we try to understand how any of this could possibly be legal. How does this situation compare to the charges against former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and former...

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Opening Arguments

Since it's been a while since we last did a GG crossover, I wanted to share the new trial we are doing over there! It's a new Gavel Gavel trial! We are excited to announce that we will be producing a totally new full trial re-enactment working from our EXCLUSIVE access to the transcript of the federal prosecution of Sean Dunn, better known to the world as the “Sandwich Guy” after being federally charged for assaulting a CBP officer with a fully-loaded 12-inch Subway sandwich on the streets of DC. But before we get to the meat of 2025’s Trial of the Century, legal sandwich artist Matt...

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Opening Arguments

Here's a preview of Law'd Awful Movies!!! If you'd like the full thing, become a $2+ patron at patreon.com/law! LAM 1010 - After taking a break with a couple of things we actually enjoyed (Juror #2 and My Cousin Vinny), Law’d Awful Movies returns to form with the first two episodes of USA’s uniquely terrible adaptation of John Grisham’s classic 1995 legal thriller The Rainmaker. Thomas, Lydia, and Matt review the show’s bizarre and often cowardly divergences from the source material, its AI-level of understanding of how humans operate in the world and talk to one another--and, of...

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Opening Arguments

OA1220 - What’s an FBI agent to do when a notorious low life reports a local cop is asking for a bribe? Turn him into a confidential information of course, and see how far you can get that dirty cop to go. A tale of two assholes, steadily making each others’ lives worse and worse, while one is wearing a wire. Now, why does the Supreme Court care about any of this? Half the conviction hinges on whether this cop “exceeded authorized access” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and no one can agree what that means… including your cohosts. Hear Thomas try to figure out why Amy...

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Opening Arguments

OA1219 - This year we are celebrating Boxing Day by not doing whatever people are supposed to do on Boxing Day and talking about weed instead. Did Donald Trump really just finish out 2025 by doing something good for US drug policy? We hotbox some Time Machine to revisit Matt’s analysis from last May of Joe “Grandaddy Purple” Biden’s announcement that he was initiating the long process to have the federal government to reclassify OG Kush from its current legal status as Green Crack down to the same category as metabolic steroids. We then return to the present to check in on the weirdly...

info_outline We knew the Epstein plea deal was awful. Newly released emails make it EVEN WORSE. show art We knew the Epstein plea deal was awful. Newly released emails make it EVEN WORSE.

Opening Arguments

E18 - Congress required the Department of Justice to release (nearly) everything it had from the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell by December 19th, so of course they pretended to do that on time on Friday afternoon and then waited until everyone was just about to start heading home for the holidays before actually dumping 30,000 pages of anything resembling actual substance into the record on Tuesday morning. We review and discuss new revelations on how much more time Trump spent on Epstein’s plane than we ever knew, the 30-year-old FBI report that could have changed...

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OA1218 - What happens to your first amendment rights when you work for the government? Do you give it all up when you walk in the door? How do we balance the individual right of the worker to speak, against the government’s need to have a functioning work place? Pickering v Board of Education (1968) sets us up to understand how this all works… and why a teacher criticizing Charlie Kirk on their personal Facebook page probably isn’t a fireable offense. Patrons got exclusive content at the end of this one, only available at ! Can you apply these principles to eight cases that...

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OA1217 - Well, we recorded a bit late to make sure we caught Trump's "announcement" thingy and it was... nothing. But that's good! Matt also takes us through more travel bans that are going into effect and have been way underreported on. But The Federalist has a piece saying not only is this all great, but Trump should . There is no quiet part anymore. But fortunately, Matt has a fun footnote for us to bring us back up!

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We begin with a delightful amuse douche from the lawyer of Colorado election tamperer Tina Peters unconditionally demanding her release from state prison because Donald Trump said so before a deep dive into our main story: an absurdly bad take from the New York Times--in both a lengthy print story and an episode of The Daily podcast--on how Joe Biden’s unwillingness to be a border fascist got a border fascist elected. Matt breaks down the real causes of the uptick in asylum seekers to the U.S. during Biden’s term in office (and its many unreported benefits to the economy and the nation)...

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Opening Arguments

OA1216 - We welcome incarcerated journalist and advocate Christopher Blackwell, calling from his home at the Washington Corrections Center. Chris is the co-founder and Executive Director of Look2Justice, a non-profit which empowers and advocates currently and formerly incarcerated people through an “inside-out” organizing model. He is also a writer whose work has appeared in (among other places) The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Nation, and is a co-author of the new book Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement. Chris joins to share his story...

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OA1176 - Six years after his death in a filthy Manhattan jail cell, Jeffrey Epstein’s disgusting ghost is now haunting Donald Trump--his former “best friend” of more than a decade. What are the “Epstein files” and why has the demand to see them turned MAGA world against itself now?  We go beyond the headlines to explain how one of the most notorious criminals  in recent American history has become this week’s top legal story so long after his death, and why DOJ’s recent efforts to cover for Trump should constitute a ten-alarm scandal. We then review Trump’s attempt to sue the Wall Street Journal for revealing his surprisingly artistic birthday wishes to his “pal,” why his administration is so intent on unsealing grand jury records which DOJ knows can’t be released, how this whole mess has reached the point that the Supreme Court might actually have a good legal reason to reverse Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction (!), and why Trump might be about to pardon Maxwell even if it doesn’t. Also discussed: the history of Epstein’s astonishing 2007 non-prosecution agreement and its legacy, the real “Epstein files” that no one has been talking about, and how the President of France might be about to righteously bankrupt MAGA mouthpiece Candace Owens. 

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