Objections: With Adam Klasfeld

We all want to believe that we are good judges of character; that if someone close to us was a bad person, we would know. But how well do you know your neighbors? How much can you trust those around you? What does a killer look like? Monsters don’t live under the bed; they walk among us. From the award-winning team behind the UK true crime podcast — They Walk Among Us — They Walk Among America provides a unique and in-depth account of some of the most puzzling and polarizing cases from the United States. With extensive research and immersive audio, They Walk Among America is a storytelling-style podcast that delves deeper into the cases that have horrified and captivated the public. Hosted by Nina Innsted and produced in association with the Law & Crime podcast network.

For more information, visit https://lawandcrime.com/podcasts/ or https://theywalkamonguspodcast.com/

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The prisoner swap that traded Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner inspired commentary across the political aisle. It also revealed how long Bout had been on the international bargaining table, for other U.S. citizens in Russian prisons. 

In the podcast, Bout's lawyer Steve Zissou confirms that former President Donald Trump passed on an opportunity to trade his client for former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. He also responds to a Twitter post from Donald Trump Jr. calling Bout a "terrorist."

Diving deep into the more than decade-old trial of Viktor Bout, the interview explores his reputation as the "Merchant of Death," the sting operation that brought him down, and the sober account of what will become of his arms trade.

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Shortly before a New York law targeting online hate speech took effect, a prominent First Amendment scholar joined two social media platforms in challenging it in a federal lawsuit filed in Manhattan. The plaintiffs are UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, the social media company Rumble, and another website called Locals. 

Passed in the wake of the white-supremacist inspired mass murder in Buffalo, the challenged law forces social media platforms to post a policy for moderating content that would “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence” against people based on race, class, gender or other protected groups. Those platforms would have to establish a reporting system for enforcement and would be subject to civil liability for violations. 

This week's guest — Professor Volokh, who runs the blog the Volokh Conspiracy — explains why he believes that the language of the statute is too broad to pass constitutional muster. He also hashes out Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is such a key law for free speech on the internet and why it's recently become such a lightning rod across the political aisle.

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In light of the Senate's recent passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, this August episode featuring an interview with Jim Obergefell — the man behind the landmark Supreme Court ruling for marriage equality — is being rebroadcast.

The day that the Supreme Court released its ruling for marriage quality, Jim Obergefell — the man behind the watershed decision — saw a sign of his impending victory on his admission slip.

"Every time I had been in the Supreme Court, the tickets were bright orange," Obergefell reflected on the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld."

"On Friday, June 26 — that day, it wasn't bright orange," he continued. "It was lavender, and when we realized that we all thought, 'Well, this has to be a sign. This has to be a positive sign. There's no reason for the ticket to have changed color, let alone being lavender.'"

In an extended interview, Obergefell moves beyond the cold record of that case to reflect upon how he and his late husband John Arthur began their legal battle over their marriage. He describes how he became ordained to officiate weddings after his Supreme Court victory — and came to read the closing lines of the ruling that bears his name at "every" ceremony.

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Most pundits have viewed the midterms results as a repudiation of 2020 election denialism and ex-President Donald Trump, noting that extreme candidates like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona lost. 

So did most election conspiracist candidates for secretaries of state, who can exert substantial power over states’ electoral systems. But upon closer inspection, a more complicated portrait emerges. 

A broad swath of the GOP House representatives who objected to President Joe Biden's victory won, as did other first-time candidates who embraced election lies.

Detailing the complete and messy picture in this week’s episode is Lindsay Schubiner, from the extremism watchdog Western States. She provides a needed antidote to the heady celebrations about the triumphant bounceback of American democracy.

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Over the course of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes's seditious conspiracy trial, the government released a flood of secret recordings, encrypted messages, and other evidence highlighting the group's private communications around the time of the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol.

This episode gathers much of that newly released evidence. It explores what it shows about the Oath Keepers' history dating back to its founding — and the group's efforts to keep former President Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.

Law&Crime has been reporting the trial from the ground extensively, and the show's host shares his insights and reporting about Rhodes's testimony and cross-examination.

Note: The audio evidence released from the trial includes explicit language.

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As lawsuits surrounding the Arizona drop box "vigilantes" swirled in court, an obscure group called Clean Elections USA and its Steve Bannon-linked founder took focus in the litigation. Investigative journalists specializing in elections, however, unpacked the less-covered role of True the Vote, a right-wing dark money group that's been an influential force in conservative politics for more than a decade.

In our latest episode, the editorial director of an elections-focused news organization behind those exposés picks apart those connections.

"This is not a grassroots effort," VoteBeat's editorial director Jessica Huseman said on the podcast. "This is very much a thing that is very well-organized, very well-staffed. And so isn't nearly as a sort of organic as as many on the right have painted it to be."

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Jessica Huseman

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Nearly 1,900 miles away from where leaders of the Oath Keepers have been standing an historic trial for seditious conspiracy in Washington, D.C., a watershed ruling combating so-called militia groups came down in a county courthouse in New Mexico.

In that case, a Bernalillo County judge barred a little-known paramilitary organization known as the New Mexico Civil Guard from using "organized force" at protests or gatherings. Former Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord — now the executive director for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) at Georgetown Law — helped spearhead that fight.

On the latest podcast episode, McCord details her legal strategy for bringing U.S. domestic extremists to heel — using statutes that have been on the books in most states for decades if not centuries. She views her current labors as a continuation of her work inside the Department of Justice, where she capped off her nearly 20-year tenure with a leadership role on national security.

"This is when a foreign terrorist organization, ISIS, declared a caliphate and was taking up physically taking over territory in Syria and claiming to be its own sovereign state," McCord reflected, noting that many U.S. citizens traveled abroad to take up that fight.

"The way that those who are adhering to extremist movements recruit — and spread and propagandize and monetize and plot and plan — is very similar to the way we see domestic extremists do similar recruitment," she noted. "They prey on people's vulnerabilities, their grievances. They create an 'us-versus-them.' You know, let's blame somebody else for our own problems, whether they're economic or what-have-you."

This week's show features McCord's reflections on her career, her work against U.S. paramilitary groups, and her analysis of the ongoing Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy case.

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Mary McCord

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Just days apart from each other last week, two of the most high-profile death penalty cases in memory reached sharply different outcomes. The Supreme Court paved the way for the execution of Dylann Roof, the neo-Nazi behind the massacre at a historic Black church in Charleston. Then, two days later, a jury delivered a life sentence — rather than the capital punishment sought by the government — in the case of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz.

Several families of the Parkland victims expressed disgust at the latter verdict, saying that they were "devastated and shocked" that the jury gave Cruz life imprisonment rather than death.

The three jurors who spared Cruz from capital punishment have a high-profile defender: the Rev. Sharon Risher, who lost her mother Ethel Lance and her cousins Tyzwana Sanders and Susie Jackson in the 2015 Charleston massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

"They voted their conscience," Risher said of the jurors on the latest episode of the podcast. "They voted what they felt in their heart, and our legal system gives the jurors the power to take all the evidence in and to vote their conscience. And that's what they did. It took a lot for them to go against all of the others. It took courage to do that."

The Rev. Risher explains how the profound loss of three of her family members in the Charleston church shooting led her on an unlikely patch toward anti-death penalty activism. She reflects on seeing her mother and cousins' murderer in court, moving beyond a desire for retribution, and shares sentiments in support for Parkland jurors as they increasingly come under criticism.

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Rev. Sharon Risher

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The fourth anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s death has passed, and the public's understanding of his murder continues to evolve. The struggle for information about the incident continues, and leading some of those fights is his widow: Hanan Elatr, who married Khashoggi in Virginia just months before he died. On the latest episode of “Objections,” Ms. Elatr Khashoggi and her lawyer Randa Fahmy detail their various battles for information. They have threatened a lawsuit against the NSO Group, the maker of spyware that the Washington Post reportedly found on Elatr’s phone before her late husband’s murder. They have requested the return of Khashoggi’s electronic devices from the Turkish government and asked President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence to exert pressure on Ankara for that to happen.After years of seemingly being written out of Khashoggi’s story, Elatr has become increasingly vocal in changing the perception of his legacy.On the podcast, Elatr says the slain Washington Post reporter never viewed himself as a Saudi dissident — and she lashes out at a phenomenon she describes as “Jamal, Inc.,” the various interests she accuses of capitalizing on her late husband’s legacy. 

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Elatr Khashoggi: Jamal Khashoggi's widow.

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