Objections: With Adam Klasfeld

In early June, a man who threatened the lawyer for the whistleblower associated with former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment was sentenced to one year in prison. National Security Attorney Mark Zaid remembers the incident well—because he was that lawyer. In the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Zaid recounts his phone ringing incessantly with messages from angry Trump supporters in late 2019.

"I received about half a dozen what I consider to be genuine death threats that crossed the line," Zaid reflects. "The first one I remember had nothing but the title in the email: 'a bullet in your head.' Okay, well, that one's different."

One of those threats came from 54-year-old Brittan Atkinson, who served more than six months in pretrial detention when he was arrested last year. He will serve an additional five months in prison as a result of his recent sentence.

When remembering that time period, Zaid says that the word that comes to mind is one that is perhaps the most "overused" of the Trump tenure.

"It was surreal," he says.

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Warning: This episode involves disturbing subject matter.

During a bond hearing in May, a Homeland Security Investigations agent described some of the horrific material allegedly found on the computer of former reality TV star Josh Duggar, who is currently awaiting trial for allegedly possessing and receiving child pornography.

The agent testified that one video titled "Daisy's Destruction," showing the rape of an 18-month old girl, ranked among the "Top Five worst of the worst" that he ever had to examine.

Law&Crime's podcast "Objections" explores the crime case behind that video, created by Peter Scully, an Australian man dubbed by international tabloids as the "world's worst pedophile.” Scully is currently serving a life sentence in the Philippines for human trafficking and rape.

In the episode, Australia’s ABC correspondent Matthew Carney describes reporting from the crime scene following Scully’s arrest, and Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Jack Staton generally describes the fight against child exploitation globally.

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Late last month, a Florida jury awarded a $2.75 million verdict for Dr. Baiywo Rop, a Kenyan-born doctor who won a lawsuit accusing an Adventist Health System hospital of discriminating against him because of his race and national origin. Then, in an unusual development a week later, a judge vacated the jury's multimillion-dollar judgment against Adventist, the state’s second-largest employer.

In the latest episode of "Objections," Dr. Rop and his lawyer Jerry Girley describe how that case reminds them of a lesser-remembered part of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech."

That's the passage about the proverbial "bank of justice."

“So what we said to the jury is, 'Look, here we are again at the Bank of Justice,'" Girley recalls on the podcast. "Promises have been made. You have the authority, the ability to pay this check. It is a payment on a promise that was made hundreds of years ago. It is a payment on the notion the concept of equality before the law.”

Both describe the case, verdict, ruling and ongoing appeal on the show.

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On the morning of Monday, May 24th, the Myanmar government detained a U.S. journalist before he boarded an international flight. Danny Fenster, the managing editor of the independent news outlet Frontier Myanmar, has been held captive there since that time.

Fenster’s childhood friend Jordan Acker recounts how the arrest sent shockwaves through the small city where they grew up: Huntington Woods, a roughly 1.5 square mile suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

"There's always a feeling of hopelessness when this happens, that there's not a lot that you can do in these sorts of situations," Acker recounted, detailing the community's efforts to create a "Free Fenster" logo, draw attention to his plight, and lobby local and federal officials to advocate for his release.

An attorney with experience in the House Judiciary Committee, Department of Homeland Security, and the Michigan Board of Regents, Acker describes how Fenster told the stories of the persecuted before being targeted by the Myanmar regime. Acker also sounds off on retired General Michael Flynn's "despicable" and "sickening" praise for Myanmar's coup this past February.

Flynn made his widely criticized remarks at a QAnon conference in Texas days after Fenster's arrest, before walking them back amid a firestorm of criticism.

Learn more about Fenster at BringDannyHome.com.

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Despite Senate Republicans voting down the idea of a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6th siege of the U.S. Capitol, there remain multiple avenues for a similar probe to take root.

Laying out those alternatives on the podcast, congressional scholar Norman Ornstein notes that any of the remaining options will face unique challenges.

"Every time we've had commissions in the past—whether if you go back to the Kerner Commission set up by a presidential decree, an executive order by Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, all the way through things like the 9/11 Commission—they've been bipartisan and evenly divided," Ornstein noted on the podcast.

For Ornstein, the fact that Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.) voted against a commission to investigate the same pro-Trump mob that chanted for his brother Mike Pence to be hanged shows how impossible such cooperation has become.

On the episode, Ornstein rattles off the drawbacks and benefits of proceeding through a select committee created by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an executive order by President Joe Biden, or a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland's Justice Department.

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On the night of Jan. 16, 2017, a Minneapolis mother's then-12-year-old child lapsed into a mental health crisis that left her and family feeling unsafe. She placed an emergency call, seeking help.

Instead, she says, she got Derek Chauvin.

"I felt afraid for my life, and certainly for my kid's life at that moment, because of the way that [Chauvin] was responding to my words," the mother, Amy Coughlin, told Law&Crime exclusively on the latest episode of the podcast "Objections: With Adam Klasfeld."

Revealed on the anniversary of George Floyd's death, Chauvin's brush with Coughlin and her child fell months before the officer allegedly brutalized another teenager, whose case formed the basis of a separate civil rights prosecution of the now-convicted murderer.

Like Floyd, the 14-year-old in the federal case allegedly could not breathe because Chauvin put him in the prone position in September 2017.

Coughlin claims the same thing happened to her 12-year-old, mere months earlier.

"He had placed his knee on his back and close to his neck, if not on his neck," Coughlin said in the interview. "At that point, my child was just screaming 'Mom,' screaming. And I was pleading, 'Please. He's sick. Please. He's not resisting. You're hurting him. Please, get off of him. Please, let him up.'"

Her family's story—told for the first time on this episode—powerfully speaks to an ongoing national conversation about mental health and policing.

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In the wake of a cyber attack last week that disrupted operations of a 5,500-mile Colonial Pipeline, the infrastructure reportedly supplying nearly half of the fuel for the East Coast of the United States had to shut down, but former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted that the suspected perpetrator—the Russian-based criminal group, DarkSide—pulled off a fairly "rudimentary" hack.

“Imagine if there was a sophisticated nation state actor that decided to pull out all the stops and defeat sophisticated security countermeasures, we'd be in big trouble,” Figluizzi, a national security contributor for NBC News, noted on the latest episode of Law&Crime’s “Objections.”

With a simple ransomware attack, DarkSide reportedly got the pipeline owner to cough up $5 million in extortion money, but not before its attack sparked shortages at gas stations throughout the region as panicked consumers purchased fuel that they feared would run dry.

Having led the bureau’s counterintelligence division and served as an agent for 25 years, Figliuzzi warned that is just an example of what could happen.

“The dirty little secret is, the nation states are already telling us they can do this,” Figliuzzi said. “Whether it's China, Iran, North Korea or Russia, we have seen them peek into some of the scariest places you can imagine—hydroelectric dams, power grids, traffic, air traffic control, 911 systems, credit card payment systems, you name it. They have waved ‘Hello,’ in those networks.”

Figliuzzi, author of “The FBI Way,” is the host of the upcoming podcast “The Bureau.”

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Over the course of 28 years in courts across the world, litigation over drilling by Chevron's predecessor Texaco in the Ecuadorean rainforest has taken countless surprising turns, but perhaps none so unusual as the ongoing criminal trial of their archnemisis: environmental lawyer Steven Donziger.

"We kind of laugh about this on our legal team, but I'm probably the only lawyer in America ever to really be begging to be prosecuted by the DOJ criminally," Donziger quipped during a Zoom interview taped days before his criminal trial in Manhattan Federal Court.

On the latest episode of the Law&Crime podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Donziger and one of his most high-profile supporters, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), explain to the show's host why they are both asking for the Department of Justice's intervention in the criminal case.

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The day that authorities executed a search warrant at his Manhattan apartment, Rudy Giuliani appeared uncharacteristically quiet about the development, but the sometime Donald Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor broke that silence in written and televised broadsides against prosecutors the next day.

"Rudy would know as well as anybody that the first piece of advice that any criminal defendant, suspect, subject of a search warrant should take or receive is 'Shut up,'" CNN's senior legal analyst Elie Honig says on this podcast. "Rudy: Not the shutting up type."

A former Assistant U.S. Attorney inside the Southern District of New York, Honig worked as a prosecutor in the same federal jurisdiction that reportedly has Giuliani in its crosshairs. Giuliani led the Southern District as a U.S. Attorney between 1983 and 1989, decades before Honig's tenure there.

In the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: With Adam Klasfeld," Honig charts Giuliani's trajectory from leader to reported target of the U.S. Attorney's Office for SDNY, affectionately nicknamed the "Sovereign District" for its history of independence. Honig is also the author of the soon-to-be-released book "Hatchet Man" on Attorney General Bill Barr and the host of the podcast "Third Degree."

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Guests discuss two history-making events of the past week: Emmett Till's cousin Deborah Watts talks about the significance of Derek Chauvin's murder convictions, and scholar Ömer Taşpınar unpacks the significance of President Joe Biden recognizing the Armenian genocide.

At a press conference following the Chauvin verdict, Philonise Floyd invoked the memory of 14-year-old Till—whose kidnapping, torture, and lynching animated the civil rights movement—by calling him the "first George Floyd."

Watts, the co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, welcomed that comparison.

"We had spent some time together a few days before that," Watts recalled in an interview. "And I believe that just in sharing that bond, we were able to embrace and just understand each other's journey and pain, in sharing the story of Emmett Till."

She talks on the show about Till, Floyd, lynching and her foundation's push to prosecute the 66-year-old case.

Taşpınar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “What the West Is Getting Wrong about the Middle East,” explains why Turkey resists accepting the Armenian genocide—and why the United States has been so slow to officially recognize it.

Listeners can learn more about the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation here at https://emmetttilllegacyfoundation.com.

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