Sorting Out the Courts: The Good, the Bad, the Unknown
Sept. 24, 2024
Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell
Guest(s): Jeff Childers
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 9/24/24. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, good afternoon and welcome to another Stand in the Gap today. I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. I remember hearing a decade ago the phrase we’re now living in a litigious generation. To be honest, I didn’t fully comprehend what that meant. Yet today most Americans fully see the ramifications of that idea. The courts in our judicial system has become a quagmire of accusations, financial encumbrance, complete wasting of precious resources and the blackening of personal reputation. Whether you’re guilty or not, we’ve added a new word to our vocabulary, Lawfare. This is the weaponizing of the legal system, whether laws have been passed or not to entrap and punish political opponents, and trust me, it’s not just a political realm. For example, this past year we saw an 80-year-old grandmother in prison for simply praying in front of an abortion clinic.
Jamie Mitchell: It’s hard to keep up with all of it. Our friend Jeff Childers from Coffee and Covid is with us again today, and we’re going to attempt to sort out what is happening in the courts and give legal perspective to some of the higher profile cases, but also how all of this is affecting us as it’s been said many times in recent days. If they can do it to the rich and powerful, they will certainly come after the common man with greater ease. With all that said, Jeff Childers, welcome back my friend to Stand in the Gap.
Jeff Childers: Thanks, Jamie. It’s great to be here. Definitely one of my favorite speaking venues.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, Jeff, we love having you and you’re so insightful and much of what we’re going to talk about today. I have read annotations from Coffee and Covid, and when I put this program together a few weeks ago, I didn’t realize all that we were going to be faced with today, but as a lawyer and someone who I have said is a cultural investigator, this rise of law fair must be alarming to you. Jeff, what is happening and how has this become so prevalent in our culture today?
Jeff Childers: Jamie? One thing that I don’t think people realize is where that term came from. The term Lawfare first appeared in common parlance back in 2001, and this will surprise you. It appeared in a DOD memo and it was written by a general who proposed using legal cases, mostly international ones, but also within other countries instead of kinetic military action to win wars. So it’s actually a military term, but we’re all, yeah, and we’re used to it now because the intersection of politics and the law and what law fair means is literally weaponizing the legal system.
Jamie Mitchell: Jeff,
Jeff Childers: Go ahead.
Jamie Mitchell: Go ahead. Go ahead. Finish up. I’m sorry.
Jeff Childers: Yeah, and it exploded because politics has exploded. I think that Lawfare has been sort of a common tool, especially of the left, and just think about the effect that ACL use had over the last 20 or 30 years. Roe versus Wade, you could say was Lawfare, but when Trump became president, it was like all the restraint that the sides had been exercising was lifted. It was like they’re not thinking about how this might boomerang on them. They’ve gone all out, and so it is alarming.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, talking about President Trump, some of the court cases are the ones that have been leveled against Tim. Jeff, where are we at in these cases and how are they affecting the November elections that are right around the corner from us?
Jeff Childers: So your question’s got two parts. There’s a legal part and a political part. So on the legal side, basically everything in the pending Trump cases has been put in cold storage until after the election. Trump’s lawyers heroically have managed to beat back every single case so that nothing substantial is going to happen before the elections. In the one case where he was convicted, that’s that crazy New York case where he was convicted of his accountant writing the wrong thing on a check stub and calling a payment to his lawyer a legal expense, but he was convicted of that one and was set to be sentenced this month, but that got pushed back till December, so that’s the only one where any kind of resolution is even close. The other cases like the classified documents case down in South Florida where they raided Mar-a-Lago, that one was dismissed and now the DOJ is appealing it. So that appeal will take a year at least.
Jeff Childers: I’m sure you’re familiar with the hilarious antics of Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis, and that is in the weeds at least and probably melting down if it’s not going nowhere fast. The other two cases are hamstrung by the Supreme Court’s new ruling on presidential immunity, and so they basically have to start over using the new Supreme Court rubric. So Trump, as far as on the legal side, he’s sitting pretty good. We’ll have to see what the New York judge does in December, but if he wins the election, there’s no chance of prison because how is the president supposed to do his job if he’s in prison? So that’s not going to happen,
Jamie Mitchell: And you would probably say that most of these cases have been to try to trip him up and to just distract him. I guess you’re going to answer the political part of it. Now,
Jeff Childers: To summarize it, every single Trump case is based on a novel use of longstanding law that’s never been applied to anyone that way before. So that’s what they’re doing to Trump. Now politically, you don’t even hear the tired refrain of Trump being a felon anymore. That was a big part of the Democrat campaign at the beginning of the year, and they’ve stopped saying that. Now, just think about what that means. What it means is it’s totally backfired on them with certain demographics. Trump is more popular than ever because of his encounters with the legal system. So you would think that would make them reconsider the strategy, but they haven’t.
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah, Hey, we’re supposed to be a nation of laws, yet what’s happened when the law turns against Jew? That’s what we’re talking about today on Stand In the Gap. When we come back from our break, Jeff and I are going to discuss the courts and federal regulations that threatens our kids in schools. If you’re a parent, you want to listen as we continue sorting out the courts here at Stand In the Gap today. Well welcome back. We’re discussing with Jeff Childers, a lawyer, but most notable his daily email that I just finished reading a few minutes ago. Coffee and Covid. We’re talking about what’s happening in the courts today and how the judicial system has gone wild. Jeff, I want to discuss with you an issue probably many of our listeners have missed but could be devastating for their children or their grandchildren, and it’s the matter of Title IX and a recent attempt by the Biden administration to rewrite and reinterpret and reapply this law and use it to silence or punish individuals, especially students and children. Can you explain the situation and what the Harris Biden White House is trying to sneak through using Title ix?
Jeff Childers: Sure. As you probably know, title IX was originally passed in 1972 and signed in the law by President Richard Nixon, and at the time it was designed to ensure that women’s sports got as much attention as men’s sports did in our colleges. And so there was some controversy about that at the time, but nothing compared to the controversy that we have now. The new proposed rules issued by the Biden administration attempt to essentially rewrite Title IX to make it into a set of woke anti-male laws, and there’s almost 200 pages of new rules, but the two I think that get the most press are basically redefining the gender protections in Title IX to include sexual identity and not just biological gender. So instead of protecting women’s sports, they want to protect trans sports, and this would include male students being required by law to have entrance to women’s dressing rooms and to play on their sports teams and things like that. But the other part, even maybe more insidious is they want to roll back due process protections that male students have clawed for themselves when they’re accused of sexual assault on campus. So the new Title IX rules want to make it into a kangaroo court where male students can’t defend themselves against those claims. Those are just two, maybe the two most prominent ones, but all of it’s awful,
Jamie Mitchell: And if I understand it in layman terms, if there are students who do not like some of the things being pushed, let’s say with the transgender issue and sports, and as we have seen things like with Riley Gaines and others that have been stepping up and speaking out and saying that men should not be participating in women’s sports, men should not be in the locker room of women even though they say they’re on the team and so on and so forth. If some of these students stand up and protest this and speak against it, Jeff, they’re labeling them as discrimination issues and they could get in trouble for just voicing their complaints.
Jeff Childers: So the redefinition would expand all of the sexual harassment law on campus that has been developed over the last 40 years to include criticism of trans or maybe even just use of the wrong pronouns. And so as you said, those types of conduct would be designated as sexual harassment and students will be put into the disciplinary process that has been built for decades.
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah, some states have filed and won against the administration. However, in the states that didn’t attach themselves to those cases, they either must adopt it or they have the option to adopt it. And I know this is true because I live in North Carolina and our local school board just voted to make these new administration regulations a part of our local school system. How is that working and what can be done,
Jeff Childers: As you said? Currently where we stand is the new Title IX rules have been enjoined that is temporarily stopped by the courts in 26 different states, so just over half some states didn’t join the litigation and therefore weren’t included in those injunctions. I will say there’s a little asterisk though, and the asterisk is that Moms for Liberty joined and any parent who’s a member of Moms for Liberty as of the time of the injunction, their kids would be included. So it is a little too late for this round, but I would encourage parents who are concerned about this kind of thing to join Moms for Liberty.
Jamie Mitchell: And the likelihood, Jeff, those other states that didn’t join it was probably because they had Democratic attorney generals who decided not to jump in with the rest of the Attorney generals that sued the administration. Isn’t that probably how that worked out?
Jeff Childers: That’s a hundred percent correct.
Jamie Mitchell: Wow. Jeff, as I’ve read Coffee and Covid and numbers of times, you have mentioned issues of parents going through some very difficult times with their schools, having lawsuits, those kinds of things. What’s the latest on the of parents’ rights against schools and are you seeing anything? Are there any notable cases out there that our listeners should be aware of?
Jeff Childers: It seems like the action in parents’ rights is now focused on what I would call pornographic materials in the schools. So there’s a huge First Amendment fight going on, and there’s some interesting arguments in there about whether and to what degree children enjoy First Amendment access to offensive materials, and there’s not an easy answer to that, but at bottom, kids don’t enjoy the full range of constitutional privileges that adults do. There’s also the issue of how much delegated parental authority schools have over kids. Historically, we’ve allowed schools to exercise a lot of delegated parental authority, so while the kids are in their custody, they basically act as parents. I think that a lot of Americans are realizing that the people who are running our educational system right now, you wouldn’t trust them to babysit your kids for an hour, much less give them to them eight hours a day.
Jeff Childers: So there’s a sea change happening. It’s quiet behind the scenes. The corporate media doesn’t report about it, but there’s a big battle happening over how much authority schools have or should have over kids. And if you want an example, it’s the fights that are taking place over, for example, whether teachers are required to let parents know if kids tell the teachers they want to change their gender. And so in some states like California, the states are taking the position that the school doesn’t have to tell the parents and that they can even help the child transition without the parent’s knowledge. That’s an outlier. That level of authority is not gripping in most of the rest of the country. But that’s the battle line right now.
Jamie Mitchell: And what’s fascinating, if you just look at the San Francisco School system and the Minneapolis school system, you will see the most rank liberal anti parent regulations and laws applied to any school systems in the country. And what’s fascinating is some of our presidential political candidates come from those two outrageously rank liberal cities. It’s absolutely amazing what we’re seeing happen across the landscape. Jeff, we got about 30 seconds before our break going back to this regulation. The real problem is that these aren’t laws, these are regulations, and we’ve kind of gotten away from the whole legislative process of bringing laws into the courts
Jeff Childers: And this term, the Supreme Court issued some incredible decisions rolling back agency powers to issue those kinds of regulations that as you’ve properly pointed out, should be debated by Congress and passed as laws. If they’re going to happen,
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah, it’s all upside down, and the problem is that they are using these regulations to whip us and control us and put us in our place. Friends, it’s not just the laws that are being used. The government in stealth fashion with unelected agencies is causing havoc on our citizenry when we come back. Here’s a question everybody’s asking, will Hunter Biden or anybody in government ever go to jail? People ask me that all the time when you come back. Jeff and I are going to debate that issue here on Standing the Gap today. Well, welcome back. We’re talking with Jeff Childers from Coffee and Covid considering what’s happening in the courts and some of the high profile cases and issues that affect us and what we need to know both as citizens and Christians. So here it comes, Jeff, the name Hunter Biden, it’s been widely spoken in the last few years. He’s the son of the sitting president. He has a myriad of personal problems and assorted past, and he became famous when his laptop was left at a repair shop and the contents of that laptop was filled with all kinds of criminal and perverted evidence. He has faced some major legal issues. What is he facing right now is his father implicated and where are his cases as of today?
Jeff Childers: So what’s most remarkable about the Hunter Biden prosecutions is not what he’s been convicted of and charged with, but what he hasn’t been charged with, which is anything relating to that laptop, all the crimes that were exposed there. Instead, there are two cases that were brought against Hunter. The first was for a firearms violation alleging that he completed his federal firearms form wrong and didn’t check the box that says he was using and addicted to drugs as ironic and darkly hilarious as that is. A jury found him guilty and convicted him. He hasn’t been sentenced and his sentencing has been moved till after the election, just like Trumps. In the other case, maybe slightly more interesting, hunter was charged with tax evasion, the same thing they got Al Capone for, and instead of taking that to trial virtually the day before the trial was supposed to start, hunter pled guilty. I don’t think it’s been scheduled yet, or it may have just recently been, and I’m not aware of it, but I don’t think there’s a sentencing hearing on the books. So those are the two. There’s still discussion over whether Joe Biden might pardon Hunter before he leaves office, and that’s anybody’s guess. I think if I had to bet on it, I would bet that Biden does pardon him.
Jamie Mitchell: Now, there are other charges that are pending out there about being an agent for a foreign government, and then even some of his charges, the Justice Department let lapse, so it went outside of how long they could wait to charge him. I think the American people see that, Jeff, and they get so frustrated with our legal system and I hear from everybody, no one ever goes to jail. And even more recent, especially in light of the attempts of the assassination of President Trump, no one ever gets fired. And so for the common man, we get sent to prison or we get fired for the most minor offenses. Is there ever going to be justice in some of these high profile cases, profile cases?
Jeff Childers: Yeah, so you touch on a whole bunch of issues there. People who have access to resources have access to defenses that you and I don’t have, right? And we don’t need to look at the recent stuff. Go back to OJ and OJ paid for a vigorous defense and he got it and he was not convicted of murder, but he was found civilly liable in a subsequent civil case. I would point out before we just throw our hands up and think nothing ever happens. I would point out Bob Menendez, the senator who’s been convicted of corruption recently, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, is under investigation by the DOJ for in a wide ranging corruption case, and ironically, he’s been sued by several women under the same law that they passed to get Trump In a sort of very ironic boomerang effect, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, and I don’t know whether you believe he died in prison or not, but he was taken off the board.
Jeff Childers: Harvey Weinstein is sitting in prison right now, and I’m sure you heard about Sean Diddy Combs arrest last week. Now, all that being said, I think people accurately perceive a two tier justice system when the DOJ investigates soccer moms for domestic terrorism because they criticize the school board. And the difference between the January 6th prosecutions over 1500 convicted so far versus the near lack of any prosecutions in the summer 2020 riots cases, those are fair complaints I think, about how poorly this administration’s justice department is working. So it’s a mixed bag. Government officials enjoy immunity. There was a lot of discussion in the media about presidential immunity, which had never been defined by the courts, but every day government officials enjoy something called qualified immunity, which makes it very difficult to prosecute them for crimes. And on the one hand, you don’t want political enemies filing criminal charges against people they don’t like in government every time you turn around. But on the other hand, when you have an out of control government like we have right now, a little bit more accountability would be welcome.
Jamie Mitchell: Jeff, we got a few minutes left here. I want to jump into something that we hadn’t necessarily planned for, but I think you probably address it for our people and give us a little bit of a background and a little context of what’s happening. You talk about not trusting government. Since planning this program, we have seen a second possible attempt assassination upon Trump, but more so now has opened up this whole conundrum of the FBI and Secret Service and their LAX in really the protection duties that they have and some of the questions and some of the concerns. Where are we at with that? Again, how do we hold agencies like that accountable for failures? I don’t think they have yet to fire anybody in the Secret Service for the first attempt.
Jeff Childers: So the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, which are all up to their necks and potential liability for the failures to protect President Trump, all of those agencies are supervised by the executive branch, which means Joe Biden. And so right away you can see the problem, and this situation has come about because for two reasons. One, the failures relate to the political opponent of the sitting president, and so there’s a built-in conflict of interest there. I don’t think that’s happened before. And so our system isn’t really designed with those kinds of thorny problems in mind. It’s going to be ultimately up to the Congress, I think to bring any accountability through their oversight. But that’s going to take a long time. So it’s not a terrific situation.
Jamie Mitchell: The bigger problem is when you start to dig deeper into some of the people who are involved in the FBI and the Secret Service, when you find out some of their political alliances and their backgrounds and even statements they have made, they’re very anti-Trump, which again puts a cloud over this whole situation. One in particular is the FBI agent who is supposed to be investigating the second attempt. He had to remove all his anti-Trump information from his social media to even continue on with the FBI and get a promotion to be where he is at. And so it is such a dicey thing, but it comes back to this whole thing, Jeff, of accountability and the common person, the person who’s sitting at home listening to this feeling so frustrated that no one ever gets held accountable.
Jeff Childers: I can’t blame them for feeling that way. Like I said, especially lately with this over the top politicized environment that we find ourselves in, where it seems like all the decisions that are being made are short term decisions and not where the officials aren’t thinking about what the downstream consequences are going to be like, what happens if the other party or when the other party gets into power now that they’ve normalized the highly politicized way they’re investigating and handling these cases. Is that fair for both sides?
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah. Well, beloved, like you, I’m very disappointed that we can never hold people accountable. That’s why what we say elections have consequences yet even when we elect certain people, there’s not this appetite to apply justice equally. When we return in our final segment, I want to talk to Jeff about his sweet spot and the legal issues surrounding the pandemic and if there are any new news when it comes to unwinding the Covid debacle. Well, our guest today has been Jeff Childers from Coffee and Covid. Jeff, how many people continue to follow your informational and may I say hilarious? Look at the news on that daily basis, and how can people start receiving this excellent cultural investigational tool?
Jeff Childers: Yeah, invite anybody who wants a daily dose of essential news and maybe a little bit of sarcasm sprinkled in there to just go to our website, www.coffeeandcovid.com. That’s coffee, a ND covid, and they can sign up. It’s free. It’s a substack, so don’t be discouraged by the first couple paid options. There’s a free one down there at the end, and we’d love to have them on board.
Jamie Mitchell: How many people are getting your newsletter each day now?
Jeff Childers: Officially, almost 200,000. But I know for a fact that it’s republished all over the place. It reaches a ton. I’m amazed at how many people we have reading.
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah, it is amazing. I talk with friends and I just drop the last name shoulders and they look at me and say, coffee and covid. It’s really an interesting thing, Jeff, many of us found you and began reading because of Covid and the craziness we encountered. It’s now been four years. We’ve learned a lot about the vaccines, about what we were told about mandates thrusted upon us. Have there been any legal battles coming because of Covid? And where are we at is being held accountable? Give us a quick update on where everything stands with Covid.
Jeff Childers: Oh yeah, there’s tons of stuff going on, Jamie, and I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it. This thing is not going to be over until we have achieved accountability and gotten justice. What happened to America is unforgivable and we will forgive it, but we’re not going to forget it. And so just to give your audience a little bit of a taste of what’s going on, starting with the economic side, the company Moderna, whose only product was the Covid shot, is slowly going out of business. They have so far been unable to translate even with all the billions and billions that they earned in taxpayer money, they haven’t been able to translate that into any other successful product. Florida just last week or maybe a week before, issued a guidance against anybody taking the mRNA Covid shots. So officially in one of the largest states in the country with a huge state health department is advising against them.
Jeff Childers: So that’s taken years to achieve, but we’ve done it. I’m sure your listeners know that Robert Kennedy, who anti-vaccine positions are well known, is working with the Trump campaign and is likely to be in the Trump administration and the lawsuits continue. My firm filed a lawsuit last month against the federal government challenging the Prep Act, which is the law that provides legal liability immunity to companies like Pfizer and Moderna preventing people from suing them for injuries. And I feel very strong about our case. I think that we can prove that that statute is unconstitutional and we’re just getting started. So I would say standby.
Jamie Mitchell: Well, the other thing I just read the other day on coffee and Covid was another government official has been highlighted in regards to putting mandates and putting all kinds of regulations upon Americans, but then basically living the way they want to leave the old rules for thee, but not for me, kind of a thing, Jeff. It’s almost weekly. We see more hypocrisy coming from the people who use covid as a weapon.
Jeff Childers: And these are the supposed experts in which we were supposed to put our blind trust. And for me, Jamie, one of the things that has been forgotten in this whole conversation, especially the conversation about trusting the science as they say, is that trust is something that’s earned, not something that can be purchased or just handed out. So it was their responsibility to earn our trust, and they did not earn our trust. In fact, they did the exact opposite. And now we’re finding out downstream, as in the case that you just mentioned, these people are not trustworthy at all. They’re horrible people. This gentleman that you referred to, we won’t bandy his name today, but senior science advisor who is responsible for coming up with some of the harshest and most destructive mandates in the country is a sex pervert and a drug addict. And he was at the time, and yet he’s still being referred to as some kind of scientific expert. And I think we need to get back to some basic morality and an understanding that these people have to earn our trust. We are not required to give it to them.
Jamie Mitchell: Fascinating. Watching the former governor of New York Cuomo in Congress about a week ago, and him fumbling all over himself to justify what he did with the nursing homes. I couldn’t help but think, here’s a name to bring up that kind of disappeared is our beloved Dr. Fauci going to see accountability anytime soon, Jeff.
Jeff Childers: Jeff? Well, that was a little harder because he thought he’s getting up there and it takes time. I talk about when people ask me about accountability, I point out to them how long it took to start winning the tobacco cases where it was proved that big tobacco conspired to get kids addicted, so they’d be lifelong customers, but it probably took 10 or 20 years before that really got going because the tobacco companies are well funded and they have access to lots of defenses. In this case, our opponents are even bigger and more well-funded than the tobacco companies. It’s the government itself. So we have to be patient. But having said that, I do think it’s going to happen much faster than the tobacco justice was achieved. I do believe that
Jamie Mitchell: Jeff, we see RFK Jr. Who they’re talking about food and eating healthy and living healthy, but his thing has been vaccines and the whole vaccine industry. He’s now involved with the Trump campaign, and you wrote even as this morning in your newsletter, interesting. Trump was asked about the vaccine. We have about 30 seconds. What did you take away from that answer that he gave?
Jeff Childers: Yeah, I think there were two points that really stood out. I think he was more honest about the vaccines than he’s ever been. First of all, he didn’t argue about whether the vaccines might be damaging to people. So I think that’s big. And then he said, and this is really, really fascinating. He said that there are studies being done and we’re going to know for sure within 12 months. So what does he know something is coming. And then he pointed out that Democrats love the vaccines and so he’s got to walk a line.
Jamie Mitchell: Yeah, Jeff, this has been a blessing to us. I could talk to you forever. I want to encourage you to go get on the Coffee and Covid list. We’re talking about the courts. Keep your eye on the news, keep listening, and live and lead with courage. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you, Jeff Childers.
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