Trump's Aggressive Election Strategy

0:00Some people treat Chachy PT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. Chachy PT work is a new way of working in Chachy PT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachy PT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chachypt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about, keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help, with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business. Building a dream business?

1:03Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at mastercard.com slash small business. If you listen to financial news, you know a lot of time to spend thinking about what's next. The next opportunity, the next investment, the next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next. It's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at cinfin.com. This is Bloomberg Law with June Grasso from Bloomberg Radio. You say the third time's a charm? Well, maybe this latest appeal to the Supreme Court

2:03will be the final word on the maps Missouri will use in the midterm. The dispute over a new map drawn to help Republicans gain a seat in the pivotal midterms has triggered confusion and uncertainty for more than a million potential voters who could be shuffled among districts. It comes amid crucial administrative deadlines. Election officials in Missouri have already started mailing ballots to military personnel and other voters outside the country. In two separate rulings this month, the Supreme Court has told Missouri it must use its old map, not the new gerrymandered map drawn up by Republicans. But on Monday, a three-judge panel of the eighth circuit Court of Appeals said the Constitution requires that the state use the same voting map in November that it used during the primary elections. And now the case is back at the Supreme Court. Joining me is Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights in the rule of law at the campaign

3:05legal center. Danielle Missouri's redistricting battle has been among the longest and most complex in the roughly dozen states that have sought to change their House districts over the past year. Explain why it's back at the Supreme Court once again. That's a great question. I think it's because some of the plaintiffs in the Missouri case can't quite get the hint from the Supreme Court and not seem to be the case I think for the eighth circuit as well. So twice as has been before the Supreme Court already and then the Supreme Court has said no, we have to follow what the Missouri Supreme Court has said about the redistricting and what map needs to be used. But notwithstanding those two prior orders from the Supreme Court, the eighth circuit, nonetheless ruled in favor of plaintiffs that are trying to seek the use of a map that the Missouri Supreme Court has said cannot be used. And under those circumstances that you'll have to go back to the Supreme Court to correct that error. So the Supreme Court ordered Missouri to

4:10use its old map in the upcoming midterm elections. However, during the primaries, Missouri used the new map which was drawn up to give Republicans an advantage. So they're using a map with different lines from that used when voters went to the polls for the primaries that does seem like it might cause some problems. And the eighth circuit said it's unconstitutional. Right, but I would just say in this context, I think the Supreme Court has already been clear. You know, these are not new facts. The issue was already brought to the Supreme Court of whether or not as the Missouri Supreme Court's order could be evaded and the answer was no. And so under those circumstances, I wouldn't expect that to be a change in the Supreme Court's position. And also the ballots have been mailed already, right, to overseas and military voters. Exactly. The, you know, is far too late to change things. The election is underway and the court, the Supreme Court has already spoken twice. Let's turn now to some of the problems that seem

5:15to be arising ahead of the election as President Trump is trying to assert greater federal control over the elections. And the Justice Department is employing an aggressive strategy that includes suing states for voter records, investigating election officials and even seizing ballots in some states. And this is setting off alarm bells as to what might happen on election day. And the NAACP is suing over what it says is a Trump administration plan to station arm federal agents near voting locations. The federal government has sent monitors to election sites before. Tell us what normally happens. Yeah, there's been a long standing federal observer policy and program from the Department of Justice as well as congressional observers, but that's all they are. They are observers. They cannot interfere. They cannot even enter polling places unless they're

6:18invited. They have to stand outside. And so it is not the case that observers can interfere with our elections in any way. So that's a long standing practice. And of course, I would expect there to be observers at the polls this year, the same way that they have always been. Of course, there have been, you know, concerning and fear mongering statements from members of the administration suggesting perhaps more nefarious motives that the polls by federal officials, but their federal law is actually very clear. There's a statute that says that you cannot send federal armed officials to the polls point blank. That is the law. There are no ifs ands or buts to that law. And so there is no reason for there to be federal armed officials at the polls. Have the Justice Department or FBI officials hinted that they might be armed? Well, I mean, I think that that is the image that is

7:20evoked by FBI officers, ICE and the like is that those are typically law enforcement that are armed officials. But the point is that there is no kind of military or law enforcement federal law enforcement permitted at the polls. In fact, many states don't even allow state law enforcement to be at the polls except for under very limited circumstances. Because of course voters should feel at ease at the polls and there are some communities that feel very ill at ease when law enforcement is present. So the NAACP is one of the groups that's suing over this plan to place armed federal agents at the polls. So I mean, what can they hope to get before an election that would stop that from happening? Yeah, I think that groups like the NAACP are putting down a marker to make it very clear in the litigation that the law stands, that the law is clear. And that federal law enforcement will not be tolerated at the polls and that the civic engagement community,

8:23the civil rights community has voters back. And so, you know, we'll see how that litigation plays out and whether or not there will be any kind of preliminary relief thought there. But one way or another, it lays down a very clear marker. This is the law and we will not tolerate it to be violated. I'm also wondering, so if despite this, armed agents end up at the polls, what happens at the polls? Because at that point, you have disruption. I'm sure you have some voters who are intimidated already. What happens? The state runs to court or the county runs to court and tries to get an order? Yeah, I first, I just want to assure listeners that we don't have any reason to believe that there is going to be kind of forms of law enforcement at the polls. I expect 2026 elections to go the way the voters normally experience their elections. Like, if they go to the polls, they meet their friendly election officials, they get their sticker and they go along their merry way. But, you know,

9:26as this law suit kind of demonstrates, civic engagement communities are prepared for every eventuality and to protect voters. So what does that look like? Okay, so if law enforcement appears improperly as the polls, voters are going to have community members there with them. They can just go ahead and vote, right? They're going to move forward with their day. They're going to lawfully cast their ballot and move on. And in the meanwhile, there will be very prompt legal action. And I would imagine that any such a tense at deployments would be very quickly cut off. I mentioned the head of the Civil Rights Division before, Harmeet Dillon. Historically, the Justice Department has focused on addressing racial discrimination, language and disability access at polls and other barriers to voting under President Trump that's changed. And now you have the department suing more than two dozen states for their voter

10:30roles. Explain why they want those roles. Yeah, the Department of Justice has been on a mission to try to hoover up all of Americans voter data across the entire country, including social security numbers, drivers, license numbers, voter history. There's just no reason for the Department of Justice to do that. There is no lawful basis for the Department of Justice to do that. And it raises both concerns about their motives as well as the privacy of that data for American voters. And the good news is that they have been unsuccessful. Red and blue states alike have pushed back and they have been unanimous in their victories thus far in the courts and kind of pushing back on those attempts to hoover up American voter data. Does this search for state voter roles have anything to do with the case before the Supreme Court where we're waiting for the court to make a decision about the Trump administration's use of the save database?

11:31Yes and no, I would say. Technically no. And then the Department of Justice has at times suggested that they are unrelated. But at the same time, we actually do know from reporting that the Department of Justice did appear to be sharing that data with Department of Homeland Security and using this so-called save database to try to match voters to other federal data. And what's the district court and the DC Circuit found in that case is that that entire process was unlawful, violated the Privacy Act. And it had all sorts of both security and accuracy concern. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, we'll talk about how state election officials and county officials are trying to game out what might happen, the worst case scenarios during the midterm elections. I'm June Grasso and you're listening to Bloomberg. Some people treat Chachi PT like some kind of smart search engine and some use it to get work done. Chachi PT work is a new

12:37way of working in Chachi PT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachi PT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chachipt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. You already know how AI is changing how every day work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage built for this new era. Welcome to a Gentegrévenu. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock,

13:40built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Grenola, Modo, and Edge. Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent at CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Fix up leads at 2am, catches renewals before they slip, hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash ihard. That's adio.com slash ihard. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem. Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odo for free at oduo.com. That's oduo.com.

14:52While the Constitution largely puts states in charge of elections, President Trump has sought to reach, and, to virtually every corner of the voting process, as he boosts baseless accusations of widespread fraud, and he's empowered agencies like the Justice Department to pursue extraordinary legal tactics to assert greater federal control over U.S. elections. I've been talking to Daniel Lang, Vice President for Voting Rights in the Rule of Law at the Campaign Legal Center. Harmeet Dillon, who's the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, warned of criminal investigations of state and local election officials for failing to clean up voter roles. Sending letters to top election officials nationwide, I mean, is there a reason for her warning? This is intimidation. I'm nothing more. If you'll remember back at the beginning of the year, when there was that huge ice surge in Minneapolis, the Department of Justice was trying to

15:56kind of trade on, oh, perhaps we will pull back on our ice surge if you will give us this data or information that we want about voters, which just shows the kind of length of intimidation and kind of sugary that the Department of Justice has been willing to engage in when it comes to their mission to undermine our elections. So I see those letters of kind of trying to threaten election officials into doing their bidding as just another element in that scheme. Election officials have regular list maintenance processes that they go through year round. They are constantly cleaning their roles to make sure that people who pass away or move or remove and that everybody who's newly registered gets registered. That's their job and they know how to do it well. I will say the one time that they're not doing it, they're not doing kind of removal list maintenance is right now. In the 90 days before a federal election, it's actually illegal

16:56to engage in systematic list maintenance. So election officials have already gone through all those processes in a timely manner so that they could pause them in the run-up to the election so that nobody get improperly removed without the ability to kind of fix it before the election. Every investigation, et cetera, has shown that the incidence of non-citizens voting is very, very low. But we had that disclosure in New Jersey of the state software error that registered several thousand non-citizens in 2023 and 2024, including several hundred who ended up voting. And I wonder how much that is giving credence to Trump's continuing claims of fraud and non-citizens voting. Well, the administration has been on a consistent method unsupported by the fact for the evidence for a long time while predating this particular data point about New Jersey,

17:59telling American spies about the integrity of our election. And so I think they would tell those lies under any circumstances that there's a mission of the administration to undermine our election. What happened in New Jersey was actually an example of where there are errors, how the system should work. They found the errors, they fixed them, they resolved it. And it's important to note here that that was a data issue. It was not a question of voters trying to engage in subterfuge. These were individuals who had actually disclosed their citizenship status when they got their driver's license. And the agency made an error, a data error. So nothing in a kind of new restrictions on voting or the like would have prevented that. It was a human data error. And we caught it and we fixed it. And not exactly what should happen. California's AG Rob Bonta told Bloomberg recently that Democratic state officials are gaming out

19:04worst case scenarios for November, including if federal agents show up to seize ballots. What happens if federal agents come to try to seize ballots? Here's what I'll say. I think our elections are going to run really well in 2026. The federal government doesn't have power over running our elections. Their elections are run by thousands of individual jurisdictions with their own power over the elections and election materials. I also think it's right for data officials to be gaming out worst case scenarios because of course this administration has engaged in a lot of really dangerous threats. It has engaged in unprecedented activities like going to seize the ballot materials in Fulton County, Georgia. And what I would expect is that data officials will be very well prepared to push back on those to immediately speak return of those materials to make sure that we have

20:04backup data where possible to verify our election results. And so I am, you know, gratified. Although I very much hope it's unnecessary that data officials will have plans for every scenario. And so now as far as there have been all the, you know, the legal battles over mail-in ballots and the post office trying to impose rules on the state's submitting ballots, has that all been settled? Is that all over? Yes. The USPS rule is not going to be in place in any way, shape or form for the 2026 election. It has been enjoined by two separate district courts, the first circuit, and the Supreme Court has said we are not going to disrupt that injunction. As far as going back to the Missouri map and the congressional map situations, all this confusion over the maps and this last minute jockeying is because President

21:06Trump made that request starting with Texas to redistrict. Besides Missouri, are there any other states maps that are still in question? No, there should not be elections are underway, you know? I mean, for the reasons we talked about at the top of our discussion, Missouri also shouldn't be a question, except for the kind of unreasonable behavior, I think, of the plaintiffs in that case. And I very much hope that that's going to be put to and hopefully today. If not, you know, later this week by the Supreme Court. And so voters have really been put through the ringer this year with the three districting more. It's something that voters should not have had to face. And it is a third for there to be those race to the bottom when it comes to redistricting, when there doesn't need to be any redistricting being done mid-cycle. You know, normally we only redistrict every 10 years with new census results. This is unprecedented. But I think that we are

22:10at the end and it's time for voters to actually have their voices heard. Is the whole point of a lot of this just intimidation and to try to stop people from coming to the polls? I think that is part of the purpose, but I don't think it will work. I think that is the idea that we can kind of demoralize voters. We can scare voters. We can confuse voters. And so that will change the outcomes of an election. But I actually think American voters are a lot more resilient than that. They can kind of see through all of this mirage and see that what's really happening is that there's a lot of attention being paid to the rules of voting trying to undermine their vote because their vote is powerful. I am pretty confident that voters are going to be steadfast in making sure that their voices are heard. There's always, I don't know, is it? Always are often litigation after the elections over results. I suppose I would say often, but it's close to always if you

23:12think about a national election. There's always going to be some elections that are very close and therefore lead to some post-election litigation. Are you guys anticipating that there'll be even more this midterm? I think it's really hard to say. A lot of this will often depend on how close the races are when elections aren't that close. It doesn't really leave a lot of options for candidates to try to undermine the results. Where they are closer or where candidates are unwilling to concede to the voice of the American people, they will sometimes try to use the courses away to change the results. But I've been through a few cycles of that now and it doesn't succeed. The Justice Department is still relitigating or investigating the 2020 election. I mean, they actually seized ballots in Georgia, right? They did seize ballot materials in Georgia related to the 2020 election. That's correct. I mean, it's been litigated so many times. I can't imagine.

24:16So many times over. I can tell you that you and most Americans would prefer to not hear anything more about another investigation into an election that occurred six years ago. Oh, I'm wondering. I've been reading about concerns for the safety of election officials and election workers because in recent years, they've been subjected to more threats of harassment and violence and that some election offices have done security upgrades because of these threats. I mean, let me start by saying that I think that listeners that there's one thing they can do to help support our elections. It's the kind of your election officials say, thank you. They are doing hard work and it is a real civic duty and it's a labor of love for election officials. They serve our democracy as the front lines and they have been subject to really outrageous harassment and intimidation because of the lives that have been told to the American people about our elections.

25:20And I find that really heartbreaking. Stopping said, I do think that state level officials have worked hard to make sure that election officials have the supports that they need and we're continuing to try to provide election officials with the supports that they need. Some states have specific laws protecting against intimidation and not the place where we need to continue to pump resources. If we care about our democracy, we need to continue to pump resources into its plain administration, make sure that officials have everything they need to do their jobs safely. And do you have any advice for voters in general? It's a busy time and I think it can be really dizzying. I think the one thing I would say is that listeners are going to see a lot in the news about voting rules and challenges in the news and it will be hard to follow it all. But I think you can have states that at the end of the day, what's going to happen this November is we're going to have an election day. We're going to cast our ballot. Those ballots are going to get counted and then we're going to have results and those results

26:24are going to lead to new elected officials throughout the country. And so there's going to be a lot of dizzying fights in the short term. But voters just have to have the eye on their prize, which is just to make sure that they know what they need to do to make a plan to vote. Thanks so much for joining me today, Danielle. That's Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights in the rule of law at the campaign legal center coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. San Francisco is suing Trump's social media platform truth social for offering customers who pay $100,000 a month, priority access to the presidents and other high level officials post before they're available to the public. I'm June Grasso and you're listening to Bloomberg. Some people treat Chachy PT like some kind of smart search engine and some use it to get work done. Chachy PT work is a new way of working in Chachy PT that can take action across your

27:24apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachy PT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chachypt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans. You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage built for this new era. Welcome to a GENTIG Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP,

28:29and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like granola, modal and etched, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agentics CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Fix up leads at 2 a.m. catches renewals before they slip. Hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash ihard. That's adio.com slash ihard. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem. Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. ODO is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try ODO for free at oduo.com. That's oduo.com.

29:36San Francisco's city attorney is urging a state court to block Trump's social media platform truth social from offering customers who pay $100,000 a month, priority access to the presidents and other high-level officials post before they're available to other users. In the lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the city attorney says that Trump media and technology group is aiding and abetting Trump's violations of federal ethics and anti-corruption law and violating other federal laws that protect against insider trading. Quote, it's a pay-to-play scheme for early access to the president's market-moving government decisions. This public scheme has turned public trust into private profit. This is corruption, plain and simple. Trump media said the lawsuit fails to grasp the basic distinction between public and non-public information.

30:37Joining me is Bloomberg Law Senior Correspondent Alex Ebert. Alex, tell us more about this. Shall we call it a service? So, Trump media and through their company truth social, they've created a paid subscription program that allows early access to Trump and other senior officials post on truth social. It's called Truth API and for $100,000 a month, you get some early access to some pretty critical information if you're a trader. Think about announcements about tariffs or maybe if there's a merger happening that the government is allowing for perhaps if the government leaks the Bureau of Labor statistics a little bit early, these kind of things might pop up on truth social and these people would have first dibs at getting to see them. Is this already ongoing? Have people subscribed? This is ongoing. People have subscribed. There's been an investor call about it and the early sort of pronouncements on it are that we've seen

31:38investors interested in it. We've seen crypto firms interested in it and these are folks that really can take advantage of lightning quick actions on information to make bets in the stock market. $100,000 a month, I mean to me that's high but is that high for a service like this? Well, I'm not aware of what the market price is for a service like this but let's consider we work for Bloomberg. It is definitely more than you'd pay for a terminal purchase and the difference there between buying a terminal subscription or purchasing truth social API framework is that this is public information from public officials that they got from their public offices. And so you see lots of challenging this idea of potential trading on the information that you get from being an author. The San Francisco City Attorney is suing. Why are they suing in particular? Yeah, they're suing because they're saying this is about the haves and have nots. You're going to have a lot of investors in the world that can afford $100,000 a month to get at this information

32:42and they're saying some pension funds can't get at it people with their 401Ks. They're not going to have the same access to this quick information from Trump and other members of his cabinet that would allow them to trade as quickly and efficiently as the people that are paying into truth API. They're saying that this creates violations of California's unfair competition law. It certainly seems unethical but Trump has made billions of dollars during his presidency doing things that other presidents would never have done. I mean most other presidents don't do any business dealings during their presidency. Well, I'm not here to comment on the ethics of it but it's definitely unprecedented. In the lawsuit you see San Francisco trying to do an interesting bank shot here. They're trying to say that this program violates federal laws. It's your violation or insider trading violation. Because of that, you can sue claiming that this is an

33:47unfair business practice in California. That is different from the litigation that we're seeing out of the DC district court. There you have a couple non-profit suing saying these are constitutional violations. We're talking about people trading on their office and it's violating First Amendment, Fifth Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act of the US citizen. So what are the plaintiffs looking for in these lawsuits? Well, the two different lawsuits I believe are looking for the exact same thing which is to shut this down. The question is going to be in California, can you get some sort of injunction there that covers the state and so that matter? Can you get it to cover the entire country in the same DC? For the folks in DC, their claim is listen, we have a First Amendment right to listen. This is public information. You can't trade on it for ethics reasons but for constitutional reasons, you and not do this because when that information becomes public, it is in the public sphere. This is a public forum. You need to give

34:51this up to the public, but we need to stop the president's company from doing it. So Trump media said in a statement that the lawsuit fails to grasp the basic distinction between public and non-public information and also accused the city's attorneys of being left-wing activists. What is the Trump administration's position? The Trump administration's position is that they can do this. I think it will be really interesting to watch this litigation moving forward for a couple of reasons if we can just roll the clock. I think the first will be standing, right? Especially in the city's case, it'll be interesting to see is the court there find issues with that. I think it will be fascinating to watch if the underlying claims here get a really hard lift too because we are talking about something that's a little bit more and more if it's there in a bank that it relays better than a lot. You've seen under this unfair competition law insider trading type suits brought against some defendants, including the investment firms,

35:53but they're rare, right? So in due those cases brought against folks like Morgan Stanley and Coinbase sort of play in the same sandbox as something against a social media company where the whole idea behind is to share information. So these are sort of open questions there. And then in the district of Columbia's case, I'm going to be really interested to see how standing works there as well because if I were the Trump administration or defenders, I would be saying that there's a delay on public dissemination of information between groups and people all the time, and depending on the amount of delay here, this might be fine under the Constitution. As you write on Monday, a group of former prosecutors and federal agents filed an amicus brief in yet another case against this service in the southern district of New York. So you have this group of the amicus 53 prosecutors and law enforcement agents, right? It worked on public integrity, public corruption matters, and they're pointing to all of these

36:55concerns of the ethics that you were bringing up before, right? They're just trading on public information. This is, you know, profiting from, you know, the office. And it's not just Trump. We're talking about close from other federal officials. You've got Deputy Chiefs and Staff, Dan Cavino. You've got HHS Secretary Robert of Kennedy Jr. You've got Transportation Secretary, Sean Delphi and FBI Director Cash Patel. And at least in the DC litigation, you have Natalie Hart, Trump's executive assistant, as a defendant because she's the fat finger is behind Trump's true social posts. So if even broader than Trump when it comes to this idea of taking public information, putting it behind a paywall, at least for a limited amount of time, and extracting profits from it. I mean, this is unique, right? This has never happened before. Anything like this. This is unique. There is no precedent for it. You don't see anything in these last few. It's referencing back to anything from, you know, the times of earlier American

37:58scandals. You know, we're inside the eye of a hurricane here, you know, looking out at the combination between an aggressive social media company, just looking to monetize and compete using, you know, an owner president's post. And you're looking at liberal groups reaching out to try to stop it, you know, because they see it either as disadvantaging, there are people limiting access to public information or as a gift. So yes, this is completely unheard of. I mean, if this were not president Trump, it's something that you would expect an agency like the SEC to be investigating. You'd expect that. I think that we would run into, you know, similar issues that we saw with investigation regarding Jack Smith. And, you know, the fact that you cannot investigate a sitting president. But, you know, we also have some interesting, nesting issues there, right? Because Trump's trust, blind trust holds his ownership in this.

39:02And so I'm sure there's someone out there who can make an argument that there should be an investigation into this. But you don't have that yet. You see in California too that the underlying allegations here sort of, you know, beg for that, right? They're saying that there are violations here of, you know, securities laws, but you don't have an investigation to back that up. So the question then becomes if you don't have, you know, some sort of written in stone violation there, can you support, you know, the allegations that San Francisco is bringing? Do you know how truth social is doing as a company? Not well, according to Bloomberg's own reporting during a recent call, it sounds like there are several hundred million dollars in debt. The gist is that, you know, they're sort of floundering and this could be a way for them to make up the gap that they have between other social media companies. And $100,000, you know, per year's or this looking for those quick information is not a drop in the bucket. That can be

40:03serious cash. And do you have any idea how much they've made so far? I think reporting the indicates that they've made about a million dollars in one month. I'm surprised there hasn't been more publicity about this. At least so far, perhaps the lawsuits will bring the publicity. You see these lawsuits trying to attack and challenge this unprecedented business relationship with the sitting president that raises all these issues and concerns. There's going to be fights over standing. There's going to be fights over applications of these law and whether these let against can prove of these claims. But the underlying accusation that a public official is seeking to profit from early announcements, that's not in dispute. It's actually the business model. Well, thanks so much for the conversation, Alex. That's Bloomberg Law. Senior correspondent Alex Ebert. And that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law podcast. You can find them on Apple podcasts,

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