*Episode published on 2/19/2021

Elie Honig:

From CAFE, this is Third Degree. I’m Elie Honig. Well, I am so happy today, everybody, because for the first time on Third Degree, I am not alone. That’s right. Let me explain. This is our new format. This is how things are going to work from here on out. So we’re going to be doing three episodes per week. Now Monday and Wednesday will be what you’re already used to, 10 minutes or less, it’ll be me. I’ll break down interesting legal stories in the news. But on Fridays, we’re going to go a bit deeper and a bit longer. And most exciting, we’re going to be joined, I’m going to be joined by one of our rotating cast of co-hosts. Now who are these folks? You’re wondering.

Well, here’s what we’ve done. We have set about on a nationwide search. And we have identified three of the brightest, most interesting up and coming law students in the country. These are your next generation of legal superstars. And each week, one of our law student co-hosts will join me on Friday, which I guess makes me the kind of old guy in this relationship. Or maybe I’ll think of myself as the semi cool professor. And together, we’ll break down the week in legal news and we’ll talk about careers. And I’ll tell some old war stories, which I always like to do. We’ll just let it roll, so I am so pleased to introduce our first ever law student co-hots, Safeena Mecklai. Safeena, welcome.

Safeena Mecklai:

Thank you, Elie. I am so happy to be here, and so flustered by that very generous introduction. And I’m happy that you’ll be our professor guide through these Friday sessions.

Elie Honig:

Look, I’m just overjoyed. You’ve just made history. You are the first person other than me to ever speak on this podcast. And we’re going to have a great time. So Safeena, welcome. Give us just a little bit about your background so the listeners know a little bit about you, where you’re from, where you’re in school, what you’re hoping to do. And then we’ll do this Jeopardy style. At the end of the first issue, I’ll come back and do a little more tribute to Alex Trebek, get into some of the nuances.

Safeena Mecklai:

Well, I love Jeopardy, so I’m totally game for that. So as Elie said, my name is Safeena Mecklai, and I’m a 3L at the NYU School of Law. I was actually born in Canada, but immigrated to the United States when I turned nine. Grew up in California, and moved to New York after graduating from UC Berkeley. And I’m very happily, a new New Yorker.

Elie Honig:

All right.

Safeena Mecklai:

And at NYU, I’m the student body president, and I’m also a managing editor on our law review.

Elie Honig:

It’s so good to talk to you right at this moment because we just got through a historic event in our country’s history, which is of course the second impeachment of former president Donald Trump. You actually have had impeachments now your second and third years of law school. If we had one in 2019, you could’ve actually pulled off the triple crown and had one all three of your years. So I want to ask you this. How are you all talking about this impeachment in law school? How did your professors talk to you? And really, more specifically I guess, in terms of what the impeachment says about our Constitutional democracy, our political and legal system, did you personally find the process we just went through to be reaffirming of our democracy or discouraging, in terms of the outcome or the process?

Safeena Mecklai:

Well, to your first point, something that was really strange is how little we talked about impeachment, and I think it’s totally because it’s our second one in two years. My law school experience has been defined by this big, public, legal events. 1L was the Kavanaugh hearings, which I remember watching in the student lounge at NYU. And then second year was first impeachment. Third year is the second impeachment. And it feels like every year there’s this big legal event that gets all of us question sort of: Why are we in law school? And how much can we separate law from politics? So one thing that was strange was the fact that it seemed like, oh, boy, this is just another impeachment. We went through this last year. We sort of knew what to expect, so that was weird.

I think on the whole, talking to my friends, and even the way that our professor spoke about impeachment when it came up, it felt discouraging for two major reasons. The first is the Constitution really doesn’t tell us enough to know what to expect with impeachment, or how it will be done, or how to do it right. And I think even though, especially in second impeachment, we saw excellent lawyering from the House impeachment managers. And as a law student, you’re totally nerding out about people making these legal arguments. It’s frustrating because the truth is that when the Senate is the jury, so much of it came down to politics. And so I was curious about how much it really mattered that we were seeing good lawyering. How much did the arguments matter? And as a student of the law, it’s hard to be in an environment where you’re thinking about how to craft good legal arguments, watching a trial where you’re not sure how much those actually matter, so that felt discouraging.

Elie Honig:

Safeena, I think your reaction was a very common one across the country, based on what I’ve seen, that you had this process, which as you say, the Constitution really tells us almost nothing about. The Constitution doesn’t purport to be a recipe. Right? It doesn’t say, “Here’s every step you’re going to need.” They give us the big points. But really, all they tell us in the Constitution is high crimes and misdemeanors, House majority, Senate, two third, convict, remove, disqualify, and you all figure out the rest.

And what we saw during this impeachment was not just a sort of figuring it out in realtime, but almost making it up as we go along. I mean, you saw a lot of the processes, they were figuring out. What are we going to do today? What are we going to do about witnesses? I think you made a really good point as well about the quality of the lawyering. And I would gladly hold up a lot of what we saw in impeachment to you or any law student and say, “This is how you do it, and this is how you don’t do it.” I thought we really saw a stark contrast in quality of advocacy. And I know you do mock trial. Correct?

Safeena Mecklai:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, I do.

Elie Honig:

I would take a video of any of the House impeachment managers and show it to your mock trial team and say, “Do this.” And I mean from Jamie Raskin, to Joe Neguse, to Stacey Plaskett, on down the line, that was exemplary lawyering. And look, I’m a tough critic when it comes to this stuff. I mean, I grew up at the SDNY. We used to critique the heck out of each other. Here’s why I thought they were so effective. They were clear. You never had a moment where you’re like, “What is this guy on about? What is the point of her statement here?” They were concise. They did it quickly. It never dragged. You never found yourself going, “All right, enough from this one already.” They blended the speaking part of the presentation with the visuals, the evidence. They really melded it all really well.

And this is maybe a little bit more of a subtle point that I give them a lot of credit for. They didn’t take cheap shots. They didn’t go out of their way, for example, to rub it in Donald Trump’s face that he had lost the election. There’s a lot of times where they were talking about the count of the electoral votes, and I kept expecting them to go, “And of course, as we know, Joe Biden trounced Donald Trump in that … ” They didn’t do any of that. They didn’t hit collateral targets. They could’ve spent all day going after Cruz and Hawley and Rudy, and they just kept focused on the person who was on trial.

In contrast, Trump’s lawyers, let me first make a … I guess I’ll apologize on their behalf because they did have very, very little time for reasons that are complicated because Trump lost his first legal team because they wouldn’t go along with some of the crazy things he wanted them to say. And you get these Philly lawyers, and I say this with full affection for Philly people, being a Philly person myself, who has more of a South Jersey accent, but Philly inflected, boy, were they embarrassing. And boy, did they do a lousy job. I mean, they were wildly unprepared. It was painful to watch. And by the way, let Bruce Castor be a lesson. Don’t ever think you can wing it in the court.

Elie Honig: I mean, look, there’s an element of spontaneity. You have to be able to react on your feet. But to think you’re going to get up and give an hour long, half hour long talk, and do it off the cuff, you’re going to fail. And watch him. I thought they did a poor job explaining the law. I thought that they were anywhere between ignorant and dishonest in their presentation of the facts. At one point, one of the lawyers claimed Donald Trump did not at all know what was going on, or that Mike Pence was in danger in the Capitol. Their tone to me was off putting. It was over the top angry. It was self indulgent. The first day, the lawyers were up there all breaking down into tears reading Longfellow. It’s like, “Who do you think you are? What do you think this is?”

So I thought there was a real contrast in lawyering, and maybe what was frustrating is not just because of the contrast in lawyering, but the fact that the facts were really so clear. And yet, how do we come out? Not guilty. Right? It was 57, 43. You need two thirds. But I guess I do want to say this. Maybe I can bring your spirits up a bit, Safeena, and your colleagues.

Safeena Mecklai:

I would appreciate that.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. Look, impeachment to me, the verdict is important. I’m never going to tell you the verdict’s not important. Of course, that’s the bottom line. But ultimately to me, I think we’re going to see law students 50 years from now, 100 years from now, who will be studying this the way you just did. And I think ultimately, they’ll probably be asking the same questions you were, which is: How on Earth did this come out not guilty? But I think the factual record is really what will stand through time. And I think there’s no question about what happened here and about Donald Trump’s culpability for it. And I think, I hope it’s remembered, and I hope it’s not just a footnote that he got out really because of politics, but he got out also, the vehicle, the escape hatch here was this whole Constitutional argument of can’t impeach a former president. I don’t know that any of these guys really believe that, that you can’t impeach a former president. But you know what, you give them an escape hatch, they’ll take an escape hatch.

Safeena Mecklai:

Yeah, that’s really validating because I think impeachment felt important to witness after seeing the events of January 6th. School hadn’t started yet. I was sort of doing my reading, getting ready for school, here in my apartment, as I’ve been for the last year, watching the events at the Capitol unfold, and thought, “There has to be a reckoning with what just occurred.” And even if impeachment came out not guilty, I think it’s important that, that factual record, as you said, was developed. It was the way that the House impeachment managers were able to use multimedia to really set out what that day entailed. It felt validating and important to reckon with that publicly, so I think that does give me hope that even if the verdict was not guilty, that there is this factual record.

And the fact that we went through this process shows future executives perhaps that there is a line, and we’re going to wrestle with what that line is, and what is sufficient for impeachment, how politics and the law will continue to interact. But at least we did something and we didn’t let that day sort of just sit as a day in history.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. I think that’s a great point. I think we collectively, the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, regardless of party, had a job to do here, and it’s to put down a marker. And people said from the start with both Trump impeachments, there were plenty of people saying, “What’s the point? He’s not going to get convicted. There’s not going to be enough Republicans who go along with it.” And my reaction sort of brought me back to my prosecutor days a bit of, it’s not always about the bottom line. And you can’t take the viewpoint of this is going to be difficult. This may not result in the verdict I want, hence, I’m not going to pursue it. Sometimes there’s a marker that needs to be put down. And in particular, where the whole nation is watching it, and where history will be watching. So I think that’s a really good perspective that you have on that, Safeena.

So let’s get into a little more about you, and then we’ll hit on some other topics. What do you see for yourself in your future? What kind of lawyer do you want to be?

Safeena Mecklai:

A good lawyer is my first answer after watching that impeachment trial. I am planning to go to a big corporate law firm after law school. And I really want to be a litigator. I love trial work. I love the difficulty of getting evidence in. I love talking to you about your time as a prosecutor because I’m just fascinated with there’s the real world out there, and then there’s the world in a trial. And I love that world, so I want to do that kind of work. Long-term, I think I actually took a class with Preet Bharara.

Elie Honig:

Who’s that?

Safeena Mecklai:

Yeah. Have you heard of him? And I thought that maybe I wanted to be a prosecutor, but actually, he exposed me to some really incredible defense lawyers and defense theories. And so this year, I’m in the federal defender clinic at NYU, and think that maybe federal defense would be an excellent sort of long-term career plan.

Elie Honig:

That’s a great career plan. And let me tell you, a defining experience for me at law school is I did the Harvard Defender’s Program, and I got to defend poor people in very low level cases, but that sort of gave me the bug. That sparked me off, wow, this is fascinating. This is what I wanted to do. And I’ll tell you, the federal defenders in New York City are mega elite, I mean, top, top notch lawyers, who I have all the respect in the world for. Some people may be thinking, “Preet, former prosecutor, how’s he leading people to the defense side?” But Preet and I, and I think any good prosecutor has ultimate respect for what our public defenders do.

On a less serious note, I note that you are a huge fan of The Office, the TV show, The Office, which has done a … It’s the only show that my kids and I and my wife all feel the exact same way about, so I got to ask you. What Office character do you most identify with?

Safeena Mecklai:

This is a hard question because no Office character is perfectly lovable.

Elie Honig:

Right.

Safeena Mecklai:

I think the answer, and I think what my friends would probably say, is I probably have a little bit of Michael Scott in me, in that as a leader of a team, I really want to create an environment where everyone feels loved, and like a family, and I’m always trying to do silly things to get my friends and my peers at school to get to know one another and to go on adventures. And I think mostly, they tolerate me doing that with them, but it all comes from a good place.

Elie Honig:

Okay. Look, it shows a lot of self awareness if you can say that I identify with the Michael Scott character. So Safeena, there are other important legal issues out there that have come off of the impeachment and that are related to the impeachment. And I know you prepared a question for me and for us to discuss on that.

Safeena Mecklai:

Yeah. I’m very curious about the investigation that we’re starting to hear about in Fulton County. And that’s about the call that Trump made to secretary of state in Georgia, Raffensperger, asking him to find 11,000 votes. And I’m wondering: What are the charges on the table there? What’s the strategy? How likely are they to succeed? And what do you think of DA Willis’ strategy so far?

Elie Honig:

It’s such an interesting case, and I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this. So first of all, I give the district attorney, Fani Willis, a lot of credit for taking on this investigation. It’s not easy to investigate Donald Trump. Right? Look, I went after some powerful people in my day, mob bosses, not mega powerful politicians, but political folks, and it can be a little intimidating. But gosh, Donald Trump, I mean, this guy, you know he’s going to fight you. You know he’s going to fight dirty. You know he’s going to accuse you of all sorts of wrongdoing. And he’s got a massive following. I mean, he has tens of millions of people who are devout followers of his, so taking him on is a difficult thing.

The charges here, actually, if you look at Georgia law, it’s a crime to willfully try to interfere with any election, and that means the counting of any votes, or the certification of an election. And if you look at that call that you mentioned, when Trump says, “I need you to find 11,780 votes,” to me, that’s such devastating evidence. I mean, first of all, find. Okay, find votes, not count them all, not, hey, make sure you got them all. And then that number, it’s one more than he needs to win. And the thing about that number is, he doesn’t mean I want you to just make sure you count all the votes. When he says, “I want you to find 11,780,” what he means inherently is all for me, by the way, only the ones for me. And to me, that is really harmful to Donald Trump in terms of his intent.

I do want to say this about the district attorney, who again, look, I have a lot of respect for her. She is a veteran prosecutor. I always respect people who have sort of earned their way up the prosecutorial ranks, and now she’s run for and won the office of district attorney. But I really do have a problem with her going on this publicity tour, this media tour that she’s doing now. She did a high profile interview on MSNBC. She did an interview with the New York Times. Safeena, let me sort of advise you as somebody who maybe will be a prosecutor down the line, maybe a defense lawyer, please don’t do this. This is not a good idea. This is not good practice for a couple of reasons.

First of all, at DOJ, it’s outright forbidden. You cannot make a public statement about a pending investigation. Now you may be thinking, “But why?” I’ve seen US attorneys, I saw Preet many times behind the podium giving remarks to the news. Those are charged cases though. That’s where a judge or a grand jury has already found probable cause, so you’re already on the books with a charge. It’s a very different thing to do that in a pending investigation. Now look, district attorney, most district attorneys in this country, most attorneys general, are elected. And they can essentially do what they please. They don’t have this established set of rules in the justice manual and things like that, that we have at DOJ.

But the fact that they can do mostly what they please does not mean they should. And let me break down for you why I disagree with this idea of doing the press tour during an investigation. One, it’s bad for your investigation. This is when witnesses tend to disappear, maybe nothing quite that dramatic will happen here. But witnesses can tweak their stories. They can get together and sort of coordinate. They can listen to what you’re saying, madam DA or mister DA, and conform their stories to meet with what they think you want to hear. You never want that as a prosecutor. Evidence gets destroyed. Emails get deleted. There’s a reason we want to investigate in secret, that’s number one.

Number two, the people are your investigating, subjects, not even accused, not even people who’ve yet been formally accused, they have rights. They have rights. And I know it’s Donald Trump, so we think, “Well, he’s put himself out there. He was president.” He’s a private citizen now, and love him or hate him, he has rights the same that you or I would have. And just announcing an investigation can do serious reputational damage to people. Right? It can cause them to have family problems, reputational problems, professional problems, financial problems. If people know someone’s under criminal investigation, that can do a lot of damage to a person. So I now it’s harder to see it in the Trump context because he’s wealthy and he seems untouchable, but it’s still a principle and an important principle.

The third thing is you’re making life difficult for yourself and for the courts and for our whole system because you’ve got a whole pool of potential jurors out there in the American public. These are people who are going to get that little notice in the mail saying, “You’re due for jury duty,” and they’re going to show up someday. And it’s going to be state of Georgia versus whoever. And the questions they’ll be asked, I’ve done cases that have been in the news, are: Have you heard anything about this in the news? Do you have any preconceived notions? And that makes it much more difficult to pick a jury. Look, we have ways of filtering out people who are overly biased. But when you get to a point that everybody’s heard about this, it really makes it harder to have a fair and just trial.

Two more things. I have a whole litany of things that I object to about this. Sorry, look, listen, you get indoctrinated at DOJ a certain way. And this is really, it goes against the core of what we were taught. You’re giving the defendant, if he’s ever charged, a defense. There is a legal defense of selective prosecution, meaning they picked me out for political reasons. And I think what you do if you’re making that argument, you roll the tape of the DA talking to Rachel Maddow. Look at her, she’s out there grandstanding, and she’s … Why? Because I’m a juicy target politically. That is actually a defense that defendants can make in court. It almost never works. But why give any ammunition?

And then finally, it’s just a bad look. It just shouldn’t be what prosecutors are about. It suggests you’re taking some glee or some delight in pursuing this person. And it suggests that politics are at play, so that really bothered me about this approach. Again, I applaud the DA for having the guts and the backbone to open up this investigation. I just wish she wasn’t out there doing a press tour about it. Interested in your reaction, Safeena, to the way that the DA has gone about this from your view as a young person, as a law student.

Safeena Mecklai:

Yeah. All of that makes total sense to me. And I think three major reactions that I had were. first, feeling very validated that there was somebody on TV reminding me that there was another path to justice after just watching sort of the failure of impeachment. So that was my initial sort of, oh, wait, there’s still other avenues by which justice might be done. But I think to your point, there’s this tension and conflict between you want our justice system to presume folks innocent until they’re proven guilty, you want every defendant to have a fair chance at proving their innocence in trial, with the fact that this is a really weird defendant, and it’s a really weird case, where the evidence is incredibly public. We’ve heard this phone call tons of times. You’ve seen it all over the media, where you know this defendant is sort of going to leverage their public following. The DA’s already noted that she’s gotten threats and attacks.

And so it’s this weird thing where it’s already so public that you wonder how there could ever be a fair trial in the world of Donald Trump. And so that’s the major tension for me, is if it was anyone else, I think my defense instincts are so strong that I want the process to protect that person from any undue influence. But it’s such a weird, sort of the public nature of all of this makes it so much harder to navigate.

Elie Honig:

I think you hit on exactly what the DA would probably say if she was asked, “How do you justify doing this media tour?” I imagine, and I think her best explanation would be, I wanted to remind the American people that there are other avenues for accountability. Right? Because we were just coming off of this verdict, which a lot of people felt was unjust, and even Republicans who voted not guilty said he was culpable. Mitch McConnell put the blame squarely at the president’s feet, but then let him out on this Constitutional sort of loophole that I don’t believe they actually believed in, but they saw it as convenient.

But I think the DA could argue this was my way of reassuring and reminding the American people that there still can be accountability, so I think you hit on that exactly. So Safeena, I’ve asked you to come up with a question that you might want to ask a grizzled old former trial lawyer like me about life on the front lines. And it sounds like you may be headed for a similar career, perhaps on the defense side, as we get down the line. So go ahead and ask. What can an old guy like me tell a young person, a young rising star like you about this profession?

Safeena Mecklai:

Well, as we talked about, I’m on the mock trial team here at NYU. And we actually have the first round of one of our tournaments tonight. And an issue that we’re having in Zoom world is how hard it is to communicate with each other during a round. And I’m wondering if you ever had a moment during a trial where you really wanted to communicate with, say, your co-council while they were examining a witness, or making a statement. And how did you handle that moment?

Elie Honig:

Oh, gosh. I love this. This is bringing back a, I don’t know if it’s a great memory or a terrible memory, but it’s a very distinct memory. And you’re right, when you’re on trial at a physical trial, you’re sitting shoulder to shoulder with your trial partner. And most trials are done by two people together, two prosecutors, sometimes three in your bigger case. And you just pass notes back and forth, although, I used to say, and I was taught this when I was a younger lawyer and I used to tell this when I became the more senior lawyer. Don’t do it in a spastic way. Don’t show the … Don’t start frantically scribbling and throw notes in front. Do it cool. Play it cool. Jot something on a note, slide it over.

But you are not always physically together. I never had to deal with the Zoom scenario, which you will have to deal with. But here’s the story, I was doing a trial of a Gambino family, captain and a soldier, so two pretty powerful guys. And the lead defendant, the captain, the higher ranking guy was a guy named Sal Scala. His cohorts had very creatively nicknamed him Fat Sal, and you can guess why. And the charge in the case was that he was extorting, shaking down, a strip club, an adult club in Manhattan. And basically, they were just going in and threatening the owners and making the owners pay them every month, and using the place for their own purposes. If you’ve ever seen The Sopranos, think like the Bada Bing.

Safeena Mecklai:

Got it.

Elie Honig:

You know the club that they hang out in the back of. And so we had this extortion charge against Sal Scala, Fat Sal Scala, and Tommy Sassano was the other guy. Now in addition to the extortion charges, we brought tax charges because you know how much these guys paid in tax every year, zero. They didn’t even file their return. By the way, I laugh. I say, “Oh, no. I’m a tax lawyer. I did a tax charge once against these mobsters who literally didn’t even file tax returns.” And so during the trial, the defense was essentially on the tax charges, my lawyer said that, actually, this sounds familiar, because I was being investigated by the FBI, slash audited if you think about Donald Trump, I shouldn’t pay my taxes.

Elie Honig:

And so they called in their defense case, a former lawyer for Sal Scala, who was really a mob lawyer and a dirty guy. Now my trial partner gets up to cross examine this lawyer, who has just basically said, “I told them because he’s being investigated, he shouldn’t file taxes for nine years,” which is ridiculous. My trial partner was a former Manhattan DA. Now the Manhattan DA is really sort of a shoot from the hip kind of place, and they do multiple trials in a day. And it’s this very fast paced place. First, the SDNY where I was, DOJ is a little more deliberative. Now my trial partner was also a bit of a hothead, and I knew him well, and I was worried about this.

So he gets up to do the cross examination of the lawyer. Now the judge had ruled that we were not allowed to introduce evidence that Sal Scala, the defendant, had this prior conviction for a pretty similar crime. He had been convicted of extorting an adult video story. Right? And the judge said, “No, you can’t use that evidence.” And I think that was probably a fair ruling because he said, “It’s too close to the crime here.” If the jury knew that this guy had been convicted of shaking down an adult video store, they’d go, “It’s close enough to shaking down an adult dance club,” so that was out. We had a pre trial ruling. You cannot do that. So my trial partner gets up and he starts this cross examination, and he starts down this road of the lawyer basically saying, “You knew that Sal Scala was paying you with dirty money, with mob money, with money that he got from shakedowns and from crimes.”

And the lawyer is stubbornly denying that. He’s going, “No, I had no reason to think that. I had no reason to think that he was paying me with criminal money.” And I’m thinking, here’s where I wish I could’ve communicated with my trial partner. I knew what he was going to do. And I’m thinking, “No, no, no. Don’t. Don’t. Please.” And he just goes, he just does it, he just goes, “But you knew that Sal Scala had been convicted of shaking down an adult video store, and had no real job.” And immediately, it was just one of those moments where I’m like, “No, no. Why did you just do … ” The judge immediately gets furious. He was a tough judge. Council, to side bar right now. Throws … Jury, you’re in recess. Get the jury out of there, rips into him. I specifically excluded that. You’ve infected this jury. I thought the judge was going to call a mistrial on the spot.

And my trial partner argued, “Yeah, judge, but he opened the door, the lawyer, the witness opened the door because he was denying it. I had to be able to confront him.” And that sort of calmed the judge down a bit, so the judge brought the jury back in and said, “I instruct you to disregard what was just said. That has no part in this trial.” Now we get a conviction. The jury comes back and finds these guys guilty. And then fast forward a couple months, it comes time for the appeal. Right? Now we’re in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And they schedule our argument. We know we’re going to have a big appeal issue because the defendant’s going to argue that question was inappropriate, and that prejudiced the jury. Well, guess what my trial partner does, he was more senior than me, he schedules a European vacation for the date of the Second Circuit argument. So guess who gets to do it, I end up doing the appeal argument.

Now the chief judge, the most senior judge out of that three judge panel, because when you argue an appeal in the federal courts, it’s three judges, was Sonia Sotomayor, now Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But at the time, she was a Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge. And I knew she was good, and I knew she was tough, and I knew what the first question was going to be. So I get in front of that panel, and they say, “Council for the government, you may begin.” And I said, “Your honors, may it please the court, Elie Honig,” and I didn’t even get through my name, and now justice, then judge, Sotomayor goes, “Council, I have a bone to pick with you.” And I thought, “Here we go. Here we go. I know what this is going to be.” And she says, “Was that you? Was that you who blurted that out in front of the jury?”

And I said, I was ready for this, I had rehearsed this, I said, “Your honor, it was not me. It was my trial partner. However, I take 100% responsibility for everything that both of us did throughout this trial. And she gave me this look of like, all right, all right kid. That’s the only thing you could’ve said. So the Second Circuit, the Court of Appeals ended up upholding our conviction. They found that there was plenty enough other evidence to sustain the case, and that the jury was properly sort of instructed by the judge to disregard it. There’s an opinion out there, if you want to look it up, on Westlaw or whatever. But they did reserve some harsh words, appropriately, for my trial opponent. So that’s one time when I was thinking, I was trying to telepathically communicate with him. But he was too far away from me. I think if he was sitting next to me, I probably would’ve put my hand on him and go, “No.” But gosh, that is a story I hadn’t thought about in a little while.

So you have this moot court, you said competition tonight. Is this like the NCAA bracket? Who are you against? How does this work?

Safeena Mecklai:

So it’s through the Texas Young Lawyers Association. And they send out a big case packet, and then we get matched. I think we’re against Brooklyn law school this evening.

Elie Honig:

Oh, regional rivalry.

Safeena Mecklai:

Yep. Regional rivalry, it’s a regional tournament. And the case is a torts case that … And we’re arguing for the plaintiffs that this big utility company is responsible for this woman’s husband’s death.

Elie Honig:

Okay. How are you feeling? You ready to go? You feeling confident?

Safeena Mecklai:

I feel confident. I’m a little nervous about the logistics of Zoom and the fact that I cannot go on a European vacation to avoid the entire trial. But I like our theme, which is the fake utility company is called Big City Electric, and our theme for the case is that Big City had no business providing electricity to this small town, so I’m excited to say that a few times this evening.

Elie Honig:

I like it. Well, this won’t come out until after you’ve had your argument, so your opponents can’t pre scout you and get-

Safeena Mecklai:

Okay. Good.

Elie Honig:

Get a dime on your line. Well, good luck. Listen, you did a great job here today.

Safeena Mecklai:

Thank you.

Elie Honig:

Thank you for joining me. As you can probably tell, I’m so happy to have company behind the mic here. Good luck. And next time you’re on, you’ll tell us how it went. And hopefully, you’ll be in the final four or whatever by then. Safeena, thanks so much for joining me.

Safeena Mecklai:

Thanks, Elie. Thanks, everybody. This was so fun, such a great way to start the morning.

Elie Honig:

Third Degree is presented by Café Studios. Your host is Elie Honig. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The audio and music producer is Nat Wiener. And the Cafe Team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Jake Kaplan, Geoff Isenman, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh, and Margot Maley.