Sekulow

Logan Sekulow: Welcome to Sekulow. We're back. It's Monday, August 3rd, 2026. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. Will Haynes is joining me in the studio. Rick Grenell is going to be coming on a little bit later. ACLJ attorney Liam Harold is going to be joining us. It is going to be packed, but I do want to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. Once again, I'm reporting to you that President Trump has changed his mind again on what will be the next step with Iran, saying that maybe we have a peace deal on the table. It's getting close. Of course, this comes after the major threat of bombing the blanket of them. At this point, I have to be honest and just say it. I've said it a million times now, but I feel like we have to do it once again. This negotiation in plain sight, negotiation in the press, these threats that turn into negotiation talking points. If they worked the first few times, maybe. But I feel like this has been an ongoing back-and-forth now for months where we come on here and say President Trump has said he's going to do this, and then by the end of the day or end of the weekend, we've decided to put a hold on it, and it wasn't actually going to happen. I'm a bit frustrated with all of this. I don't know if it's good for the American people to have this play out in the public square. I don't know if it shows strength for us to make these big threats and then not go ahead with them, or to somehow say, they said they want to talk, when we've seen constantly the violation of them talking. President Trump even put out a statement today about this issue on Truth Social.
Will Haynes: Yesterday, there was that announcement on the 1st of August that there was going to be this pause because Iran had asked to go back to the negotiating table, and the mediating countries, the Gulf nations, had asked for that as well. But then today, you see this. This is after reports that the Iranians are saying, "No, we didn't ask for that. We didn't ask for him to not bomb us. We didn't ask to talk again." He puts this on Truth Social. He says, "Iranian leadership is unbelievably duplicitous. They ask for a meeting, some would say beg, talks begin with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say openly and proudly that they're not having any discussions and that nothing is being talked about, and they're only dealing with Oman. They then go on to give their usual blathering in saying the Strait of Hormuz will be operated powerfully by them when it is already completely controlled by the United States Navy and our blockade."
Logan Sekulow: We know, President Trump, they're liars. You know this. We've said this. We all know this. They lie. They lie to you. They lie to the press. They lie in their statements. It's a continual circle of lies, and it's going to be that way unless you have a completely different group of people running this country. But you didn't decide to go that route. Now, the decisions really have to be made. I don't want to see a continual war that goes back and forth. Either we need to finish this job or get out. Those are going to be the options here because this plan of this back-and-forth is simply not working. It's not working with public opinion, and it certainly doesn't seem to be working when it comes to truly negotiating any kind of end to this deal. You're dealing with people that have no problem saying one thing and doing another, or doing one thing and saying another.
Will Haynes: There's more to this post that we'll get to in the next segment because I think it feeds back into what you're saying, Logan. He finishes this by saying that nothing gets through to Iran unless we want it to, and nothing will go through unless a deal or total surrender is accomplished. I think that's the problem we're having today. We don't think that a deal necessarily will get across the finish line. We've been saying that for months, but we have been willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt on this. He is showing the true picture of this. It's not like he's saying the only way is a deal. He's saying either deal or total surrender. Total surrender would come through military action. The problem is that he starts it off with, "The Iranian leadership is unbelievably duplicitous." We've said that. He said that when they said you used to say that you could work with these people, but what changed? He said, "I got to know them." He's already been down this road, and yet he is giving the diplomatic way another chance, having all this confusion and chaos. At what point does he either say we've accomplished our goals, we have destroyed their infrastructure, or does he say enough is enough, we're going to go forward with full regime change? I feel like those are the only two paths forward, and he could spin it. He could own it as he even says here, "It's very simple, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon." I do feel like, even though most people in the public eye maybe don't believe this at this point because of the back-and-forth, he could say we accomplished that goal. We have put in a place that we know we have decimated the infrastructure, and if they try to start moving back and building again, we will just bomb them again. He could say that and probably take the win, but he won't. I think we should also point to this. A new Reuters poll that came out shows that only one in three Americans are now backing the conflict in Iran. That is extremely low for something that this President, who is very focused on poll numbers, has always been someone that paid attention to this. 33 percent of Americans are in favor of this at this point. That's the lowest in the recorded five months they've been asking this question. Something other than the back-and-forth has got to change in his mind to change that narrative.
Logan Sekulow: We've got calls coming in on both sides with a lot of different conversations. If you want to chime in, we'd love to hear from you. We have a couple of lines still open at 1-800-684-3110. I'd like to start with Anne in Pennsylvania. Anne, you're on the air.
Anne: Hey, guys. Great show. Just a little bit of a disagreement. I'm not stressed out at all. I'm just kind of sitting back and enjoying the show, if you will. For eight years, I was completely stressed out with Biden in office and all of the stuff that went on, all of the corruption and so on and so forth. We don't know what's going on behind the scenes. He is the Commander-in-Chief. If anybody, I would question maybe some of his advisors, like maybe Vance in particular. But having said that, I just feel like this is a chess game that we've been watching, and I'm just waiting for the next move. I know it's back and forth and people are getting impatient, and I completely get that. But at the end of the day, he's the Commander-in-Chief. We spent so much time and energy trying to get President Trump elected. Now is not the time to question my intuition and also my ability to understand and comprehend Trump and the way that he does things. He does things not on a whim. He plans it out, and sometimes he is spontaneous. But I trust him. I'm sitting back. I'm not stressed out at all.
Logan Sekulow: I appreciate you calling in with your point of view, and I understand that. I think it does become a little bit more heated when you're talking about American lives on the line potentially, too, when there is a bit more of this hostility that maybe comes towards some of this negotiation tactic. I don't mind the negotiation as much as I mind the way it's being played out in front of the public because I feel like we are being used a bit in this conversation where we're being told one thing and then it flips and it flips and it flips. You start to lose not just patience, I'm not talking about patience here as much as I am talking about just frustration or exhaustion from the conversation from the flipping. I do think that there was some early on, like you said, there may be some people he should have listened to and some people he shouldn't have listened to. Now, I want to counter that with Peter, who's calling in Texas. Peter, you're on the air.
Peter: I hate war. I hate the killing of anybody. But knowing the Iranians and knowing the IRGC, any negotiation they do is just a stall tactic. I think we do need to take them out and we need to change the regime, maybe put in the Crown Prince or give the freedom fighters a chance. Give the true Iranian people a chance that love America and love Israel and give them a real chance.
Will Haynes: Peter, I think we've said very similar things. The President, I think, has conducted it this way because he is kind of like you. He has always said he doesn't like war. He doesn't want to see American lives taken. Where the narrative I think has been lost a little bit is that Iran, until this conflict, had never killed American soldiers. That we know is a falsehood. Ever since the revolution, all the way through even the Iraq War and even post-Iraq War, their militias that are backed by Iran have been targeting US troops and taking the lives of Americans. So as you say, it's not as if it diminishes the death toll that has happened during this conflict, but it is a fallacy to say that before this, Iran wasn't targeting and killing Americans. This is an extension of a 40-year war that began with that revolution. I think that is one thing that has not been clearly articulated enough. It's been attempted, but the articulation of that was not done very well when the President tried to say these comparisons about the death toll in Vietnam, etc. He got a lot of payback even from those on the right because some people felt like he was diminishing the sacrifice of those that were killed in this conflict. I think that is part of the poor PR of this war, that all of a sudden this five-month conflict is the only vacuum that a conflict with Iran has existed in. That's just not true. They've killed thousands of Americans, and that is one of the reasons, as Peter said, the IRGC and the regime have to be taken out. They cannot exist in this current form, this theocracy that hates America and chants "death to America" because what will they do? They will continue to kill Americans, and that is something I believe we all want to stop.
Logan Sekulow: If that was going to be the case, then it does question why we did this in the first place. Phone lines are open at 1-800-684-3110. I do want you to have a big update on the work of the ACLJ. We just got done with our Liberty Drive. We're moving into an Impact Match month, and I want you to be a part of it today. But you're really going to see a big update of what we are working on right now with one of our attorneys, Liam, who's going to be joining us. You've heard about some of our street preacher issues out of Chicago. We've got a big update coming from that in just a moment.
Will Haynes: You'll remember, and Liam has really taken the lead on this since the very beginning, defending these men who were in Chicago ministering on the street corner. We've shown video before of Liam going up to Chicago getting those victories for them in their criminal citations. What that led to was the ACLJ saying, "There seems to be a pattern here where these individuals going out expressing their First Amendment right, sharing the Gospel with individuals, were specifically targeted." Many times they were cited with noise ordinances or things of that nature, but they weren't even louder than the traffic in these cases. Liam fought hard, got them the charges dismissed in these cases, but the ACLJ then decided we need to file a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago for targeting people for their faith. Liam, that's where we're at now. We're in this lawsuit phase, this federal lawsuit. I wanted to get from you because there are some updates. We've had to do some filings. Where are we at, and what is this action we just had to take on Friday?
Liam Harold: If you're keeping up with this case, you probably remember that the city of Chicago filed a motion to dismiss, trying to get this case completely kicked out. The judge wasn't having it and allowed this lawsuit to proceed. We're now in the next stage, which is called discovery. Discovery is a lot of documents, a lot of paperwork. We demanded all the receipts from Chicago. We want to look at their history of their noise ordinance, how they're enforcing it, and against whom they're enforcing it. That's all very important because we need to prove that this is part of a pattern and practice of hostility towards religious voices. What we ran into was a stonewall. The city of Chicago has certainly produced some documents, but there were entire categories of documents that they didn't want to provide and they didn't think they had to provide. That's not right. We have a viable claim. We're suing the city of Chicago. We are demanding those documents. Since we've begun this lawsuit, we have only found more and more victims of Chicago's supposed neutral noise ordinance. People who have been protesting outside abortion clinics, people who have been preaching in Millennium Park or on the streets. It's not just our clients. So we need these documents to prove our case and, ideally, to fix this problem so that people like our clients can continue to evangelize without this horrible regime silencing them.
Will Haynes: As in any case with the ACLJ, many times it may be one specific constitutional rights violation, but it's not just for that client. It is for anyone. It is to protect the constitutional framework that we live in and that we celebrate and as we try to continue to keep that strong in America. It's not just for our clients, it's for everyone that wants to enjoy those liberties as well. I think that's what's so interesting here is a lot of times these cases, especially in an area of the country where you may have more liberal federal judges at the district court level, we were able to survive the motion to dismiss. That's already a very big thing for this entire case that we are moving on to that discovery phase. You said that it's not the TV law, but for many times the attorneys, that's where they get most excited. That's where the case develops and where you can actually see what's going on and peek behind the curtain to continue to fight this out for our clients. Tell us about this motion to compel that we had to file on Friday because of that brick wall we ran into.
Liam Harold: I want to be clear, we tried everything we could short of that. We've been back and forth with the city's lawyers. We explained why it is we need these documents. We explained our legal basis for entitlement to these documents. What the city told us was that they weren't going to provide them. The city shrugged their shoulders. If this feels to our viewers like we're still here many months later, well, I think they're right. The city really did drag their feet in getting here. When we finally got here, they stonewalled. They said that there were categories of documents that they weren't going to provide. We had these back-and-forths, emails, phone calls. We said, "No, here's our legal basis. We know this law. We know that we're entitled to these documents." Ultimately, when it comes to a legal case like this, when the other side isn't cooperating, we go to the judge and we lay out our case and we say, "Your Honor, we need you to intervene and tell the city, no, this isn't going to stand. You need to provide these documents. You need to allow the ACLJ legal team to look at these documents." That's exactly it. It's peering behind the curtain. We get to really see what these politicians are saying behind the scenes, the directions they're giving to their officers. We are confident that these emails, these communications, these orders are going to build our case and allow us to ultimately prevail at trial.
Logan Sekulow: It's a process. The ACLJ team has to be ready to go, and they have to be able to bash through that wall. That's why we send our ACLJ team, the youngest and brightest, the ones that can just bash through it. Liam, for those who have been watching this case, what is the next step in this? What should people be thinking about and praying for when it comes to what will be the next step in this case?
Liam Harold: When it comes to the next steps on this case, really it comes to what we would call summary judgment or trial, which is the ultimate part where we take all the facts we've learned. We have the facts that we already have from our clients. We have the videos. We have their testimony. We have everything they've told us. We're going to combine that with everything we've learned from Chicago. Once we finally get our hands on these documents, we're going to put all of that and we're going to bring it before the judge. That's where the case really comes together. If we can find what we know is out there, these directives, these communications from politicians from the people directing these officers, we can demonstrate that their pattern of practice is repugnant to the First Amendment. It is discriminatory towards people like our clients, and it's not limited to just our clients. If we can get that case before a judge, and we're confident we will, then we can secure victory. The victory is twofold. It is exactly what Will said. It is not just for our clients. A victory here tells the city of Chicago that they need to stop it, and the judge can intervene and not just protect our clients, because at the end of the day, what happened, happened. It's about going forward. When I speak to our clients, I think that's what's most heartening is they really understand that it's not about them. It's about the next generation, the people who come after them and everyone else, to make sure that Chicago is a safe place for preachers.
Logan Sekulow: What we've learned through all this ACLJ work is that it reverberates throughout the country. What happens in Chicago, yes, it may be a local issue, but we know there's precedent being created. There are laws being created that often, though they may not have direct correlation to what's going on on the larger scale of the country, we know that once you have this plan, we can take it and expand it upon the rights of people around the country. I appreciate you, Liam, for being a part of the team and obviously being a part of the broadcast today. When you support the work of the ACLJ, remember, you're not just funding a show that you enjoy each and every day. We love that, we've got a great team here. You also are funding the incredible legal team that is out there each and every day fighting for you. Go to ACLJ.org when you can, make a donation, and be a part of the team. It is an Impact Match month that we're kicking off, so be a part of it if you can. We have a second half hour of the show coming up, so don't go anywhere. Find us broadcasting live 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time each and every day on ACLJ.org.