Dear listeners,
Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York has begun, with jury selection underway. Ken and I recorded this episode yesterday, as Judge Juan Merchan considered pretrial motions and scheduling requests for a trial that is expected to take six to eight weeks. We’ll be watching developments this week — depending on the amount of news that develops, we’ll be back with another episode covering the developments either late this or early next week.
On today’s show, Ken and I discuss Trump’s last-ditch efforts to get this trial delayed, and public support he has gotten from a surprising advocate: imprisoned ex-attorney Michael Avenatti, who phoned into MSNBC from his oceanfront Los Angeles home to say he thinks the case is seriously flawed. What Avenatti had to say is not especially profound — he’s not the only person to notice that Michael Cohen is not a trustworthy witness — but as Ken says, this situation where the government must rely on a somewhat shady witness to narrate the documents that really tell the story of the case is pretty common, given that criminal conspiracies inherently involve criminals.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon did something we said she might: She declined to make any decisions about those jury instructions she asked attorneys a bunch of weird questions about. It’s not typical to issue jury instructions this early in a case, and Cannon took exception to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s statement that she must rule on the issue now, calling his demand “unprecedented and unjust.” She also won’t dismiss the charges against Trump now but could do so later at a time when the government would lack any remedy. Smith is in a bind — he threatened to appeal in his brief, but an appeals court is very unlikely to provide extraordinary relief about something bizarre a trial judge hasn’t done yet — and if he tries to get relief over jury instructions during trial, he will have a very tight timeline (like hours) to get an appeals court to intervene.
Incompetent ratfucker Jacob Wohl and his sidekick Jack Burkman are in trouble again, though still not for the Big-Boy Federal Felony that Ken expects sooner or later. They have settled a case brought by New York Attorney General Tish James and will have to pay up to $1.25 million over an illegal scheme to suppress the black vote with robocalls in the 2020 election.
And actress Gina Carano is a character on Serious Trouble for the first time this week. You may recall that Disney fired her from “The Mandalorian” over a series of edgelord-ish political comments she made, including a 2021 Instagram post in which she compared the suffering of US political conservatives to that of the “thousands” of Jews who were rounded up by Nazi soldiers under Hitler. Earlier this year, she sued Disney, saying they broke California law by discriminating against her for her political activity, and that they engaged in sex discrimination because they didn’t fire male actors who made controversial public comments. Disney has moved to dismiss her suit, asserting that “The Mandalorian” is an expressive product and Disney has a First Amendment right to cast who it wants in its television shows. Ken thinks this argument is persuasive, but also narrow — even California employers not engaged in expressive businesses would still likely have a legal right to terminate someone who made comments like Carano’s.
That’s this week’s show. Plus, we have some exciting news: at long last, premium episodes of Serious Trouble are available on Spotify! So if you’re a Spotify user who’s been holding out, now is the perfect time to upgrade.
