Dear listeners,
We’re back with more Serious Trouble!
We got a lot of listener feedback about last week’s episode, especially about Kenny Raincloud’s take on how Judge Aileen Cannon could tank the government’s case against Donald Trump if she cares to.
This week, for paid subscribers, Ken responds to a lot of that feedback — getting especially specific about the attorney-client privilege issues that are likeliest to trip up the government.
We talk about how the government could try, eventually, to get an appeals court to remove Cannon from the case. The key problem is that Cannon has not done enough — yet — to merit such removal, and she may be wise enough to avoid ever doing so. On the upside, she could avoid that by trying the case fairly. We shall see — we’re likely to be in her courtroom within weeks, getting a first glimpse at how she’s managing the case.
We also talked (for all subscribers) about Trump’s arraignment, and the especially lenient conditions of release that were offered to the former president. It’s not that we think those conditions were wrong (Trump is about the lowest flight risk imaginable), but we note that other defendants similarly unlikely to flee don’t tend to get such dispensation.
And we talk (again for paying subscribers) about some non-Trump news. There’s drama between the large law firm Lewis Brisbois and a pretty large new firm founded by 140 (!) attorneys who simultaneously left Louis Brisbois. After the defections, the old firm got revenge, releasing years of racist, sexist, and unprofessional emails from the new firm’s two founding partners. (“Tell him that he’s the reason why most people hate Jews” is a representative excerpt.) The whole thing is questionable PR strategy: while announcing that two of your senior partners were behaving like this for years will blow up their careers, it doesn’t exactly make your firm look great either.
And we have an update on the ChatGPT case, where attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca have been in the unfortunate position of pleading stupidity to a federal judge.
This show is again more than an hour long for paying subscribers. It’s about 20 minutes for free — if you’re currently a free subscriber, you can upgrade and get the whole thing.
Thanks for listening,
Josh
