Dear listeners,
Happy Birthday to America’s Mayor, now 80 years old! Well, actually Rudy is still 79; he’ll turn 80 on May 28, but he had a big bash to celebrate his 80th birthday last Friday, down in Palm Beach. He posted a photo from the party on social media, taunting Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes for her failure to serve a summons on him for his indictment for trying to steal that state’s presidential election. And then, around 11pm, agents from Mayes’s office approached him to serve his summons on person — having been alerted to his presence in Florida by his constant social media activity.
Happy birthday, indeed.
Giuliani claimed if he ran out the clock on receiving the summons, the Arizona AG would have to dismiss the indictment. That’s not a thing, says Ken — if the state fails to diligently try to serve you, you might escape trial, but merely hiding for a few weeks is just going to make you subject to an arrest warrant if service fails. And while Giuliani will soon be due in an Arizona court, he is also having trouble in the bankruptcy court, which won’t allow him to engage in post-trial litigation over his huge defamation judgment because he keeps ignoring that court’s instructions.
In New York, Michael Cohen spent days being cross-examined in Donald Trump’s criminal trial — Trump attorney Todd Blanche conducted a long, meandering, and at times hostile cross examination that landed a few blows, but as Ken says, the risk with a very long and self-indulgent cross is the jury might forget the handful of nuggets you really wanted them to focus on. A good cross should be crisp and short — more like an hour than several days.
A journalist for New York magazine says he saw Trump apparently editing statements to be given by the surrogates who have been appearing outside the court to say what he’s not allowed to under the gag order. This quite possibly is a violation of the gag order, says Ken, but good luck enforcing it — with the trial moving toward completion, neither prosecutors nor Judge Juan Merchan are likely to get bogged down in an investigation of national elected officials and how they came up with their talking points.
David DePape, who brutally attacked Paul Pelosi, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, but the judge screwed up at his sentencing, forgetting to allow DePape to speak on his own behalf. This error can likely be fixed, says Ken, even though DePape is appealing to have the sentence thrown out. And Hunter Biden is in serious trouble — his benefactor, Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, says he’s tapped out after lending Hunter more than $6 million to pay back taxes and legal bills. Hunter needs to find cash to pay for two expensive upcoming trials, including one that’s coming up within weeks — and his attorneys may need to figure out whether they can get out of doing work they may not be paid for.
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We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
