Dear listeners,
A new federal indictment has come down for Ryan Wesley Routh, and this one gets to the meat of it — he’s charged with attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate. (Didn’t we say last week that’s not a federal crime? Our mistake — it doesn’t come up that often, and it’s buried in an unexpected corner of the criminal code.) As Ken and I discuss, this order of events isn’t that unusual — the Feds bring a quick criminal complaint on the simplest charges to get a defendant into custody, and then a grand jury charges the more serious offenses.
We also discuss how proving Routh’s intent to kill Trump might be challenging. Well, it might have been, if he hadn’t left behind a handwritten note explicitly expressing his intent to kill the former president and offering $150,000 to anyone who succeeds where he fails. And we talk about what “attempt” is — Routh never pulled the trigger, but there are a number of “substantial steps” he took toward killing Trump that should still make this case not that hard for prosecutors to prove.
Meanwhile, Caroline Ellison has been sentenced for her role in the implosion of FTX: just two years in prison, far below the guideline sentence of life. As Ken notes, life was never really on the table here, but two years is a very good outcome for her. Her cooperation surely helped matters, though Ken says praise of that cooperation from prosecutors and the judge was more than a little fulsome. Ken also thinks her gender may have helped, through a flip side of sexism in the federal judicial system: while Ellison was very much one of the architects of the fraud at FTX, judges can be inclined to see women involved in white-collar criminal schemes as pawns of the men around them, reducing their perceived culpability. (We will see how the two male cooperating defendants in the FTX case — former executives Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — are sentenced in the coming months.)
Judge Tanya Chutkan will allow prosecutors to file an unusually long brief (180 pages) laying out why they believe various offenses and evidence are fair game against Donald Trump despite the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. Trump’s attorneys preferred a briefing schedule that would have kept such a document from being publicly filed until after Election Day, but she continues to seek to move the case forward expeditiously. Meanwhile, an advocacy group in Ohio has filed a “bench memorandum” urging criminal charges against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for stirring up hatred and disruption in Springfield, Ohio with their baseless accusations of pet-eating by Haitian immigrants. There’s no basis for a charge based on their comments to date, though Ken sketches out a scenario in which an escalation by the candidates could tempt an aggressive prosecutor to try.
Plus, a friend of Matt Gaetz made some boneheaded litigation strategy decisions that have led to new, embarrassing disclosures about the congressman (who nonetheless still appears safe from criminal charges) and Brett Favre will not get to sue Shannon Sharpe for badmouthing him on ESPN.
Free subscribers get the conversations about Routh and Ellison. Trump, Gaetz and Favre are reserved for premium subscribers — so if you’re not one, maybe you should be?
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
P.S. We hear something has happened in New York, possibly having to do with business class airline tickets? We’re going to look into that and discuss it on next week’s episode.
