This Episode Is Not RICO

Dear listeners,

Yes, yes, we know: the Georgia indictment came out late Monday night, conveniently released around 11pm eastern, with many counts and many defendants, including Donald Trump. And yes, Ken has seen your emails, DMs, toots and skeets about the specific nature of the indictment. Here is what he has to say:

We will soon have an episode for you about the long, sprawling and — dare we say — somewhat legally creative Georgia indictment. Imminently. But not right this second.

What we have for you now is the show that we taped on Monday morning. We talked very little about Georgia because we were expecting to get the indictment (we expected it on Tuesday, but whatever) and we have a lot of updates on various other legal matters of importance, including:

• Whether, even before he got indicted in Georgia, Trump was already trying to unlawfully intimidate a witness, former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan.

• Trump’s federal criminal case in Washington DC, where Judge Tanya Chutkan hasn’t satisfied either side with her decisions about a protective order, and where Trump seems intent on trying the judge’s patience with his public statements.

• TwitterX’s desire to warn Trump that the government had issued a search warrant for his account, and how the courts reasoned TwitterX did not have a First Amendment right to do so.

• Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail revocation; the last straw for Judge Lewis Kaplan was when he leaked his ex-girlfriend’s journals to the New York Times. SBF’s misfortune reflects how improper dealings with witnesses can get you sent into pretrial detention (a warning for Trump) but it also reflects how odd it was that SBF was out on bail to begin with, given his financial history and his proclivity for living in small island countries.

• Rudy Giuliani being a moron again.

• And a very funny defamation case involving a classy hotel, the worst Manhattan rich kid you can imagine, and Drake.

We hope you enjoy the episode, and we’ll be back again very soon — later this week — with our analysis about the new case in Georgia.

Josh