The big action this week was again in Georgia, where 3 of the 19 defendants in Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s RICO case sought to remove their cases to federal court. Removal of criminal cases is unusual — it’s much more common in civil court — so the law on when a federal officer must be tried in federal court is less well developed than you might hope. Ken and Josh talked about the varying strength and creativity of the removal arguments from Jeffrey Clark, Mark Meadows and David Shafer. And we’re still waiting for the removal notice from Trump himself. The whole situation is a bit of a mess — expect Fani Willis to keep moving straight ahead — it could take years to resolve.

In other news, we’ve learned more about the demise of Hunter Biden’s proposed plea agreement, including some signs that Republican political pressure was an important factor in the deal falling apart. And we talked about a remarkable and bold threat from Hunter’s lawyer — that they would seek to put Joe Biden on the stand if Hunter went on trial. Yikes. And we talked about further signs of the financial strain legal troubles are putting on Rudy Giuliani — and about the former president’s limited willingness to help him out with that.

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Okay, now it’s RICO. Donald Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators have been indicted on 41 counts in Fulton County, Georgia, and the headline count is RICO: District Attorney Fani Willis alleges this group constituted an enterprise trying to steal Georgia’s electoral votes (and those of other states) in violation of Georgia’s version the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. We’re skeptical of Willis’s plan to take this thing to trial within six months. In fact, we think the whole thing is overcomplicated and excessively vulnerable to constitutional challenge. Georgia defense lawyer Andrew Fleischman joins us to discuss the overreach and excessive creativity in this indictment, and the likelihood that any Georgia RICO prosecution will drag on for years, with Trump's own trial very possibly moved into Federal court. Not great.

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The big Georgia indictment came out late Monday night, conveniently released around 11pm eastern, with many counts and many defendants, including Donald Trump. We will soon have an episode for you about it — but that's not what this is. This show, taped on Monday morning, covers developments in Trump's federal criminal case in DC, Twitter's unsuccessful effort to get the right to warn Trump about a search warrant, Sam Bankman-Fried's return to jail over his improper dealings with witnesses (and why Trump gets more leeway), more legal bumbling from Rudy Giuliani, and a fancy hotel's defamation lawsuit against a very unlikable rich kid who nonetheless has constitutional rights that a court has been trampling on. We hope you enjoy the show and we'll be back with more on Georgia later this week.

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Another serious week on Serious Trouble! In Washington DC, Trump's attorneys are fighting with prosecutors about what Trump can say in public about his case and what's obtained in discovery. It's not a gag order, and Ken says what Trump's already saying about Mike Pence and others on social media aren't true threats either. Speaking of dumb things to post online, Ken’s been writing/complaining about bad, misleading coverage of the Trump cases: clickbait-y stories about potential sentences and whether or not Jack Smith’s charges in D.C. violate established law. That's the episode for free subscribers. Paying subscribers get our discussion of Judge Aileen Cannon's first sort of spicy order in the Trump documents case, and also, by request, a discussion of an academic scandal at Harvard with a litigation angle. It's an accusation of research dishonesty in a study about honesty — and now the professor is suing both Harvard Business School and the authors of a research integrity blog that pointed the issues out to Harvard. Juicy.

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Donald Trump got indicted again. (And this time, we hadn’t started recording the week’s episode. So we set about doing so, on an urgent but non-emergency basis.) This new federal indictment, issued in Washington DC, is for trying to steal the 2020 election. This was a grave abuse of his office, for which he was impeached though not convicted. Special prosecutor Jack Smith says it was also a crime — actually, several crimes. On this week’s episode, Ken and I discuss Trump’s likely defenses. Free subscribers will hear all of that.

Paying subscribers get a lot more, including: a discussion of Trump’s six alleged co-conspirators, some of whom are likely to be indicted later; the indirect role of the January 6 riot in the government’s case, what we know about Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is likely to preside, when we can expect this trial to start (and how long it will take), and what sort of sentence Trump might face if he’s ultimately convicted.

If you are a paying subscriber to Serious Trouble, we appreciate you and we’re glad for your support, which makes this show possible. If you’re not a paying subscriber and you’d like to hear all the topics I list above, join our community and unlock this full length episode (and all of our future episodes) for $6/month or $60/year at serioustrouble.show.

When Sara, Ken and I discussed when to record this week’s episode, we were concerned about when a new federal indictment of Donald Trump might drop. Naturally, one dropped literally minutes after we finished our recording session — but not the one we’d been preparing for. A federal grand jury in south Florida has issued a superseding indictment in the documents case, which adds new charges, some new amusing color about security cameras, and a new defendant.

So, we re-started the recording to produce a superseding opening segment to this week’s podcast (while preserving our original episode opening, for transparency and for your amusement). Meanwhile, in indictments that didn’t happen: Trump hasn’t been indicted in the January 6-related case for which he received a target letter over the weekend, but an imminent indictment is likely, quite possibly next week. And Hunter Biden didn’t get indicted on Wednesday even though he wanted to be, because his attorneys and the government didn’t agree on the meaning of the convoluted plea and diversion agreements they had negotiated. Oh! And Sam Bankman-Fried. He’s in trouble again. Would a gag order from the judge be more effective than a de facto gag order from....his parents? Support our show and find a transcript of this episode at serioustrouble.show!

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This week, we talk about the arguments before Judge Aileen Cannon about when she should schedule the federal criminal trial of Donald Trump. The Trump team has made arguments for a long delay, some of them very splashy and aggressive — most prominently, their insistence that he should not be tried until he is no longer a prominent political candidate. But there are lots of other reasons a trial like this would take a long time to start and it seems likely that Trump’s side will succeed, one way or another, at pushing back the trial’s start well into next year or beyond.

We talk about Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood — the former may lose his law license because of his 2020 election-related shenanigans, and the latter has given his license up so he can stop going to so many hearings. We talk about E. Jean Carroll, who is still trying to sue Donald Trump for statements he made while in office — and who no longer faces opposition from the Department of Justice in her effort to do so. And we talk about Elon Musk, who is suing Wachtell Lipton, the law firm that represented Twitter in its successful effort to force Musk to close the acquisition deal he’d agreed to.

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Happy Fourth of July Week! Josh and Sara and I will be back to breaking news next week. For now, enjoy this deep dive special episode about how to be a critical consumer of legal news, and hear a useful explainer of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines — helpful for anyone who has ever read the words "they face a maximum of __ years in prison."

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The goat is back. You can thank Rudy Giuliani, who — for some unknown reason — sat for a voluntary interview with federal investigators. This week, we talked about The Tape — the recording of Trump bragging about his possession of a classified Iran war plan he now says he didn’t possess at all. Trump says it’s a misunderstanding: he’s a “legitimate person,” and if he was talking about having “plans,” they were probably for buildings or golf courses. But what the documents were or weren't about is, as far as his legal case goes, unimportant. The key legal thing about the recording is what it shows about his knowledge about classification. After all, the government never found the war plan document, and it never charged him for possessing it. Speaking of never finding that document — maybe it’s at Bedminster, right? Ken and I talk this week about news about Bedminster, and why the government never executed a search warrant there like they did at Mar-a-Lago. We also talk about early orders coming down from Judge Aileen Cannon — so far, they seem pretty sensible and appropriate. Finally, we talk about Hunter Biden and the IRS whistleblower who says prosecutors protected him from the felony charges he should have faced.

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We’re back with another episode of Serious Trouble. And this week, Ken feels compelled to summon the scream of a goat to express his feelings as we add two more items to the list of contexts in which one should just shut up if under criminal investigation. One of those contexts is a televised interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier. We look at the admissions Donald Trump made about which documents he retained and why, and how those could help the government, particularly if Judge Aileen Cannon were to throw out other evidence of Trump’s knowledge and intent that is needed to prove the charges against him.

Another such context is Hunter Biden’s 2021 tell-all autobiography, in which he made admissions related to a gun purchase for which he has not yet been charged with a crime. The issue is that Hunter falsely claimed not to be addicted to any illegal substances when he purchased a gun in 2018. As Ken notes, this is a crime that’s rarely prosecuted, and one that prosecutors might never have thought of if he hadn’t written the book. Also this week, we look at news reports about internal disagreement within the Department of Justice about whether the January 6 investigation should have turned sooner to the question of criminal liability on the part of Donald Trump, we also look at initial orders from Judge Aileen Cannon in the documents case — boilerplate so far — and at the complicating role that the Classified Information Procedures Act could play in the case’s early days.

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