Serious Trouble

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James Comey has been indicted, charged with making a false statement and obstruction of justice. Now, the government will try to prove he lied to Congress when he said he never “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports” about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, even though he had, in fact, authorized “Person 3” to do this. But — who will prosecutors say Comey did authorize?

That’s our conversation for free listeners. Paying subscribers also get our conversation about:

* The Trump administration’s motion for the Supreme Court to issue a stay letting them kick Lisa Cook off the Federal Reserve Board for now, and the ways the court may try to avoid having to weigh in on the exact special, unique historical nature that makes the Federal Reserve special, unique, and not subject to the decision it’s surely about to issue overturning Humphrey’s Executor;

* The guilty verdict against Ryan Routh and a judge’s admonishment of prosecutors in the case against Luigi Mangione;

* What legal exposure Tom Homan could have faced if he really accepted $50,000 cash in a Cava bag; and

* Updates on Trump’s try-hard defamation litigation against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show

Disney has “indefinitely” ceased airing Jimmy Kimmel Live under pressure from FCC chairman Brandon Carr and from Nexstar and Sinclair, two major owners of ABC affiliate stations, which themselves faced significant pressure from Carr. It is illegal for federal officials to “jawbone” private actors into punishing other private actors for their speech, but for relief to be possible, there has to be a pretty clear connection between the jawboning and the speech restriction. Listen for our analysis, and who could even sue here.

Paying subscribers, there’s much more this week including:

* Our look at the first criminal charges against Tyler Robinson, who faces the death penalty in Utah.

* A look at Donald Trump’s new defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, and Nina Jankowicz’s loss on appeal in her suit against Fox News (about which she is incensed).

* Why Lisa Cook remains on the Federal Reserve Board, for now (it has to do with the Fed being a special, unique entity in a long historical tradition).

* The reason for the dismissal of terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, and a look at why, in New York, a trial court is “Supreme” but premeditated murder is merely “second degree.”

* And why Judge Tanya Chutkan found there was nothing she could do for migrants whose removals to Ghana sure appeared designed to get them back to their home countries, despite having court orders prohibiting their removal to those countries.

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This week’s show takes a look at federal charges in the widely discussed Charlotte train murder case. Murder, of course, is not generally a federal crime, but because the murder happened on a train, the Feds have charged it as a violation of 18 USC § 1992, which prohibits “an act, including the use of a dangerous weapon, with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury to any person” in various transportation-related places, including on train tracks.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will soon weigh in on the IEEPA tariffs case — the court has set a fast briefing schedule and will hear arguments in June. Also in this episode: The Babylon Bee lawsuit that got California’s anti-deepfake law thrown out as unconstitutional; FBI agents suing over their political terminations (and why they stand a better chance in the courts than the various fired commissioners); the collapse of Michigan’s fake elector prosecution; another court decision upholding a judgment E. Jean Carroll won from President Trump; and the unhinged pro-se filings from would-be Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Routh (filed, of course, to Judge Aileen Cannon).

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This week: Jeanine Pirro has returned to her roots as a prosecutor, but prosecutors in her office have failed to secure felony indictments in at least three cases they brought to grand juries, including the case of “Sandwich Guy” Sean Dunn, who will face only misdemeanor charges for launching a submarine sandwich at a CBP officer.

Trump lost another appeal related to many of his tariffs (IEEPA!); Trump’s weird lawsuit against federal judges in Maryland was thrown out; Alan Dershowitz lost his appeal of his defamation lawsuit against CNN; Kash Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Williams has filed a Macron-like lawsuit against a conspiracy theorist who says she can’t actually be attracted to him; the Trump administration continues to try to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia; and we take a look at the administration’s new tool for pursuing political enemies: allegations of mortgage fraud.

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As Eric Adams says, New York is the Zagreb of America. People from all over the world come to New York to make their dreams come true. And sometimes, those dreams are illegal. Today we talk about the second indictment for longtime Adams consigliere Ingrid Lewis-Martin for taking a TV series cameo in exchange for impeding a street safety redesign that would have complicated access to co-defendants Gina and Tony Argento’s Broadway Stages in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Other aides are swept up in that case too. And then there's Winnie Greco, Adams’s longtime liaison to the Chinese-American community, who apparently tried to give approximately $140 to reporter Katie Honan of THE CITY, a sum that was placed in a red envelope stuffed inside an empty bag of potato chips.

Greatest city in the world.

In non-Eric Adams news, John Bolton’s home outside Washington D.C. was raided by the FBI early Friday morning, apparently searching for classified documents. Ken and I discuss what showings the DOJ must have made to get the search warrant. Plus: Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s arguments that he is being subjected to selective and vindictive prosecution, an appeals court in New York threw out the nearly half-billion dollar disgorgement penalty against Trump and his businesses, Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle defamation litigation about the 2020 election, and a judge’s decision that Alina Habba isn’t the US Attorney for New Jersey, and we look at a favorable ruling for the beleaguered Media Matters for America.

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Judge Paul Engelmeyer has refused the Trump administration’s request to release the grand jury transcripts from Ghislaine Maxwell’s prosecution. He notes forcefully that he’s reviewed the grand jury transcripts and there’s no there there — everything of interest disclosed to the grand jury became public at trial. Indeed, the only reason Engelmeyer considered releasing the transcript was that it would serve the public interest of showing the government had been lying about what’s in the transcript. But he said that wasn’t necessary, either, because the government ultimately admitted in subsequent filings that the transcript didn’t contain interesting information. So what, exactly, have we been doing here?

In other news, some idiot threw a sandwich at a CBP officer sent by Trump to patrol the streets of Washington and the Justice Department is hot to make an example him. Laura Loomer’s defamation suit against Bill Maher continues.

Plus: tariffs, a look at a couple of favorable rulings for Trump out of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, an update on US Attorney Bill Essayli’s effort to keep former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Trevor Kirk out of prison, and the misfortune of Mohamed Bahi, an aide to Eric Adams who does not seem to enjoy the same protection from federal justice that Adams himself has.

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This week Ken and Josh discuss the next steps the Trump administration may be considering to deal with the Epstein mess: what to do about the files, what to do about the transcript of Todd Blanche's meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell, who was moved to a much nicer federal prison, has a colorable argument that her conviction should be thrown out because she was supposed to be covered by the sweetheart deal Jeffrey Epstein cut with federal prosecutors back during the Bush administration.

Plus: Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl are pleading no-contest to Michigan state crimes relating to their voter-suppression robocalls, the Ninth Circuit has denied the government a stay with regard to the temporary restraining order restricting the grounds on which ICE can detain suspected illegal migrants, and in the Valley, former NBA star Gilbert Arenas has been indicted for running an illegal poker game, updates in the Trump v. Murdoch case and regarding an apparent DOJ investigation into James Comey.

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Ghislaine Maxwell has sat for a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who not very long ago was serving as President Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney. The idea seems to be that Maxwell could offer some “help” getting to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in exchange for some sort of leniency. That’s for free subscribers. For paying subscribers this week, there’s much more:

* Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron’s libel suit against Candace Owens

* The machinations that have kept Alina Habba in charge, for now, at the US Attorney’s Office in New Jersey

* Another ruling blocking the administration’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship

* A strange Supreme Court order saying lower courts should do a better job inferring what its decisions on the shadow docket mean, and a concurrence from Justice Kavanaugh that says the lower courts really do need more guidance — guidance that only a more proactive and meddlesome Supreme Court can provide.

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Donald Trump has sued the Wall Street Journal over its story saying he wrote a weird poem to Jeffrey Epstein and drew a caricature of a naked woman with his own signature as her pubic hair as part of a book wishing a happy 50th birthday to the New York financier. Ken and Josh discuss the suit, which looks more like an exclamation point on his claims that he never even liked that Epstein guy! than a serious effort to win damages from (or extort) the Rupert Murdoch empire. Meanwhile, Trump is seeking the release of grand jury testimony from the investigations into Epstein and his henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell — a release that wouldn’t be likely to include any books of ribald poetry.

Also this week: Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster — claiming that Woodward and S&S violated Trump’s copyright by publishing the audio of interviews Trump thought were only for use in a written book — has been dismissed; Trump is facing difficulty with another novel application of IEEPA — this time, not tariffs, but an effort to sanction the International Criminal Court, there’s a certified class in the birthright citizenship litigation; a federal judge in California says ICE can’t pick people up just because they look Mexican; and some government immigration lawyers have started appearing anonymously in immigration court; an extra-bizarre civil RICO suit against Eric Adams and the NYPD, from Adams’s own ex-interim NYPD commissioner; Douglass Mackey, a.k.a. “Ricky Vaughn,” has won an appeal of his conviction for trying to trick Hillary Clinton voters into “voting” by text.

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This week, we discuss the mostly favorable verdict for Sean Combs, a.k.a. P. Diddy and his upcoming sentencing. In another bizarre sex-related case, two founders of OneTaste, a new-age-female-empowerment-business-slash-sex-cult, have been convicted of coercing their employees into sex acts.

Also this week: an update on D.H.S. vs. D.V.D., a case where the Supreme Court’s orders have been fairly inscrutable and the litigants have now been deported to South Sudan; another shadow docket victory for the administration; the Trump administration’s lawless claim that it can waive the TikTok ban and how there’s probably no way for their action to be remedied in the courts; what can be done when a president extracts bribe-like payments from corporations; and we look at the trouble the administration created for itself by fanning the flames of Epstein conspiracies it now can’t document.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.serioustrouble.show/subscribe