Serious Trouble

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Letitia James has been indicted, as President Trump’s retribution campaign continues. (So has John Bolton, but that happened after we recorded.) While the Bolton indictment has a forbidding, professional feel, the James indictment does not, and is likely to be vulnerable to some of the same attacks James Comey is...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show James Comey has been arraigned and has a trial date of January 5. Both his lawyer and the judge appear set on moving rapidly to trial, and the government is rushing to be ready. We discuss the motions it sounds like Comey's legal team will file, which likely will be helped by the message from the president demand...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show We know more this week about indictment of James Comey. Maybe the grand jury vote was weak, but an indictment is an indictment, right? Maybe not. We discuss how Comey’s attorneys are likely to seek dismissal of the indictments. Meanwhile, we have some more detail on how the FBI came to be conducting a public corr...

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

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 o...

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 va...

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!);...

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...

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 wo...

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 sw...

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

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...

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 in...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show For all subscribers: a discussion of the Sean Combs jury deliberations and a look at the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA that says trial courts (generally) can no longer issue nationwide injunctions. As Ken and I discuss, the ruling is sure to greatly change how aggressive executive branch actions get l...

More shadow docket news on this week’s show: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked an order from a federal judge in Boston that had imposed due process requirements when the Trump administration tries to deport migrants to countries other than their countries of origin . As is often the case with shadow docket orders, the judges in the majority did not explain their reasoning, leaving...

It’s been a big week for some of the dumber litigation we follow around here. It’s not all dumb — we start with an update on California’s litigation over the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, where the state has gotten relief at the trial court level but faces a tough road in the appeals courts. And we look at a case in Boston where a federal judge has blocked, for now, the cancella...

Donald Trump has activated the National Guard in California over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, and Newsom has sued , claiming the activation is illegal. Ken and Josh discuss Newsom's chances of prevailing against the president's broad authority to use the military for various purposes. Meanwhile, union leader David Huerta has been charged for his actions of civil disobedience. One of Hu...

In the ongoing defamation trial of Mike Lindell, who accused Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer of personally conspiring to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump, Lindell isn't bothering to argue that his claims were true. Instead he's saying he believed them at the time he said them. Is that a good defense? Plus: a federal appellate decision upholding an injunction against Texas Att...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show This week’s show is heavy on economic policy. Yay! We discuss a ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade that many of Trump’s beloved tariffs are illegal and then, a strange shadow-docket order in U.S. v. Wilcox , a case about the National Labor Relations Board that raises a key economic question: Does t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show This week, we look at the indictment of Judge Hannah Dugan and the end of Ed Martin's reign at the US Attorney's office for the District of Columbia. For paying subscribers, we have an update on family business at the Sean Combs trial, where James Comey's daughter Maurene is facing off against Mark Geragos's daug...

This week on the show: Jury selection for Sean Combs' eight-week RICO trial, which is moving along very quickly for for a complex federal criminal case. Plus: a ruling in the Alien Enemies Act cases, a ruling that gets at the heart of the policy question : whether there is an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” that triggers presidential powers under the law in the first place. It's a strange one....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show We've got a lot for paid subscribers this week: Updates on several removal cases, a look at the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, our first look at the litigation over Trump's tariffs, a cautionary tale about what happens when you accidentally file your internal deliberations about the weakness of your case on the pu...

This week, Ken and I have a discussion of Harvard’s lawsuit fighting the Trump Administration’s effort to punish the university for failing to submit to what amounted to a demand to place the university in a kind of federal receivership . We look at the Supreme Court's middle-of-the-night, weekend rebuke to the Trump administration , ordering a halt to Alien Enemies Act removals from the Northern...

The Supreme Court is getting increasingly involved in the sprawling litigation over Donald Trump’s many aggressive executive orders. In J.G.G. vs. Trump — the case seeking to prevent removals under the Alien Enemies Act — the high court issued an emergency ruling saying detainees are entitled to due process but they must seek it through petitions for habeas corpus in the jurisdictions where they a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show There has been a cat-and-mouse game about venue in several of the cases brought by people protesting the Trump administration’s efforts to remove their visas and remove them from the country. For example: if you thought your client was in New York when you filed your lawsuit, but he was really in New Jersey, and...