Serious Trouble

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 stren...

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

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

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

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

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 n...

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 li...

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." Visit serioustrouble.show to see notes about this epsiode,...

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 “plan...

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 docu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show We got a lot of listener feedback about last week’s episode , especially about Kenny Raincloud’s take on how Judge Aileen Cannon could tank the government’s case against Donald Trump if she cares to. This week, for paying subscribers, Ken responds to a lot of that feedback — getting especially specific about the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show There is no such thing as an emergency podcast. But… this is as close as we get. Serious Trouble is back for a second time this week because Donald Trump has been indicted. Again. But this time in federal court — and on a set of charges that can’t (easily) be dismissed as chickenshit. The 49-page indictment has r...

In this eye-opening episode of "The Legal Brief: Beyond the Machine," renowned attorneys Ken White and Josh Barro explore the potential risks and limitations of using AI, specifically ChatGPT, for drafting legal briefs. Joined by esteemed legal professionals and experts, they delve into the allure of technology, the nuances AI may overlook, and the potential ethical dilemmas and risks of inaccurat...

Is Rudy Giuliani in serious trouble? He’s facing two lawsuits. One is for getting a supermarket employee arrested. The other is… well, it’s for a lot of stuff. Ken and Josh discuss the prospects for ShopRite employee Daniel Gill’s lawsuit over Rudy crying “assault” over a tap on the shoulder. s for Noelle Dunphy, she has some pretty shocking claims about several areas of alleged misconduct, and we...

Ken and I started this week talking about the CNN town hall with Donald Trump. On CNN’s air, Trump repeated his denials of his assault of E. Jean Carroll — denials for which he was ordered (the day before the town hall) to pay a defamation judgment. Carroll has mused about suing him again, and she could, though her main challenge in court would be showing that his fresh denials further harmed her,...

This week, Ken and I discussed the verdict — and the $5 million judgment — in the Carroll v. Trump case, and whether Donald Trump erred, in retrospect, by not showing up for trial. We also talked about his prospects for appeal (slim) and when E. Jean Carroll can expect to get her money. We talked about Rep. George Santos, who has been indicted for crimes including unemployment insurance fraud. (Ho...

This episode of Serious Trouble, live and in person with Ken and Sara! This week, Ken and I talked about the Walt Disney Company’s lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which raises an interesting legal question: When is an otherwise-constitutional government action made unconstitutional by the motive that elected officials had for acting? The Disney case also gave me an opportunity to make K...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show *This episode contains un-bleeped profanity, as usual, but the swear jar is used once. Tucker Carlson has been dismissed from Fox News. Media accounts on why he was fired differ, but the departure looks like it was, in one way or another, downstream of the lies Fox broadcast about Dominion Voting Systems and the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Well, holy crap. As you’ve likely heard, Dominion v. Fox will not be going to trial. We recorded this episode on Tuesday morning, and then when the settlement came out, we recorded again — so this is some fresh, fresh content, looking at what forces would have driven the parties to get to ‘yes,’ and how the settl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show This week, Ken and Josh discuss major developments in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, which will imminently go to trial in Delaware. So far, pre-trial rulings have been in Dominion's favor, but as we saw a few months ago in the Tesla shareholder lawsuit against Elon Musk, it’s possible to win b...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Well, this one’s a doozy. There’s a reason this week’s episode for paid subscribers is more than an hour long. After years of hearing that “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump,” after two impeachments, and after Ken and Sara and I produced hundreds of podcast episodes regarding his legal travails, Donald Tru...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Ken is back from his vacation, and there were no Trump indictments while he was gone. Isn’t that nice? We discuss the evidence that led many people, including Trump himself, to declare an indictment was imminent; and we discuss what we might infer about whether there will even be an indictment. Plus, updates on o...

It appears that E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump might actually go to trial pretty soon — the court is behaving like it does when a trial is about to begin. This week, we talked about evidence of Trump’s prior behavior — two other accusations from women who say he committed sexual crimes against them, decades apart — that Judge Lewis Kaplan has decided may be admitted in c...

First: Yet another of SBF's top lieutenants has pleaded guilty to crimes including wire fraud and commodities fraud, and in the plea documents we learned more about SBF’s ill-advised campaign finance schemes. Plus, prosecutors and his own lawyers are proposing an agreement to further restrict SBF’s access to technology — including taking away his smartphone. Then Josh and Ken catch up on Donald Tr...

Defamation litigation tends to be unavailing. Many offending statements don’t meet the definition of defamation — they may be opinions, or insults, or false statements against a public figure made without actual malice, or even true factual statements you just didn’t like hearing. This week’s episode is mostly a deep dive into defamation lawsuits brought against Fox News (and related parties) by t...