Serious Trouble

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...

Dear listeners, We’re back with more serious trouble! On this week’s show, we take a look at the (partial) report of a Georgia special grand jury that had been investigating efforts to interfere in that state’s reporting of its 2020 presidential election results. The report says the grand jurors think they heard some perjury. And its unreleased portions may contain recommendations about criminal c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Elon Musk got a big win in the civil trial over whether his “funding secured” statements defrauded shareholders. We talked about how “that’s Elon being Elon” can be an effective defense. We also talked about Sam Bankman-Fried and the ever-sprawling pool of potentially-cooperating witnesses who might tell prosecut...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show This week, we talk about how not to stay out on bail (yes, once again, it's Sam Bankman-Fried), and how the judge is likely to respond to him contacting FTX employees. We also talk about David DePape, who seems pretty nuts — but not nuts enough to have an effective insanity defense for his attack on Paul Pelosi....

This week, Ken and I talked about a substantial sanctions order — nearly $1 million — that Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba must pay for the frivolous RICO lawsuit they brought against dozens of defendants. As sanctions orders go, this is really big — and Ken thinks Habba should worry about being disbarred — but is this really an effective deterrent against Trump, who got lots of publicit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Ken is utterly dismayed that Sam Bankman-Fried has started a Substack, where he’s writing in great detail about FTX. Then: Ken and Josh talk about the classified documents found at President Biden’s home in Wilmington and the Penn Biden Center in Pennsylvania, if there is legal exposure for the president, among o...

In some ways, George Santos is having a pretty good year. The congressman-elect's new salary is $174,000 a year, which is a lot more than he was making at the Dish Network call center. Of course, there are some other things that aren’t going so great for him. He is a big lying liar who lies , and while lying about whether you ever worked at Goldman Sachs isn’t a crime, some of the lies Santos told...

We talk a lot on this show about bad clients — people in legal trouble who disregard advice, talk when they should shut up, and generally make their lawyers' lives miserable while increasing their own odds of facing a large judgment award or ending up in prison for a good, long time. You know, clients like Sam Bankman-Fried and Donald Trump. So we thought it would be good to talk about what it tak...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Sam Bankman-Fried… boy, is he in serious trouble. He’s been indicted on several counts, with the central accusation being that he defrauded customers, lenders, and equity investors doing business with his now-bankrupt companies, FTX and Alameda Research. Importantly, the story Bankman-Fried has been relentlessly...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Sam Bankman-Fried is in serious trouble! And he has a strategy: tweet through it. We talk about the legal risks that come from tweeting through your legal risks — it’s not just that SBF risks providing evidence to help the government prove he committed crimes; he may also be committing new crimes, like wire fraud...

In this episode of Serious Trouble, we discuss: - An order granting the New York Attorney General’s request for a monitor to oversee Trump Organization financial activity, and some troubles the Trumps face in this civil action that they would not face in a criminal case. - An acquittal on all counts for Tom Barrack, a businessman and associate of Donald Trump’s who was accused of acting as an unre...

We answer a listener question about what’s likely to happen to InfoWars, now that Alex Jones and his companies are subject to a $965 million defamation judgment. We also talk about legal difficulties at Fox News — including one that’s overblown. And, after receiving a lot of requests from you to discuss this topic, we talk aboutd the prospects of chess prodigy Hans Niemann’s lawsuit, in which he s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Someone close to attorney Christina Bobb is making sure reporters hear it was definitely not her fault that she incorrectly told investigators in June that Trump had already handed over all the marked-classified documents remaining at Mar-a-Lago. Bobb insisted on adding a caveat to her declaration, saying it was...

There’s been a lot of legal news in the last ten days, and so today’s show is on the long side: nearly an hour and it’s also free for all listeners in its full length. We talked about the oddly snippy correspondence between Judge Aileen Cannon and the much more senior federal judge she’s named as special master overseeing the Mar-a-Lago documents, we answer a listener’s question about whether Trum...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Whew, it’s been a big news week! Big enough that we had to record this episode one and a half times: on Wednesday, following the first conference with Special Master Raymond Dearie; and again on Thursday, after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals made Dearie’s job much easier by saying the DOJ is free to use approx...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show If you are a lawyer, it is important to make sure you get paid for your work, especially if your client is someone like Donald Trump, who has very complex legal needs and a history of trying not to pay his vendors. So we weren’t surprised that attorney Chris Kise, one of the big shots on Trump’s legal team, has c...