This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio. It was another transformational term at the Supreme Court, where the Republican appointed supermajority left no doubt that its conservative revolution is pushing ahead to attain its goals without much
regard for precedent. The Conservatives slashed the power of regulators, rule that Donald Trump is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official presidential acts, made it harder to challenge voting maps as racially gerrymandered, and found that homeless people sleeping on the streets can be jailed. In those decisions, as well as seven others. The Court was divided down ideological lines six to three, with the liberal justices in the minority.
Joining me is Anthony Michael Christ, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. People are bemoaning how the Supreme Court had has become so political, But you write that the Supreme Court always has been political and that the Court has never been an apolitical arbiter of the constitution. Tell us why so?
You know, the Supreme Court has two important features in terms of how justice think. I think the first one is that you know they're members of society, and so you know, society has kind of dominant main streame views and those that are very much on the outside, and justices, much like your average citizen, is going to internalize those views, internalize those changing dynamics in society and current events and all the like, and their jurisprudence is going to sometimes
be affected by that. But then the other thing that's even more important in terms of the Supreme Court's jurisprudential outcomes is the fact that it is the byproduct of big political coalition that elected presidents and that elect majorities in the Senate. That then creates this dynamic where you get a president who appoints justice the Supreme Court who
also reflects their ideological commitments. And so generally speaking, because of these two different features of how justices get picked and how they just operate as regular members of society, right, they're not for medically sealed off from the rest of us. You know, the courts tend to reflect majoritarian views. Certainly, I think there's a case to be made that this court, the Roberts Court, and as the Roberts Court is currently constituted.
A lot of people may say this, well, outside of the kind of mainstream views of the average American today, And I think there was an argument made for that, for sure. But generally speaking, the Supreme Court just contrary to what most of us have been taught in law school and in college for years and years and years, it's not a counter majoritory and institution. It has typically reflected the majority view on major questions of law and politics.
Do you think that this is becoming more pronounced because the Court has moved so fast to overrule precedent and to change the law.
Yeah, So I think maybe a good app comparison maybe the Warren Court from the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties and the current Robbers Court as it existed we'll say since the Trump administration, so around twenty sixteen, and certainly there's similar dynamics in that both courts overturned a lot
of precedent. People generally don't see the Warren Court as being at a step with the average Americans view during that period because the New Deal coalition was dominant and they won outright majorities both in Congress and substantial majorities time and again in terms of sending a president to the White app and even Republicans who were more conservative than the average Democrat at the time tends to be more liberal, and so the views of the average politicians
who was electable in that time period was very much in sync with the appsview of the typical Supreme Court justice at the time. Why I think people seem more skeptical of this court is because unlike the War in Court, for example, you know, Donald Trump when he was first elected, never cured a popular vote majority, and I think, you know, in terms of public opinion pulling really never cracked a
majority of Americans supporting his presidency. And at the same time, there was a dynamic that occurred in the Senate where Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominees, unlike every nominee in the years past, was unable to secure a majority of Senators to confirm the nomination that he put forward for the Supreme Court, who also represented a majority of Americans, because
the Senate has become so malaportioned based on population. And so I think part of the anxiety that you see, particularly from the center, center, left and left of the political spectrum here in the United States, that is a byproduct of the feeling that the Supreme Court is representing minoritarian on minoritarian on minoritarian interests and not in step with kind of the general flow and trajectory of the American body politics, as was the case perhaps in the
nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. So there are similarities in terms of the court reflecting winning coalitions to a certain extent, both between the Warren Court and the Roberts Court. But I think there are also very significant qualitated differences in terms of where we are in the kind of a longer term trajectory in American politics.
So let's talk about some of the cases. One of the cases where it seemed to me that politics was blatantly at play was the Idaho abortion case. There were enough justices to place a stay on the district court order so that Idaho could enforce its ban before the decision, but then some of them must have had a change of heart backed off, and in the dissent, Justice Alito seemed to question why, and is the obvious answer the upcoming alone.
I think the answer is it was absolutely the election, and it was a feeling by a number of justices on the Court that coming down with a ruling that restricted abortion access further would be electorally damaging to conservatives and Republicans across the country in a very important election cycle.
And I think one of the key dynamics here that it's important to note is that this was of course a dig right, so it was dismissed and providently granted, which basically means that at least one of the members who voted to hear the case in the first place so voted to hear, sir, decided that no, they had coal feet and they just didn't want to touch this, And that to me suggests, you know, it was probably not one of the liberals right who would get cold feet,
because they would not vote for curt unless they thought they would certainly win, which with this court being as conservative as it is, an anti abortion as it is,
you know, that wouldn't be a really safe bet. So it's very like, if not absolutely certainty, that either Justice Barrett, Chief Justice Roberts, or Justice Kavanaugh or in that group who initially decided to hear this case and realize that it was going to go in a way they didn't particularly like, likely for political reasons, and they backed off. And so I think the core disposition here at least among the three more I would say more moderate conservatives.
I wouldn't call them moderates, but they're certainly less conservative
than say Justice Alito or Justice Thomas. But those three Kavanaugh, Roberts, Barrett, I think hope that either they could pump this off for another time and decide against the federal government during a year that is not an election year, or they could just sit back and hope Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, wait for the Trump administration to reverse course on this policy that bid an administration promulgated, and
then they won't have to touch it at all. So this was really politics all the way down.
Now, the Eighth Amendment, we don't talk about it all that much in the news, and the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court seems to often ignore its protections and a lot of times the case is involve criminal laws. But this term there was a case involving homelessness. Tell us about that and what the court did there.
So, in a case called City of Grant's Past, the Supreme Court said that it does not violate the Eighth Amendments ban on Cruel and Unusual punishment to essentially criminalize people from camping in public spaces. And the hard part here is that, you know, there's a couple of dynamics that really make this situation agonizing, I think for people
who particularly are concerned about unhoused persons. And how you know, we treat homelessness in the United States, which is, you know, a lot of cities create policies and adopt public policies that are not particularly friendly to affordable housing or density which can make housing more available and cheaper and whatnot, which could help ease some of these pressures. And you know, cities also seem to be really resistant in many respects
to provide adequate services. And so you know, cities make these deliberate policies which make it harder for people to secure housing or to seek temporary shelter. But then at the same time, say you can't just sleep outside, you can't put up a tent, or we're going to basically
criminalize your essential existence as an unhoused person. And so in this respect, the policy choices of cities is really a way to kind of crown people and push them out of their jurisdiction and say you're someone else's problem now, and that puts people in a really tough bind and it's really hard to get out, and so you know, the majority basically said, well, you know, this is not a problem, like you essentially have choices here as a person,
and that's that there's no constitutional refuge or shield here under the Eighth Amendment. Whereas I think that the centers understood the bind that people face in these very tough situations. I think what's telling in some respects, at least for me as a scholar of political history and particularly somebody who is focused on reconstruction. You know, so much of
this court is hell bent on originalist principles. And it's kind of ironic because, you know, if you look back to the eighteen sixties when zoadical Republicans were running the show and reconstruction was on their mind, and the Fourteenth Amendment came into play, as did the forerunner to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of eighteen sixty six.
These lost many respects for us to push back on seven states which use vacancy walls, which were very similar right to what is that play here in the City of Grant Pass case, and basically track people either you know, working on certain plantations or working in certain conditions kind of fleeing the jurisdiction. And the huge part one of the pushback against that was that people should have freedom
of movement. And you know, there were certainly people who also thought that there was a requirement and an obligation on government to provide some kind of basic social safety net. And this is a particularly important point that reconstruction legislators in South Carolina made in the late eighteen sixties and or only eighteen seventies. But there's no originalism here, right, There's kind of no originalism for folks who are poor. And I think that's really kind of telling in some
respects about what this court is doing. It's not some kind of neutral jurisprudential decision making. They make decisions on an ad hoc basis, implementing whatever kind of constitutional tools of interpretation they want as they see fit. There's really no rhyme or reason to it other than they see an issue and they craft a rule based on what they viscerally and politically feel is the right outcome.
Coming up next on the Bloomberg Lawn Show, what happened to the Chief Justice being an institutionalist who believed in judges only calling balls and strikes. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. The Supreme Court's fractured decision in an important gun rights case. This term shows the justices can't quite agree on how to use history and tradition
to analyze the constitutionality of firearm restrictions. The eight to one ruling in the Rahemi case, which upheld a federal law that bans people's subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing a gun, elicited separate writings from seven of the nine justices. Concurrences on both sides of the ideological line show there's a rigorous debate going on over the legal theory of originalism, which the Court's conservative majority has embraced.
I've been talking to Anthony Michael Christ, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. Do you think, not only in this case, but in other cases, it's sort of exposed the problems with originalism and riffs among the conservatives about originalism especially. I think it showed in the Raheemi case. I think, where you know, what is it? Everyone has a different you know, not everyone, but there are so many different opinions what is originalism?
I think the Rahemi case is really telling in some respects. It's ironic to me that Justice Tummas, who wrote the decision a couple of years ago in Bruin which was this right revolutionary Second Amendment case, basically was a loan to center in Rahimi and said, well, you don't really
understand what I wrote. And so you know that that kind of undercuts the whole point of originalism, right when you have the author of an opinion that received majority vote by members of the United States Supreme Court saying to other people in the Supreme Court you don't understand just a couple of years later what I actually meant kind of ironically undercuts originalism and its alleged integrity as
a tool of interpretation. But I think the other thing is that it has shown some crack in that people have understood that originalism has applied in a very strict and narrow sense, had unworkable and untenable outcome. And I think, frankly, the fact that the justices all raandly rejected this idea that the Second Amendment should somehow protect domestic abusers and allow them to have weapons. You know, most people in the United States, I think, would say they agree that
that should not be the case. But if you applied just to Thomas's tests that he articulated a couple of years ago in a truly faithful way, the outcome would have been different. And so I think the Rashini case in some respects illustrates how there's this kind of roving attempt by a number of the members of the Court to apply originalism where it works for them, and to
kind of push back a bit where it doesn't. And that, again, I think truly is astonishing for a group of people who suggest that originalism is the one, only and true way to interpret the Constitution.
And you point out that there were cases where the Court sort of applied lenient statutory interpretations to benefit, for example, the January sixth defendants and white collar criminals.
Yeah, so to me, one of the interesting cases that the Supreme Court decided was a case dealing with January sixth defendants called Fisher. And in Fisher, there was again it can just catch all phrase that if you apply it a very strict form of textualism that somebody like Neil Gorsuch would often propose as being his preferred way of statutory interpretation, he makes sure have come out with a different outcome that didn't favor the January sixth defendants.
And so I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who may say that that decision of Fisher, as a matter of statutory interpretation, it might make sense, it might not. There might be some reasonable disagreement about
what that decision should have looked like. But the decision itself, here's kind of the veil of legislative intent and legislative history in order to reach an outcome, and there are a number of justices who sign onto the opinion who generally reject that as an approach to interpreting a statute.
And so I think one of the things that is something we should debate perhaps is whether or not these justices are being principled or whether they are again just kind of approaching these cases like lack a mole and hitting the kind of originalist opportunities where they come up and avoid them where that kind of approach doesn't really
work for the outcomes that they truly desire. And so I think the real questions that arose out of this term cases which really is ripe for debate about whether or not the justices are being true in terms of adhering to this kind of principle or this kind of theory or kind of pool of interpretation uniformally, no matter what the out I think they're often disingenuous in that respect.
So along that line, when Trump was contesting the election in twenty twenty, it seemed like the court didn't do him any favors, but this term they gave him everything he wanted. In more, you mentioned the January sixth case. There was that incredibly broad ruling on presidential immunity. They refused to allow Colorado officials to remove him from the ballot. What happened? Why did they go so far to try to insulate Trump?
I think the big difference is that many people fell in twenty twenty that President Trump at the time had very weak political standing. There was a sense that there was going to be a total, perhaps landslide in favor of Joe Biden, and that of course didn't really happen. The election was much close, or I think most people anticipated, and that was both of the presidential election but also in terms of the Senate and the House of representative of results as well, but there was a sense that
that was probably going to come to pass. And even when it didn't come to pass, at that point, Donald Trump had lost and so the wins in his sales were completely disflated, and so there really was no benefit to the Supreme Court to go out of their way to help Donald Trump. And if they did, that would also severely risk their own institutional capital. And that's not true. Now.
Now you have a resurgent Trump. You have an income president who very well may beat Donald Trump, but who seems to be a little weaker than what most incumbents would want to be at this point in the presidential race. And they also don't want to risk the ire of Donald Trump should Donald Trump win the election in November, And so you know, that's all kind of in that mix.
And then of course they're the Conservatives are looking up for their own interest I suspect, which is they would much rather have a seven to two, eight one nine zero conservative Supreme Court if they could have it, and not having a Republican win in November makes it less likely that there will be more Conservatives on the Court a few years from now than there are today. So there are a number of different issues that are at play, but I certainly think that some of the change in
tone is political. And I also think though that some of the key issues, for example, the Presidential Community case, the number of members of this Court have truly believed in a doctrine that has empowered the executive. They believe in a unitary executive. They believe that the president should have the power to really wrestle control of administrative agencies and change policy as they see fit in things of
that nature. And so to the extent too, that they could write an opinion that is reflective of their very long standing ideological commitments in consolidating executive power and do so in a way that could at least temporarily, if not long term, benefit Trump as perhaps the preferred presidential candidate they're going to do. So.
You mentioned the administrative state basically, and the administrative state took hit after hit from the Court this term, and now with its decisions, it places power in the federal judiciary rather than in experts and agencies. So are we bound to see decisions based on the political views of federal judges more and more now that they don't have to worry about Chevron deference.
I think it's possible that you could see that there is I think, to some extent, a somewhat limiting factor here, which is there will be times, perhaps where judges will be a little squeamish of wading into a particular policy and pushing back against it because they just don't have the kind of capacity in terms of technical expertise to
do so. There will be other areas, I think this is particularly true in environmental policy perhaps, but there will be other areas where judges will feel a lot more
comfortable stepping in and pushing back against administrative state. But when that does happen, and when judges do feel comfortable and more at ease to inquire into the rationality of a particular agency's policy, you know, certainly when you're asking something rational or you know something kind of passle sness test, you know, whatever, the test that eventually gets developed, because of course we have a rule from the local right case, but we don't really know how it's going to be
fleshed out over time. I think there is a lot more room perhaps for mischief now where a judge's personal policy preferences will be easily substituted for whatever the inmistry of agency wants to do. So certainly that is a risk, but I do think that we'll have to wait and see for the next few years how this all shaked out.
Over time, the Chief Justice John Roberts, he used to care, or he seemed to care, about the public's view of the Court, about the Court as an institution, claiming, you know, justices are not politicians, that they're just calling balls and strikes. What do you think happened this term that he seemed to throw away that concern.
That's a good question. I think for a long time, Justice Roberts was dealing with a court that was really straddling an ideological lead avoid a bit where any case could come out five to four. Really truly, before Donald Trump took office, you know, the Supreme Court was still incredibly conservative. Even though it had a lot more ideological diversity on it, the court was certainly right of center.
And you know, when Justice Kennedy left the bench a couple of years into Donald Trump's term, you know, the court went vastly right ward. But I think despite the Court's conservative dynamics before the Trump innistriction, John Roberts still had to cobble together coalitions, and I think that there was a sense that the American public was becoming increasingly liberal, especially on social issues and some of these kind of hot button issues that were very salient during the Aboma administration.
I think there was a sense that he really had to keep together a coalition of five and so there might be some internal judicial politics at play there. It's really hard to say, but I think what we can for certain day is that he has seen, for whatever reason, the Court, you know, in his view, needs and can
take a sharp turn. Right now, it's hard to understand exactly, I think without the perspective of more time to kind of grasp exactly what's happened there, but there is I think a noticeable shift in the Chief Justices perspective on the Court as an institution, in the institutional capital that it had. There are some risks to that. I think that opens up the Court to a lot more political tax you know, and so we'll have to see if that works out to his benefit in the longer term.
So, as you point out, the conservatives have played a long game with the Supreme Court. So at this point, what is it that liberals or those in the center can do because the court is what the court is, and it's in power, and can anything be done.
I think the lessons of liberals is that there needs to be a long game played in a way that is somewhat similar to what conservatives did in the late nineteen seventies and kind of hyper charge in the early nineteen eighties. Liberals don't have. I mean, there's certainly the American Constitution Society, which folks may be familiar with, which is in many respects kind of a liberal version of
the Federalist Society, which many people are familiar with. But the Federal Society is a really powerful organization that began as a small conference at Yale in nineteen eighty two. A lot of work had to be put in by conservatives and libertarians into that organization to get it in a place where it's kind of at the center of power. Right.
It took forty years to be at the true center of power, but it really was a very important institution in terms of developing lawyers into judges and putting people into places political power, and being a truly important center for networking and the spread of ideas that would later become by constitutional law. The liberals, I think, need to understand that that kind of organizational power, that kind of structural political force, is required in order to make the
law turn left. So they're going to have to create those organizations or invest in the ones that already exist, and understand that that is a long term investment. At the same time, I think a lot of liberals have been kind of deluded for years by the war in court in particular, even that Court will save us right, that there's some kind of liberal value in the American constitutional order as embodies by the courts in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, that is going to kind of
live on in perpetuity. And that's just not the case. Constitutional law begins at the ballot box, and in particular, begins at the ballot box in presidential election years. And so I think for folks who look at the Court's conservatism and are kind of struck by it as being bad for the United States or reflecting values that they disagree with, then the response has to be to create organizations and the kind of structural political forces to push
back against that and to invest in electoral politics. And that's really important. Courts don't operate in their kind of independent, isolated sphere. They are truly part of a broader political atmosphere.
Thanks so much for being on the show and sharing your insights about this term, Professor Anthony Michael Christ of the Georgia State University College of Law. Coming up next, the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez is coming to
a close. This is Bloomberg. In eight weeks of trial, the government has presented a sprawling case against Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, with testimony from a cooperating witness and more than a thousand pieces of evidence, including thirteen goal bars, five hundred thousand dollars in cash, and a secret FBI videotape. Federal prosecutors say Menendez put his power up for sale, pursuing bribes for years while promising to use his power to help those who paid him, in a clear pattern
of corruption. The defense says prosecutors have not come close to meeting their burden of showing the gold or cash was given as a bribe. The seventy year old senator is accused of bribery, extortion, fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt and he faces decades in prison if convicted. Join me from the courthouse is Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriancis, who's been covering the trial. David tell us about the prosecution's theory of the case.
The prosecution theory is that Senator Robert Menendez engaged in a five year bribery scheme with his wife, who was his girlfriend for much of the period, and with two New Jersey businessmen who paid him bribes in exchange or official actions. They also say that Menendez acted as an agent of the nation of Egypt, taking several actions or promising to take several official actions that would benefit that country.
They say that Menendez also obstructed justice when his lawyers tried to head off an indictment before it happened by lying to prosecutors about some of the underlying facts of the case. And they say that Menendez was quite sophisticated and cunning in the way that he acted over several years, never being too obvious or overt in his demands, but always taking money, particularly when his wife Nadine needed it.
What was the strongest evidence the prosecution had against Menendez?
In your view, I thought.
They did an excellent job of building a circumstantial case that married the timing of various texts, emails, actions, meetings, photographs with what they say were bribes received by Menendez and official actions or the promise of official actions that he took. So they built three different long summary charts that FBI officials introduced to the jury, and that was their way of bringing in literally hundreds of texts and
emails that showed over a five year period. This is what Menendez was thinking, This is what Nadine Arslanian later his wife Nadine Menendez was thinking. This is what Fred Bavies and Will Hannah, who our defendants were doing, and a whole long list of characters that are also involved in this case in some way.
How much depends on the testimony of the witness who flipped Jose Rebey.
It depends on who you ask. If prosecutors say that they built a strong, essentially bullet proof case that does not rely heavily on Uribe, who's a former insurance broker from New Jersey who treated guilty to Thriving Menendez and testified against them for several days. Prossecuers believed that they
corroborated his account at every step of the way. On the other hand, Menendez his lawyers say that prosecutors are quite reliant on Uribe, who is a serial liar, who fabricated conversations to make Menendez look bad, and who can't be trusted, and because he can't be trusted, the government's case can't be trusted either.
There were some heavy hitters that testified against Menendez, including the New Jersey Attorney General at the time and the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.
Right the former New Jersey Attorney General, Gerber Greywall, who is now the Enforcement director at the Securities in Exchange Commission, testified about a phone call and a meeting that he had with Menendez in twenty nineteen that prosecutors say, you know was part of the Bride Grey scheme. Jurors also heard from Philip Spellinger, who's the current US Attorney in New Jersey, which makes him the top law enforcement official
in the state. And they also heard from an undersecretary former undersecret carry at the US Department of Agriculture about a similar phone call that he took from Menendez in which he said the senator asked him to drop an effort to get Egypt, to abandon a monopoly that one of the defendants had in Egypt, or meet in sections under the Holal standards.
We've talked before about the physical evidence of those gold bars and the five hundred thousand dollars in cash, How does the defense explain.
That The defense sent a great deal of time and inflammation trying to explain the gold bars and the cash. On the cash, they said that the prosecutors failed to show that there's a connection between that currency that was found in the Menendez house in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey by the FBI, and any actions that he took as
a senator. They also say that Menendez had a long standing habit inskilled in him by his Cuban refugee family, of taking out cash regularly from his bank account and essentially affording it, and that's how they can explain away a great deal of the cash. They also say that the gold bars were given to Nadine, his wife, without his knowledge, and that he had nothing to do with the gold bars, so they have a number of explanations. They also acknowledge that this is a difficult part of
the case for the defense. They say that it is really the heart of the government's case and that if jurors will be patient and listen to their explanation, that the prosecution case just falls apart.
David, I mean, is their main defense saying that the prosecution has improven things beyond a reasonable doubt or do they have an affirmative defense?
They say there's an absence of evidence that they have not proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt. They also say prosecutors failed to show that Menendez either promised to
take official action or actually took official action. And you know, they've attacked the way that the prosecutors put the case together using these massive summary charts, the texts and emails and phone calls and meetings, saying that they're asking the jury to go too far to draw negative inferences without having direct proof of any wrongdoings.
So Menendez's wife is being tried separately, which is like a gift to Menandez in the case because it allows him to point at someone who's not in the courtroom as a possible culprit. Where does the wife fit in in the defense view?
Maybe Menendez is not at the trial because she has breast cancer and is getting treatment for that. The prosecutors see her as a critical go between who facilitated conversations and bribes between Bob Menendez and the businessman who bribed him.
The defense have used her as a fall person to blame for many of the actions that prosecutors say were criminal, and they essentially say that Nadine held critical information from Bob about the poor state of her finances and the gifts that she received from those businessmen.
I thought it was interesting. At one point he summoned her with a bell, and the prosecution used that to show that he was the one in charge. Tell us about that bell ringing.
Right.
There was a critical meeting on the patio at ten pm on September evening behind the house of the Menendez is where the businessman who pleated guilty, Jose Uribe, met with Menendez, and prosecutors say and Uriba testify that he gave critical details to Menendez about what he should say to the new Jersey Attorney General at the time of
gray Wall. The two men were sitting on the patio for an hour, according to the testimony, drinking Grand Marnier, smoking cigars, and Menendez needed to write down some information and this was a colorful part of the trial. According to Eurebe, Menendez picked up a bell and rang it to summon his wife, who came out with a piece of paper, and.
The prosecution said the bell showed that he was the person in charge, not a puppet having his strings pulled by someone else. You know, we had talked before about whether Menendez would testify or not, and I thought he to try to counter some of the evidence and perhaps went over a juror or two get a hung jury. Did the defense mention at all why he didn't testify it?
Menenda said outside the courthouse after he announced he was in testifying that he felt that the prosecutors had not proved their case, so he was essentially saying there was no need for his testimony because they failed to prove the unreasonable doubt that he engaged in all this criminal conduct.
He's accused of bribery, extortion, fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt. If he falls on one, will he fall on all of them? Or are their unique circumstances for some of those charges.
I think what is going to make this case difficult for the jury to judge is there are a number of separate plots alleged by the government. There's overlapping evidence and intersecting points and players. But this is going to be a difficult job for the jury to weigh all these different criminal charges against three defendants. I think it's going to take them a while to reach a verdict.
There's also thirteen hundred.
Exhibits, at least thirteen hundred. There's a lot of evidence to go through. The prosecutors took nearly six hours in their initial closing argument. Menendez's lawyer took at least five hours. There's a couple more closing arguments than the prosecutors get a rebuttal case again, and then there's a fairly complex set of legal instructions that the judge has to give
to the jury. Now this is a jury that was told that the case would last six weeks, and now we're almost into our ninth week of the trial.
Well, I know you will be there until the bitter end. David, thanks so much. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriacis. In other legal news today, Arcago's Capital Management founder Bill Huang was found guilty of criminal charges stemming from his firm's twenty twenty one collapse. Concluding a two month trial that captivated Wall Street, the jury delivered verdicts against Wang and
his co defendant, former Archagos CFO Patrick Halligan. Both men were convicted of defrauding Arcago's counterparties like Credit Suisse and UBS by lying to them about the firm's trading activity and the level of risk in its portfolio. Wang was separately found guilty of manipulating several stocks, including the former ViacomCBS, though he was acquitted with regard to one stock. Both
men were also convicted of participating in racketeering conspiracy. Each count theoretically carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. The judge set in October twenty eighth sentencing for both men, and that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on
our Bloomberg Law podcasts. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot Bloomberg dot com, slash podcast Slash Law, And remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg