This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio. The Supreme Court has issued twenty opinions in argued cases so far this term, and fifteen of them have been unanimous. That may seem unusual for a court that's often split down ideological lines in controversial cases since the three Trump appointees joined the court, leading to a super conservative majority, but Chief Justice John Roberts has often talked about the importance of unanimity.
I still think it's an important objective one because I think judicial decisions should be narrower rather than broader, and the way to do that is to try to get as many people on board as you can. That you know, if you're going to reach a broad decision that's going to cover all sorts of different factional scenarios, a lot of people are going to say, well, WHOA, I'm not quite sure I agree with that. They might write something narrow, But if you keep it narrow that it only decides
what's absolutely necessary to be decided. Usually you can get more people to agree with that one.
But in the next two months, as decisions are handed down in controversial cases involving abortion, guns, racial gerrymandering and presidential immunity, you can expect that unanimity to evaporate. Joining me is John Elwood, the head of the appelladan Supreme Court practice at Arnold and Porter. He's been before the justices many times. For those who are not familiar, will you explain the process the justices go through in making these decisions once they've heard oral arguments?
Sure?
Well.
The Supreme Court here is argument for basically two weeks every month between October and April, and at the end of I think each week of argument they vote on
which position everyone's going to take on every case. And I believe that at the end of the whole sitting there's a kind of a final tally where the person who is presiding, that is, the senior most justice in the majority, assigns opinions to all of the justices in a way that tries to give them kind of an equal share of cases, an equal number of authorships.
Twenty opinions and argued cases this term fifteen have been unanimous. I know the Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Cony Barrett also has talked about how you know we're unanimous on the majority of cases, but tell us about the kinds of cases they're unanimous on.
Well, most of the cases that have been decided so far are not the kind of read letter, big ticket to mix metaphors cases for the term, they're more generally
the Duller cases. There are a few cases that are more noteworthy which were nonetheless unanimous, which were likely unanimous because they were so narrow, like, for example, there were the social media blocking cases link Keepers is Freedom O'Connor rat Clippers's garner, which involved a fairly big ticket issue about whether when public officials block people on social media that is essentially state actions, it is regulated by the
First Amendment. And that was the case that really the justices seem to have some trouble grappling with an argument, but they decided very little of it. They decided a fairly narrow rule and left most of the applications for reman and so I think that would have been a very easy case to not be unanimous if they had decided it any more broadly than they did.
So are they trying to present a picture of unanimity with these cases by, as you say, either limiting them or you know, choosing cases that are not hot button.
Issues well, to begin with, one of the things I like to emphasize is that when you're dealing with such small numbers, it doesn't take much for things to seem like outliers. You know, when you're dealing with just like eighteen cases, it only takes something like four extra cases to go from an ordinary term to an really unusual high water mark of unanimity. And so this is something
that I always try to emphasize. When you're dealing with the Supreme Court, the numbers are so small that it doesn't take much for things to look like you have some real outlier term or real weird trend. But with that, you know, I do think that the Roberts Court does
try to emphasize unanimity. They also there may be a different dynamic in that, you know, they're trying to get cases out because they are relatively behind in getting opinions out, and so they may just you know, be writing opinions narrowly so they can clear those cases out, get them out so they can focus on the remaining cases. So there are a number of reasons why they might be doing it this way. I do think that they try to be unanimous whenever they can it's kind of part
of the ethos the Roberts' Court. John Roberts cares about it, and I think he tries to job on other people into feeling the same way that maybe that they're taking relatively few cases. There are very low number of grants' term and it may be that they are picking out cases that they feel there's a pair amount of unanimity end and it may be that they're, you know, kind of clearing the wave for more contentious issues which have yet to be decided.
Every year, the cases that we're waiting for involving hot button issues come down at the end of June, sometimes the last two days of June, before they go on vacation. Is there a reason for that or is it just a decision to leave the most controversial cases until the final days.
I think a lot is just explained by the practicality of it, which is that descending opinions take more time, and sometimes in the most contentious cases there's back and forth between the descent and the majority opinion, and when people are fine tuning opinions, you know, in draft after draft after draft, it can go kind of down to the wire. So I think much of it is explained simply by the practicality of you know, more opinions, more drafts, take more.
Time, And will you explain the process of circulating the opinions so all the justices see what others have written and can respond to it.
That's right. A majority opinions circulate, Descending opinions then circulate, and each subsequent draft is then circulated to the entire group, and then you know, justices who are joining opinions may ask for changes. Justices who are joining descent may ask
for changes. Authors of both majority opinions and authors of the sense may tweak their opinions to respond to the opinions on the other side, and each of those opinions will be circulated as a whole group with a red line, so everyone knows what's new and what's been changed is the last draft.
I guess that does show why it takes so long. Now, as far as the oral arguments go, and everyone says, you can tell what the decision will be from the oral arguments, but can you sort of figure out the broad strokes of the decision from the oral arguments? Have you ever been totally surprised by a decision?
Like?
Wow? I never expected that.
There have been some that surprised me. There was a case many years ago when the oral argument was still in a pretty rigidly one hour format where there was actually kind of a reversal of positions that the position that Justice Stevens seemed to be advocating wound up being
taken up by Justice Scalia and vice versa. But I think, especially under the new format, which essentially goes on as long as the justices have questions, I think oral argument is a much better predictor of where people are going to come out in the end. There are fewer surprises, I think under the sort of format because all of the issues are thoroughly ventilated the court.
It's been said a million times, but it's at its lowest approval rating since they've been taking those polls. Do you think that that matters to the justices or not. They're there for life.
So yeah, I don't think that they're unmindful of it. But I think that they kind of do the same thing year in and year out. They go in and they decide the cases, you know, the way they feel that they should be decided. You know, they may try to be more unanimous in a particular case or decide
an issue more narrowly. And I do think that they're generally kind of an incremental and minimalist court in the sense that I think that they try to decide, and many times they try to decide the least that they can decide so well. I don't think that they're unmindful of it. They read the newspapers. I don't think that they let it shape their behavior. I think that they
I'm kind of one of those pollyannas. You think that they really try to just do justice, or they try to follow the law in every case.
As you're talking about the oral arguments as someone who's argued, I mean, do the lawyers like the arguments that often do go on for hours?
You know. I actually had a conversation with several other kind of repeat players the other day on this, and I think generally one thing we like about it is that it really does allow everybody to be kind of heard fully, and I think that that generally is a favorable thing. The downside is that it makes it harder
to argue more cases. That you can essentially fully ventilate one controversial case per day, but if you have a second argument it's going to get much more summary treatment, and you know that that makes it kind of more difficult for the court to hear more cases.
And they've been cutting down on the number of cases that they.
Take each year, and it's kind of at low low EP right now. You know, it's kind of more in the sixty case range. And I don't know if they're related or not, since they don't explain what they're doing, I don't know if they're related. But one consequence of the longer world argument format is that it makes it harder to hear two cases.
Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate your insights, especially knowing that you've argued some ten times before the justices. That's John Elwood, head of the Appellatan Supreme Court practice at Arnold and Porter. The Supreme Court handed down two decisions today and neither of them was unanimous. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Lawn Show, we'll get an update
from Donald Trump's hush money trial. This is Bloomberg. Stormy Daniels finished her testimony today at Donald Trump's hush money trial. The question is did the adult film star help prosecutors prove the former president falsified business records. Joining me now is Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriakiz, who's covering the trial for us. All in all, what was your take on Stormy Daniel's testimony? Was she credible or not?
Stormy Daniels gave in passionate testimony that she had a sexual encounter with Donald Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in two thousand and six, and that, despite very intense cross examination, that she was not backing down from that account and that she was not motivated by making money, even though Trump's lawyer Susan Necklace crossed her on how she had made more than a million dollars in various commercial ventures based on her account of having sex with Trump,
and how she had changed key details of that encounter a number of times since this happened eighteen years ago. And so what Trump's lawyer was trying to do was raise serious doubts about her credibility before the jury, and Stormy Daniels was able to stick to her basic account. She sparred with Trump's lawyer Susan Necklace, and while she wobbled a bit, she stuck to her core story and was not shaken off of that.
Seems like the testimony is going from you know, compelling witness to the paperwork. And it is a case about business records. So who was on the stand next?
The next witness was a publishing executive, and then we heard from Medline Westerhouse, who was Trump's assistant just outside the Oval office, who testified about how she handled Trump's payment of personal bills. This matters in this case because, of course Trump was accused of falsifying corporate records to hide his repayment to Michael Cohen of one hundred and
thirty thousand dollars that he paid to Stormy Daniels. And I should also say that after the final witness, a Trump's lawyer, Todd Blanche renewed a mistrial emotion that he's made on Tuesday, saying that the judge allowed a great deal of prejudicial testimony by Stormy Daniels about the sexual
encounter that was improper. The judge said that essentially the defense had opened the door to that by attacking her credibility in their opening statement and saying that the sexual encounter did not occur, And so the judge said, well, the proseputor was then allowed to bring her on to say that yes, it did occur. Todd Blanche also asked the judge to modify his gag order on Donald Trump to allow him to respond to the Stormy Daniels testimony. The judge refused to.
Do that, and did that argument get heated?
Yes, it was quite a heated argument for a good while after the end of trial testimony and judge was Stinelass came back for the prosecutors and essentially said, you know that all of Todd Blanche's arguments were misguided and that the prosecution did nothing improper in eliciting Stormy Daniels testimony about what happened in the hotel room in the Tao in two thousand and six.
Since Tuesday, has Trump been following the gag order.
There have been no complaints from the prosecutors that he has violated the gag order. He's obviously very angry about Stormy daniels testimony. The judge admonished him in a sidebar when he was cursing at Stormy Daniels on Tuesday. But as far as I know, he hasn't said anything publicly about Stormy Daniels or any other witnesses to violate the
gag order. Essentially, Todd Blanche asked the judge to allow the Jackles off so that Trump could talk freely to the public and on a campaign trail about Stormy Daniels, and the judge said that that would imperil the integrity of the proceedings, and he denied them.
What does the jury have to believe from Stormy daniels testimony to make the prosecution's case? I mean, did the prosecution even have to call her as a witness?
And that's an excellent question. It's possible to argue that the prosecution could have made their case without Stormy daniels testimony. It doesn't matter whether they really had sex or not. What matters is that he paid hush payment days before the twenty sixteen election to prevent her from going public with her account, whether it's true or not. And the trial, of course, is about you falsifying records to cover up
that payment. What the judge said and what the prosecutor said is that the testimony by Stormy Daniels was important because the defense had called her credibility into question and said that this never happened, and so the prosecutor said that they needed an opportunity to put her on the witness and essentially to show that she was a credible witness and that her account was important to complete the story. You know why it was that Donald Trump was paying the hush money that he paid.
Has the prosecution decided not to call Karen McDougall.
The prosecution said they were not calling Karen McDougall. We did not get an explanation from the prosecution on that. We actually learned that from a defense lawyer in an argument before the judge.
Who's on the stand tomorrow when they.
Resume as usual. The prosecutors have not said who they're calling next. But the big remaining witness is Michael.
Colin, and that cross examination maybe epic. Thanks so much, David. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter David Voriachis. The dramatic twenty twenty one collapse of our Chagos Capital Management will be replayed in a criminal trial over the next two months, as prosecutors tried to convict founder Bill Wanog for market manipulation, racketeering,
and fraud. In announcing the charges a year ago, Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York called it a market manipulation scheme that nearly jeopardized our financial system.
The scheme was a historical scope. We alleged defendants and their co conspirators live banks to obtain billions of dollars that they then used to inflaye the sock price of a number of public retreated companies. The lies that the inflation, and the inflation that more lives round and round it way.
Prosecutors say Wog misled some of Wall Streets biggest banks into inflating the value of our Chago's holdings to as high as one hundred and sixty billion dollars before the family Office imploded, all but erasing his thirty six billion dollar fortune. Jury's selection has begun in the case, and Bloomberg Legal reporter Chrystal Mesh is covering the trial for US. Tell us about Bill Wang? Who is he?
So Bill Wang? He's a Tiger cub from Julian Robertson's camp at Tiger Management. The late Julian Robertson, legendary trader who trained quite a few people to become traders and kind of launch their own funds and firms. So Bill started under him and learned the ropes, and then around I think it's two thousand and one he started his own firm with some money from Julian roberts I think
twenty five million, so he ran that. It was called Tiger Global Asia, you know, took the name from Robertson and mainly traded in Asia stocks, but had to eventually the firm pleaded guilty to a kind of a stock sandal, basically involving tips on Asian equities. He didn't admit any wrongdoing, but he settled. But as a result he formed a
family office. It became our Chagos and basically did the same kind of thing trading, made a lot of money and then, as everybody knows, blew up in March twenty twenty one whether the trade went south.
He's very religious and he sort of likes to spread his faith. I mean, tell me about that aspect of him.
Yes, very much. In fact, you know, an interesting part about this trials we've seen Christianity today. The periodical that covers religion and Christianity is here for the trial, so that kind of tells the first Yes, definitely never seen them before, so definitely preaches his faith. He said he invests basically, you know, he takes his hints from the Bible, tries to invest in things that he thinks, you know,
the Lord would want him to invest in. He started his own foundation, the Grace and Mercy Foundation, to further that goal of religious education. He says, he reads the Bible religiously, and we won't know how much of that will come up during the trial, and the government pretty much wanted to kind of limit that kind of arguments about his good acts and his faith, and the judge said,
we're not going to really go into that. It's hard to say how much of that is actually going to come up, but one can't imagine that it won't come up at all through the witnesses.
Tell us what he's charged with.
There are two defendants, so there's Bill Long who was the founder, and then the CFO, Patrick Halligan, who's not charged in quite so big of a scheme. So Bill was basically charged with conspiring with traders at the firm to trade. Essentially, he traded on swap, so he was
trading on margin. But the government's allegation said he was trading on margin with multiple firms who didn't really realize the level of his exposure, and the allegation so that he did this to manipulate the market and drive up interest in the stocks that he had invested in, so that when you know, his margin ran out and there's the banks started to make margin calls because he had gotten more credit. Suddenly the stocks started plummeting because they
realized suddenly how exposed he was. So he's kind of accused of that market man infization scheme. And separately, he's also accused with the CFO of attempting to mislead the banks and fool them into not knowing that he had these kind of lines of credit with other institutions.
I've read that his strategy in retrospect was like market suicide, and one of his attorneys said, he never sold a nickel of his shares. Does anyone know what the point of this was?
Well, that's a good question.
You know.
The judge has questioned the prosecutors like, what was the goal of this if he lost all his money? So I think that's going to be the main point of the defense here is they argue he wasn't trying to manipulate the market that he was making on its trades and that it fell out for under him, and they essentially argued that the banks did their own due diligence.
These are very sophisticated in institutions that did their own research, that weren't going to extend credit unless they felt comfortable with doing so, and that at the same token, you know, they were required to hedge his trades through the contract by buying whenever he decided to trade the options. They were forced to buy the schairs and the underlying stocks
as a hedge. He argues that rather than just a one for one hedge, one share for every time he bought, they were going out and very broadly hedging this and therefore kind of he says that underminds the argument that the banks didn't know what was going on.
The key is that the prosecutors say he lied to the banks they were barring from and used the swaps to conceal the huge positions that he was in. Right, So this is federal court. So the judges doing the questioning for the jury selection, this case sounds like it could be a bit complicated. What kind of jurors are they looking for?
So it's hard to say on that end, but jury selection it's been very interesting in this case. Normally when we do jury selection, every judge is different, but generally, you know, they'll bring a lot of jerors into a courtroom.
They'll you know, ask them if they have time constraints, they'll go through their individual history to see if you know, they know any of the witnesses or any of the parties involved in the case, and then they'll just kind of go through what they call bar geer and and ask them about, you know, what they read, what, you know,
what they know about that sort of thing. In this case, the judge, because it's going to be a two month trial, brought them all in yesterday, brought in the jurors one by one and asked them if they could sit for two months, that was really it, and if they could, they went home for the day and they all came back today and they began the process of whittling down
the jury. So obviously this morning there's lots of questions about financial institutions, did you work with the counterparties involved. There's more than you know, three dozen witnesses on the witness list from counterparties here and multiple banks. So they're slowly kind of going through each institution and you know, people who have had experience with law enforcement. But we really haven't gotten to any kind of individual whittling down. So it's kind of hard to see what the strategy
is behind the jury selection at this point. But I will say that the judges made it clear, like many judges do, that he wants a big cross section of life experiences and things like that on the jury. So there's all kinds of people. We've got a general counsel for newspapers, We've got people who worked in finance, We've got people who worked in construction. We've seen just the whole gamut of different occupation through the last two days.
And now who's expected to testify? Do we know like who the main witnesses will be.
Yeah, So the two big star witnesses or is former head trader William Tamida and the former head of risk management, which was Scott Becker, and they have both pled guilty and agreed to cooperate against him, so they formed the
majority of the government's case against him. Like I said, they will bring up witnesses from the counter parties from Credit Suite and many of the other banks likely who will testify about you know, their reaction to finding out about how exposed our Chagos was, and we should have also, like some analysts from the cell side, and also we'll
definitely have multiple experts from both parties. Beyond that, we're still waiting to hear some names of some of the people who will be on the witness list.
I understand that the defense may argue that the prosecution is pushing this novel market manipulation theory. Is this the first time that the Feds have prosecuted a case like this, and maybe this is the first time a case like this has happened.
Yeah, it's definitely kind of the first time that the government has kind of brought this kind of broad market manipulation scheme. There have been others, but none of them have been quite as widespread and infamous. Really, many of them have been in kind of niche markets things like that, And so it's definitely one of the more interesting prosecutions that we've seen a white collar crime in years.
So Wall Street is watching this, I take it for sure.
Now, let's be clear, Archie Ghost doesn't exist. Credit Suite is bought by UPS and the fallout was broad from this, but it's not like there's going to be a broad impact on the market from what happens here, but it will be a message probably to family offices to be more prudent. And you know, there's no doubt that this is a fascinating episode in Wall Street history to the financial industry. So in that aspect, I think everybody will be watching it.
I'm interested in the judge, Alvin Hellerstein. He's known for overseeing the long litigation stemming from the September eleventh terrorist attack. And is he ninety years old? Because that gives us all hope for the future.
The judge is ninety years old, you would find it hard to believe, given that he went through eight plus hours of jury selection yesterday and he candidly admitted he was exhausted at the end, but he was back at it today. Alvit heller seems a very interesting man. He's clearly got his head in the trial. You don't see many jurors giving h related excuses.
What do we know about the prosecutors in the case.
They've all got some sort of experience in white collar prosecutions. Here at the Southern District. Matthew Podolski, who you could probably say is the lead prosecutor's co chief of the Securities and Kabadie's task Force, and he was one of the lead prosecutors in the fraud case against the Nicola Corp. Founder Trevor Milton, who was sentenced to four years in
prison last year for misleading investors about its prospects. Alex ross Miller, Alexander Rossman and Andrew Mark Thomas also have similar experience in white collar cases, but not as much as Podolski.
And what about the defense attorneys.
Well, Barry Burke is the defense attorney for Bill Long along with his colleagues Jordan Destie's and Dandy James. He's a very well known white collar defense attorney. Used to be a trial lawyer for the Federal Defender and he's represented many high profile white collar defendants. Served as Chief and Statement council for the House in the first Senate
trial of Trump. And also Mary Mulligan is representing the CFO Patrick Calligan, and she's a former prosecutor and is also a veteran white collar defense attorney who represented the Trump Organization CFO Alan Weiselberg.
Is there any talk of one taking the stand, Well.
It's a little early for that. It's a great question. In every case, it's the question.
I know, it's always the.
Question defense case, which is, you know, a month away at the least. We haven't heard a lot of talk about that. And usually when it comes to white collar cases, and really in any kind of case, defendants aren't required to tell them if they're going to testify until really the last minute. And often, you know, it's really one of the only cards that the defense can pull out if they're not going to call a real robust case.
So they like to keep that one close to their vest until they really get a sense of when they're going to do it. So I wouldn't expect to hear anything about that until we get really substantially deep into trial.
I'm sure we'll be talking again soon. Thanks so much, Chris. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Chris Dolmesh, and that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Podcast. Remember you can always get the latest legal news by subscribing and listening to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Slash Law. I'm June Grosso and this is Bloomberg