Acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin continues to make bizarre and political use of the DOJ for Trump’s political purposes — this time, he's trying to impanel a grand jury to hear evidence about heated political remarks Sen. Chuck Schumer made in 2020 about Supreme Court justices. It hasn't worked, and neither has his effort to get a magistrate judge to approve a warrant to freeze the bank account of an environmental organization. Plus: why lawyers working on EO litigation m...
Mar 05, 2025•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Trump administration continues to ice out the Associated Press, and now the AP is suing. We discuss how the administration changed its argument (not great, from a policy perspective, but it may actually put the White House on stronger legal ground). Ed Martin — the conservative activist serving as acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, whom Trump has named to be the permanent US Attorney for that district — continues to send out weird, threatening letters about non-criminal behavio...
Feb 27, 2025•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Emil Bove's weaponization of the Justice Department is leading to resignations, including of a former protégé; Pam Bondi's bark is worse than her bite; Alex Spiro is a good lawyer. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.serioustrouble.show/subscribe
Feb 19, 2025•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week: more firings — dozens of DOJ line prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has drawn a flurry of litigation, much of it related to the Administrative Procedure Act. States and grantees are suing to stop the OMB funding pause, and finding success so far. Unions representing government workers are suing Elon Musk’s access to their information. Several anonymous FBI agents are even suing to stop disclosure to Trump officials of which cases they worke...
Feb 05, 2025•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just a week and a half back into the presidency, Donald Trump has seen to it that various federal prosecutors who were involved in prosecuting him have been fired. Can he do that? Also: the DOJ continues to drop cases against defendants who enjoy Trump’s political favor, so other defendants and convicts are trying to curry Trump's favor, including former Sen. Bob Menendez, who was just sentenced for a bribery scheme that didn’t even involve a Mercedes E-Class. And Meta has paid a large settlemen...
Jan 31, 2025•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show It's the first Serious Trouble of the new Trump administration. We start with a discussion of pardons: the ones Joe Biden gave on his way out of office and the ones Donald Trump gave on his way in. For premium subscribers: the Jack Smith reports (the one about the January 6 prosecution which was released publicly, and the one about the documents prosecution, which Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked from being rele...
Jan 24, 2025•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Supreme Court declined to save Donald Trump from being sentenced in his New York criminal case, but the justices said that decision was in part because there wasn’t much to save him from : Judge Juan Merchan had indicated that he would sentence Trump to an unconditional discharge, i.e. no punishment. In other Trump-criminal-case-wind-down news, Judge Aileen Cannon has continued to make trouble for DOJ officials seeking to release parts of a report about Trump’s two federal criminal prosecuti...
Jan 14, 2025•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s already a busy 2025 for some of our favorite characters. On this episode: Rudy Giuliani has been held in contempt in proceedings in Judge Lewis Liman’s courtroom, where he has stalled the liquidation of his assets for the benefit of two women he defamed. Donald Trump gets an "unconditional discharge" penalty from Judge Juan Merchan and is trying to stop the release of Jack Smith's report. George Santos asks a judge to delay his sentencing so he can develop and monetize his podcast (!), Eric...
Jan 10, 2025•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Welcome to the first Serious Trouble episode of 2025! For all subscribers this week, Ken and Josh discuss Luigi Mangione’s indictments in both Pennsylvania and New York, and he’s also the subject of a federal criminal complaint. Both New York and the Feds look eager to prosecute him, and there’s going to be wrangling over who gets to go first, with an important difference in the stakes — he’s facing a capital f...
Jan 03, 2025•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is our last episode of 2024! We'll be back right after the new year to discuss new messes. Today, we look at the substantial settlement that Disney-owned ABC has agreed to pay over George Stephanopoulos’s repeated assertions that Donald Trump had been found “liable for rape” by a jury or juries. And Trump sues CBS, Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register. Plus: Judge Juan Merchan has ruled that the Supreme Court decision establishing a sphere of presidential immunity does not compromise the ...
Dec 18, 2024•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast People get really weird when a murder suspect is hot, huh? Luigi Mangione needs to be extradited to New York, and he’s resisting that — we discuss why it can make sense for a defendant to delay the inevitable. Also in New York, Daniel Penny has been acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely. Juries can get weird. Plus: InfoWars may not be sold to The Onion after all, an expert witness in AI used AI to write his testimony and it hallucinated some fake cases (oops!)...
Dec 13, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Joe Biden has committed the ultimate act of snowplow parenting: a presidential pardon for his son, and not just for the specific acts he faced charges over, but for anything he did between 2014 and five days ago. This week, Ken and I discuss exactly how unusual this pardon was and exactly what kinds of norms about pardons even remain to enforce, and rumors that Biden might hand out a lot more preemptive pardons...
Dec 06, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Did you know Ken is a huge Kendrick Lamar fan? Well, not really. But he is psyched that Lamar and Drake have produced some truly hilarious litigation to discuss. Their beef goes back years, and they have traded diss tracks — in Kendrick's latest, he calls Drake a “certified pedophile” who’s “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A Minor.” Is that defamation? If you’re a regular listener to this show, you know it very likely isn’t — and even Drake isn’t quite ready to sue for defamation. But he ...
Nov 27, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Wouldn’t you know we recorded this show Thursday at 11am Eastern, just in time for Matt Gaetz to withdraw his candidacy for Attorney General a bit after noon? Don’t worry — we went back and recorded a new beginning of the episode, tossing out the now moot (probably?) conversation we had about the ethics report everyone in Washington wants to see. Ken and I still took the opportunity to talk about how a DOJ unde...
Nov 22, 2024•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Last week’s presidential election, which has made Donald Trump once again the president-elect, will obviously have profound effects on the various criminal cases against him. On this show, we cover the Department of Justice winding down the two federal prosecutions and why they're doing it now, and the prospects for the prosecutions in Georgia and New York. For paying subscribers: a deeper conversation on what ...
Nov 13, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast For your Election Day listening pleasure, we have an episode for you covering the news that has arisen in the lead-up to the election: * Updates on Eric Adams, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says her office is looking into whether Donald Trump illegally threatened Liz Cheney at a rally in Arizona. * Young Thug, the Atlanta rapper who has stood accused of running a street gang, pleaded guilty in the long-running, very messy RICO case where he has stood trial alongside several of his associat...
Nov 05, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show For all listeners, we have updates this week on Michael Avenatti, Aileen Cannon, Laura Loomer and Bill Maher. Our valued paying subscribers (thank you for your support!) will also hear about: the Central Park Five lawsuit against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani being ordered to hand over assets to the election workers he defamed, FTX defendant Ryan Salame, who alleges (dubiously) that federal prosecutors double-cro...
Oct 24, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast SpaceX is suing the California Coastal Commission for objecting to a plan to increase the frequency of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The commissioners did raise some concerns that actually relate to the Pacific coastline, but they also mouthed off about how they dislike SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s general political activities. And Judge Tanya Chutkan considers how the Supreme Court decision in Fischer affects the criminal charge against Donald Trump for obstructing an official pro...
Oct 18, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show The long memo Jack Smith promised is here: a 185-page document laying out evidence he’d like to present in his January 6-related case against Donald Trump. The memo has to be so long because the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity was so complex and vague: Smith must show, act by act, that he’s offering evidence either of Trump’s unofficial actions, or of official acts where he can overcome the pres...
Oct 10, 2024•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Federal prosecutors allege that New York mayor Eric Adams accepted tens of thousands of dollars of free business-class upgrade on Turkish Airlines as part of a broader scheme to receive illegal support from foreign nationals (including concealed political donations from Turks) in exchange for official favors, including from the Fire Department of New York. This is a long, fun “speaking indictment” with juicy details. Plus, there’s other news: Three Iranian hackers indicted for the breach of Trum...
Sep 30, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Ryan Wesley Routh has been charged with attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate. Ken and Josh discuss how proving Routh’s intent to kill the former president might be challenging (had he not left a note expressing his intent), and we talk about what “attempt” is — Routh never pulled the trigger, but there are a number of “substantial steps” he took toward killing Trump that should still make th...
Sep 26, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast We were kind of expecting Sean Combs to get indicted sooner or later, but we weren’t expecting the indictment to be for RICO. Federal prosecutors allege that Combs, as the leader of the “Combs Enterprise,” led a criminal organization for purposes including coercing female victims to have sex with male prostitutes at drug-fueled orgies known as “freak-offs.” Is that really RICO? Plus: just gun charges (for now) for the man caught laying in wait for Donald Trump at his Florida golf course with a r...
Sep 20, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Josh and Ken discuss developments in the Data Colada-Francesca Gino-Harvard case, Sarah Palin's defamation case against the New York Times (for free subscribers), and (for paying subscribers) the different philosophies the judges have about how the presidential election should affect the scheduling of the Trump criminal cases they preside over. Plus: Hunter Biden's Alford plea, the Tenet Media FARA case and whe...
Sep 13, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast You probably saw the moronic TikTok trend in which check fraud became trendy and was rebranded as a “glitch” that allowed you to get large amounts of money out of any Chase ATM, even if you had little cash in your account. It’s federally illegal, it’s illegal in every state, and “I saw it on TikTok” isn’t a defense. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean every one of these cases will be interesting to prosecutors. Speaking of stupid criminals: Jacob Wohl and his sidekick Jack Burkman are back in t...
Sep 06, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Jack Smith is attempting to salvage his two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump with a superseding indictment that removes evidence about Trump’s presidential acts from the document backing his charges over Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The new indictment removes the allegations that are closest to the core of presidential powers — for example, Trump’s efforts to get the Department of Justice to o...
Aug 30, 2024•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Santos has pleaded guilty and will likely be sentenced next February to several years in federal prison. Santos also lost his copyright claim against Disney over his Cameo videos that were broadcast on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Disney had less luck trying to argue that a customer whose wife died of an allergic reaction would have to arbitrate any wrongful death claim because of an obscure clause in the service contract for Disney+. Several associates of Matthew Perry were indicted for their role...
Aug 22, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Elon Musk has produced some new legal issues for us this week. He has sued a coalition of advertisers for colluding to boycott the Twitter platform , saying this is an antitrust violation, and Musk is also the subject, along with Donald Trump, of a labor law complaint before the National Labor Relations Board, filed by the United Auto Workers . Plus: Trump may sue the federal government over the Mar-a-Lago raid , Missouri will not get the Supreme Court to consider whether its voters were harmed ...
Aug 15, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast As we’ve discussed, the Supreme Court threw a major wrench into the various prosecutions of Donald Trump with their ruling on presidential immunity. The RICO prosecution in Atlanta was already so hopelessly fucked that they probably won’t need to think about it for a couple of years, and the documents case in Florida is, for now, dismissed. But in New York, Judge Juan Merchan is proceeding toward sentencing, notwithstanding immunity being one of Trump’s several issues for appeal, and in Washingt...
Aug 08, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this week's episode, Josh and Ken delve into two defamation cases where Trump has survived motions to dismiss, and the close legal questions that allowed those cases to proceed. They also look at a civil lawsuit where Hunter Biden is making headway, and at Hunter's effort to rely on Aileen Cannon's favorable ruling toward Donald Trump to fight his own criminal cases. They discuss settlements for Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, and they look at the latest headache facing New York judge Arthur Engo...
Jul 29, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Well, it’s been a more eventful week than usual. President Trump was shot in the ear at a rally — a shocking security failure by the Secret Service, and now the subject of an FBI investigation; there is much to look at even though there is no shooter to pursue. Ken and Josh discuss why “stochastic terrorism” isn't a useful concept when talking about law or policy, and how admonishments that people should be careful about what they say lest they inspire violence are now being thrown back at liber...
Jul 17, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
