Unfortunately we taped this episode before Elon Musk urged Disney CEO Bob Iger to go fuck himself . If we had waited, we would have been able to discuss how Musk had reinforced one of Ken’s points about Twitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters for America over its report showing that Twitter served up ads for major brands next to neo-Nazi content . That discussion is at the end of this episode. We also talked about Judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order against former president Donald Trump that looks l...
Nov 30, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Donald Trump “re-truthed” a post calling for a “citizens’ arrest” of Judge Arthur Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Normally, when people ask Ken whether a statement is illegal incitement, the answer is a quick “no,” but this case is closer. Also in New York, Mayor Eric Adams looks to be in somewhat serious trouble. The FBI raided the home of his chief fundraiser and his own electronic devices were seized. Hunter Biden wants to subpoena documents about his prosecution from Tru...
Nov 17, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to this week’s episode of Serious Trouble, in which Josh attempts to troll Ken about maximum sentences. Sam Bankman-Fried was speedily convicted by a jury that took only several hours — one of them spent at dinner — to deliberate. Will the government bother to try him on the remaining charges? Meanwhile, also in New York, Trump and his lawyers continued on a strategy best described as “burn everything down and see what emerges from the ashes.” Plus: former White House Chief of Staff Mark...
Nov 08, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Donald Trump may be in serious trouble, but Michael Cohen’s testimony isn’t the reason. On this week’s episode, Ken and I talk about the thud with which Cohen’s testimony landed at the civil trial over alleged fraud at various Trump businesses. Judge Arthur Engoron called a little impromptu hearing in which Trump took the witness stand, testifying about who exactly he was referring to when he told reporters a p...
Nov 01, 2023•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s been a heated week at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York. Judge Arthur Engoron was enraged at Trump’s failure to fully comply with an order to take down a web post attacking his law clerk and he imposed a $5,000 sanction. Trump attorney Christopher Kise also drew the judge’s ire for his rude and dismissive comments to that same law clerk and to one of the attorneys from the New York Attorney General’s office. Not great. Plus: we're up to four guilty pleas in DA Fani Willis' RICO p...
Oct 25, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it rains, it pours: Donald Trump is now subject to not one but two gag orders, and the new one is more expansive than the first. Judge Tanya Chutkan's order isn’t as broad as the government requested — Trump is still free to criticize Judge Chutkan herself, as well as the US government and the Justice Department, though not the individual prosecuting attorneys — but it’s broad enough to be constitutionally questionable. Trump will appeal the gag order — and Ken is pleased that this case wil...
Oct 17, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Donald Trump withdrew his lawsuit against Michael Cohen so he wouldn’t have to sit for a deposition on the holiday, but Columbus Day didn’t stop us from bringing you a new episode of Serious Trouble. This week, we look at Trump’s first gag order: The former president’s gratuitous social media attacks against Judge Arthur Engoron’s law clerk enraged the judge and led him to order Trump (and also the other parties in the New York AG’s civil fraud lawsuit) not to publicly criticize his staff. We al...
Oct 09, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The McDonnell line of Supreme Court cases isn't likely to save Bob Menendez; Hunter Biden sues Rudy Giuliani and Robert Costello, who is suing Rudy Giuliani; Judge Tanya Chutkan isn't going anywhere 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
Sep 30, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Rudy Giuliani's ex-lawyer is suing him for non-payment; Hunter Biden is suing the IRS for airing his dirty laundry; the FTX bankruptcy estate is suing SBF's parents for being morons; Ray Epps, still not a Fed, is pleading guilty; Jack Smith wants a gag order on Donald Trump.
Sep 21, 2023•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode starts in Georgia and with Mark Meadows, who lost harder than we expected in his efforts to keep his RICO trial in federal court. And we discuss the report of the investigative special grand jury, which recommended charges against 39 individuals — way more sweeping than the already-cumbersome 19-person indictment that DA Fani Willis got from the regular grand jury. Plus: a very strange open letter from some criminal defense attorneys to Ken Chesebro, urging him to protect his intere...
Sep 12, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Here’s what’s on tap in this week’s episode of Serious Trouble. - The sentences that have been coming down for some of the prime movers behind the January 6 riot at the Capitol - Fulton County DA Fani Willis says it will take her four months and 150 witnesses to try her big election RICO case — and that each trial will take that long, whether it involves one defendant or all 19. Really? - Sidney Powell and Ken ...
Sep 08, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.serioustrouble.show Rudy Giuliani and Michael Avenatti both used to be good lawyers — or, they at least used to seem to be good lawyers — but those days are long past. This week, Ken and Josh discuss Giuliani and Avenatti — a two-fer — and how Giuliani’s drinking actually poses multiple problems for Donald Trump’s likely legal defenses in Jack Smith’s January 6-related case. We also talk about the trial date that’s been set in tha...
Aug 31, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 strength and creativity of the removal arguments from Jeffrey Clark, Mark Meadows and David Shafer. And w...
Aug 23, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 of Georgia’s version the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. We’re skeptical of Will...
Aug 15, 2023•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 criminal case in DC, Twitter's unsuccessful effort to get the right to warn Trump about a search warra...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 threats either. Speaking of dumb things to post online, Ken’s been writing/complaining about bad, mislea...
Aug 09, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 impeached though not convicted. Special prosecutor Jack Smith says it was also a crime — actually, se...
Aug 02, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 new amusing color about security cameras, and a new defendant. So, we re-started the recording to pro...
Jul 28, 2023•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast 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 like this would take a long time to start and it seems likely that Trump’s side will succeed, one way ...
Jul 18, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, including a transcript, and we welcome you to support our podcast for $6/month or $60/year there. Th...
Jul 03, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 “plans,” they were probably for buildings or golf courses. But what the documents were or weren't about i...
Jun 29, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 documents he retained and why, and how those could help the government, particularly if Judge Aileen Can...
Jun 22, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 attorney-client privilege issues that are likeliest to trip up the government, and how the governmen...
Jun 15, 2023•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 remarkable and hilarious detail, including Trump making the sorts of statements prosecutors can only ...
Jun 10, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 inaccurate information. Discover why relying solely on ChatGPT for your legal briefs may not be as foolproof ...
Jun 06, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 want to see what does (or doesn’t) come out in discovery to support them. We also talk about Mark P...
May 24, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, beyond the damages she’s already been awarded compensation for. We also talked about the legal cons...
May 17, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. (How pedestrian!) We talked about his best strategy going forward from this point, and the major bargai...
May 11, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Ken talk about the rule against perpetuities, which was almost as enjoyable as when I make him read o...
May 05, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 legal proceedings that ensued. Ken and I talked this week about the stresses that litigation can imp...
Apr 27, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
