Episode description

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 prosecution, Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a written version of the gag order she’d already announced in court, but then issued a stay pending appeal. That stay means Trump remains free to run his mouth as he likes (except about Arthur Engoron’s court staff) and he has been. In New Mexico, prosecutors plan to take Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter charge to a grand jury again — we discuss what could be going on here. And Ken and I talked some about whether it might be a good idea to put Sam Bankman-Fried on the stand to defend himself, and after recording, we learned his defense team intends to do just that.

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