Serious Trouble

As Eric Adams says, New York is the Zagreb of America. People from all over the world come to New York to make their dreams come true. And sometimes, those dreams are illegal. Today we talk about the second indictment for longtime Adams consigliere Ingrid Lewis-Martin for taking a TV series cameo in exchange for impeding a street safety redesign that would have complicated access to co-defendants Gina and Tony Argento’s Broadway St...

Judge Paul Engelmeyer has refused the Trump administration’s request to release the grand jury transcripts from Ghislaine Maxwell’s prosecution. He notes forcefully that he’s reviewed the grand jury transcripts and there’s no there there — everything of interest disclosed to the grand jury became public at trial. Indeed, the only reason Engelmeyer considered releasing the transcript was that it would serve the public interest of sh...

This week Ken and Josh discuss the next steps the Trump administration may be considering to deal with the Epstein mess: what to do about the files, what to do about the transcript of Todd Blanche's meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell, who was moved to a much nicer federal prison, has a colorable argument that her conviction should be thrown out because she was supposed to be covered by the sweetheart deal Jeffrey Epstein cut w...

Ghislaine Maxwell has sat for a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who not very long ago was serving as President Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney. The idea seems to be that Maxwell could offer some “help” getting to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in exchange for some sort of leniency. That’s for free ...

Donald Trump has sued the Wall Street Journal over its story saying he wrote a weird poem to Jeffrey Epstein and drew a caricature of a naked woman with his own signature as her pubic hair as part of a book wishing a happy 50th birthday to the New York financier. Ken and Josh discuss the suit, which looks more like an exclamation point on his claims that he never even liked that Epstein guy! than a serious effort to win damages fro...

This week, we discuss the mostly favorable verdict for Sean Combs, a.k.a. P. Diddy and his upcoming sentencing. In another bizarre sex-related case, two founders of OneTaste, a new-age-female-empowerment-business-slash-sex-cult, have been convicted of coercing their employees into sex acts.

Also this week: an update on D.H.S. vs. D.V.D., a case where the Supreme Court’s orders have been fairly inscrutable and the litigants have now ...

For all subscribers: a discussion of the Sean Combs jury deliberations and a look at the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA that says trial courts (generally) can no longer issue nationwide injunctions. As Ken and I discuss, the ruling is sure to greatly change how aggressive executive branch actions get litigated, but the exact na...

More shadow docket news on this week’s show: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked an order from a federal judge in Boston that had imposed due process requirements when the Trump administration tries to deport migrants to countries other than their countries of origin. As is often the case with shadow docket orders, the judges in the majority did not explain their reasoning, leaving the lower courts without clear guida...

It’s been a big week for some of the dumber litigation we follow around here. It’s not all dumb — we start with an update on California’s litigation over the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, where the state has gotten relief at the trial court level but faces a tough road in the appeals courts. And we look at a case in Boston where a federal judge has blocked, for now, the cancellation of certain grants the National...

Donald Trump has activated the National Guard in California over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, and Newsom has sued, claiming the activation is illegal. Ken and Josh discuss Newsom's chances of prevailing against the president's broad authority to use the military for various purposes. Meanwhile, union leader David Huerta has been charged for his actions of civil disobedience. One of Huerta’s legal problems stems from his...

In the ongoing defamation trial of Mike Lindell, who accused Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer of personally conspiring to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump, Lindell isn't bothering to argue that his claims were true. Instead he's saying he believed them at the time he said them. Is that a good defense?

Plus: a federal appellate decision upholding an injunction against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's efforts t...

This week’s show is heavy on economic policy. Yay! We discuss a ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade that many of Trump’s beloved tariffs are illegal and then, a strange shadow-docket order in U.S. v. Wilcox, a case about the National Labor Relations Board that raises a key economic question: Does that mean the president can ...

This week, we look at the indictment of Judge Hannah Dugan and the end of Ed Martin's reign at the US Attorney's office for the District of Columbia. For paying subscribers, we have an update on family business at the Sean Combs trial, where James Comey's daughter Maurene is facing off against Mark Geragos's daughter Teny. We have updates...

This week on the show: Jury selection for Sean Combs' eight-week RICO trial, which is moving along very quickly for for a complex federal criminal case.

Plus: a ruling in the Alien Enemies Act cases, a ruling that gets at the heart of the policy question: whether there is an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” that triggers presidential powers under the law in the first place. It's a strange one.

Another long-running case where ICE c...

We've got a lot for paid subscribers this week: Updates on several removal cases, a look at the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, our first look at the litigation over Trump's tariffs, a cautionary tale about what happens when you accidentally file your internal deliberations about the weakness of your case on the public court docket, some fo...

This week, Ken and I have a discussion of Harvard’s lawsuit fighting the Trump Administration’s effort to punish the university for failing to submit to what amounted to a demand to place the university in a kind of federal receivership. We look at the Supreme Court's middle-of-the-night, weekend rebuke to the Trump administration, ordering a halt to Alien Enemies Act removals from the Northern District of Texas. The subtext of thi...

The Supreme Court is getting increasingly involved in the sprawling litigation over Donald Trump’s many aggressive executive orders. In J.G.G. vs. Trump — the case seeking to prevent removals under the Alien Enemies Act — the high court issued an emergency ruling saying detainees are entitled to due process but they must seek it through petitions for habeas corpus in the jurisdictions where they are actually being held. Is this a r...

There has been a cat-and-mouse game about venue in several of the cases brought by people protesting the Trump administration’s efforts to remove their visas and remove them from the country. For example: if you thought your client was in New York when you filed your lawsuit, but he was really in New Jersey, and now he’s in Louisiana, sho...

Paul Weiss is the third law firm to come under attack from the Trump administration and the first one to cut a deal, agreeing to certain terms about its practices in exchange for Trump withdrawing an executive order that effectively aimed to bankrupt the firm. The firm had different things to say about the agreement than Trump did — and we discuss what a capitulation like this might do for its business, staffing and more at Paul We...