Sound And Fury

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

The defendants in the Georgia RICO case would probably like the hearing to go on forever.

It’s got it all: sex, screaming, accusations of lying, financial improprieties. If there’s a species of salacity you crave, this hearing has got it in loads.

But what does it all mean? Mike Roman, joined by Trump and other defendants, allege that Fulton County DA Fani Willis should be disqualified because she contracted an outside attorney with whom she was engaged in a romantic relationship to prosecute the case. They traveled together, he paid, and she thereby received an improper financial benefit from the case itself.

At the hearing on Thursday and Friday, several damaging pieces of information came out: Willis said that she reimbursed Wade in cash for the travel — no receipts. One witness contradicted the couple’s statement that the relationship began after Wade was hired; another was mostly barred by privilege from saying the same, but questioning from Trump attorney Steve Sadow made it fairly clear that there was a second witness who believed that the dalliance began before Wade’s hiring. 

That witness was Terrence Bradley, who very much did not want to appear. He asserted privilege over everything on Thursday. When he testified on Friday, he arrived hours late. His testimony revealed a big mistake: that he had texted with Mike Roman’s attorney about Wade’s personal life; a prosecutor impeached his credibility on cross examination by pointing out that he departed Wade’s law firm amid a sexual assault allegation.

So, where does that all leave us? Disqualifying Willis is a very high bar to meet, and a stiff penalty for Judge Scott McAfee to impose. That’s not to say that her conduct here was unimpeachable; it’s rather to point out that the claim of her reaping big financial rewards from prosecuting Mike Roman still appears somewhat tenuous.

But Bradley presents a more difficult problem. After the public hearing ended on Friday, he met with Judge McAfee privately in his chambers, where he purportedly told the judge everything he knew — no privilege needed. That could really damage Willis and Wade. 

We’ll hear more after the long weekend.

In late 2020, when the Trump campaign sought to do something that had never been done before in American history — overturn a presidential election, based on nonsensical evidence, months after it had been held — it needed some creative lawyering. While Trump’s attorneys’ initial strategies — press conferences in landscaping service parking lots and claims about Hugo Chavez’s actions beyond the grave — didn’t do the trick, they soon found a lawyer with a touch more credibility: Ken Chesebro.

TPM obtained a trove of Chesebro’s documents, including emails between him and other Trump lawyers during the critical period when their strategy to steal an election was mapped out. They paint a detailed picture of how, starting in November and ramping up in December, Chesebro supplied the campaign with a bevy of legal theories that sought to draw a comparison between what happened in the 2000 election and what Trump would try to pull off in 2020. He designed the fake electors scheme, theorized ways to pressure the Supreme Court to help Trump, and pinpointed Jan. 6 as the final, important date for the Trump campaign.
 

The documents form the basis for a set of exclusive stories published by TPM this week unveiling significant new information, and showing how the legal theories that led to Jan. 6 came together in the words of those who authored them.

Read it all here.

On Friday, New York state Judge Arthur Engoron handed down the verdict in Donald Trump’s civil fraud case. Engoron ordered Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, along with other officers, to pay more than $360 million. Trump himself is banned from running any corporation in New York for three years; his sons are banned for two.
 

“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” Engoron wrote.

New York Attorney General Letitia James got nearly everything she asked for in terms of disgorgement, and secured the business bans, if for shorter durations than she’d sought.
 

Engoron is also extending the tenure of the Trump Organization’s independent monitor (finding that Trump et al. would likely continue to commit fraud “unless judicially restrained”), banned two top executives from being in roles of financial control for life and barred Trump and company from getting loans from financial institutions in New York for three years.
 

Engoron had already found that Trump and his top executives committed fraud; in Friday’s verdict, he settled on the penalty.
 

Check out our liveblog for the play-by-play (and I’m not just saying this because I speed read 92 pages for you fine people; Engoron is a fun and fanciful writer, and this verdict is chock-full of zingers). 

If you are terminally online or even maybe just a little online, you probably saw that OpenAI, the company most responsible for dragging the rest of us into a future few asked for, unveiled Sora, a generative AI video tool. The responses were swift, strong and extremely bifurcated.

On one hand, you have the eternal optimists who think all technical progress is good. Bounding forward with a toddler’s confidence, they point out all things AI can make better without acknowledging how technology exists within a society bound by cultural norms and socioeconomic systems.

On the other side, you had skeptics pointing out that generative video AI, among other things, works by stealing work from artists and writers that already exists. That is how AI “learns.” They point out it seems most likely AI will be used to create misinformation, weird porn, identity theft and other scurrilous behaviors.

I’m 35 years old and I’ve lived long enough to have seen movies like this before. Silicon Valley and its acolytes selectively point to the best uses of a thing, conflating what is possible with what is probable, because they rarely spend any time thinking about actual human beings. In fact, at times, they seem outright hostile toward actual humans and eager to evolve into whatever comes next.

It’s impossible for me to watch this and think of the convergence of several trends culminating in this hostility. First, the techno-libertarian mindset that decries any real sense of community and instead endorses a brutal, hobbesian, we’re all on-our-own mindset. Second, the very real economic and social shortcomings of our society that make people feel alienated in the first place. Third, an obsession with the so-called “productive” that suggests the only activities of value are those that drive revenue, which leave things like the humanities on the chopping block. Fourth, the fact that we allow people to accrue insane amounts of wealth so that we now have a small circle of rich, ignorant meglomaniacs charting the future of humanity.

I’m skeptical of AI not because I don’t think it has the potential to help humanity, but because I don’t see any evidence that its most fervent, died-in-the-wool proponents actually want to do so or will do so.

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