Dear listeners,

Jack Smith is attempting to salvage his two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump. In Washington, DC, Smith has filed a superseding indictment, removing 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 open a bogus investigation — while retaining other acts Smith believes he can successfully argue were unofficial. The new indictment simplifies the task before Judge Tanya Chutkan of deciding how the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity affects the case, but the high court will still surely need to weigh in on this case again to clarify exactly what Trump can be prosecuted over.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Smith has argued Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the documents case (due to what she sees as the illegality of using a special counsel) should be overturned. He didn’t explicitly ask the Eleventh Circuit to remove her from the case; Ken says if the circuit is inclined to do that, they’ll likely do it without Smith asking (but she’s probably going to be staying on the case).

In Arizona, defendants in the case about the state’s fake-elector scheme are using the state’s very odd anti-SLAPP statute to argue their charges should be dismissed. Onetime-superlawyer Tom Girardi was convicted of stealing huge sums from his clients — he took the stand in an effort to convince jurors he’s suffered too much mental decline to have known what was happening with his firm’s money, but the jury was not convinced. The Ketamine Queen now has a prominent defense lawyer — but the situation she’s in might not actually be the kind of situation that calls for Mark Geragos and his firm. And LiveNation’s CEO may have to be deposed in a lawsuit over the Astroworld music festival disaster, despite the apex witness doctrine and Texas’s efforts to position itself as the pro-business court state.

Finally, we have a correction from last week. When we talked about a motion Disney made in a wrongful death case arguing a litigant would have to arbitrate because he entered into an arbitration agreement as part of his Disney+ service contract, we misidentified the prestigious law firm that surprised us by making the argument. It was White & Case, not O’Melveny & Myers. We regret the error.

This week, free subscribers get the discussion about the two Trump cases and Georgia. Updates on Tom Girardi, Jasveen Sangha, LiveNation and more are for paid subscribers only — so why not become one?

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh...