Dear listeners,

You probably saw the moronic TikTok trend in which check fraud became trendy. Fraud was rebranded as a “glitch” that allowed you to get large amounts of money out of any Chase ATM, even if you had little cash in your account — just write a bogus check, deposit it at an ATM, withdraw your newly elevated balance as cash, and then run away before the bank figures out the check isn’t going to clear. (At least TikTokers settled on this instead of the even simpler “glitch” where you can get money just by pointing a gun at a bank teller.) Ken tells me about how, back in his day, they called this crime “check kiting.” He even prosecuted some of it as an AUSA. It’s federally illegal, it’s illegal in every state, and “I saw it on TikTok” isn’t a defense. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean every one of these cases will be interesting to prosecutors. If you or one of your loved ones participated in this viral crime trend, your best bet to avoid prosecution is to put the money back in your account so the bank doesn’t take a loss.

Speaking of stupid criminals, Jacob Wohl and his sidekick Jack Burkman are back in the news, having started a company that purports to engage in AI-driven lobbying. In fairness to them, this isn’t dumber than the average AI business pitch. Unfortunately for them, they started the company under aliases, and they made false claims to have signed up blue-chip clients like Lockheed Martin, and those false claims may have helped them collect payments from other, real clients, which apparently included Toyota (!). Ultimately, as tends to be the case with these things, they got dimed out by their own mistreated employees. Sad! As Ken notes, these chuckleheads are still on probation, and their probation officers aren’t likely to take too kindly to this. And while Wohl hasn’t caught big-boy federal felony charges yet, this makes Ken more bullish on that than he’s been in a while.

A new federal indictment alleges that former executives at Russia Today schemed to pay nearly $10 million to right-wing influencers in the US promoting messages congenial to Russia’s interests, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Amusingly, the right-wing influencers who got paid — including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson — seem to have genuinely had no idea about the Russian origin of the money they were getting, which raises the question of why Russia needed to pay them to run their mouths when they would have done so anyway. But the intermediaries who brokered the payments through their company Tenet Media — Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan (no, not that Liam Donovan) — apparently were aware of the source of the funds, which raises a question Ken and I discuss: why haven’t they been charged with violating FARA, too? Meanwhile, in Florida, participants in a truly fourth-rate Russian influence operation are going on trial in another FARA case, which seems like maybe not the best use of prosecutorial resources.

In New York, Trump is trying (again) to get his hush money prosecution removed to federal court, but is still unlikely to succeed. And in Washington, Judge Tanya Chutkan has retaken control of the Trump January 6 case and has set a calendar to consider questions about what evidence can be considered in light of the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. Much to Trump’s laywers’ irritation, some of those questions will be aired before the election. But meaningful decisions are likely to come well after that.

We recorded this episode before Hunter Biden announced his intention to plead guilty in his tax evasion case — we’ll discuss that next week, including a hot conversation about what an “Alford plea” is and why Hunter wasn’t allowed to make one. But for now, please enjoy our discussion of these various other idiots.

We hope you enjoy the episode,

Josh

Click here for a transcript of this episode.