Dear listeners,

For your Election Day listening pleasure, we have an episode for you covering the news that has arisen in the lead-up to the election:

• Eric Adams has a trial date set for next April, though (as happens with these things) the actual timing for his trial is likely to be later in 2025. Judge Dale Ho declined Adams’ request to investigate whether federal prosecutors were leaking unfavorable information about him, but is still considering Adams’ argument that the government has not really alleged that he received bribes, only gratuities. Ken and I discuss the difference and why Adams’s argument about this is unlikely to prevail at this pre-trial stage.

• Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says her office is looking into whether Donald Trump illegally threatened Liz Cheney when he said at a rally in Arizona “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.” As Ken notes, whatever this comment’s propriety, it is far from meeting the legal standard for a true threat — in addition to being heated political rhetoric, Trump’s proposition that Cheney herself would hold a rifle is consistent with the his campaign’s account of what he meant: that if she favors foreign wars, she should fight in them herself. Don’t expect Arizona to actually bring charges here.

• Young Thug, the Atlanta rapper who has stood accused of running a street gang, pleaded guilty in the long-running, very messy RICO case where he has stood trial alongside several of his associates. He had no plea agreement with prosecutors, and in theory could have faced up to 25 years in prison, but Judge Paige Reese Whitaker sentenced him to time served, plus a great deal of probation and a requirement to spend a decade away from Atlanta — a favorable resolution that got him immediately out of custody, and one that is likely to cause further embarrassment to the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Whitaker, who took this case over from the recused Judge Ural Glanville, has strongly indicated that she would like the case to be disposed of, and with several defendants now having pled out, she is well on the way to achieving that.

• Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who has the typical money troubles faced by many Trump associates, is suing a lender that he says financed his company on usurious terms. Fair enough, though Lindell is specifically suing the lender for RICO — a sign of being more interested in getting attention than getting a judgment.

• Rudy Giuliani is having a rough time of defending himself in litigation brought by his (alleged) ex-employee, Noelle Dunphy.

• Elon Musk is defending his program that awards million-dollar prizes to voters who sign his political organization’s petition, including some in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner has sought an injunction to stop the program as an illegal lottery. (After we recorded, Judge Angelo Foglietta declined to issue the injunction, but he has not yet issued his detailed ruling explaining why.)

• And Trump is trying to use the law against the media in various ways that are likely to prove unavailing — suing CBS over what he says was deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and complaining to the Federal Election Commission that the Washington Post is paying to promote articles about Harris. There’s also the issue of equal time in exchange for Harris’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live — NBC actually has filed a notice that makes clear Trump may be eligible to seek that time, but there’s not much of it left before the election anyway.

We hope you enjoy the episode, and we’ll be back next week, when one of our topics will surely be how the election result will affect various pending legal proceedings.

Best,

Josh

Click here for a transcript of this episode.