Eric Adams Must Really Hope Supreme Court Is Serious About Blowing Up Bribery Laws

Episode Notes

Transcript

Chris Williams:

Hello. Welcome to this week’s episode of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. This is your normal host, Chris. I’m joined by Joe. Patrice.

Joe Patrice:

That’s right, you are. Thanks for that. We are, as you know, from Above, the Law, and we do this show every week. To give you a quick rundown of the big stories from the week that was, we are usually joined by Kathryn Rubino who can’t be here. So it’s just us this week to tell you what’s out there, but we would be remiss if we still don’t have some small talk. Right. What’s up?

Chris Williams:

It’s strange having Kathryn not be here and knowing that there isn’t some Taylor Swift concert. Did one pop up in New York, or

Joe Patrice:

No, she’s meeting with somebody and couldn’t move it. Just lots of businessy sorts of meetings. As you may have known, anyone who reads the site may have saw that my production was really down last week. That was because I was at Relativity Fest covering that conference. And so obviously when you’re covering a conference, I mean, I always feel bad when I do those. I feel like I should be pumping out stories about the conference, but you don’t have time. You’re just going from one meeting to another

And you don’t really have time to type anything out. But did that saw some the latest and greatest stuff in e-discovery? My biggest takeaway is that if you are still a human being who primarily works as a contract attorney in brute force style document review, you need to start rethinking where you’re going to get your money. It’s just not going to be feasible soon to maintain those hundred bodies in a room going through documents. The correct rate for these ais that are doing that kind of work right now is now better than human reviewers are. So they’re faster, cheaper, and better. That’s not a great combo.

Chris Williams:

It’s terrifying.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I don’t think AI is going to replace lawyers per se. Some

Chris Williams:

Just their jobs.

Joe Patrice:

Well, no. Like some doomsayers, but it doesn’t replace the job of a firm lawyer or an in-house lawyer. Those people still have to do something with the document review on the back end. But it is going to disrupt that category of folks who either, like there were several who did it out of necessity during the recession, but other people who did it just as a lifestyle, they didn’t want to be full-time lawyers, but wanted to use their law degree to make some supplemental cash and then do their passion project on the side. And those folks I know of several who do a couple of months of that kind of review, then spend some time writing their book, that kind of lifestyle, those

Chris Williams:

Jobs, golf, are we playing the, they aren’t a class of lawyer game. It sounds me like those are lawyer jobs that have been replaced.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean, those are definitely jobs that somebody could have. Although weirdly, one great question is it’s never been entirely clear why lawyers had to do that job anyway. To the extent that they are under the supervision of another lawyer. There’s not really a reason that couldn’t have been a paralegal gig gig.

Chris Williams:

Sure, I did something similar as a

Joe Patrice:

Paralegal,

Chris Williams:

But nonetheless, the job, they’ll be like, Hey, you need to have a JD to do the thing.

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, that position is the one that goes. Now, does that translate to needing more lawyers to do the higher level work because the speed at which discovery can now be done means that firms can take on more cases and stuff like that? Possibly. But if you are trying to work in an hourly basis doing brute force review, you should start planning for a future where that’s not a thing. Because I mean, the products are just amazing. And honestly, relativity is a little bit behind some of the other eDiscovery producers actually. We talked to them about that, and their position is that they enjoy a space of being pretty prolific in the market, and they felt they didn’t really need to move quickly and preferred to go slow and make sure that they were getting it right rather than getting it out there first. But now they feel comfortable with that. They join several other platforms with AI review of this caliber and it’s not a great space. Yeah, the fact that one of the biggest players was going slow and being very deliberate about it was actually kind of staving off the removal of those jobs probably. But now that they’re in, they released for general availability there tool, and they have another couple that are coming within the next quarter.

Chris Williams:

I’ve never heard a small talk segment that sound like it was about to lead into a commercial. This is the most medium talk I’ve ever experienced.

Joe Patrice:

So

Chris Williams:

I say to the listeners, I’m sorry, this is what happens when Kathryn is out. No,

Joe Patrice:

But it was a great time there. We had great fun chatting with people. I was on a couple of panels, got to hang out with the judges and chat about life with them. And then I go to Cleo’s conference next week, so I will never not be at a conference it looks like.

Chris Williams:

Well, that is a work-life balance everyone would love. I spent a weekend on a farm, fed some pigs and chickens got attacked by a rooster. And the funny thing is, I thought that the pen contained them. No, this bastard jumped off, was flying around, hit me in my left kneecap, which is the bad one. But other than that, it was a good opportunity. Thankfully, the farm had wifi, so I caught up on some videos. This guy, his name’s FD Signifier,

On YouTube and he’s a sociologist that posts videos. I won’t say I agree with everything that he says, but I haven’t heard him say something I disagree with. So if anybody listening, everyone wants to know what my thoughts were on the Kendrick Drake beef or the specific challenges black mothers face in healthcare. If you watch his videos, I’m probably somewhere close to that.

Joe Patrice:

Well, by definition, anybody can watch those videos and find something they agree with. Right. Empty signify. See, I’m making an empty signifier joke.

Chris Williams:

Okay, so no psychoanalysis on the podcast, Joe? No psychoanalysis on the podcast, Joe. It’s like swiper, no swiping. There are things we can and can’t do.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, that well, that’s real good. Alright. Okay. I We’ve gotten through our psychoanalysis joke. That’s probably the sign that we are done. Sign. No, and then we can start talking about the news. Oh, the week. One of the big stories I think, and this is a big story in the mainstream media too. New York’s mayor has been indicted on multiple charges by the feds. It just may not even, yeah, this may not even be over as his top aid had her phone taken by the New York County da. So that suggests there might be a follow on state prosecution over something. So yeah, things don’t look great there. I would say to the extent there’s a legal story, there’s a few legal angles to it, obviously, he has brought on Alex Spiro, who is most famously known of late for representing Elon Musk, being involved with Alec Baldwin’s case, a real lawyer to the famous situation, and I’ve talked to him in the past.

We have an article that I wrote several years ago when he first moved firms. So he is involved here and trying to help out the mayor who just earlier as we’re recording this, filed his motion to dismiss the charge of bribery, claiming that the Supreme Court has made it really clear that bribery is legal, which was expected. That is not a surprise that that would be the take he took. The Supreme Court has of course been on a bit of a tirade of late trying to make open public corruption. More legal now will not cast any aspersions as to whether or not that’s because of the activities A couple of them have that we’ve learned about in the last year, but dating back to when they let the Virginia Governor walk who had taken money for favors saying that, well, we don’t really know as though that counts as we don’t think that’s what Congress really meant when they said bribery, which was wild. They have since then pushed further, obviously this last term. They had a case where they said a government official who took money with an understanding that if he did the job that the company wanted, he could get paid on the backend, did not count as illegal bribery because it was just technically a gratuity. They said not probably what anybody thought was the law when they passed laws against government officials taking bribes. But here we are.

Chris Williams:

We need to have a term for this quid pro free or something, right?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no.

Chris Williams:

Or like quid. Quid pro freebie.

Joe Patrice:

No, I mean I think that’s a good one. We should coin that and start using it. So yeah, so Eric Adams is pleading quid pro freebie that when he took illegal contributions, that was not a problem. Now he’s really only going after the bribery part. Now there are other crimes alleged. You can’t take illegal campaign contributions from a foreign entity. In this instance, he was taking it from Turkey who were setting up allegedly a series of straw donors to try and hide it. That is something beyond what the bribery jurisprudence will let him get away with, but he can

Chris Williams:

For now.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, but he can make some motions to get out of that for here. But put aside the substance of it, I actually really enjoyed, I was at this conference, a couple of reporters at this conference. We had a side chat where we just, whenever we would look up from the conference, we would read part of the indictment and share with each other our favorite paragraphs. It was a banner day,

Not to get back to legal tech, but it was a banner day for teaching the value of collecting and preserving phone data and the forensics surrounding that. It appears as though there were multiple texts. They were always being told to delete their texts. Seems as though they didn’t really, there were some encrypted messaging apps that were being used to keep things from getting revealed later. One of the more entertaining stories in the indictment is of a voluntary interview that one of the aides was doing with the FBI and when the FBI asked, so tell us about this encrypted app. They said, hold on, I need to go to the bathroom. When did the bathroom and tried to delete the app. Fun fact, when the FBI is asking you that they already know you have the app. They’ve worked that out. That’s why they’re asking. You can’t just delete it.

Chris Williams:

Magnet came back and was like, oh, long time in the bathroom, man.

Joe Patrice:

Trouble with the toilet paper. Yeah. So that didn’t work. But yeah, no, it was really interesting. There were a lot of mistakes being made there. A reminder that crime is hard, hard to do. Right. There is, I guess another one of the better paragraphs was one where basically the foreign entities like, oh, we want to give you an illegal campaign contribution. And a staffer is like, oh, no, no, no, I don’t think we would be into that, but obviously thank you for your time, whatever. I will certainly check. And then the next text was, okay, I checked, and apparently we are going to do that. So it was just high comedy all the way. But this brings us to the third legal angle of this story that I wrote. Jonathan Turley, who has used his platform as a law professor for a long time now to make the dumbest possible statements under the aegis of his constantly dwindling reputation.

Chris Williams:

That is one lawyer job. That is one lawyer job that might get replaced by ai.

Joe Patrice:

Well, most of the things he says sounds like hallucination. So yeah, no, I think that that is

Chris Williams:

AI is also known for that

Joe Patrice:

We should create the Turly bot and not even worry about it. So he put out his new piece where it is of note that he has spent the last couple years very heavily pushing a conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden pushing the idea that obviously there are definitely crimes that Hunter Biden is involved in. Obviously he owned a gun when he wasn’t legally allowed to. That’s what he’s in trouble for all that. But he’s been pushing this idea that Hunter Biden was involved in illegal foreign influence in elections using peddling influence with his dad. The problem for Turley with all of this is that all of his examples of how this happened happened during the Trump administration when Joe Biden was unsurprisingly not in office, which makes the argument a little bit harder to sustain. But Turley is undeterred. That said, he’s been pushing this bribery argument about Hunter for quite some time.

But now that a politician who, despite Eric Adams technically being a Democrat is a beloved character of Republicans, he has a far higher approval rating among Republicans. Turley writes an entire article trying to explain how well this kind of bribery wouldn’t be all that bad. I don’t think it was a tour to force in disingenuousness. I was very impressed. He spent some time explaining that taking $10 million from to act as a agent for a foreign government and maybe help them build a building that violated fire codes is not nearly as bad as that time. The A OC wore a dress from a designer. It was a stretch, but you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, I guess, and

Chris Williams:

Some of them that you do. And that was an air ball of reasoning,

Joe Patrice:

Many of them that you do. Yes. So that was the last aspect of this. There’s some incredibly stupid commentary happening about this case. Obviously innocent until proven guilty, all that sort of thing. But yeah, there’s a lot of texts in this indictment.

Chris Williams:

The angles I really liked were the memes that came out of it. It was like Eric Adams is apparently now pro prison. Abolition cares about me, cares

Joe Patrice:

About bail a lot more.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, yeah. Oh, and that picture of him with Diddy holding the key to the city did not age well.

Joe Patrice:

That was just a year ago. Life comes at you very fast,

Chris Williams:

Especially at a Diddy party.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Now Diddy of course is not, they’re not in the same place. Eric and Diddy though. Diddy is apparently sharing a common area with Sam Bankman freed of FTX. So that’s where the fun parties are in the federal prisons right now.

Chris Williams:

God, this is such a weird timeline.

Joe Patrice:

All right. Well, do you want to talk about Judge Newman’s continuing struggles with her own court?

Chris Williams:

Hell yeah, I do. And

Joe Patrice:

Good.

Chris Williams:

It looks like right now the court is the one struggling. So when I met this woman, what feels like two years ago at this point? Really? I had It

Joe Patrice:

Did. That does come fast. Yeah,

Chris Williams:

It’s been forever. But no, so I’m trying to think of the way to say this. Remember that time when there were videos of Mitch McConnell talking and he was actively rebooting and it was like, oh, something’s wrong with him. And that’s like an impression that doesn’t shake you. When I met Pauline Newman, my first impression was, this lady walks faster than me. There was no, it blew my mind. I was like, am I tripping? We then have an hour long conversation or so just over lunch and also doing an interview and in between, because showing me the judges chamber, she was like, oh, this window overlooks X, Y, Z. And she’s like, oh, this particular thing is interesting because this was about to be demolished. But then one of the president’s wives stopped this from happening and that’s why this is a park here. And I’m like, this is not the sign of a person in mental decline. This is a phenomenal memory. Good recall responding to things. And then I’m like, we’re talking. I’m like, isn’t it kind of weird that your colleagues say that you’re not there mentally when the Supreme Court continues to side with you over them? So just thinking about the interactions I’ve had with this person and just seeing the things that they’re like, I’ve never seen a person mental decline then have attend a vaccine conference and speak at it.

But I guess I’m giving a bunch of context prior to this. So the story is Dr. Aaron Filler who’s a neurosurgeon. He ran tests on Newman to assess cognitive capability. He’s not the first to do this, he’s the third specialist in 18 or so months to do this. But what was interesting and different about the way that he did it was that there was some objective measure. He did, I think it’s like a profusion CT scan and what it resulted in, there were actual pictures. There were pictures of this woman’s brain, and what you could see is where if there was evidence of dementia, if there was evidence of Alzheimer’s, you would see that the brain structure would change in a particular way due to blood flow, what have you. I’m not a surgeon, but the way that he explained was very clear for even a low person like me to feed up on it. I highly recommend read, if not the article, read his report. There were pictures, you’ll love pictures. It’s like Dr. Seuss, but with decorated judges. Anyway, so he looks at her brain, he’s like, not only is there nothing wrong with her, she’s a super ager.

You could look at this brand, you think that this person was 70.

And I’m just like, as a person, I’m interested in the legal side of it. Clearly there are even people that were just at the start being like, there are some clear due process issues happening here. But just as a person that interacted with her and heard her side of the story, it just kind of supercharges all the things she was saying. There was one point where she said that she was accused of getting angry at a clerk, and she was like, oh, I can explain that. He kept repeating the same thing. He wasn’t listening to me, blah, blah, blah. And now knowing that there’s literally nothing wrong with her brain, I think she was right. I think she was just frustrated that people were treating her. Something was wrong with her for the last 18 months when there was demonstrating nothing wrong.

Joe Patrice:

Accomplished lawyer yells at somebody is not a standard. If that were the standard, there’d be a lot of people out of business. So let’s step back just in case. I think everybody’s known this story, but just in case. So Judge Pauline Newman, she’s 97 I think, on the federal circuit. The rest of the federal circuit has been engaged in a battle claiming that she slowly suspending her from hearing cases. It is something of a pocket impeachment. They couldn’t actually impeach her, but they’re just claiming that she’s in mental decline. So they’re preventing her from hearing cases,

Chris Williams:

Which by the way is unconstitutional. That is not the way you take the gavel and roll off a judge.

Joe Patrice:

That seems like that could cause a lot of mischief.

Chris Williams:

And one thing worth mentioning, and once it clicked for me, this changed my relationship to the story immediately. A lot of the coverage that I saw was like 95-year-old judge, X, Y, Z, 97-year-old judge, blah, blah, blah. But I was like, wait, the due process violations would be there if she was 97 or 32, well, 46, that’s it. So I was like, this isn’t about her age at all. This is about the procedure. This could happen to a judge. That’s 56. So my thing was, if this happens, what protections would a judge on any of the other circuits have from their colleagues? And that said, and I was making these arguments prior, but then finding out she was also a super age or it was like her age really doesn’t matter because the metrics that we usually associate with aging are, she’s an anomaly in that respect. But yeah, it’s not an age thing.

Joe Patrice:

And a lot of the justification for was to say, sure, you have all these decorated and famous neurologists saying that you’re fine, but we have our preferred person and you haven’t met with them, so we’re not letting you do this. Now if that gets to be standard,

Chris Williams:

Which is brute forcing, which amplifies the angle of this is not the process and that’s subject to any other

Joe Patrice:

Judge, you could create some kind of fake reason for anything. And if the judge doesn’t choose to go along with however the rest of the court made up their handling of it, they’d be in trouble. And cognitive decline is something that can happen to somebody on the bench. It is coming out as years go by that it seems as though Judge Posner might have started his decline right before he left the bench. Obviously he was still mostly okay. And he did retire on his own early on in this process, but retired on his own. He did have some clashing with his colleagues about it, but they followed a normal process where he stepped down himself that said, look, I find this case fascinating because it underscores, I am a big supporter of term limits on judges. I think that we owe it to the whole process of the judiciary to do that.

I think it would prevent situations where unqualified people get on benches to maximize how long they’re going to sit there and dead hand govern. And it also artificially locks off very good competent people. No one’s going to appoint somebody who’s 63 to the bench right now because on the political game it doesn’t make sense. But that person might actually be for the next 10 years or so, the best possible person to be on a bench. And we shouldn’t artificially agely prevent that from happening. So I’m a big believer in term limits and term limits would avoid this sort of situation. She would have moved on and probably gone back to private practice years ago. Not anything to do with whether or not she is competent. That would’ve happened and it would’ve been in the natural course. But until we have term limits, she has every right to be hearing cases until then.

Chris Williams:

And also, here’s the thing that I find interesting about it, besides the it is not the case that age should be a factor. She’s also the, it’s weird to refer to a 97-year-old woman as a poster child, but she’s the example, Parex ance of a person that can do this job phenomenally well into their later years. I think during the period where her court was functionally impeaching her, one of the decisions went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court was like actually Newman’s, right? Yeah. Her entire career has been decorated with excellence. So if there is an example of a judge that there would be a loss if there were term limits imposed,

Joe Patrice:

It’s

Chris Williams:

Pauline Newman.

Joe Patrice:

Alright. The final story we have is one from one of our columnists, our tax expert Steven Chung, who side note also Theo v’s podcast, which is relatively famous. They incorrectly identified Stephen Chung as a Trump campaign lawyer that is not who works for the Trump campaign. And indeed they spell their names differently. Obviously Above, the Law does not employ a spokesperson for the Trump campaign anymore because we have absolutely done that in the past, I suppose. But that was a while ago and she didn’t have that job yet. But let’s talk about the Stephen Chung article. This is about Tani’s 50 50 home run ball. It actually was collected by a lucky fan in Miami and that fan now is going to have to pay some taxes.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, I guess the operative word here is lucky.

Joe Patrice:

So this is a thing that a lot of people never know about until they take income tax in law school or something like that. Which if there are law students out there, I did not become a tax lawyer by any stretch, but I needed to pick up another class as a two L and I was like, eh, I guess income tax. I really did think it was one of the more fascinating courses I took. I do recommend it. It is kind of fun to learn about how we think about tax anyway. A lot of people don’t realize, would you get these kind of collectibles? You have something of value, you have collected income, you have not liquidated it, but you’ve got it. And so what this article talks about is how the IRS will almost inevitably treat this historic ball as a collectible and mean that it will be given a fair appraisal and the fan will be taxed 28% of that. That probably means a lot of money given the nature of this. And probably it means he might need to put it on the market to get the money so that he could pay off that tax bill. But this is something people don’t understand. Like the Oprah, you get a card, you get a Card,

A lot of people don’t remember. You do owe taxes now on all of these things. Some places when they’re giveaways like that will gross it up, give you some money that then covers that tax bill. But you don’t get that when you catch a ball in the outfield.

Chris Williams:

Now if in that scenario where they’re like, we will accommodate for, you need to have income tax on this thing and pay off some of it, is that also a gift that needs to be taxed? Is it like an infinite regression

Joe Patrice:

sort of? It is, but you give the amount such that it covers the taxes on you getting it as well as the other taxes. So if you need 10,000 to cover the taxes and you have to give 12,000 to then cover the 10,000 tax as well as use that 10,000 to pay off the, that’s how these gross ups work. You see these a lot in, there’s private travel and stuff like that. If you’re the sort of executive who has access to a private plane and stuff like that, that’s stuff that you can get taxed on. And so the company will then gross that up, give money that then covers all that.

Chris Williams:

Hey man, I think that there’s a very obvious solution that isn’t being discussed for the person that caught the ball. They could just become a judge.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, right. That was a gratuity. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I was going to try to make some joke about his poor translator who is now facing charges or maybe pleaded guilty to them. I can’t remember. But

Chris Williams:

Gotcha,

Joe Patrice:

And neither here nor there. But yeah, no, actually I remember in my income tax class, there was a conversation where he’s like, technically all the paid for by the firm cars that you get to take home after seven or whatever for free. Theoretically you should be reporting all that as income and everybody in the room kind gasped collectively. But yeah, really fascinating course. I think I recommend text to people just as a thing to have in their back pocket if nothing else.

Chris Williams:

And also it’s recession proof.

Joe Patrice:

My professor had been the head of the IRS before too. So we got a really interesting perspective on it from somebody who’d actually, like this had been his job in the Carter administration, so he knew everything about how these tax laws existed and stuff.

Chris Williams:

Do you think it’ll be AI proof?

Joe Patrice:

Well, I don’t know. I assume so. I mean, still have to be humans to do some things. Humans still have to do most human tasks, but there are some very motorized tasks that we let humans do that we don’t need them to do those anymore. And that’s going to be annoying for people who’ve used that as their path for a while. But alright, well I think we’re done. Thanks everybody for tuning in. You should subscribe to the show to get new episodes when they come out. You should leave reviews stars, write something on your podcast delivery device of choice. That all helps. Check out other shows. Kathryn’s the host of the jabot. I’m a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist round table, which we did live from Relativity Fest. And we’re doing a live one from CLioCon two. So look at that. This week we will not be live, but next week. And then also there are multiple shows from the Legal Talk Network to check out. You should be reading Above the Law. So you read these and other stories before we talk about them. Follow social media at ATL blog at Joseph Patrice at Rights for Rent. I’m also Joe Patrice over at Blue Sky and that is everything. Talk to you all later. Peace.

Continue Reading