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Speaker 1: Welcome to Judging Sam, The Trial of Sam Bankman Freed.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Lewis. Court is on a break until Thursday,
Speaker 1: October twenty sixth, the day we expect the prosecution to
Speaker 1: rest their case and the defense to begin there possibly
Speaker 1: even with the beginning of Sam Bekman Fried's testimony. I'm
Speaker 1: here with Rebecca Mermelstein, defense attorney, former prosecutor and partner
Speaker 1: at O'melvinie and Myers, and also with Lydia Jean Cott,
Speaker 1: our intrepid courthouse reporter. I should note we're recording this
Speaker 1: conversation on Monday, October the twenty third Lydia Jean, I
Speaker 1: imagine you have some questions you're dying to ask, Rebecca,
Speaker 1: and I understand you might have some for me too.
Speaker 1: Where do you want to start, Rebecca?
Speaker 2: I would actually love to start with you. The prosecution
Speaker 2: has pretty much wrapped their case, and I wonder, from
Speaker 2: a distance from how you've been watching, what stood out
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 3: I think that what stands out is really how overwhelming
Speaker 3: the evidence is. The prosecution has put on a very
Speaker 3: strong case. We've talked about before how many cooperating witnesses
Speaker 3: there are, but you don't know until they testify if
Speaker 3: they're going to be good witnesses, if they're going to
Speaker 3: be good at explaining what happened, if they're going to
Speaker 3: fall apart on loss examination. And we do know the
Speaker 3: answer to that now, and I think they were strong
Speaker 3: witnesses for the government. I think the cross examination did
Speaker 3: not buy and large undermine the core testimony, and so
Speaker 3: I think the government's done a good job.
Speaker 1: How do you feel the defence is done? You're now
Speaker 1: a defense attorney, so you can look at it through
Speaker 1: that lens.
Speaker 3: I am and I feel compelled then to preface it
Speaker 3: by saying, this is a really hard case to be
Speaker 3: the defense attorney in, and so there's only so much
Speaker 3: they can do. I think from a distance people often
Speaker 3: look at a trial and they look at the two
Speaker 3: sides and you say, well, sort of, who's the better lawyer.
Speaker 3: That's who's winning. But it's not a mock trial exercise.
Speaker 3: The two sides don't have equal evidence and ammunition, and
Speaker 3: the defense has to play the cards that they got dealt,
Speaker 3: and so often the deck is very, very stacked, and
Speaker 3: it's not really a battle of better lawyering. I don't
Speaker 3: think they've really scored a lot of points. Were there
Speaker 3: points that they could have scored and they haven't scored.
Speaker 3: It's hard to know from from this distance if there's
Speaker 3: more they might have done. But at the end of
Speaker 3: the day, they haven't really undermined I think the core allegations.
Speaker 3: To me, they haven't suggested that these cooperators are lying.
Speaker 3: And if these cooperators are telling the truth, he's going
Speaker 3: to get convicted. So I think it's not going well
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 2: One thing that stood out to me a lot about
Speaker 2: the prosecution is the extent to which they're really telling
Speaker 2: a story, like to the point where it feels like
Speaker 2: a movie almost. There was one moment when Nishad saying
Speaker 2: one of the cooperating witnesses, was on the stand and
Speaker 2: he talked about this heated conversation he had with Sam
Speaker 2: bankman Fried when he said he realized that Alameda had
Speaker 2: taken money from FTX that it couldn't pay back. And
Speaker 2: this conversation was on the balcony of this penthouse in
Speaker 2: the Bahamas, and the prosecutors showed a picture of the balcony,
Speaker 2: and then the picture was in the evening and they
Speaker 2: had Nishad explain where he was standing and like where
Speaker 2: Sam was. It didn't seem to be part of the
Speaker 2: legal making of the case, but it feel like for
Speaker 2: the screenwriters who are in the courtroom, and I think
Speaker 2: there were some, they were just handing them a scene
Speaker 2: on a silver platter. And I wonder what you think
Speaker 2: about that, Rebecca.
Speaker 3: Well, I totally agree with you. That's not a piece
Speaker 3: of evidence that's important to the key facts of the case,
Speaker 3: but it really does give you some of the color
Speaker 3: about being able to think back and sort of think
Speaker 3: about what it would have been like on this luxurious balcony,
Speaker 3: and I agree that the prosecution has done a nice
Speaker 3: job of bringing moments of drama to the trial. People
Speaker 3: think criminal trials are all going to be a few
Speaker 3: good men and big moments, got you moments, and really
Speaker 3: actually it's often a slog of evidence that you have
Speaker 3: to get through. But they have done a nice job
Speaker 3: of finding those kinds of moments. One I really liked
Speaker 3: was that the lawyer for FTX was testifying mister Son,
Speaker 3: and he was describing a conversation that he had with
Speaker 3: Sam bankman Fried after Apollo had it started to ask
Speaker 3: questions about the missing money, and in mister Son's recitation
Speaker 3: of it, he says, you know, Sam asked me for explanations,
Speaker 3: like what might we say about this? And Son's reaction was, well, like,
Speaker 3: you could try to say this, or you can try
Speaker 3: to say that, but these are not legitimate explanations, and
Speaker 3: he was clear with Sam that they're not legitimate, and
Speaker 3: Sam understood they were not legitimate. And then the prosecution
Speaker 3: immediately played a clip of Sam Bekminfried on kind of
Speaker 3: his post collapse press tour giving those explanations to a
Speaker 3: reporter and then turned off the tape. Circled back to
Speaker 3: Son and said, you know, is that the fake explanation
Speaker 3: you gave him? Essentially? You know, yes, no more questions.
Speaker 3: Prosecutors and all lawyers are thoughtful about trying to end
Speaker 3: on a note that's really strong. We know just about
Speaker 3: the way people's minds work, that there's a recency and
Speaker 3: a primacy, right the thing that happens first, that the thing
Speaker 3: happens last, and you want to really nail those moments.
Speaker 3: And they're doing a great job.
Speaker 1: You know, you just answered a question I had after
Speaker 1: it collapsed and Sam started doing all this media and
Speaker 1: the lawyers we're saying to me like, this is just
Speaker 1: not going to help. And I kind of thought, like,
Speaker 1: how could he make it worse? It was so bad already,
Speaker 1: and I wondered how that stuff would ever be used,
Speaker 1: And this was an example like how it gets used.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think a lot of us wondered if it
Speaker 3: would come back to bite him and predicted it would,
Speaker 3: and it did.
Speaker 1: Judging Sam will be right back, welcome back. What are
Speaker 1: the arguments for and against him testifying?
Speaker 3: Arguments against are the obvious ones. He has a right
Speaker 3: to remain silent. People are familiar with that idea from television,
Speaker 3: from movies, and he doesn't have any burden of proof.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have to do anything. And so what his
Speaker 3: lawyers are presumably trying to do is poke all kinds
Speaker 3: of little holes in the government's case to give themselves
Speaker 3: enough ammunition and closing to say, look, we don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what happened here, but we don't have to tell you.
Speaker 3: They fail to do their jobs. That's the story. If
Speaker 3: he gets up and he puts on an affirmative narrative
Speaker 3: by telling his own story, then the government gets to
Speaker 3: poke holes in that story. And even though that doesn't
Speaker 3: change the presumption, the government keeps its burden of having
Speaker 3: to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. As a practical
Speaker 3: matter my experiences, the minute the defense puts on that
Speaker 3: kind of real affirmative story, you lose that presumption. It
Speaker 3: becomes really like, well, which one do I like more
Speaker 3: as between the two, And that's a very bad thing
Speaker 3: for a defendant. And of course he's made, as you say,
Speaker 3: a lot of public statements. The government has a sense
Speaker 3: of what story he might try to tell, so they're
Speaker 3: going to be armed and ready. If he tells the
Speaker 3: story he's been telling, and if he tries to tell
Speaker 3: a different story now, then it's a different problem, which
Speaker 3: is he's already locked in. He's already committed to what
Speaker 3: his explanation is in his big press tour. He can't
Speaker 3: now offer a third explanation because the government's going to
Speaker 3: come out after him with that too. So I think
Speaker 3: the downside in that respect is obvious. In terms of
Speaker 3: what the risks are to conviction. I think in a
Speaker 3: case like this where conviction is looking very likely, the
Speaker 3: other big risk of testifying is pissing off the judge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I wonder, right.
Speaker 3: And this is a judge who's been kind of cranky
Speaker 3: with him for a while. So you don't want to
Speaker 3: do that. If you testify and you tell a story that,
Speaker 3: by virtue of its verdict, the jury essentially says it
Speaker 3: doesn't believe. Right. If you get up and you say
Speaker 3: I didn't know this was happening, or I knew it
Speaker 3: but I didn't understand it, or I thought it was okay,
Speaker 3: and the jury convicts you anyway, then the jury has
Speaker 3: more or less said we think you were lying, and
Speaker 3: there are specific enhancements that's sentencing for having done that
Speaker 3: and more than that, you really then have a judge
Speaker 3: who says, sitting here a year later, after all of this,
Speaker 3: you're still not sorry. You still haven't accepted responsibility, and
Speaker 3: that's going to put you really in a very marked difference,
Speaker 3: I think, to all these cooperators in this case, because
Speaker 3: one thing that's really noticeable about these guys is how
Speaker 3: fast they started cooperating with the government, right, how quickly
Speaker 3: they came in and said, we did it, it was wrong,
Speaker 3: we knew it was wrong. And how remorseful they've been
Speaker 3: on the stand. I think how much they've owned that
Speaker 3: they were wrong and that they knew it was wrong.
Speaker 3: Not all cooperators are quite as good at that, And
Speaker 3: so you have everyone else saying we knew this was
Speaker 3: no good all along, We're really sorry, and the minute
Speaker 3: the wall came tumbling down, we tried to accept responsibility.
Speaker 3: And here you have Sam being a holdout, fighting and
Speaker 3: fighting and fighting against it, and I think you might
Speaker 3: see real additional sentencing exposure from doing it. So big risk.
Speaker 3: What's the upside. It's a hail Mary, right, it's a
Speaker 3: hail Mary. Things are not going well. I think if
Speaker 3: you asked one hundred white collar lawyers one hundred are
Speaker 3: going to tell you he's going to get convicted, and
Speaker 3: what can you do? At this point the government's proof
Speaker 3: is in. There's not much you can do left to
Speaker 3: undermine it. The defense has said they may need a
Speaker 3: week for their case, so maybe there's evidence. I'm not predicting.
Speaker 3: There may be things coming, But the hail mary is
Speaker 3: you put him on the stand. You either get the
Speaker 3: jury to believe that he was naive enough or not
Speaker 3: paying attention enough or sympathetic enough to not have known
Speaker 3: what was going on. I don't think that's going to
Speaker 3: be a likely outcome for him. You'll know from knowing
Speaker 3: him better, Michael, what he's going to seem like on
Speaker 3: the stand. But I'm not sure he's going to do
Speaker 3: himself any favors there either. But it's a hail mary
Speaker 3: because there's nothing left to do about that.
Speaker 1: What do you imagine the effect on his sentence could
Speaker 1: be if he gets up and he pisses off the judge.
Speaker 3: It's really hard to quantify. So the Sentence and Guidelines
Speaker 3: are a very long and complicated book that provides judges
Speaker 3: with recommended ranges for sentences for every kind of case.
Speaker 3: And so for every kind of crime there's a base number,
Speaker 3: and then there are pluses and minuses. If you sell
Speaker 3: drugs and you had a gun, that's a plus factor.
Speaker 3: If you only played a small role, that's a minus factor.
Speaker 3: And it's an algorithm, it pops out a number, and
Speaker 3: then there's a whole part of the algorithm that relates
Speaker 3: to people's prior criminal history, which won't be relevant here.
Speaker 3: So as a technical matter, you get a two point
Speaker 3: enhancement on that algorithm for having lied. And how much
Speaker 3: of a bump that is in mathematical months depends on
Speaker 3: where you started in the analysis. I think because of
Speaker 3: the loss amount here, the recommended sentence is going to
Speaker 3: be off the charts anyway, so it won't actually move
Speaker 3: the needle in terms of what the recommendation is. How
Speaker 3: much does it move the needle for the judge, it's
Speaker 3: really hard to say. Very occasionally judges in imposing sentence
Speaker 3: will say, I was going to do acts, but because
Speaker 3: of this, I'm going to do Why you might hear
Speaker 3: that here, you might not, you know, twelve to twenty
Speaker 3: four months. I'm making it up. No one really needs,
Speaker 3: but that's my guess.
Speaker 1: That's what you think you would add, Yeah, but on
Speaker 1: top of what thirty years?
Speaker 3: It is so hard to predict what Judge Kaplin is
Speaker 3: going to do here. I think the recommended sentence is
Speaker 3: going to be essentially life because the loss a mounts
Speaker 3: so high. That's not useful to anyone, right. I think
Speaker 3: it's going to be between ten and twenty five years.
Speaker 1: Huh, You've been right about a lot so far.
Speaker 3: Well, this one's very hard to predict. I've been wrong
Speaker 3: about sentencing many times in my career, Michael.
Speaker 2: I'm curious, as someone who has spent time with Sam Magmanfried,
Speaker 2: what do you think we could expect if he were
Speaker 2: to take the stand.
Speaker 1: You know, he's expected to take the stand. I would
Speaker 1: not be surprised if he changes his mind. I think
Speaker 1: his lawyers think that the likely effect of taking the
Speaker 1: stand is not twelve to twenty four months, but a
Speaker 1: lot more. I think they think the judge is just
Speaker 1: waiting to pounce on that. So he's going to be
Speaker 1: sitting there thinking am I going to get fifteen years?
Speaker 1: Am I going to get forty years? I think they
Speaker 1: feared that kind of effect. So there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that thinks if as a betting man, and you
Speaker 1: gave me the odds right now, and the odds are
Speaker 1: probably twenty to one that he's going to testify. I
Speaker 1: take those if he takes the stand. You know, it's
Speaker 1: tricky because if you look at the whole case, I mean,
Speaker 1: nobody disputes like what they agreed all agreed was true
Speaker 1: was so damning just to start with, right, all his
Speaker 1: money was never in FTX. It started out in Alameda,
Speaker 1: so the funds were mixed all the way back in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. The argument's all about when in state of mind.
Speaker 1: So it seems that the prosecutors and their witnesses have
Speaker 1: sort of agreed that people really started to wake up
Speaker 1: to this as a big risk in June when the
Speaker 1: crypto markets collapsing, And so I see, Sam is going
Speaker 1: to try to tell a story about how out of
Speaker 1: touch he was from June until November, and it's not
Speaker 1: going to be believable because he's got all these other
Speaker 1: people saying we told him. There are a couple things
Speaker 1: I've learned that have been interesting to me. One was
Speaker 1: the way he active avoided the meetings to discuss the
Speaker 1: subject that came up. Nobody made a huge deal about it.
Speaker 1: But that was interesting to me, and that it was
Speaker 1: almost like a willful act. I mean, if someone tells
Speaker 1: you that there's a bug and it looks like we're
Speaker 1: short sixteen billion dollars, but maybe actually know that we're
Speaker 1: short less than that. You're in that meeting, right, You
Speaker 1: don't avoid that. So he just has too much to
Speaker 1: explain how he will seem. I bet the jury after
Speaker 1: they listened to him for a couple of days, it's
Speaker 1: not going to change their decision, but it's going to
Speaker 1: make them feel a little differently about it. They'll see
Speaker 1: a person I don't see how they do anything but
Speaker 1: convict him, but it will change the tone of the
Speaker 1: conversation a bit. The whole thing's been riveting to me, Rebecca,
Speaker 1: I it's been interesting to me to watch the way
Speaker 1: a lawyer tells a story it's and also the way
Speaker 1: the court constrains the story it can be told. Let's
Speaker 1: say all the money's actually there, and after a sentenced
Speaker 1: John Ray says, oh, we found it all. It was
Speaker 1: all just in these weird accounts in Asia or or
Speaker 1: the things he bought are worth way more. The customers
Speaker 1: can get all their money back now that actually doesn't
Speaker 1: affect the legal outcome, right, nobody cares. Nobody cares. However,
Speaker 1: people when you tell the story story, people care. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: So it's not just all stolen and gone. It's there,
Speaker 1: but that you can't get that in the courtroom.
Speaker 3: I think you'll hear prosecutors say all the time thin
Speaker 3: to win, and what they mean by that is, don't
Speaker 3: take on problems you don't have to take on, don't
Speaker 3: prove more than you have to, don't open the door
Speaker 3: to some side, show that's going to be a distraction
Speaker 3: and confuse the jury. And this definitely feels to me
Speaker 3: like it's in that zone. Who cares, Right, it's still
Speaker 3: a crime either way. Lots of the money went where
Speaker 3: it wasn't supposed to. Don't sweat the details. Maybe we'll
Speaker 3: find out the bankruptcy could be relevant at sentencing, right,
Speaker 3: It will be interesting to see if at sentencing, assuming
Speaker 3: there's a conviction, I imagine you'll see an argument which is, look,
Speaker 3: this was a huge mistake, but at the end of
Speaker 3: the day, everybody got paid back. Maybe there was. You know,
Speaker 3: Sam will say I always thought it was going to
Speaker 3: work out. The prosecution will say he got really lucky
Speaker 3: with this completely other thing that he couldn't have predicted
Speaker 3: was going to save him. But bottom line, sort of
Speaker 3: everyone got their money back, and so that should be
Speaker 3: taken into account. I expect you'll see that argument.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it doesn't seem like the judge would be
Speaker 2: that receptive to that argument.
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think the judge will say, you got lucky, and
Speaker 3: that's great, and I'm glad people got their money back,
Speaker 3: But what you did, right, had the risk of losing
Speaker 3: everyone's money, and you did it for your own selfish purposes.
Speaker 3: It didn't care, right.
Speaker 1: I got a question Rebecca that I it's just been
Speaker 1: flicked around in the back of my mind. So as
Speaker 1: all as started, what does it mean to prove intent?
Speaker 1: Intent to what? Intent to misappropriate the funds?
Speaker 2: Is?
Speaker 1: What are they What intent do they have to prove?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's an intent to defraud under the statute.
Speaker 3: But I think you're right that here it's really an
Speaker 3: intent to misappropriate the funds because well, I'm certain you'll
Speaker 3: see this in the jury instructions. A standard instruction in
Speaker 3: a case like this is going to be that it
Speaker 3: is not a defense if the defendant believed it would
Speaker 3: all work out in the end. Right. So if you
Speaker 3: work in a small company and you take money out
Speaker 3: of petty cash to pay your rent, but you know
Speaker 3: you're going to be able to pay it back, right,
Speaker 3: that's still stealing and that is going to be the
Speaker 3: instruction you're going to get. I would expect in this case,
Speaker 3: it doesn't really matter if Sam thought he could work
Speaker 3: it out in the end, as long as what he
Speaker 3: was doing was taking customer money that he wasn't authorized
Speaker 3: to take.
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
Speaker 2: So, best case scenario, what could Sam say on the
Speaker 2: stand that would help him.
Speaker 3: I'm not optimistic there's anything he could stay on the
Speaker 3: stand that would help him. I think that in a
Speaker 3: ideal world that is really hypothetical. A defendant could be
Speaker 3: so sympathetic that they could encourage a jury to nullify right.
Speaker 3: So in our system we allowed jury nullification. It's a
Speaker 3: very strange concept. We don't tell the jury they have
Speaker 3: the right to do this. In fact, if they asked,
Speaker 3: they would be told that they could not do this.
Speaker 3: They're instructed they must follow the law, that it is
Speaker 3: not for them right punishments for the judge, and they
Speaker 3: have to follow the law. But if a jury nullifies,
Speaker 3: if after the fact you discover that the jury got
Speaker 3: in the room and said, oh, yeah, that guy totally
Speaker 3: did it. But we really don't think this should be
Speaker 3: even be a crime, right, we think marijuana should be legal,
Speaker 3: So we're not going to convict him. That there's no
Speaker 3: recourse for the government. That's it double jeopardy and the
Speaker 3: case is over. So you could imagine a defendant, and
Speaker 3: I don't think this is a good case for that.
Speaker 3: You can imagine a defendant who was so sympathetic, so young,
Speaker 3: so naive, so compelling, that even though the jury really
Speaker 3: thought they had done it, the jury didn't want to
Speaker 3: convict them. Is that gonn happen here? I don't think so,
Speaker 3: and I'm not sure he has the right personality for that.
Speaker 3: But best case scenario, a defendant could hope for that,
Speaker 3: And so if I were his lawyer, I would tell
Speaker 3: him not to testify. I think I would understand why
Speaker 3: someone might feel it was the only alternative. But I
Speaker 3: don't think he's going to help himself. And there's so
Speaker 3: much to confront him with. He's made so many public
Speaker 3: statements that I think it would be a mistake, and
Speaker 3: I don't think he's going to because no one knows.
Speaker 3: But I think that he has learned his lesson now
Speaker 3: that he has seen at the trial the way in
Speaker 3: which the government has used his words against him, and
Speaker 3: he's going to decide to sit quietly. But we'll see.
Speaker 2: If he doesn't testify, what will happen? What will the
Speaker 2: defense do?
Speaker 3: They may have other witnesses they've suggested that they do.
Speaker 3: Many of their experts have been precluded, so I don't
Speaker 3: know who's left, but you can imagine them calling a
Speaker 3: few small witnesses or nothing. They'll do nothing. They could
Speaker 3: offer some documentary evidence if they wanted to, but they
Speaker 3: could have a very small.
Speaker 1: Case stick around. Judging Sam, we'll be right back, Welcome back.
Speaker 2: Now that your book's been out for a while, has
Speaker 2: anyone any characters in the book reached out about either
Speaker 2: what they're thinking about the trial or the book.
Speaker 1: Lots at least ten FTX people, most of them like
Speaker 1: Zaane Tacket or Ramnik Aora or pretty main characters in
Speaker 1: the book have reached out to say that it captured
Speaker 1: the feel of their experience, and I think people like
Speaker 1: being reminded of why they got charmed into the situation
Speaker 1: in the first place. Some of these people are still
Speaker 1: as furious as hell at Sam and most of the
Speaker 1: employees FTX are furious because they went down with him.
Speaker 1: You know, they had all their life savings on the exchange.
Speaker 1: So that's how they feel. They feel like I imagine
Speaker 1: the jury will feel if he gets up and talks.
Speaker 1: They're furious it happened. They're angry with his decision, but
Speaker 1: towards him. Mainly they feel just sadness, a kind of
Speaker 1: sadness slash pity. It's been kind of interesting. The stuff
Speaker 1: in the trial has been their details that have been
Speaker 1: riveting to me. You listened to it in one way, Rebecca,
Speaker 1: I listened to it in another. I'm not actually paying
Speaker 1: a whole lot of attention to is he going to
Speaker 1: be convicted or e quitted? Because I just assumed it
Speaker 1: was done when it started almost. I mean, the whole
Speaker 1: thing was a mess from the start. You should never
Speaker 1: have all the funds in Alameda. Put that to one
Speaker 1: side for a second. All the problems are so concentrated
Speaker 1: in such a short period of time. There are a
Speaker 1: couple of exceptions, but mostly they're talking about the period
Speaker 1: from June to November of last year, and watching them
Speaker 1: talk about it and talk about how they felt about
Speaker 1: it is so interesting to me because I was with
Speaker 1: them and there was no surface indication that anything had
Speaker 1: changed in their mind except Nishad had started to talk
Speaker 1: about we shouldn't spend all this money. That was the
Speaker 1: only thing I noticed, and I was in a viewing
Speaker 1: all of them. I'm not Gary because Gary didn't speak.
Speaker 1: If it's true the story they're telling, and I don't
Speaker 1: have any reasons to doubt the veracity of it, how
Speaker 1: good they were at not seeming like anything had really changed.
Speaker 1: And I think the truth is that part of their
Speaker 1: brains didn't want to believe that anything had really changed,
Speaker 1: the part of their brains thought this is all going
Speaker 1: to work out, because they'd been through this once with
Speaker 1: Sam before, you know, back in twenty eighteen. They'd watched
Speaker 1: this chaos ensue, money be lost, everybody calling him a criminal,
Speaker 1: and then they find the money. You know, I think
Speaker 1: they thought I kind of thought Sam had magical powers.
Speaker 2: How did it feel for you to be learning that
Speaker 2: they It seems like knew this thing and were acting
Speaker 2: like it wasn't happening while you were there.
Speaker 1: So I didn't know what Sam knew, what Sam didn't know,
Speaker 1: I knew who what Sam told people he knew and
Speaker 1: didn't know. A couple things surprised me. The first thing,
Speaker 1: that really is it surprised me that not all of
Speaker 1: them knew that, that Nishah doesn't know that till September.
Speaker 1: It surprised me that Caroline was so insistent about her
Speaker 1: interactions with Sam because they were busted up. In Sam's telling,
Speaker 1: they weren't talking very much because none of this stuff
Speaker 1: comes up in her memos to him. So how did
Speaker 1: I feel about it? It tilted my calculation just a
Speaker 1: bit towards it's really not likely that he didn't know anything.
Speaker 1: And this shacker was like be willful, not wanting to
Speaker 1: be at the meetings, that kind of stuff. That was
Speaker 1: sort of a tell I have all kinds of questions
Speaker 1: about the decisions he made. The questions that are all right.
Speaker 1: So this thing blows up in May or June that
Speaker 1: the crypto markets collapse and these people who are lending
Speaker 1: US crypto demand their eight billion dollars back, and Sam
Speaker 1: makes the decision to give it to him, and what
Speaker 1: he's given to him is an effect customer money. Why
Speaker 1: didn't you just let it go? Like it's just a
Speaker 1: crazy decision, It doesn't matter the lawsuit, But I would
Speaker 1: like to poke and prod him on that that is
Speaker 1: the active decision. There is a moment where he could
Speaker 1: have just said, we're stiffing these lenders and Alan Mete
Speaker 1: his bankrupt. But FTX is fine. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: have theories about it's sort of the psychology of it.
Speaker 1: My theory is that it is his identity was all
Speaker 1: bound up in being this great trader and it just
Speaker 1: cut to who he was to let that thing go,
Speaker 1: and he just couldn't imagine the shift in his perception,
Speaker 1: the perception of him.
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting that you say that it was
Speaker 3: his identity was bound up in being the successful trader
Speaker 3: and that's why he made the decision, because it also
Speaker 3: goes to why he went to trial. Right, Why didn't
Speaker 3: he look for a plan. Now we don't know that
Speaker 3: he didn't, but it sounds like there really were never
Speaker 3: any serious plane negotiations. Right, he was never interested. It
Speaker 3: was clear there was going to be a trial. Wh
Speaker 3: he knew what happened, right, he knew what Caroline and
Speaker 3: Nishad and Gary were able to say, and in advance
Speaker 3: of the trial, he was given all of the they're
Speaker 3: called three to zero two's right, the reports the FBI
Speaker 3: wrote of the interviews with them, he knew what they
Speaker 3: were in fact going to say, but he still went
Speaker 3: to trial. And I think when people do that, it's
Speaker 3: often this inability to accept the mantle of failure, of
Speaker 3: embarrassment of admitting that you knew. It's even in the
Speaker 3: face of all that, it's easier to be able to
Speaker 3: maintain to yourself that it's not true.
Speaker 1: In his case, if you look over his life, he
Speaker 1: preserves a kind of romantic notion of himself in a
Speaker 1: totally socially isolated situation, and that romantic notion of himself
Speaker 1: isn't paid off, isn't confirmed until he collides with wall Street,
Speaker 1: and wall Street says, yes, you're absolutely right, you're a genius,
Speaker 1: that you're a genius at this this kind of decision making,
Speaker 1: and Alimeda was home to that kind of decision making.
Speaker 1: FTX wasn't I mean, FTX was just a dumb exchange.
Speaker 1: It was the risk taking was all in Alameda, and
Speaker 1: it was such a threat to who he was to
Speaker 1: have that thing go down.
Speaker 3: This was fun, This was fun. I have a homework
Speaker 3: assignment for LJ. What's my assignment? Okay, So it's a
Speaker 3: maybe an urban legend among trial lawyers, but everyone says
Speaker 3: that if you look at the jury when they come
Speaker 3: in with their verdicts, because what'll happen is, at some
Speaker 3: point the judge is going to say we have a note,
Speaker 3: or he's going to say we have a verdict. They're
Speaker 3: going to bring the jury in and there's someone's gonna
Speaker 3: be the four person. They're gonna have an envelope in it,
Speaker 3: and it's very dramatic, right, They're going to pass it
Speaker 3: to the judge. He's going to quietly open it, he's
Speaker 3: going to look down, he's going to read it. Everyone's
Speaker 3: looking at his face and he gets to know what
Speaker 3: the verdict is before everyone else. Then he passes it
Speaker 3: back to the to the juror, and the juror stands
Speaker 3: up and the judge's deputy will say, as to count one,
Speaker 3: how do you find and they'll go through each of
Speaker 3: the counts. Everyone says that if you watch the jurors
Speaker 3: faces when they come into the courtroom for that, if
Speaker 3: they look at the defender they're going to acquit him,
Speaker 3: and if they look away, they're going to convict. And
Speaker 3: I don't think it's true, but I do think you
Speaker 3: sometimes see what's happening. Sometimes they stare down the defendant
Speaker 3: in anger, and you can tell that they really sort
Speaker 3: of are personally angry at him. And sometimes you can't
Speaker 3: get anything from them. So we're not there yet, but
Speaker 3: I won't be in the courtroom. I'm curious to see
Speaker 3: what they do when they come in. I will report back,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 1: Al Jay, I will see you on the courthouse steps
Speaker 1: on Thursday.
Speaker 2: See you soon, and thank you so much. Rebecca.
Speaker 3: Bye, guys, bye bye.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in your feed soon with more expert
Speaker 1: analysis and news from Sam bankman Fried's trial. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Olivia Gencott is our court reporter. Catherine Gerardeau and Nisha
Speaker 1: Venken produced this show. Sophie Crane is our editor. Our
Speaker 1: music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of
Speaker 1: stell Wagon Symphonet. Judging Sam is a production of Pushkin Industries.
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